The Sea Gate

by Jane Johnson

‘His name was Hamid and when I first knew him he was only twenty years old, and the handsomest man I ever saw.’

  ‘And you only drew his back?’ I grin at her.

  She tsks. ‘Of course not. I made dozens of sketches of him. There were photographs too.’ She looks wistful.

  I admit that while searching for her missing locket I have scoured the house but not come across these portraits. Her chin comes up. ‘They were all burned,’ she says.

  ‘Here? In the house? Was there a fire?’

  ‘In winter there is always a fire,’ she says cryptically. ‘I saved only one.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  She looks away. ‘It’s gone now.’

  ‘Can I ask how you met?’ I am, I know, pressing my luck.

  Olivia folds her lips. ‘Breakfast first. What is there?’

  We settle on scrambled eggs and toast, and I go out to the kitchen to prepare it, and a fresh pot of tea, while she dresses herself, since she has steadfastly refused any aid. Under instruction, I take the breakfast things into the parlour and remove the cloth from Gabriel’s cage, and when Olivia comes in, turbanless now and with her hair dried into a silky white froth, he bounces up and down, bright-eyed and delighted, as if her return has given him a fresh lease of life.

  I can hardly eat for curiosity, but I make myself chew and swallow as she works her way through her breakfast, taking her time. I am sure she is spinning it out: every so often she shoots me a sly look.

  At last, she folds her napkin. ‘I’ve never spoken about this to a living soul, you know,’ she says in a somewhat combative tone. ‘I’m only telling you because you have that look in your eye. That family gumption. The never-give-up look. But it’s private: you understand?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She sits back, cradling her tea, takes a long sip from the cup, then begins. ‘It was during the war.’

  I do not need to ask which one: the date on the back of the painting of the naked man reads ‘1945’.

  ‘Hamid was an internee up at the farm. He’d come off a trawler that hit a mine, smuggling, I think. He was an Algerian, so not really an enemy, but at that time all you had to do was speak with a foreign accent and they’d put you in a POW camp. So he was working up at the Roberts’ farm: they put prisoners of war to work, you know. There was a labour shortage and the country needed all the food that could be grown. There were a number of them working up at the farm – no guards or anything: you didn’t need them down here at the end of the world. Once you were here there was nowhere left to go, except into the sea!’ She laughs mirthlessly.

  ‘One night there was an escape. An Austrian airman whose plane came down in the field up by one of the Swingate Stones – have you walked the upper footpath to Lamorna?’

  I admit that I have not yet ventured out in that direction, except to walk to the bench overlooking the sea past the lookout point, a tranquil spot where you can watch the sun burnishing the sea.

  ‘It always seemed so shocking to me that such evil could occur against such an enchanting backdrop,’ she says. ‘Or that it could look so… clean-cut. The Land Girls who stayed here thought he was a proper looker: blond-haired, blue-eyed, very proud of his Aryan heritage. He held some sway over the boys at the farm, too. People are so gullible, aren’t they? They fall for appearances and easy charm, don’t seem to have the nous to look beneath. Anyway, this devil attacked and killed a child.’ Tears fill her eyes.

  I hardly dare breathe. ‘Who was she?’

  ‘Mamie? A sweet girl, the daughter of the farmer, a little younger than me – in years; more in her head. They called it “simple” then – I expect there’s a more politically correct term nowadays. But to him, she was barely human, just a defenceless little animal he could use and throw away. Hamid… well, Hamid tried to stop him, but he was too late, she was already dead. Mind you, if you mention him around here you’ll get a different story. People are so ready to condemn according to their prejudices, especially if they don’t travel. Blackie, they called him, and for my shame even I thought of him as the Dark Man. But he wasn’t black at all, except his hair; just a really rather lovely chestnut brown. They hadn’t ever seen a proper black man around these parts – though there were black American GIs posted further east…’ She sighs. ‘I was right there…’ Olivia points to the centre of the rug. ‘I thought I was going to die. That Nazi airman had his hands round my throat and I was beginning to lose consciousness, and that’s when Hamid appeared. Like a genie out of the Arabian Nights. I would have gone the same way as Mamie if he hadn’t come just at that moment. My guardian angel, that’s what he was. It’s why we named the parrot Gabriel – or Djibril as he is in Arabic. My darling Gabriel…’ Her gaze goes distant and I can see her mind is wandering again.

  ‘Cousin Olivia,’ I say coaxingly. I have to know, can’t hold back any longer. ‘There was a landslide down in the tunnel and some bones were found. Pretty much a whole skeleton. The police took it away for forensic examination, but their initial report is that it’s neither recent, nor ancient. Was it the Austrian airman?’

  Her eyes go wide as if she is slowly waking up. ‘Oh. Oh no. All these years I’ve kept that secret. All these years living in a house with a corpse down in the tunnel. Hardly daring to leave in case someone found it. His ghost walked, you know. It couldn’t get past the sigils Hamid carved, but I’m sure it walked. That’s why I needed you to brick up the cellar. So they’d never know.’

  I take her hands in mine. ‘Oh, Olivia. The things you’ve been through. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know. But I don’t think bricking up the cellar would have made any difference in the end. Secrets always find a way out, don’t they?’

  ‘It was self-defence. He’d have killed us all.’ She pauses, looks pensive, weighing her words. But just as she opens her mouth again there is a knock at the door. We stare at one another.

  ‘Let’s pretend we’re not in,’ says Olivia.

  It seems an attractive option but a moment later a face appears at the window. It is Rosie, who raps on the glass.

  Olivia glares at her, then back at me. There’s an odd smile on her face. ‘Bad pennies always turn up, don’t they?’

  ‘You don’t have to see her ever again if you don’t want to,’ I say, and I mean it. ‘She’s a wicked old woman and I won’t have her upsetting you.’

  ‘Oh, stop mooing and go and let her in. Time we had it all out, then I can rest and the ghosts can settle.’

  Out in the hall the new phone sits on the console, all shining and smart: the landline went in at the weekend. I pick it up and quickly leave a message on Reda’s mobile, in case I need back-up, but I needn’t have worried: Rosie Sparrow is out there alone. She looks smaller than I remember. Is it because I know so much more about her? More than she knows I know? I am rather less afraid of her than I thought I would be, knowing the extent of her venality. Greed and hatred are such mean motivations: they diminish those who carry them, suck them dry from within. I open the door.

  She brandishes a bunch of flowers. ‘Brought her these.’

  I wonder if you can poison flowers. I do not take them from her. Instead, I stare into the pale depths of her eyes, making myself as stern and unwelcoming as I am able. ‘You’d better come in, then.’ I usher her before me into the parlour.

  Gabriel takes one look at Rosie, pushes the cage door open (has he fiddled the lock open?), leaps up onto the threshold and starts barking like a dog. I’ve never heard him do this before. I make a move to guide him back into the cage, but he evades me neatly and takes wing.

  ‘I’m not coming in here while that devil’s out of his cage!’

  ‘You’re free to leave.’ Olivia waves a hand airily towards the door.

  Keeping an eye on the devil – who has taken up his favourite lookout post on the bookcase – Rosie edges inside and thrusts the bouquet at Olivia. She is not, I notice, wearing gloves, so probably the flowers are not going to kill her.

  ‘Peace offering.�
��

  The old women face one another. How odd, I think, that time blurs the physical differences between us as we age. Looking at them now they’re hard to tell apart in age: small and dense and packed with energy, though one has black eyes, the other pale. And of course Olivia has her own bad teeth, while Rosie has had hers expensively re-engineered.

  ‘You know I can’t stand chrysanthemums,’ Olivia says uncharitably.

  ‘They’re dahlias.’

  ‘Same thing.’

  They glare at one another.

  ‘You tried to kill me!’

  ‘You tripped over your own feet.’

  ‘You pushed me!’

  ‘Did no such thing.’

  I close the parlour door to make sure Gabriel does not escape. ‘I’m really not sure you should be here,’ I say to Rosie. ‘After everything you’ve done.’

  She juts her sharp little chin at me. ‘I’m sure I got more right to be here than some little gold-digger from London, come down to pick over the old bird’s bones.’

  People do give themselves away by the things they accuse others of. I adopt a conversational tone. ‘Why have you been stealing from Olivia all these years?’

  ‘You don’t know the first thing about it!’ Rosie barks.

  ‘I talked to Olivia’s bank manager. No wonder you’ve got a smart car and expensive teeth, and such a nice house.’

  Her eyes spark pale fire at me. ‘How dare you snoop on me!’

  Olivia holds her hands up as if refereeing a match. ‘Stop, both of you. Mary, sit down here where I can see you. Rebecca, sit over there.’

  Mary? I wonder if Olivia’s quite as recovered as I thought.

  Rosie purses her lips. ‘No one calls me that any more. I hate it. It’s Rosie to everyone nowadays and I’ll thank you to remember it.’

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come. Because at last I can tell you what I’ve not had the courage to do all this time,’ Olivia says to her. ‘There really aren’t any more secrets left that you can blackmail me with.’

  ‘Blackmail? That’s what you’re telling people, is it?’

  ‘What else could you possibly call three thousand pounds a month? For a bit of housekeeping?’ I ask, feeling fiercely protective of my cousin.

  Rosie glares at me. ‘You know nothing. She’s keeping a promise.’ She jabs a finger at Olivia. ‘A solemn vow.’

  I stare at Rosie and at my cousin. In that instant they look spookily similar: the set of the jaw, the bone structure around the eye. There is something going here on that I don’t quite understand.

  ‘Just go home, Rosemary Sparrow,’ Olivia says wearily. ‘You’ve picked all the flesh off me for now. You and your good-for-nothing boys.’

  ‘You leave my boys out of this.’

  ‘They were using the cellar and tunnel for smuggling.’ I offer the conjecture.

  Olivia merely shrugs. ‘Oh, I expect so.’

  I sink back into the armchair, feeling as if I’m on dangerous ground. ‘Were the Sparrows using the cellar with your knowledge?’

  ‘We had an agreement of sorts.’

  ‘But, smuggling?’

  ‘We don’t call it that down here,’ Rosie says firmly. ‘It’s just a bit of this and that; just… trading. Been the way of the world for hundreds of years.’

  ‘You really can’t call drug smuggling a bit of this and that!’ I object.

  Olivia sits up a bit straighter. ‘Drugs?’

  Rosie purses her lips. ‘No need to be shocked. Remember when we tried growing those plants up in the attic?’

  ‘The marijuana?’

  ‘That was a right to-do!’

  ‘What about those electricity bills?’

  They laugh. Olivia turns to me. ‘We grew it on the cliff underneath the Roberts farm in the end. That worked much better, till the police helicopter spotted the plantation.’

  The two old women are grinning slyly at one another now, a pair of geriatric criminal kingpins bound in a perverse conspiracy.

  Whatever have I got caught up in? Drug-running, money-laundering, art-theft, attempted poisoning, and a Nazi buried in the tunnel. Panic rises in me. The police are coming tomorrow to ‘have a word’ with Olivia. She’ll be a total liability. I can imagine her recounting to them her decades of misdeeds without an iota of shame and more than a touch of boastfulness. She won’t be needing her stately en-suite room at this rate, she’ll be banged up in a prison cell. In my mind, it cascades from there: newspapers, TV, tongue-in-cheek movies about elderly criminal masterminds putting one over on local law enforcement. The house that we have toiled over and all Olivia’s beautiful paintings sequestered under the Proceeds of Crime Act…

  Rosie turns beady eyes on me. ‘Anyway, who says my boys are smuggling drugs?’

  ‘There were packages in the cellar.’

  ‘And you opened them, did you?’

  I have to admit I did not. ‘The police took away what they found.’

  ‘And did they say it was drugs?’

  ‘No…’

  Rosie returns her gaze to Olivia. ‘It isn’t drugs.’

  ‘Well, what is it, then?’ I persist.

  ‘If you must know, Miss Snoop, it’s tobacco. They sell packets of it all over the place for a bit of pocket money. Nothing wrong with that.’ She is defiant. ‘People have done it for centuries down here. It’s a time-honoured tradition.’

  ‘It’s still illegal, avoiding the import duty,’ I say quietly. ‘As is systematically poisoning Olivia.’

  Rosie blinks, very fast. ‘Poisoning?’

  ‘I found it in the kitchen. Rat poison.’

  Olivia sits up a bit straighter. Rosie shrugs. ‘Bloody nuisance, those rats. They’re everywhere.’ She looks to Olivia. ‘Anyway, you like the way I make your tea, don’t you?’

  ‘Did you put poison in Olivia’s tea?’ I ask her straight out.

  ‘No.’ Rosie folds her arms. ‘Course not!’

  Olivia leans forward. ‘Poison?’

  I explain about finding the tin in the cupboard with the tea things, the odd smell in the teacup, and then I come to a halt as a realization hits me. One of the cups decorated with forget-me-nots, the other with roses and rosemary. Mary, Rosie: Rosemary. So the cups wouldn’t get mixed up; so the poisoner would not get poisoned.

  ‘That smell was in the tea in the flask Rosie brought into the hospital for you. The doctors said your blood tests indicated liver damage.’

  Rosie gazes at me stonily. ‘Load of nonsense. How you going to prove any of that then, eh?’

  ‘The tea was handed over to the laboratory for tests.’

  Olivia is staring hard at her housekeeper now, her hands balled into fists. ‘What have you done? You’d better tell me. Because I’ve had my suspicions.’ She shoots me a look. ‘I even left a letter with the solicitor. It says “in case of my death from unexplained causes” – though when you reach my age I doubt they count anything as unexplained – “please test my body for poison and then arrest Rosemary Sparrow”. So, out with it, or else.’

  Rosie’s fingers make imprints on the skin of her forearms as she kneads the slack muscles. ‘Well,’ she mumbles at last, ‘you’re a right pain sometimes. It was a sort of punishment, to start with. You treated me like a servant, just because you got the house and the money and all, even though I should by rights have got half. It’s not fair. It gets to a person after a while.’

  ‘So you really did poison her?’

  ‘It isn’t really poisoning, though, is it?’ she rallies. ‘I mean, here she is. She isn’t dead, is she? After all this time, she still isn’t dead.’ When she looks at me her eyes are mean and dried up, all the light gone out of them.

  Olivia is appalled, understandably. ‘You gave me rat poison?’ she says faintly. ‘In my tea?’

  ‘Shepherd’s pie, too. And your spag bol. Tomato sauce masked the taste better.’

  ‘You told me the garlic was a tonic! I even looked it up in my herbal book, and there it was – g
ood for the liver, and infection and the like. I remember we collected all the wild garlic round here during the war for the Herbal Medicine Committee—’

  ‘It was me you sent out to pick all that stuff. To get me out of the house. So you could be with him!’

  ‘Shut up. Shut up now.’

  Rosie rubs her face, remembering. ‘It was Jem gave me the idea. They used Rodine all over the farm to keep the rats down, had tons of the stuff, used to put it down in drainpipes they’d set up with grain to get the beggars used to going in to feed. He said it smelled like ramsons.’ She shrugs and addresses me. ‘I only used a tiny bit from time to time. Not enough to kill her. To teach her a lesson, when she was mean to me, which was often enough. Always thought yourself better than me, didn’t you?’ she shoots at Olivia, who folds her lips and says nothing. ‘And, well, it became a habit when she was playing me up. Didn’t do her much lasting harm, did it? It’s probably gone off after all this time, anyway. She got the constitution of an ox! Haven’t you, Livy? The constitution of an ox!’

  ‘I knew I wasn’t going mad,’ Olivia says after a long moment of silence. ‘Every time we fell out. Every time we had cross words, I would get ill. I suppose… deep down, I knew what was going on, or I thought I deserved to be punished, after everything that happened. I suppose it’s time to tell you the rest of it.’

  26

  Olivia

  May 1945

  ‘SOMEONE’S DAMAGED OUR GATE!’ MARY ANNOUNCED dramatically. She stood in the middle of the kitchen with her hands on her hips, looking more than usually belligerent. The action made her skirt ride up and the material strain across the bodice. Her school uniform had become too tight for her, and had probably been that way for some time, Olivia realized. Details like this often escaped her, especially now that Mary was dressing herself. They couldn’t afford to replace it: Olivia had traded their clothing rations with Mrs Clemo at the farm near the school, so at the very least it would need the seams letting out and the hem down. The idea of having to unpick and resew all this was unpalatable: of all the subjects at school Domestic Science had been Olivia’s worst. How many times had Miss Appleyard made her re-sew the hem on that gingham apron? ‘Ten stitches to the inch, Olivia. How many times do I have to tell you? Honestly, this looks as if a gorilla did it…’ The whole class had dissolved into giggles. Olivia had hated all of them, but Miss Appleyard most of all.