Talking to the Dead

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘It’s OK. Edward won’t even be off the train yet. We’ll still be back before him.’

  ‘We’ve been away ages. It’s all taken much longer than it should have done.’

  ‘Well, we know why that was.’

  He’s still smiling. He doesn’t hurry, though I snatch at the door-handle and yank the seat-belt so hard it jams. He’s still in the sunlit foreground of the landscape, in those last moments before the storm hits. Behind him the sky is livid. A small crack of lightning flickers above a tree, and in another part of the picture it’s already raining hard.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  We come in through the garden. It looks as if Susan’s just finished the table and gone inside through the open French windows. The heavy linen cloth hangs in glassy folds, and Susan has filled four vases with the black dahlias and white Japanese anemones and placed them down the centre of the table. She’s plaited ivy and twined it round the candlesticks. By each plate there’s a tiny vase of rosemary or lavender. Everything is carefully, rigidly spaced. But in the centre of the table, between the candlesticks, there’s a big fruit bowl I haven’t seen before. It’s a deep, pure splash of yellow.

  ‘We’ll put the figs in that. I’ll roll some newspaper balls for them to lie on so they fill the whole bowl.’

  We hear footsteps on the wooden boards, and Susan comes out, her arms full of sunflowers.

  ‘Oh, there you are.’ She beams at us as if she’s our daughter. ‘Doesn’t it look nice?’ Her face is flushed with heat and satisfaction.

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  Susan drops half the sunflowers on a garden chair, and their golden faces twist as they settle, looking out through the slats for the sun. ‘I’ll do these in a minute. Did you get all the food? Where’s Edward?’

  ‘He’s coming back by train, so he should be here soon. We’ve got all the stuff in the car.’

  ‘We’d better start bringing it in.’

  The garden is perfectly still. What we say seems to have no more meaning than the tap of birds’ beaks. What is all this for? The table, the food, the round staring hearts of the sunflowers? What are we playing at here? There’s nothing to celebrate.

  ‘Is Isabel still asleep?’

  ‘Oh no,’ says Susan, ‘she couldn’t sleep, so she’s gone out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Susan pushes her hair back behind her ears. ‘Well, she came down and said she couldn’t sleep, and I hadn’t really got started on anything because of the baby. He took ages to settle after his feed. So Isabel said she’d take him out for a few hours so we could all get on with the meal.’

  Richard responds lightly at first, as if to a joke. ‘She’s taken him out? She can’t have. She’s not well enough to walk anywhere.’

  ‘She’s not going to be walking. She rang for a taxi from the garage. He was going to drive her down to the Gap. It’ll be cooler by the water, and then the baby’s never seen the sea. It’s only five miles.’

  Susan must notice the way we’re looking at her, but she patters on, ‘She said she was going to keep the taxi for the afternoon so he could drive her back as well. She’s taken the changing-bag and bottles and everything. I packed it all up for her, I put in three bottles.’

  Richard and I look at each other. ‘You could have gone with her, Susan.’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t really, could I? I mean, there was all this to do.’

  There’s no blaming Susan. She stands there, pink and upright, clutching flowers. She’s done her best, what more can we expect?

  ‘When did she go?’

  ‘It was a bit after twelve. I’ve got all this done since then.’

  She can’t resist another quick glance over the table, can’t help wishing we’d notice it again. I mustn’t give way to the feeling that this thick air isn’t really breathable. I clench and unclench my hands to calm myself, and my heart sucks at my ribs. But I always feel like this before a storm, because atmospheric pressure comes into my head like fear. There’s nothing to be afraid of now. Isabel’s gone out for a change of scene, that’s all, for some fresh air by the sea. But even as I click the clichés round in my head they stop working. She’ll be on her way back in half an hour, with Antony still asleep in his baby seat. He won’t know he’s gone anywhere. She’ll be smiling her faint smile, remote, surprised that anyone’s been worried about her for a moment. Why do I always make such a drama out of everything?

  Isabel hasn’t been out for weeks, not even in the garden. And then this meal, out of nowhere. A plan, a party. She threw the scent to us and we went chasing off after it. You and Richard and Nina go and do the shopping. You’ll have to go into Brighton to get everything. Then as soon as we were out of the house she went off in a taxi to the beach, five miles, farther than she’s been for months. Because she wanted a change of air. Susan’s looking at me.

  ‘What do you think?’ Richard asks me, as if Susan’s not here.

  ‘I don’t know. She ought to be back soon, if she’s just gone down to the Gap. And she won’t want to get caught in a storm with the baby.’

  ‘No.’

  I can’t take my eyes off the sunflowers. Where has Susan got so many, and why has she picked them all when they look so much better standing? Their shaggy goldenness spills over the edge of the chair. What will Susan put them in? They’re too big for any of the vases. Richard is waiting. Does he think I’m going to know what to do? Susan eyes us both.

  ‘I’d better go and get some water for these sunflowers,’ she says, separating herself from us.

  ‘Wait.’

  The tension builds. The flowery, festive table jeers: What party? Did you think there was going to be a party?

  ‘I think we’d better get down there,’ I say.

  ‘And meet her, you mean. Yes, that’s a good idea. She won’t realize how tiring it is, the first time out.’ How responsible we sound. How adult. Then suddenly it hits me like a wave that the house is empty. If I walked round it all, opening every door, I wouldn’t find my sister.

  ‘Oh well then,’ says Susan, relief in her voice, ‘if you’re going to do that I’ll start getting the plates and glasses out in the kitchen. Mum’s bringing the ice-cream over with her. I said eight, was that OK?’ She waits, fractionally, but no one answers. ‘I bet you meet them coming back. She’s gone in Mickey Nye’s taxi, from the garage. He’s got that red Sierra.’ She smiles. You could draw a neat waterproof line right round Susan. We are the ones who are going to sort everything out, and she’s Susan, doing her job as well as ever.

  ‘When Edward comes back, tell him we’ve gone down to meet Isabel,’ I say. She nods, already turning and walking crisply into the house.

  ‘I’m sure it’s all right,’ says Richard as we get into the car. ‘But I don’t feel too happy about Isabel on her own down there. She’s not up to it.’ I glance at him while we jab in the ends of our seat-belts, but say nothing.

  I went on a self-defence course once, after a man had his throat cut in my street. Most people get into trouble because they override their instincts, said the instructor. Afterwards they’ll tell you they didn’t like being in the same room with a particular person. They had a bad feeling about him, but they pushed the feeling down because he was a friend, or the gasman or whatever. You’ve got to learn to listen. Your body’ll tell you all sorts of things if you let it. If you get the feeling you want to move away from someone, do it. Move away fast.

  My body is sick with fear. It’s so strong I feel it coming out of my pores like sweat Richard puts the key in the ignition slowly, fiddles with the wing-mirror and then starts the car, and we’re halfway down the drive before I remember the food in the back. But I say nothing and hope he won’t hear the plastic bags rustle. The food will be spoiling already in this heat, but we can’t go back now. At the end of the track Richard turns left, instead of right.

  ‘You’re going the wrong way.’

  ‘I know, I’m just going to go up to the garage.�
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  ‘She won’t be there. He’d bring her straight back to the house. Listen, this is going to take another ten minutes, you’re wasting time.’

  ‘Nina, for Christ’s sake relax. I can have a word with Janice and find out if Mickey told her what time he was coming back.’

  We swing off the road and bump into the dusty courtyard, but even before we stop we’ve both seen it. A bright red Sierra parked over on the tarmac by the carwash. Richard jumps out of the car ahead of me, and goes across to Janice in the paybooth. ‘Janice, is Mickey about?’

  She has a pinched face with a ragged pixie haircut round it, and she looks like a child pretending to keep shop. ‘He’ll be round the back, there’s an Espace we’ve got in for a service.’

  Mickey Nye’s got the car jacked up and he’s rolling away one of the tyres.

  ‘How’re you doing, Mr Carrington?’

  ‘Fine thanks, Mickey. Just wondering what time you dropped my wife off down at the Gap.’

  ‘Oh now, it’d be a few hours ago. About half-twelve, it must have been. She said you’d be going down to pick her up later.’

  ‘That’s right, we’re on our way. This is Isabel’s sister, Nina Close.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’ He grins at Richard. ‘Just as well you told me, I’d never have guessed it. You’re not much alike for sisters, are you?’

  ‘Did you leave her on the beach?’

  ‘Just by the café. They do a nice cream tea there, and she wouldn’t want to be walking far without a pushchair. Still, it’s kept fine for her, though they say we’re due for a change tonight, and it might come sooner by the looks of it.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right, I want to get Isabel back before it does.’

  Our car rocks back on to the road, its tyres spurting dust and stones. I turn and see Mickey Nye staring after us, his wrench in his hand, like a witness saving up what he’s seen. ‘Why did she say I’d be picking her up?’ says Richard.

  ‘It costs a lot to keep a taxi all afternoon. Maybe she didn’t know how much till she asked him the price.’

  ‘She told him I was coming. We might have waited all afternoon for her back at the house.’

  ‘She’d have rung.’

  Of course she’d have rung. I’m so sure of it I can almost hear the phone ring through the noise of the engine, ringing and ringing in an empty house. I can see Isabel in the old red phone box at the Gap, her back pushed against the door to let in some air, her hair spilling over the receiver. She strains to hear through the noise of kids at the ice-cream van that’s always parked near the phone box. The ringing tone goes on and on. She puts down the receiver, stares ahead for a moment, dials again. Six, seven, eight double rings. Susan’s down the garden picking more flowers, and we’re here, flying down the thunder-dark lane, getting to Isabel as fast as we can. I can’t see Isabel’s face. Only her hand, clutching the receiver, and her foot rocking the baby in his car-seat so he doesn’t wake and start to scream.

  It’s only five miles. Midges slap against the windscreen, leaving bobbles of blood. Richard turns on the radio and cello music belches from the speakers, yawning and yearning, as we slam down the narrow lanes. And then as we whack round a bend there’s a tractor coming towards us, trundling on the crown of the road. The driver’s got his ear-muffs on. He keeps coming, waving to us to go back.

  ‘Was there a gate, Nina? Somewhere he can pass?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  We reverse, our tyres biting the earth at the side of the lane, but there still isn’t enough room. We go back, and back.

  ‘Jesus, if he can’t get past here. I’m in the fucking hedge as it is.’

  The tractor comes on with dreamlike slowness. It’s a boy driving it, a red-faced boy with gum in his mouth. He won’t make way for us.

  ‘He’s got a football pitch on his left, the stupid bugger.’

  The tractor takes our wing-mirror, bends it forward as far as it’ll go and snaps it back, shivering the glass into pieces. Through the back window I see the boy’s ear-muffed head wagging from side to side to the beat in his headphones, and then our car jumps forward.

  There isn’t much at the Gap. A café with a pitch-and-putt beside it, some swings and four sagging umbrellas over plastic tables. The beach is made of hard white pebbles and the sea is grey, flat as a table. The light hurts my eyes.

  We park the car beside the café, and cross the road to the beach. The hot smell of chip grease follows us. There’s the ice-cream van, and the phone box beside it, empty. Visitors sit on mats on the pebbles, in small, muted huddles. They look as if they’re waiting for something that hasn’t begun yet. There are children in the sea, pushing surfboards around on the flat water. It’s one of those lifeless seaside scenes I’ve seen a thousand times. The day expanded to its fullest point hours ago and now it’s seeping away towards evening. It’s calm, eerily calm. Where is she? I run a few yards on the pebbles, my feet scrunching and sliding.

  ‘You go the other way. I’ll go down to the water.’ Richard comes after me. ‘No, Nina, she won’t have gone down here. Not with the baby.’

  But the bubble of panic in my throat is getting bigger and bigger and I flounder on through the heavy shingle until I reach the edge of the breakwater and look down the eight-foot drop. Green, furry weed clings to the black wood, and the tides have heaped up pebbles into great scallops. I’m staring straight down on to the breasts of a topless sunbather who is stretched out with her back arched over a curve of pebble and her eyes closed. Her nipples look back at me, dark and tough.

  ‘Everyone’s packing up,’ says Richard. ‘Let’s try the café.’

  People are looking up at the sky as they roll towels and mats into bags. Near us a family pulls down its windbreak home. I think I’m going to see Isabel there with them, lying with her face up to the sky. A baby cries and I turn but it’s not Antony. There are babies everywhere, in pushchairs and backpacks, or staggering on the pebbles with ice-creams in their hands.

  ‘If we walk right down to the end of the beach and then back…’

  It doesn’t take long. All the holiday-makers are gathered into a strip a few hundred yards wide, and beyond that there are red flags and yellow poles and warnings. I remember Isabel telling me it wasn’t safe to swim outside the flags. The water looks calm, but there are currents underneath, and rocks. People don’t believe it because it looks as safe as a bath-tub. There are just a few old people walking. How far could Isabel walk, carrying Antony? Surely she won’t have come this far. I keep seeing Isabel. The roundness of her head bobbing far out on the water. Isabel is beautiful when she comes up after a dive, her hair streaming and her lashes stuck down, clotted with water. But how could she swim with the baby? Or there, that figure of a woman disappearing into the café, back the way we’ve come. I’m almost sure she had something in her arms. But she’s wearing a blue dress and she doesn’t walk like Isabel. The air tears and prickles. ‘Thunder,’ says Richard, ‘did you hear it?’

  People are moving faster now, picking up chairs and children, straggling towards the car park. There’s a sudden shiver of wind over the sea, breaking the flat surface into oily little waves. Mothers pick their way over the pebbles at the edge of the water and call their children in.

  ‘Lauren! Rebecca! I’m not going to call you again.’

  But they do. I strain to catch the names, as if one might be the one I want.

  ‘Paul! Pa -ul!’

  There are names flying everywhere. ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Listen.’

  We stand still and another shiver of wind blows Richard’s shirt against his body, and then lets it falls loose. ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘I thought I heard someone call Isabel. Listen.’

  ‘It can’t have been.’

  He’s right, it can’t have been. Isabel wouldn’t call her own name like that, as if she was calling herself in from a long way out, so far, out that her voice was just
a thread in the wind. Isabel’s a good swimmer. We always swam far out, both of us, farther than was safe. We always knew we were safe together. We’d practised life-saving over and over, towing one another in. I would hang in the water with my eyes shut tight while Isabel kicked like a frog and brought me back to the sand. ‘You’ve got to struggle, Neen,’ she’d say, but I never did. When we were older we’d talk and talk, out there where no one else could hear, treading water, our voices intimate between the chuckling of the waves. The sea held us up, and we knew we couldn’t have sunk if we’d wanted to.

  All the mothers are calling their children in now. They want them close by their sides, bare brown legs twinkling to keep up. There are slaps and cries when kids won’t come, and then they look up at the sky and they want to come, as fast as they can. One or two big drops of rain fall as we hurry back along the beach.

  ‘She’s not here.’

  ‘She must be. She can’t have gone anywhere else. She’ll have gone inside somewhere.’

  ‘There’s only the café.’

  ‘That’s where she’ll be.’

  The drops thicken and spit on the car-park tarmac, and the acrid smell of rain after drought bounces back to us. Far off over the sea, the thunder clears its throat. It’s coming fast now. A gust of wind picks up crisp bags and chip wrappers and bowls them over and over.

  That’s when I look back at the sea one last time. The wind’s chopping at it, blowing up foam as it blows in the last few people from the beach. There’s the woman who was sunbathing under the breakwater. She has a red T-shirt pulled on over her breasts now, and her hair flaps wildly. She’s hurrying to shelter, but then she sees something behind us and she slows to watch it. I turn. That’s when I see the police-car sliding down the hill towards the beach. It goes silently and not too fast and there’s no siren or flashing light.

  Richard has seen it too. ‘There can’t be anything wrong or it wouldn’t be going so slowly,’ he says. But we begin to run.