by Julie Mayhew
‘Nothing is happening here,’ I said, words spoken automatically as my mind ran the truth on a loop – a truth I had always held within me.
Paul left because he knows. Paul left because he knows. Paul left because he knows.
‘Remove the beam from your eye, Leah,’ my father said. ‘Don’t be afraid to see.’
‘All will be well,’ I persisted, ‘a boat will come.’
‘It is too late for me, but not for you.’
‘All will be well.’ It was a prayer now, a mantra. ‘All will be well. All will be well.’
‘Be not deceived,’ he told me, a last clutch at scripture. ‘God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’
And then he fell silent.
And then he was gone – my father, dead; the Lark I knew dead with him.
FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018
Viola is downstairs again in the quiet of the cottage, standing in front of Leah’s mantelpiece. She is ready to move on.
When Leah and Saul return, Leah will be a mess and Viola doesn’t want to be here for that. Never return to a firework once it’s lit.
Before she goes, she turns the Cedars family portrait face down. Peter Cedars’ gaze is what she cannot bear. He would be furious at what she is doing, dragging his daughter into all of this, but Viola refuses to shoulder any guilt. She turns away from the mantelpiece.
Leah Cedars was not dragged into anything. Leah Cedars inserted herself, made promises she had no intention of keeping. She had told Viola and the Eldest Girls that she was named for a woman in the bible who was skilled at deception; that meant, by implication, so was she. It should have come as no surprise that Leah was leading them on, using them to get exactly what she wanted.
‘She deserves everything she gets,’ Viola tells Dot, snatching up the dog’s lead.
They head through the kitchen, out the back door, the rhythm of Dot’s claws against the hard-standing familiar and comforting.
Viola knows where she must go next – to the very seat of justice – because it is time for the island to wake up. To really wake up.
Out the back gate they go, into the ginnel that runs between the two lines of cottages. They must sprint again; St Rita’s bell will ring soon.
But a hand is there, on Viola’s shoulder, before she can pick up any pace. It is a powerful grip, one that spins her around.
‘Where are they?’ is the demand hissed into Viola’s face. ‘Where are the Eldest Girls?’
DECEMBER 2017
Christmas came and went at the Reunyon Farmstead without mention.
Viola and her mother had not celebrated the previous Christmas either, back on the mainland, because the incident had happened just weeks before. Cards landed on their Surrey doormat, some expressing sympathy, some offering good wishes for the season – probably. All were carried at arm’s length straight to the dustbin and deposited, unopened. The television and radio remained off, so there would be no ambush of cheer. Viola spent Christmas morning praying that her mother would not give her a present. In her grief, Viola had not thought to buy her one in return. How was Viola supposed to react to a gift anyway? There were no reserves of joy or gratefulness to call upon. No presents were exchanged. For lunch they had eaten something on toast, and then spent the rest of the day in bed, because every corner of that house held a reminder of merrier holidays past.
In many ways, a Lark Christmas was easier. On the island, there was no precedent for happiness.
Come Boxing Day, Viola took Dot to the Sisters’ Stones at their usual time, in the slim hope that the Eldest Girls would show up. They hadn’t been to the circle for over a week now and, though Viola was growing uneasy at this, she reminded herself that the run-up to the 25th, for normal families, could be filled with any number of time-consuming celebrations.
Viola had considered wandering down to the harbour to see if she might find the girls there, engaged in some activity around that decorated tree by the stocks – an impromptu bout of carolling perhaps – but she had stayed away. Festive music was a guaranteed trigger for sadness, and for this same reason, she had thought she would avoid chapel on the last Sunday of Advent. The girls had convinced her to go. This was the last time she had seen them.
‘The Christmas hymns make me cry,’ she’d confessed, ‘they remind me of Dad and of Seb. I can’t be there.’
She felt weak making this admission. Britta, Anna and Jade-Marie went every week, and to school every day, regardless; they faced down their fears while Viola and her mother had run as far as they could from their tragedy.
Still, the girls had been kind, talking her through every detail of the upcoming service, it being the same every year, and these details, in their unfamiliarity, had convinced Viola to go.
‘We couldn’t do the four-part harmonies without you,’ Anna said – a final persuasion.
Viola leant against the middle stone of the circle that Boxing Day for almost an hour. She scanned the ferns for their recent guest, worried that she would be responsible for entertaining him alone, and what ‘entertaining him’ might necessitate, but anxiety soon dissolved into boredom.
She threw things for Dot to fetch, who would make the initial dash, then pull up, as if remembering belatedly that she wasn’t like other dogs and didn’t get excited by stupid sticks.
Restless, Viola had crawled through the hollow centre of that middle stone, Dot liking this game at least and joining in. Viola wasn’t sure that sorrow was an ailment that could be cured by the stone gods but she hoped they might give it a try.
‘That’s your worms and fleas sorted, too,’ she informed Dot as they headed back through the wood for home.
The day after Boxing Day, a large dappled horse sauntered into the farmstead yard. Riding it, dressed head to toe in worker’s greens, was the woman Viola had seen with the gamekeeper, the one the same age as her mother. The woman hefted herself off the horse with a grunt and an awkward swing of the leg, gravel crunching as she hit the ground. She introduced herself as Mary, before telling Viola that she would like her to sit down for what she was about to say next.
Viola had sunk down instantly, thudding onto one of the peeling wooden steps of the veranda. Mary, who had clearly expected to be invited inside on that bitter December day, was taken aback for a moment. She stood unfastening her riding helmet while Viola inhaled deeply, then held her breath as if she was about to be submerged by water.
Viola understood this moment – knew it viscerally. Someone says they have something to tell you and that you need to sit down.
Then they say it.
Then your whole life changes.
Mary perched beside Viola, the weight of her making the step bow and creak.
‘It’s Peter,’ she said, her eyes glistening at the mention of his name.
Viola let go of the air in her lungs. ‘Who?’ she asked.
‘Peter Cedars,’ said the woman, her voice sharpening, irritated by the need to clarify.
Viola shook her head, slowly, apologetically.
‘The gamekeeper?’ Mary offered.
‘Oh, yes, him.’ Viola relaxed a little; they were back on track.
‘Well …’ Mary eyed her cautiously, ‘he had a serious heart attack.’ She paused, as if checking that it was all right to go on. Viola nodded. ‘And though Saul Cooper managed to keep him alive while Reuben Springer ran for the defibrillator, we have only limited resources here on Lark, and what with it being winter and no boats passing near, well …’ She took a great shivery breath. ‘I’m afraid he didn’t make it.’
‘Okay,’ said Viola, because it was obvious she must respond. ‘That’s –’ what would be the right word? ‘– sad.’
‘It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it?’ said Mary, a tear travelling down her pink and doughy cheek. She grabbed Viola’s hand and squeezed it firmly, and they stayed like that for a while, quiet, listening to the rapid, expressive undulations of a robin’s song. It was comforting, s
omehow, to be held so tightly, her own mother not in the market for physical affection right now, but still, Viola could feel dishonesty swelling inside of her.
Eventually, she said it: ‘I didn’t really know him.’ She gave Mary a quick, tight smile. ‘Sorry.’
Mary dropped Viola’s hand and tipped away from the girl, her whole body asking the question: What do you mean?
‘I talked to him a few times,’ explained Viola, keen to draw the woman back. ‘Usually because he was cross with me for trespassing.’
Mary stared. Viola felt herself being reassessed, reclassified.
‘But,’ Mary narrowed her eyes, ‘he said… Peter said that he was looking out for you, because your mother was…’ She glanced back at the house and lowered her voice. ‘Because she’s not so well at the moment and that I was to do the same. I was to make sure you were okay if I ever came across you, because you were often out alone and Peter was worried that…’
Viola stared back at the woman and did some reassessing of her own.
‘He was worried that something might happen to you, that someone might…’
Now Viola did feel sad; she felt awful. You reckon it’s a good idea, do you, wandering about like this? It had been concern, not a telling-off. Viola felt a bubble of something rising in her throat – grief, terrible grief – though not necessarily, not completely, for the man they were speaking of.
‘You came on a horse,’ she said quickly, diverting that bubble, making it pop.
‘I’m finding it hard to get back in the Land Rover.’ Mary sighed and looked off into the middle distance so she might not cry, a technique Viola recognised, had used many times herself. ‘It used to send me mad, all those balls of string and wire in the cab, the slips of paper and his empty Thermos flask, but now, that mess of his…’ She stopped, sniffed, licked her lips: more techniques Viola had in her own arsenal. ‘Anyway!’ Mary slapped her green thighs and forced her voice towards brighter tones. ‘Ingrid Duchamp has been helping me get better control of Dandy here, and I, in return, have tempted that Swedish ice queen out of her big glass box for a change.’ She said all this with a wry smile, as if Viola should understand what was funny.
‘I don’t know who Ingrid is either,’ Viola confessed.
Mary laughed, seemingly grateful for the opportunity to do so. ‘What are we like, eh? Princesses in our towers, the lot of us. You should start introducing yourself a bit. It’s much harder for folk to be rude about you when you’ve made the effort to say “hello”, take my word on that.’
Viola nodded that she would.
She also agreed to go to the funeral – it was what Peter Cedars would have wanted.
Deborah Kendrick had been more than ruffled at the sight of her daughter in the kitchen, later that week, dressed in smart black trousers and a roll-neck.
‘Why are you wearing that?’ she demanded. ‘Where are you going? Not the school, not that doctor…’
The presence of her mother in the kitchen, out of her bedroom, not lost-eyed on the veranda, might otherwise have been the right moment to broach what was going unsaid – What are you so scared of, Mum? Tell me, and I’ll tell you what I’m scared of too – but for the moment Viola was only concerned with quelling her mother’s rising panic.
‘Peter Cedars, the gamekeeper, has died and I’m going to his funeral,’ she explained, in her haste not realising what she had done. If festivities reminded Deborah Kendrick of lost Christmases, the mention of a funeral would send her right back there, to the aftermath.
‘Oh, Viola!’ Her mother dropped her head. ‘You don’t have to. We came here to escape all of that.’
‘I don’t think you can,’ Viola replied very softly, heading into the hallway to put on her coat – a thin, inadequate black one, suited to the occasion if not the weather – before embarking on the long, cold walk to the chapel.
On the coast path, ahead of the service, Viola encountered Michael Signal. He bounded up to her, gasping in her ear, equal parts appalled and thrilled: ‘What are you doing here?’
He pulled her behind the shelter of a wind-scooped hedge, out of hearing of the line of mourners, and proceeded to tell the story of the goat’s heart driven through with nails, how it had been delivered by Mary Ahearn to Mr Crane’s desk in a game sack, and how the girls were now under curfew.
‘Then,’ said Michael with unsavoury delight, ‘Peter Cedars fell down dead – of a heart attack! – cursed by the Eldest Girls! And from what I’ve heard, by you too!’
He folded his arms over his suit and tie. He nodded resolutely.
Viola’s mouth was empty of an immediate response. She felt dizzy, sick, horrified by the connection. The heart wasn’t meant to harm Peter Cedars. This wasn’t their fault.
But then came another realisation, sly, fierce, rising fast – the heart had worked. Incorrectly and indirectly, it had worked! The power that Viola and the Eldest Girls had tried to harness within themselves existed; it was real, and this fact, separate from any affection she now felt for the late gamekeeper, gave Viola a sudden sense of boldness, of invincibility.
‘You should keep your trap shut,’ she shot back.
Michael’s eyes widened. ‘Why should I?’
Viola smiled darkly. ‘In case they find out who it was who fetched that heart for us, that’s why.’ Then she shoved him hard, so that he fell backwards ingloriously, into the hedge. She rejoined the queue of mourners and the boy chased behind her, dishevelled, heckling weakly in her wake, ‘What’s that supposed to mean? What’s that supposed to mean?’
This boldness carried her through the service, forming a dam against the memories she did not want flooding back.
Mary stood beside Jade-Marie in chapel, her arm around her, as Father Daniel led the coffin’s procession up the aisle, declaiming, ‘I am the resurrection and the life!’ and only then did Viola join up the dots – Mary was Jade-Marie’s mother. Why had she not worked this out before? Probably because Jade-Marie talked mostly about her father (Neil, dead at sea) and because the girls stuck close to one another for mass at the weekends, giving few hints as to who in the congregation were their parents.
Here, at the funeral, the girls were hand-in-hand with their respective mothers, the family resemblances startlingly obvious. Anna’s blonde, bobbed hair was the image of her mother’s, and the discovery that Viola’s Provisions Store nemesis was Britta Sayers’ mother was perhaps no surprise at all.
The girls were being held close that day because they were not welcome. Yet, they had to be there; absence would have been an admission of guilt. Mary’s failure to mention this to Viola seemed an enormous oversight. Did she not know of the coycrock’s friendship with her daughter, of her involvement in all of this? Or was it like Jade-Marie not speaking of her mother, was Viola no topic of conversation away from the stones?
Viola decided the omission was a kindness, so that she had not been afraid to come, and also a denial by Mary that the girls could ever have hurt her beloved Peter. Still, as Viola studied the backs of Britta, Anna and Jade-Marie, she imagined their potential, seeing it as something shimmering and actual, rising from the girls’ shoulders. What might they do next with this great power they possessed? Oh, the scores they would settle! Oh, how the guilty would suffer at their hands!
Outside, as they all stood by that deep hole in the ground, shoes caked in soil, Father Daniel’s voice battling the sharp coastal winds to explain that ‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery’, Viola thought only of their power, of what it could achieve; she zeroed in on this, so as not to recall the last time she had witnessed this sombre ritual, how on that occasion the bodies of her father and brother had been lowered into the ground.
She did not have the strength to attend the wake at the gamekeeper’s lodge; neither could she go straight back to the farmstead. The quiet there would likely unwrap the sorrow Viola kept so neatly packaged within herself; its exposure would only wound her mother fu
rther. Instead, the girl made for the emptiness of the harbour, to sit on the edge of the stone jetty that doglegged out to sea. She rested her back against the giant metal cross and let her legs hang over the edge, the wild sea licking hungrily at her heels. Then, she allowed herself to sob.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ A man burst out of a side door of the Customs House, interrupting her moment of solitude. ‘Get up, would you!’ he yelled, jogging towards her, pulling on a great, flapping oilskin coat. ‘Get up! You’ll catch your death!’
Viola quickly stood, realising the man would drag her to her feet if she didn’t obey. It was the Customs Officer, his expression twisted with horror.
‘What on earth were you playing at?’ he demanded.
Viola looked down to where she had sat, to where the sea snatched at the jetty like a tiger swiping its paw through the bars of a cage. These were the same waves that claimed a child every seven years. This was no place to hide and cry. She was playing at being stupid, was the answer to the Customs Officer’s question, but it would be too pathetic to own up to that. Instead, she reached for the lifebuoy of Mary Ahearn’s counsel.
‘Hello,’ she said to the Customs Officer, calming the chattering of her teeth and the hiccupping of her diaphragm, adopting the bright but quavering voice of a job interviewee, ‘I’m Viola Kendrick, it’s very nice to meet you.’
The Customs Officer was disarmed by this unexpected formality.
‘You’re a bloody idiot, is what you are,’ he replied, but his earlier passion had been assuaged. He strode off towards the whitewashed stone and warm light of his office, calling back to her as an invitation: ‘You’d better bring yourself inside, then, Viola Kendrick, get yourself dry.’
She followed him through the side door into a wide room with windows on all sides. The view took in the entire spread of the sea, as if the building were the bridge of a ship. Various pieces of radio and radar equipment buzzed and blipped, and added to this was the thunder of a small electric kettle.
