Marion's Angels

by K. M. Peyton

  ‘. . . the little lady who told me so enchantingly the sad tale of St. Michael’s . . .’

  ‘. . . No one loves this beautiful country more than myself. It is a great honour—a delight—to do this small thing in the hope that one of the great treasures of our common past . . .’

  Perhaps Walt had told him what to say, Marion thought.

  ‘. . . and an especial pleasure to be playing in company with one of your young and truly gifted musicians—I say this with the greatest sincerity, that I feel honoured to be partnered in this enterprise by someone young enough to dust all the cobwebs off me—someone at the start of a great career, whose generosity and—dare I say it?—bravado, in accepting the invitation of an old war-horse like me. . . .’

  Clapping and laughter allowed him to leave the sentence hanging.

  Marion saw Pat’s fingers grind each other in agony under the table-cloth, and Ephraim waved his arm towards him and said, ‘A few words, my boy—an accompaniment to my few words . . . we’re in this together, you know.’

  More clapping and cheering, and Pat was forced to get to his feet. Marion could feel the reluctance, almost mutiny, felt her own flood of agony in sympathy, the great guilt complex again. . . .

  ‘I think more bravado would have been required to refuse an invitation from such an old war-horse as Mr. Voigt—more a royal command than an invitation—’ He paused for the gusts of sympathetic laughter and then—obviously—for inspiration, darting an appealing glance at Mick. Mick smiled somewhat anxiously and shrugged, so Pat said, ‘I am afraid I’m no after-dinner speaker. I think that everybody knows that—apart from the actual piano-playing—all the work is done by my friend and business partner, Mick Zawadzki—’ This also caused great amusement, and he had to pause again. ‘So I think it would be best if he said a few words on my behalf, about the arrangements we have made so far with Mr. Voigt, and how we hope the appeal will work out. I will just add that I am extremely honoured to have this opportunity of working with Mr. Voigt, and only hope I will be able to justify his optimism in asking me.’

  This went down very well and Pat sat down with a grunt of relief to more applause.

  Mick, not reluctant at all, started to outline the arrangements and plans, tactfully deferring to Walt and Jim and making it sound as if they were the power behind the whole business.

  Marion sat back, her eyes travelling down the table, taking in the involvement of all these important people, awed by what had come about. Pat had laughed and said, ‘Pray for a rich American.’ He had never guessed, beforehand, what was going to evolve from his instructions. He sat, like her, essentially serious amongst all the bonhomie, aware of the complex threads that had gone into the weaving of this enterprise—not a cause for amusement or jollity at all, but more for silent amazement. He understands, Marion thought, more of what it is all about than clever Mick with all his right words and the astute planning, and innocent Ephraim Voigt who knows nothing. We know, and Swithin in his grave on the cliff knows, and Ted and Herbert know, and God—

  ‘Are you all right?’ Geoff was leaning across the table, anxious.

  Marion came back, concentrating hard.

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Work at it,’ Pat said. ‘And then you’ll be able to come to concerts. Sit in the front row.’

  ‘Can I?’

  ‘At the edge, near the door.’

  ‘Please.’

  He turned to her. ‘You can do anything, if you want it badly enough.’

  She had, after all. She had done this thing. Single-handed she had commanded this gathering and instigated the salvation of St. Michael’s. She could feel herself glowing, filled with a sweet fervour, as if she would take off. Pat was looking at her very sternly.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she whispered.

  Pretend it’s a concert, she thought, and Pat is playing. I am in the front row. And she sat tight, her feet firmly on the floor, like a rock. It was wonderful, having this feeling, and holding on. Before she had always let it run, like going downhill on a bicycle and not bothering about the consequences. But now it was different. She could work miracles; this was nothing beside what she had already done.

  Chapter Six

  THE FOLLOWING DAY Marion went to Fair Winds straight from school, on the bus. Geoff said he would try and get away early, so that they could go for a walk along the beach before supper. Marion wanted to show Pat the grave, and where the old city had once stood. She got off the bus and hurried down the sea-walk, keeping to the path which ran beside the dunes, as it was quicker than the shingle. There was a large car parked outside the cottage, not Geoff’s but the American ten-seater. She had forgotten all about Ephraim calling for a practice session, and slowed down abruptly. She didn’t want to share Pat and Ruth with anyone else.

  Lud was sitting in a large cardboard box on the grass.

  ‘Hullo, Mari—yon.’

  ‘Hullo, Lud.’

  ‘That man’s come.’ He waved towards the car. ‘An’ you. Is Geoff coming?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He climbed out of the box and went to the kitchen door, battering on it with his fists.

  ‘Mar—i—yon’s come! She’s come!’

  Marion went in, opening the door to a smell of fried onions. Ruth was bending down to the oven, putting in a large casserole.

  ‘Hullo! You’re nice and early. I thought I’d put the dinner in to cook while we’re out. That is, if Geoff can get away in time. And Ephraim goes.’ The last was voiced wearily, with a wave towards the door to the living-room.

  ‘He came at half-past one, and it’s half-past four now. I didn’t think he’d stay so long. I’ll make a cup of tea, and if I take one in to him, perhaps he’ll take the hint. Are you ravenous?’

  ‘Fairly. What are they doing?’

  ‘Oh, they’ve been playing quite hard, on and off. Mostly on. It sounds lovely.’ They weren’t now. They were talking. ‘Shall I make a sandwich to keep you going? Cheese and tomato? What about you, Lud? Want a piece of cheese?’

  ‘Yes. Take Daddy a piece of cheese.’

  ‘No. He’s working.’

  ‘He likes cheese.’

  ‘Not when he’s playing the piano.’

  ‘I like cheese when I’m playing the piano.’

  ‘Yes. Some people do. Not Daddy though.’

  Lud took his cheese out to the cardboard box and got in again. Ruth made a pot of tea and opened the door to the living-room to take the tray in. Ephraim was putting his violin away in its case, a good sign. In a dark jersey and cord trousers he looked very young and agile, in spite of the grey in his hair and the face like an old brown nut.

  ‘Hi, honey,’ he said to Marion. ‘Pleased to see you! You’ve sure set something in motion here! I feel like a new man coming to these pieces with Patrick here, and that old church to prop up—and all the nice people I’ve been meeting because of it. Much better than a rest—I sure do appreciate meeting you, Marion, and all you’ve got going for me. At my time of life, a little motivation is a great thing.’

  Marion didn’t know what to say, having thought that any debts were in the reverse order. Ephraim was beaming at her, his dark eyes disappearing in a web of wrinkles.

  ‘We’ve had a real nice afternoon. What do you say, Patrick?’

  ‘Yes. Indeed.’ Not expansive, but adequate. Marion guessed that ‘indeed’ was a word he had picked up from Mick.

  ‘I’m not stopping for a cup of tea, honey. I said I’d meet Walt at four-thirty and I’ve over-run that now, I think. I’ll be back on Wednesday, same time. That okay by you, Patrick?’

  ‘Yes. Fine.’

  Ephraim shook hands all round and departed. Pat went out to his car with him, and Ruth poured the tea.

  ‘Splendid! He seems very nice, not a bit stuffy. I always think people who are frightfully good at what they do are going to be stuffy. I don’t know why.’

  When Pat came back he had Geoff with him.

  ‘I got
away early—better than I expected. Not too early, I hope—not very polite, coming to dinner at five.’

  ‘Just what we’d hoped—because we can take Lud and go along the beach first. Get back before he gets too tired and grizzly.’

  ‘I’m tired and grizzly now,’ Pat said.

  ‘You need fresh air. What was he like, Ephraim? Did it go all right?’

  ‘Yes. It was pretty good. Fantastic, in fact. Marion’s not bad at miracle working. God, I’m exhausted!’

  ‘Here, have a cup of tea. And you, Geoff. I’ll go and get Lud ready.’

  It was like a holiday, Marion thought, setting out along the beach without any reason at all save to enjoy themselves. She hadn’t been on the beach with Geoff since the three of them used to go when Liz was still there, and it was the same now as it had been in those days. Geoff, she realized, had grown very quiet since Liz had died; he hadn’t always been such a quiet person. Watching him now, walking with Ruth, with Lud strung between them, it struck her that he was how she could recall him, years back when she was little, laughing and chatting away. She was amazed, having forgotten. She walked behind, on the water’s edge, watching, listening. Pat was beside her, abstracted, careless, the incoming waves catching his feet, sloshing over his plimsolls.

  ‘We can go and see the grave,’ she said. ‘The last grave.’ Swithin’s grave, she added to herself.

  ‘I’d like to find a bone,’ Pat said.

  ‘Daddy’s got some bones at home, out of the cliff.’

  The sea that had eaten away a whole town looked remarkably innocent, rolling up the gritty sand. Their feet left soft, quaking prints, the sand swelling up round the edges, hardening, the impressions filling with water. Marion could walk along watching her feet without noticing anything else, following the farthest edge of the incoming water. After a bit she noticed that she was wearing her best school sandals, and she stopped to take them off, although it was rather late. The sun shone warmly on the ragged sandy cliffs, the pale wiry grass and humped-up shingle; a small yacht slipped idly along out to sea, the sails scarcely filled, honey-coloured in the evening light. Later, Marion remembered, there would come the loom of the lighthouse and the strange stabs and flickerings of light out at sea as the horizon darkened, the warnings of banks and sands far out. A coaster glittered there now, sparkling white, riot looking like anything to do with work at all, more like a decoration, a diamond thrown on a silken sea.

  Marion found she was trailing behind, taken up with her feet on the edge of the water. Pat was in front of her, alone, skimming stones to make them bounce; then Ruth waited for him, with Lud, and he took Lud up on his shoulders. Lud took great handfuls of Pat’s hair to hold on to and Pat groaned and told him not to, so Lud put his hands over Pat’s eyes and Pat started to trip over stones and bits of seaweed with much drama, until Lud was nearly sick with laughing.

  ‘How much farther?’ Pat removed Lud’s hands, taking in the scenery. ‘I’m a sedentary worker, you know. My constitution can’t take a lot of this.’

  ‘We’re there,’ Marion said.

  ‘Where? Where’s there?’

  ‘The town that fell in the sea.’

  Pat stopped in surprise, the landscape having changed in no way at all, save that the sandy cliffs were fringed with trees, and there were a few boats pulled up the beach and a lane, coming down between the trees.

  ‘You mean—?’

  ‘We’re standing on it. It’s all under the sand and out to sea.’

  ‘There’s nothing left?’

  ‘No. One grave.’

  They caught up with Geoff and Ruth, and Pat put Lud down.

  ‘We’re both too old now for me to carry you far. Go and look for bones.’

  ‘This is where I got all mine,’ Geoff said. ‘Skulls and all. They were two a penny when I was a kid.’

  Ruth said, ‘Ugh!’ looking at the cliffs.

  ‘They used to stick out.’

  Marion said to Pat, ‘Will you come up and find the grave with me?’

  ‘If you like.’

  Geoff and Ruth stayed on the beach with Lud, and Pat followed Marion up to the lane opening. A small beaten track undulated up the sloping, broken cliff-face; the cliffs were not very high, hardly cliffs, and the edge, where the path had originally chosen its route, was broken away in several places. They had to climb and scramble across the deep cuts, until the path turned and ran away from the sea through dense undergrowth and crowded saplings. It was narrow and difficult to get through in places. About fifty yards from the cliff-edge, another even narrower path crossed at right-angles. Marion turned left, back in the direction they had walked from along the beach.

  ‘St. James’s Street,’ she said. ‘They don’t bother with traffic lights any more.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This path is—was—St. James’s Street. The one we were on was the High Street.’

  ‘You’re joking?’

  ‘No. I know where everything is—was. We’ve got all the maps and books on it at home. They belonged to my mother.’ She held a vicious encroachment of bramble on one side to stop it springing back on Pat. ‘This street runs—ran—to St. James’s church, and the inland edge of the graveyard is still there. That’s where the grave is. I’ll show you.’

  They ducked and pushed their way along the peaty track until it ran out on to a clearing of turf and they could see the sea again between mounds of hawthorn and blackberries. They walked on, side by side now. To their right some rocks cropped out of the turf in a curving line.

  ‘That’s the old churchyard wall. On the other side there used to be a busy road out of town, going south.’

  They stopped for a moment and considered the busy road out of town. Two Red Admiral butterflies spread their gold and brown to the evening sunshine, balancing on a spray of broom, and a bee zoomed on its way, low over the rabbit droppings.

  ‘Swithin lived here,’ Marion said softly. ‘He must have walked there—right there—every day, out in the morning and back at night, to work at our church.’ She could see his feet printing the dusty road as hers had printed the wet sand, his brown, thoughtful face considering the day’s problems on Herbert or Sebastian.

  Pat was silent, considering Swithin. If he were to stand on the other side of the stones, and walk south, Marion thought, watching him, and if he had been wearing fustian stuff and leather sandals instead of jeans and plimsolls, he could have been Swithin, the way he looked.

  ‘Our man, you mean? Who carved the angels?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Marion led on through some more clumps of bushes and they came to the grave, six feet from the edge of the crumbling sand. Standing there, they could look down on Ruth and Geoff sitting with their backs against one of the fishing boats, talking and throwing stones at a plastic bottle on the water’s edge. Lud was looking for bones. They were all too far away to shout to. The sea, violet-blue and hazy, seemed to fill the whole horizon, both very close and very far away, stroking the pink and gold shingle below and the sky beyond. The shadow of the cliff was beginning to creep across the beach with the lowering of the sun, and Marion could see their shadows, hers and Pat’s, down below them side by side. Neither of them said anything, looking. Pat sat down on the turf, looking out to sea, resting his back on the grave. Marion sat down beside him. The grave was just a hummock with a curved, body-shaped stone over it, green with moss. Putting her back to it, Marion shivered, thinking of the skeleton below. She was thinking, if it truly was Swithin, it would have a broken leg. If she was an archaeologist, she would get permission to dig it up and see. But by the time she would be old enough to be an archaeologist, it would be gone down the cliff, eaten by the sand and the sea.

  She had this feeling again, with Pat, that the silence between them was a mutual acknowledgement of an uncommon bond. Or was that the working of her over-active imagination? She felt it, but perhaps he was thinking of the problems set him by Ephraim.

  But presentl
y he said, ‘This fellow we’re leaning against, he won’t be here much longer, the way it’s going.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I wonder who he was, what he did?’

  ‘He might be Swithin. Swithin was buried in this corner of the churchyard. The most inland corner. So it might be.’

  Pat said, ‘I feel at home here.’

  Marion thought that a very strange thing to say. It made the hair prickle on the back of her neck. No, she thought. It’s the workings of my over-active imagination. Why had he said that?

  ‘What do you mean?’

  But he didn’t answer.

  Instead he said, ‘Your father and my wife seem to get on very well together.’

  Marion was jolted by the comment. It was given without irony or suspicion, a statement of fact, but Marion was unprepared for the switch. She found it strangely hurtful, she could not say why. She could not say anything, sitting there clasping her knees, staring out at the sea.

  ‘What was your mother like?’ Pat asked.

  ‘Like Ruth,’ Marion whispered.

  Everything Pat was saying was a shock to her system; she felt tuned up for shocks, quivering. But only because of something in herself, more vulnerable than it should have been, not because he was coarse or insensitive. It was being in this place, on this strange ground. She felt wound up, overwound like a watch.

  They sat in silence for some time, and Marion felt herself receding. Receding was the word that seemed to explain the feeling, although she knew that a person could not recede. Coming to terms with what had been said, which now, gradually, did not seem shocking at all, merely quite ordinary remarks. Why do I get to feel like that, Marion thought? It’s the same as the taking-off feeling, in a slightly different way.