The Heart Beats in Secret

by Katie Munnik

  ‘It’s not bad,’ he says. ‘Better than treacle.’

  ‘Can’t think where you’d find treacle these days. Do you need anything else?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Let me see your face.’

  ‘You know what I look like.’

  ‘We can turn on a light. The blinds are down.’

  ‘Finish your tea first. You’ll be cold after a day outside.’ I don’t want to be prim, it’s the last thing I’m feeling, but the words come anyway.

  ‘Here, take my hand,’ he said. ‘It’s you who are cold. You’re shivering.’ He rubs the back of my hand, his fingers rough and gentle. ‘You’ll be needing gloves in this house. And it isn’t even really autumn. The geese aren’t back yet.’

  ‘I’m fine. Really. I am.’

  ‘So am I.’

  He holds me. Everything else can wait.

  Then he tells me why, the words finally drifting down to the floor.

  He tells me about the last bad night, the constant flights and the roar, flames and blindness, the shattered planes landing. ‘We were worse than bridge-builders up there, or skyscraper men a hundred storeys above. We’ve got nothing tying us to the ground but gravity and that isn’t a friend. Back on the ground again and we can’t stop shaking, none of us, but no one talks about that. No one. A little whisky passed around, and we hold the flask in two hands, but then the planes need to be hosed out because that’s how you do it. There’s nothing left to lift. Just a slurry of blood and bone grime.

  ‘I spoke with the chaplain. Even managed to ask him about fear and he offered a prayer. Then he smiled and told me there was a job to be done and he knew I could do it. All the way back to the barracks, I kept saying that, repeating his words just under my breath like a spell. A job to be done, a job to be done. I didn’t decide anything, didn’t have to think at all, really, just kept pacing out those words. A job to be done. But I walked past the barracks, I did, and out to the road. Don’t know how I got there, out past the gate and there must have been a sentry. I might have spoken to them, I don’t know at all, but I know I was walking and kept walking till I found an army train heading north. Climbed on with a crowd of men, all tired out, all blind in the night and maybe I slept or maybe not, but soon enough I’d made it to Haddington, slipped away on the platform and walked home. No knowing how much shtook I’ll be in now. I just needed to be home.’

  His eyes wide as he speaks, his fingers splayed and I surface somehow, listening. No lovemaking then, but he holds me and I cry.

  ‘I’m scared,’ I say.

  ‘Of me?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘No. We shouldn’t be. I just blew here on the wind. It’s just the after-echo of fear we’re feeling. Someone else’s fear.’

  ‘You’re too clever for this.’

  ‘It’s not cleverness. Just poetry.’

  He leaves before dawn.

  I take my suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and put a blanket inside. Socks. Another jumper. The wedding photo. From the kitchen, I take the jam, the Cunard teacup, a spoon. I know that none of this is a solution. He can’t stay and more furnishings don’t change that. But I don’t know what else to do, and so I follow him out to the sea like a ghost.

  The air is heavy with sea before dawn. Sea or soundless cloud. I’d imagined a different kind of light, grey but dawning, and I’d hurry along the road, racing the band of light to the east, and catching Stanley before the bridge. But it isn’t like that. Instead, the haar is back and the world looks white and empty.

  If I’m seen here along the high street, I can always say I’m heading into Edinburgh. Too early for the bus perhaps, but I could feign confusion. If I’ve already crossed the bridge when the soldiers spot me, the story stretches, and I’ll need to think of something else.

  My head aches now, as with fever, and time and distances shudder through me. Edinburgh again and six years old, down in the Meadows with Jeanie, swinging arms and walking through the mist. The pathways were straight and the planted trees looked like the shadows of men. Jeanie ran ahead and I lost my footing on the slick wet grass. My knee stained green. When I stood again, she was so far ahead, a smudge, another shadow or just a faint reflection in a misted window, my own form doubled, my own arms swinging still. I stood, time-blind, unsure if I could catch up or simply stand and my reflection vanish.

  Somewhere ahead, Stanley is hurrying through this same mist. If he makes it to the mine before me, I will never find him. I will need to turn back. I could leave the suitcase, though the army might find it. What would they make of that?

  My ears feel fog-filled as I cross the bridge and pass the Marl Loch. There are no birds. A single silence covers the bay and the flat dune land beyond but my heart beats like something wild, a fierceness that helps me keep going. When I find Stanley, I can rest. He’ll show me the mine, and we’ll both burrow in.

  A voice behind me calls stop.

  A man. Not Stanley. I freeze, hold my breath as if I could disappear by stillness.

  ‘This way is closed.’ His accent comes through the mist behind me, strange and familiar. ‘Ah, it is you. But I have told you that this way is not for you. Are you … are you all right, miss?’ I do not turn and he steps in front of me. I can see now that it is the blond soldier. ‘You are far from home too early.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say, and I feel my lips thin. ‘I was walking.’

  ‘Yes. I was, too.’

  ‘I hadn’t realized that the coast was to be patrolled as well as mined.’

  ‘No. It isn’t. I was just walking. But it is not safe for you.’

  ‘And for you?’

  ‘I know where we put the mines. Here, let me take your case.’

  ‘No, I want to keep it.’

  ‘I did not mean to take it away. Only to carry it for you. You look worn out.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes. And lost perhaps.’ His voice is kind, safe even. By now, Stanley would be in the mine, so time doesn’t matter, does it? I wouldn’t find him now. The blond soldier holds out his hand and I let him take the case. He does not let his face express its weight, merely lifts it and continues to walk. ‘I will show you the blocks, if you like. They are finished now. Perhaps you would like to see?’

  We walk together, and the sun must be rising now because the air itself is luminous, as if overexposed, though the fog still hides the shape of the land. My fingers feel numb with cold. Away to the right, there are trees. I can hear birds beginning to argue, their voices ragged in the damp morning air. A hill rises under our feet and he touches my arm, motioning away from the track. Here, the ground is rough, the surface churned by the heavy treads of tyres, and the grasses are all scraped away. At measured intervals, concrete blocks sit heavy on the ruined earth, row after row like something emerging from the soil, pushing up into the fog.

  ‘They look strong,’ I say. ‘And old.’

  ‘We just finished them last week. But you are right. They look as if they have been here a long time. Like standing stones.’

  ‘Do they teach you local history in the army, then?’

  ‘No. I pick up things. I am curious.’ I know he is looking at me, but I will not meet his gaze. Instead, I set my hand against the block, its surface ridged and rough.

  ‘Is he your husband? The man you are looking for,’ he asks. I want to hold stillness around me, to be stone deaf, but the soldier bends to meet my eye, smiles, and the stillness is gone.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘He … he shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Yes. We can end up in strange places.’ He tells me then how he left his country last year. The sudden attack, the city under siege. Bombers destroyed the waterworks and left no water to drink, let alone to put out fires. So many fires. It doesn’t take long for a burned city to starve. Then horses were flayed in the street in front of the bank, its classical facade watching bone-white, respectable. Every day, he had t
o visit his father in hospital. Pneumonia and not unusual for an old man, but now? Such a peaceful sickness was strange as Grecian columns in the smoke. The hospital was modern, bright with windows, so much glass. And every night, more bombers. So the nurses moved the patients down to the basements. His father wouldn’t go. He wanted to stay near the statue of the Virgin. She would protect him, wreathed in stars. She was his only health, he said, and the doctor telling the son this story cried. Later, an American journalist came, his Bell & Howell camera strung around his neck. He filmed the shattered windows, the Virgin’s stars, and the quiet nurses carrying buckets. The son met him on the street and told him stories about the maternity ward in another hospital where the babies were tied to pillows because there were no unshattered cots. When the siege was over, the American would smuggle the footage home, the film wrapped around his chest like a bandage, newspaper around a glass, a hidden blade. The son would also slip away, taking a long escape from his homeland, a breath held until at last he pulled himself onto this grey and rainy island.

  ‘And now, I seem to be a soldier,’ he says. ‘I do not know if my father would like that. He was a peaceful man.’

  ‘So is my husband.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, as if he already knew him. As if the fog hid nothing.

  He tells me he can help Stanley and that I should trust him. I am not sure what trust means. Only that I am scared. And that doesn’t seem to matter.

  ‘It is getting cold,’ he says. ‘I can’t imagine that he will want to stay here longer.’

  ‘You won’t send him back.’

  ‘I said I could help. I will.’

  ‘The suitcase …’

  ‘Leave it with me. I will find him and he will have it.’

  ‘Is this risky? For you, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t think so. You should go home now. When I can, I will send word. Do you know Muriel? With the garden?’

  ‘And the pig. Yes, of course.’

  ‘I wondered if you might. Perhaps I can send you word through her.’

  The fog lifts and all that is common and kenspeckle returns. The day beyond our words.

  8

  I GO HOME IN THE GROWING MORNING LIGHT AND I wonder about going home to Edinburgh. Mum said that there would always be space for me if I needed it. But Stanley might still need me, too. I should be where I can be found.

  Aberlady will be waking up and if I am not quick on my feet, Miss Baxter will be meeting me at the door. I could tell her that ghosts kidnapped me. Or scared me off? I should never have mentioned ghosts.

  My mother believes in ghosts. More or less. She believes that the self continues after death, not in some vague paradise far removed, but here among us.

  ‘If they choose. Some must choose other places. Hilltops, woodlands. Or far out to sea. Places where you cannot live with a body, but without perhaps you might.’

  She told me this at night when I was small. I’d woken afraid, the new cot in the corner casting strange shadows on the wall and the baby fretting. Mum came through to settle us both, and all I could say was ghosties. ‘Nothing to be afraid of, pet. They’re just real, like you. Only they’ve finished with their bodies. Must be grand, don’t you think? I wonder where we might go. Up on a mountain? I’d like to be up in the air like that. Near the eagles. I’ve never seen an eagle. I think I’d like to.’

  ‘But what about heaven? Mummy?’

  ‘Oh, it comes later, doesn’t it? On the Last Day. That’s when the graves will break open and the Judgement comes. Heaven will start after that. Isn’t that what the minister says? I’ll let him worry about the details. It’s the bit that comes first I’ll look forward to. Give this old body a rest and turn away for a while.’

  She told me she’d seen a ghost once, not long after she was married. She meant to soothe me, I’m sure. She said she had been thirsty and my father sleeping soundly, so she left the lamp unlit and stepped carefully through to the kitchen where she found a woman standing by the window. It was a thin white woman standing so still with her open hand pressed flat against the glass, leaving no trace. My mother startled and stepped back, the floorboard sounding behind her as she found her balance. She thought she must have mistaken her own reflection. Just a trick of the light against the glass. She smiled at her folly and waved but the image remained fixed. Then she understood. ‘Quietly, you know. Like she was something I already knew but just realized or remembered. Nothing to be frightened by. Not really.’

  My mother left the kitchen without turning away, then went back down the hall and climbed into bed again, still thirsty.

  Night after night, the thin woman came back. My mother lay in bed, listening to her sighs. Later, she was braver and would go and sit with her for a lonely hour in the night. ‘Not reaching out or saying anything, you understand. Just sitting in the moonlight together. I always thought she looked as if she were gazing out to sea. Not that you could see it through that window. There are trees and flats and half of Marchmont in the way, and then the castle and the rest of the city, but beyond that, the sea. I knew it was there and I felt she did, too. Who knows what the dead can see. And I did wonder if she might prefer to be out there, really. Out by the sea with the white waves and the wind.’

  Remembering it now, this story feels different. As a child, I was fascinated by the ghost’s hand on the window, the thought of watching together in the moonlight. Now, I think of my mother climbing back into bed where it would be warm, where her husband was heavy, his breath steady and maybe he turned in his sleep or perhaps he woke, drawing her cold body close, the sheets warm and safe.

  My parents moved from that flat two years later in the summer my sister was born. My mother made a point of leaving a gift for the ghost on the window sill. A small pebble, sea-smooth and grey. Just in case.

  Back inside the rented house, I kick off my shoes, shrug off my coat, lie down and sleep without deciding, without dreams.

  There are birds arguing with the sun before I open my eyes. They must be over the road in the kirkyard’s yew trees. I roll over and the pillow is cold, the room too sudden. I wonder how long I’ve slept and then I wonder about Stanley, and then about the soldier who took the case. What an idiot I was. What would he do to help? Probably pilfer the socks and the jar of jam. Leave the case sprung open in the dunes. Stanley might even find it out there and figure out my idiocy. Not even worth coming home to. But that was it, wasn’t it? He hadn’t come home to me. He’d just come home. Frightened and running, back to the place he knew. Pulled to the old landscape and the stones. Like gravity.

  Next door, a window crashes open and the birds take flight with loud, abrasive cries. I push back the blanket and step into the day, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. In the kitchen, I drink a glass of water. There are mouse droppings on the floor and Stanley’s chair is pushed in slant against the table. I wish he’d left me that mussel shell he told me about. The one the rook brought him. I’d carry it about in my pocket all day, hidden and blue like a bruise.

  Towards the end of the month, Muriel comes round again. I hear her whistle outside, then her syncopated knock on the door.

  ‘You okay, hinny?’ she calls. ‘Yoo-hoo!’

  ‘I’m coming. Hold your horses.’

  She stands on the doorstep, hands in pockets, not quite smiling. ‘I was right. You do look bleak. Mum says to give you space, but there’s space and then there’s neglect. And I had the feeling something was wrong. Are you poorly?’

  ‘No. Yes. Not right, anyway.’ I step back and let her in; her heavy shoes weigh down the carpet as she walks through to the kitchen. ‘You hungry?’

  ‘That’s not the point. Mum says to bring you round for tea, if that’s what you fancy, but I wondered if the films might be a better solution. Get you out of a funk, perhaps?’

  ‘I don’t have money for the films.’

  ‘Me neither. But Mum slipped me a little for the cause and I’m sure we can find someone to smile at for a couple of choc ice
s.’

  ‘Getting a bit chilly for that now.’

  ‘Smiling or choc ices? It’s never too chilly in Haddington. We’ll be fine.’

  It would take too much energy to say no to Muriel, so I let her sweep me up and bustle me off. I’m slow to gather a cardigan, slow to finger the buttons through the right holes, not wanting to shake. Muriel takes a scarf from the dressing table and ties it over my hair, gently tucking in the stray ends. I try not to notice or I might just cry, but she’s all businesslike and jolly and makes sure I have the house key in my pocket so I can come home again.

  Outside, there are two bicycles propped against the wall. Hers is a rusty old man’s bike her father cobbled together from bits. She’s borrowed Connie’s bike for me so I’ll ride in comfort, all good leather handles and a wide basket buckled on the front.

  Out past the dog-leg in the high street, we set our backs to the sea and cycle inland past the fields and down the long road Stanley walked to get home in the dark. Muriel keeps the pace up, throwing the odd glance over her shoulder to encourage me along the way and chattering about the films.

  ‘There’s no point holding out for hope and high drama, I’m afraid. Mostly Laurel and Hardy these days to keep the spirits up.’

  ‘Well, here’s another nice kettle of fish you’ve pickled me in.’

  ‘You didn’t strike me as a fan.’

  ‘I pick up things,’ I say. ‘I’m curious.’

  ‘I always like the bit when Laurel makes his fist into a pipe and lights it with his thumb. A bit of good magic, don’t you think? We could all use a little of that.’

  After that we cycle in silence, the cold air catching my breath and my eyes beginning to run. Ah well, let them. The sun is bright in the fields and it’s a brisk wind, but I’ve a clean handkerchief to tidy with at the end of the road.

  Coming onto the high street in Haddington, Muriel swings a leg over her bicycle frame to balance a moment on the pedal before she steps down onto the road. I brake and hop down, too, jolted and out of breath.