by Julie Mayhew
‘What do you want to know for?’ Saul would have sing-songed at my asking, a hard brown sweet doing a dance across his gums. If I’d found a convincing response, his next question would be, ‘And what do I get in return for showing you?’
So, I waited. News would reach me once the ship had docked. It had no distance to travel.
We were in the staff room on a prep day before the start of term when Miriam Calder announced it proudly, apropos of nothing: ‘He has a specialism in science, you know.’ Our school administrator was spooning sugar into a cup of tea she’d prepared for Mr Crane. ‘A specialism,’ she went on, ‘that he will be sharing across the whole school.’
Ruth French and I were sitting on the low, soft chairs, piles of folders on the table in front of us. We snapped up our heads.
‘Sorry, did you say “he”?’
It was Ruth who asked; my mouth was wide open in disbelief.
Never, in my living memory, had there been a male teacher at St Rita’s. A male headteacher, yes. Before Mr Crane came Mr Bartle, who died just before I moved up to the senior classes. But a man serving as mere teacher alone… ? Mr Crane had been deputy to Mr Bartle in the years leading up to his death – he was preparing to take over, the outgoing head expected to retire, not die – but Mr Crane had done no time in front of the whiteboard then. I could only draw up memories of him speaking from the front in chapel, and of him standing at Mr Bartle’s shoulder in his office. You needed to travel back fifty years, and several feet along the row of framed school photos in the main corridor, to find another male face looking out from that teachers’ middle row.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Miriam, relishing this eking-out of information, ‘our new staff member is most definitely a man. Did you not know?’
We didn’t. She knew we didn’t. We knew that Mr Crane had found no new likely candidate for teacher training on the island – an offer I had in my time seized on breathlessly, aged eighteen, ending the terrifying idea that I would need to go to the mainland to find a career. There is an invisible line on Lark dividing those who live by their intelligence and those who lean on physical abilities. I was able to rig up a snare and raise the game by beating, all useful to my gamekeeper father – everyone on Lark had a second skill – but my true strength was my brain.
‘Will you actually be a real teacher?’ Paul had asked. Eleven years old and he thought he knew it all. ‘Don’t you have to go away and do a degree for that?’
I had made sure, when it arrived, that Mum framed and mounted my curlicued certificate of qualification prominently in the living room.
In this instance, Mr Crane had placed an advertisement in a mainland newspaper, generating interest beyond the recruitment pages, as our sporadic call-outs always did. Miriam had pinned a resulting press article to our staff noticeboard:
A 1,500-mile commute, a class of four students, one pub and a single shop – could this be the remotest teaching job on the planet? Lying so far adrift in the North Atlantic, the island of Lark is unreachable by air or sea for five months of the year. Its temperamental climate is one of warm winds followed by dense, persistent fog, making it truly the ostracised cousin of the British Isles…
Miriam had crossed out ‘five months’ and corrected it to ‘seven months’ in the margin of the press clipping. A strange point of pride. There followed several paragraphs of inaccurate history and patronising anecdotes collected from tourists and expatriates – traitors – alongside some anodyne words from the teacher we’d recruited last summer – Amy Sparks. She didn’t manage a year, exiting on the same April ship as my brother, staying just long enough to get over the failed relationship she’d crossed hundreds of miles of sea to escape. Long enough to think better of their split in light of the romantic prospects on Lark. Long enough for me to consider her a friend.
‘But don’t you miss all the shops, Leah?’ That was her parting excuse. No mention of Lark’s awe-inspiring landscape, the closeness of its community, the sunrises, only its lack of a high street.
‘You can’t miss something you’ve never experienced,’ I said, the statement feeling immediately flawed, as wrong as a stone in the mouth.
A wedding invitation from her arrived on the August ship, which seemed like the cruellest of jokes.
‘You’re scared of the mainland!’ she had said to me once, teasingly, thinking she had uncovered my naughtiest secret. ‘You only talk about loving Lark so much because you’re such a chicken!’ Miles of sea between us and still she was taunting me.
The article in the mainland press was illustrated by our most recent end-of-year photo. Caption: The entire pupil population – all 38 of them! I look it up sometimes, that article, study the expressions of the three Eldest Girls on the back row – Britta, Anna, Jade-Marie. I search their faces for hints. Was it happening already? Was the idea in them then? But they seem as upright and guileless as the very small ones sitting cross-legged on the front row.
‘Oh, yes, he’s most definitely a man,’ Miriam went on. ‘Quite a dishy one at that.’
Ruth grunted at this turn in the conversation. ‘Wow,’ she muttered. ‘A man. I never saw that coming, did you, Miss Cedars?’
My throat closed tight, sure that Ruth knew; had she spied on us through a gap in Margaritte’s curtains, dabbling with the cards, predicting his arrival? Ruth went back to labelling folders, and I took her phrasing to be accidental, a coincidence.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I really didn’t.’
I tried to match her nonchalance, but my pulse was beating fast beneath my jaw, my blouse was sticking to my chest. Miriam Calder, who knew all and saw all, could surely hear my internal rapture. The Knight of Cups! Here comes my Knight of Cups! She stood over us at the table, steaming mug in hand.
‘Well, Mr Crane usually prefers to hire women, as is clear to see.’ She twisted her neck to assess our stickering system, pass her unspoken judgement. ‘He knows that women will be far more… what’s the word… ?’
‘Malleable,’ said Ruth bleakly.
‘Reliable,’ corrected Miriam.
Ruth looked up at her, with the silent instruction that she could piss off now, but the woman had more tattle to be free of.
‘He arrived with just a single bag, according to Saul Cooper. Just one rucksack – and not a very big one either. What do you make of that?’
‘That he’s a light packer?’ Ruth deadpanned. ‘That he owns a flexible capsule wardrobe?’
‘How old is he?’ I blurted out.
Miriam grinned, validated. ‘Young,’ she replied, ‘and pretty nifty with a Bunsen burner.’
Ruth sighed at my betrayal of our tacit agreement never to encourage Miriam and her chatter.
‘Young?’ I went on. ‘Young, like… ?’
‘Youngish,’ Miriam clarified. ‘Thirty.’
I stared at the folder in my hands, at a loss as to whether it should be labelled green or yellow. A domino run was toppling at speed across my mind: the Knight of Cups has arrived, and now I will fall in love, and now I will know what it feels like, and then I will be married, and then I will conceive at the cottage, and then we will fill a property on the south elevation with children, and…
‘Green,’ Ruth barked. ‘Maths handouts we’re labelling green.’
I pressed a large circular sticker onto the folder, let the action calm me. There was a system to everything, a right order.
‘Oh, you won’t be wanting to get mixed up with him, Miss Cedars,’ Miriam said, turning away, gearing up for one of her enigmatic exits, while I flushed hot, so transparent in my desires. ‘Just one rucksack,’ she repeated ominously. ‘He’s running away from something. You mark my words.’
FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018
You do not accept lifts from strange men. Viola Kendrick knows the rules.
Say no to sweets. Refuse all invitations to see kittens. Tell a grown-up where you are at all times. Never walk home late and alone, but if you must, dress soberly, anonymously. Cross to the
opposite pavement if you are followed and pretend to be on your phone. Take the sharp edge of your house key and brace it between your fingers as a makeshift weapon. Fill your lungs. Be ready to scream.
Viola was led to believe that these rules would not apply here, that they could be left behind on the mainland. But the rules cling like limpets to the bottom of the boat. Viola cannot unremember them. She cannot action them either. How can you cross to the opposite pavement in a place that has no pavements? What use is a phone at your ear with no signal to feed it? And who carries a house key when there isn’t cause to lock your door in the first place? Still, it feels like a transgression to be bouncing down the East Road in the passenger seat of a 1980s Land Rover. The man behind the wheel in the black police uniform and yellow reflective jacket is not a stranger. But he is a strange man, certainly.
Viola scans the blur of pines through the window, searching for outlines, people, anyone who might see them hammering past, hear the noisy engine and smell the rotten exhaust. Anyone who might be willing to stand as a witness.
Her driver doesn’t speak and hasn’t since he instructed her brusquely at the Sisters’ Stones to get in the cab. He rolls a hard mint from cheek to cheek, clicking it against his teeth, pausing every so often as if he might say something, but no words come. He offered Viola a mint before starting the engine, but she refused. Like a good girl.
As they leave the coverage of Cable’s Wood, the sea spills out on their left, the surface of water still blanketed by fog. It is spring though, so this fog will lift when the sun rises, allow the first ship of the year to find its way. If she turned in her seat, Viola would see that giant’s bite in the cliffside behind them, but she doesn’t look back. They hurtle past the turning for her home – ‘home’ being not exactly the right word – to her mother, the old Reunyon Farmstead. That they have passed this exit is cause for relief but also sends a bitter wash of adrenalin to her mouth. She should speak, demand to be taken there, if only to show she is in charge. Instead, she pulls Dot, who sits damply on her lap, closer to her body for protection. The dog pants at the window, adding an extra layer of fog to the view. With every bump in the road, her wet nose draws ticks and swirls in the film on the glass.
Dot was acquired as a guard dog – Deborah Kendrick’s first tentative step towards building a total defence against an unfair world, before the idea of Lark reached her consciousness. The error was clear as soon as the puppy arrived – tiny, incontinent, as fallible as a human baby. How would a miniature Schnauzer defeat all their unseen enemies – lick them into submission?
Dogs are not protectors on the island, they are not even considered companions – they have no soul. Viola disputes this absolutely. Dot has a soul, she can feel it now, emanating from the soft, warm creature on her lap, filling her with much-needed determination as they ride the rough track, seemingly harbour-bound, instilling her with the courage to speak.
Any resolve she has falls away as the road does, steeply, the East Bay revealing itself beneath them. The back end of the vehicle competes in the gravel to become the front, and Viola clamps Dot ever tighter, gripping the seat beneath her, fingers slipping into the foam insides where the leather has split. As her driver steadies the Land Rover in its skid, he is the one who finds the wherewithal to say something.
‘How come you knew where to find him?’
‘Huh?’ Viola is unprepared, still gulping away fear from their slide down the hillside. ‘Who?’
The driver snorts, abusing the gears. He wants to appear scornful, all-knowing, but Viola can see how his hands tremble on the wheel.
‘Oh, the body,’ she says. ‘I didn’t. I didn’t know.’
A new set of mainland rules bobs obligingly to the surface. The rules for how bad things happen, how they come to be known.
‘It’s always the dog walker who finds the body,’ she tells him, because this is a truth.
The dog walker is the first voice in the story. They stare, pale-eyed, down the journalist’s camera lens, describing how their usual morning became exceptional. Then, the revelations begin.
Her driver won’t know this. He won’t have spent weeks, months, away from school, ostensibly to mourn, had mainland television deliver the news with each mealtime, had Radio 4 fill a kitchen with tragedy every hour on the hour. Here on the island there is only static, a foreign voice if you’re lucky, calling through the storm as you gently turn the dial. You might hear a snatch of a song you thought you once knew.
He also won’t know that a third of accidents happen within a mile of your home, that relatives asked to make public pleas for the return of their missing loved ones are often the prime suspect and, for all the advice about strange men and cars, that most perpetrators are well known to their victims.
‘I think you went looking for him,’ says her driver. A challenge.
The sight of the blood spatters, the boots, the coat submerged in ferns… it rises up into Viola’s vision, bringing the heart-flutter of panic, a spike of guilt. She won’t have it. She pushes it back.
‘I was just walking my dog,’ she says, as breezily as she is able. ‘I didn’t expect to find anything.’ A lie. The dog walker is always primed for discovery. Sometimes, darkly, they wish for it, for their usual morning to become exceptional, for something to flip the day’s routine. An escape – from the silence of a dilapidated farmhouse perhaps, from two-step linear equations and exponential functions that must be learnt alone, without the help of a teacher and the camaraderie of fellow classmates. From the miserable sight of an expanse of abandoned soil, a flaking veranda, still waiting for love and repair.
‘I think you went looking for him,’ the driver persists.
Viola shakes her head.
The mist has lifted on a sea that has calmed at the arrival of the sun, a rebellious child who quietens when the adults show up. At the limit of the dogleg stone jetty, the large metal cross stands dull and grey, reflecting back none of the trifling light. Today, it suggests, God is out-of-office.
‘You knew they’d done this.’ He spits when he talks. ‘Maybe you even put them up to it.’
The Land Rover swings, too fast, past the harbour loading bay and the smokehouse. The herring gulls gather on the railings, barbing, jostling – half a dozen or so, not enough to signal the imminent return of the three-day trawler. The driver brakes to a halt outside the Customs House.
She must speak, take control, decide how this will play out. The revelations must dance to a tune of her picking. Otherwise what was the point of such an early start? Why be the only dog walker on the island?
He kills the engine. They sit quietly for a moment, listening to the gulls’ disputes.
‘Well, if you think that I’m in on it –’ these are the words she eventually chooses ‘– what does that say about you?’
She reaches for something inside her mother’s long, quilted coat, exciting interest from Dot who knows that treats live in that pocket too. Saul looks down at the object she places onto the scuffed and empty seat between them. She keeps her hand tight upon it.
‘You can give me that back,’ he says.
She shakes her head, tightens her grip. He is the one to peer out of the window now, checking for people, early workers on the harbourside, anyone who might witness this scene: Viola Kendrick, the red-haired coycrock girl, and Saul Cooper, Lark’s almost-forty-year-old Customs Officer and sometime policeman, sitting together in a stand-off in a steamed-up Land Rover just after 7 a.m.
There is no one there.
Saul’s eyes return worriedly to the object. It is one half of a set of walkie-talkies.
THE BOOK OF LEAH
Spend too long admiring someone from a distance and you convince yourself that you know them, but it’s an ambush. So it was with Ben.
We were formally introduced on the first day of school, Miriam Calder drawing us into a circle in the staff room. She took hold of him by his upper arms and manoeuvred him forward, as if he were a small b
oy who might need some cajoling to join in with the silly girls. He smiled awkwardly at us, at this unnecessary, quite literal, manhandling.
Miriam’s voice came like syrup: ‘Now then, ladies, I’m sure you’d like to welcome the lovely Mr Hailey to St Rita’s School.’
‘Ben,’ he corrected as he began his round of greetings – the primary teachers first, then an unimpressed Ruth French, followed by Barbara Stanney, who grasped his hand and shook it with the same manic passion she applied to the keys of the chapel organ.
‘Yes, Benjamin Hailey,’ said Miriam, as if his first name, the full version of it, belonged to her.
I could feel the heat rising up my neck as he worked towards me, greeting our part-time assistants next, reaching down for the hand of Faith Moran, who was matched in height by some of the juniors she helped to teach, then Dellie Leven, who gave a quiet ‘hello’.
My turn.
‘Hi, Ben,’ I said in a voice as cool and dry as the hand he placed in mine. Then I spoilt it by gushing, ‘It’s so good to have a man on the team at last!’
My cheeks stung with the too-muchness of myself.
A man – he was certainly that. Tall, clean, vital, yet vulnerable-looking, boyish. He was an exotic blond, his gaze narrow and green. Ask, and it shall be given you, says the Gospel of St Matthew, seek and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. I believed in the notion, but this was an extravagance, obscene. Ben was a white rabbit being pulled from a hat, a coin appearing from behind an ear. I wanted to laugh at the outrageousness of it all, which would have been preferable to my actual response – withdrawal. Our greatest fear is not that we’ll never receive the thing we long for, but that we will, and then what?
I ignored him, stretching only to pleasantries in the corridor, and, like the other women, I helped to nudge him through the timetable of the day. He fell easily into the role of the hopeless boy, not knowing where anything was, how anything worked. Merrily, we played the eye-rolling matriarchs, smug in the solving of his problems. It was a smart initiation. Mr Crane rarely breached the threshold of our staff room, unless announcing something important or calling us to prayer. We weren’t used to a man in our small, private space. Ben made himself as unthreatening as possible.
