by Ann Swinfen
With the heat and the food, she felt herself drifting off, but somewhere, as she went slipping under the edge of sleep as if she was swimming under water, she felt a throbbing. It seemed to come up to her from the hot sand under her calves and the cool sand under her head. The slight breeze fanned a wisp of her hair across her face. Since Sandy had mistaken her for a boy, she had refused to allow her father to cut it. Now she simply chopped ragged bangs for herself at the front. The back had grown down into a rough pageboy shape. The sand was filtering into her hair and it seemed – in her half sleep – that the individual grains of sand were dancing against her skull with the vibration which came with the throbbing sound. Slowly she sat up, shaking the sand out of her hair with her eyes still shut. When she opened them the scene on the beach swam into focus: people lying strewn about, almost like the pictures of London in the Blitz which she had seen in the newspapers.
She shook her head again. The noise grew louder. It was one of the patrol planes coming low up the coast from the south. Tirza looked around, wondering where Martha was. She saw Sandy and the soldier tilt their heads back, and the soldier pointed as the heavy, four-engine plane pounded into sight from the direction of Eel Joe’s cove.
Suddenly there was a piercing scream from the other end of the beach, and the figure of a woman came racing towards them. Martha looked as though she was naked, but Tirza realised she was wearing the flesh-coloured swimsuit again. Her long blonde hair was loose and streaming down her back, but she ran clumsily, her arms and legs ugly and uncoordinated. Halfway along she stooped and grabbed Billy, who had been building a sandcastle with one of the children from the Mansion House. He had been well-behaved all day, but now he gave a shriek of pure rage as Martha’s careless feet ploughed into the castle, scattering the painstakingly constructed ramparts. She whirled around, a confused look on her face, then scrambled up over the ledges and flung herself into a foxhole. As the plane came level with Libby’s Beach, Tirza could just see the top of her cousin’s head where she crouched behind the sandbags. Filled with shame she turned away and stared blindly out at the stranded ship.
‘Who on earth was that?’ she heard Sandy ask.
‘Me, I ‘ave no idea,’ said Pierre. ‘Some crazy woman?’
‘Crazy or not, she’s a stunner. I wouldn’t mind an introduction.’
‘Monsieur Sandy, take my advice. All women mean trouble. Crazy women the most trouble.’
Sandy laughed and punched the chef on the arm.
‘I don’t believe you’re a misogynist.’
‘I ‘ave my fiancée in Montreal who is a sensible woman with a good dot. When I ‘ave saved enough for my own restaurant, we will marry. Other women, I leave alone.’
Out to sea, the afternoon light began to pearl over, thickening along the horizon and then filling up the eastern sky like a milky liquid in a glass bowl. There was a fog building out there, some miles out to sea, while over the land the westering sun went down pink and gold in a clear sky. On the face of the fog wall rainbows shimmered, sheets of brilliant colour a mile high, stained-glass windows in the sky. As the air grew cooler, mosquitoes began to filter out gradually from the marshy ground behind the shore line, and the sound of hands slapping on bare arms and thighs accompanied the replenishing of the huge campfire and the setting up of the fireworks.
People became more energetic as the evening stole in. Charlie produced a big iron cauldron and hauled a holding trap of lobsters out of a rock pool where he had kept it all day, while along at the south end of the beach someone had set up a Victrola and soldiers were dancing with girls from Flamboro, joined by some of the summer people. After the lobsters had been boiled over the campfire, they were handed out along the beach, and groups of people gathered round bowls of melted butter, cracking open the shells and dipping the meat into the butter.
When at last Tobias judged that it was dark enough, he gathered his team inside the rope barrier which had been rigged around the fireworks area. With a long taper, Walter lit the first row of rockets, which shot up to explode in constellations of red and gold. They fanned outwards and wavered in the night sky like giant feathered clusters of dandelion seeds, then fell hissing into the sea. The crowd greeted them with an involuntary ‘Aah’.
Wayne and Simon, wriggling under the rope, began setting off Chinese crackers they had bought themselves. The unexpected bangs, going off at a distance from Tobias and his helpers, made several people jump, and a child began to cry. Then another wave of light sprang up – magic fountains arranged in a square, which spurted sparks in gold and amber, silver and red, one colour after another, like demented volcanoes. Tobias was getting into his stride now.
Tirza felt her elbow taken from behind in the dark. She knew from the lingering scent of his aftershave that it was Sandy.
‘Are you wanting me to sail you home?’ she asked, without turning round. Another flight of rockets soared into the sky and hung there, a Milky Way, a solar system, a universe of hopeful stars.
‘No, no, I’m doing fine.’ He stepped up beside her, leaning on his sticks. ‘Spectacular, isn’t it? Wonderful show. No, I was wondering if you could tell me who that girl was? That beautiful blonde who leapt into the foxhole when the plane went over.’
Tirza, inexplicably, felt her mouth go dry.
‘Why do you want to know?’ she said evasively.
‘Just wondered.’
She considered. Sooner or later someone would tell him. It was useless trying to avoid it.
‘That’s my cousin, Martha Halstead.’
‘Halstead?’
‘Halstead is her married name. She’s Simon’s sister.’
‘So she’s married? I saw she picked up a little boy.’
‘That’s her son, Billy. He’s five. You met him at our house.’
Tirza fought with her conscience and lost.
‘Her husband was killed a couple of months ago, flying with the air force on a bombing mission over Germany.’
‘Poor blighter.’ Sandy seemed to consider for a minute. ‘Why did she do that? Hide in the foxhole?’
‘She’s been kind of crazy ever since,’ said Tirza clearly. ‘Whenever a plane comes over, that’s what she does. Hides. Crazy.’
‘Not surprising. The Blitz has affected some people like that, too. Would you introduce me to her?’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, well... Wife of a fellow airman.’ His voice sounded false to Tirza. ‘You know.’
Tirza sighed. ‘Oh, come on then.’
She began to walk quickly up the beach at a pace she hoped he could not match, but hopping and stumbling he almost managed to keep up with her. They came upon Martha sitting on a rug with Harriet and Billy. She had put on her short pink seersucker top as the air had grown cooler, but not her shorts, so that her long legs seemed to emerge straight from the frilled hem of the top.
‘This is Martha,’ Tirza said ungraciously. ‘Martha, this is Sandy.’ She turned her back on them, and watched the fireworks.
Martha did not get up, but stretched out her soft hand, tipped with its immaculate nail varnish.
‘Hello there,’ she said in that husky voice she adopted when speaking to men, which made Tirza feel sick to her stomach. ‘I’ve heard all about you. Where have you been hiding all this time?’
Tirza heard her shift her position and pat the rug.
‘Why don’t you sit down here and watch the fireworks with us?’
Sandy, awkwardly because of his sticks, lowered himself to the ground.
‘Tirza darling,’ Martha said, ‘could you move out of the way? You’re blocking our view.’
13
Maine: Summer 1942
Tirza had lifted her crab line and delivered one bushel basket, not entirely filled, to Pierre. Her catch had been falling off lately. Perhaps the depth charges offshore had started to affect the coastal marine life too. The lobstermen were complaining of poor catches, while the fishermen who normally trawled inshore were being fo
rced to lay their nets further and further out to sea. Apart from Walter Pelham’s Reliant their boats were not designed to work so far offshore, and a layer of anxiety lay over the town like a thin summer fog. There seemed to be little choice for the men. The inshore fishing was wiped out. Some days dead fish could be seen floating on the surface just off the harbour. Other times a flotilla of corpses came in on the tide and fetched up in rock pools and sheltered coves. The gulls were benefiting, growing fat on the easy pickings.
It was the morning after the Independence Day party and the beach was deserted as she coasted past on a long reach back to Flamboro. Part of the baseball diamond was still scored into the sand above high-water mark, and the charred remains of the great campfire filled the breeze with their pungent savour. A lone Lucky Strike packet washed sluggishly at the edge of the waves, catching the alert yellow-eyed attention of a herring gull.
In the days following the party, a sense of anticlimax settled over Flamboro and anxiety deepened. The war news continued to be grim. The party seemed now like a last defiant fling in the face of tragedy. One spark of cheerfulness remained alight, however. Pete Flett had been given a few days’ shore leave while his ship was repaired in the naval dockyard at Bath, and he arrived home in the middle of the night, having hitched a lift from Portland station on one of the fish trucks which collected the early morning catch. His ship had been grazed, was all, he declared, by a German torpedo, but some plates were buckled and she had been leaking as they limped back home, escorting the empty cargo ships which had delivered food and war supplies to a beleaguered Britain.
Two more families with sons away in the navy took some comfort from Pete’s breezy way of talking about convoy duty, though Nathan shook his head and smiled doubtfully when Tirza told him about it.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘Pete doesn’t want his mother worrying. But I reckon there’s a lot more to it than he’s letting on. The convoys go up near Greenland and Iceland. It hardly gets dark at this time of year, so they’re sitting ducks for the U-boats. When the winter comes, there’ll be more than the Germans to contend with. There’ll be Arctic storms, November at the latest. Same as the old whalers had to endure.’
Pete was contemptuous about the landing craft which had grounded on the sandbank off Libby’s Beach.
‘Some tomfool wartime captain,’ he said. ‘Can’t read his charts. That bar has been there long as anyone can remember. It’s marked on all the charts. How long were they stuck there?’
‘Till the middle of the night,’ said Wayne.
They were sitting with Pete on the porch of Flett’s General Stores and Post Office, though Julia looked as though she wished the others would go away.
‘After the fireworks the soldiers stayed dancin’ and smoochin’ with the girls,’ Wayne said. ‘Clarice,’ he added scornfully, ‘reckined it was great. My sister is so stupid. Anything in a uniform.’
‘Well,’ said Julia, holding tightly on to Pete’s hand, ‘a uniform is very handsome. It’s just a shame that a war has to go along with it.’
She and Pete looked at each other in what Simon called a moony way, then Pete said, ‘Clear off, kids. We’ve got things to talk about.’
Tirza wandered off on her own. She thought she would visit a patch of blueberry bushes which grew on the edge of the Tremayne property near the foxes’ den. For some reason these blueberries always ripened earlier than other bushes, and she was planning to take a pailful to the Boston ladies. Miss Susanna had retired to her bed after the Fourth of July, though Miss Molly had said yesterday that she would be sitting downstairs today and she wanted Tirza to come round and hook part of her section of the patchwork rug.
As she climbed the cliff path she became aware of a powerful smell, like rotting fish but worse, much worse. The ordinary clean sea-smell of fresh-caught fish had been part of Tirza’s world all her life, and so had the rotten filthy smell of the bait shed. Also, since the depth charges had started killing off the fish, everyone had become familiar with the sight and smell of the clumps of dead fish washed ashore at certain spots around the coast – the cove below Christina’s wood, the curve of Libby’s Beach where it met the natural causeway of rock leading to Todd’s Neck, and round in Eel Joe’s bay. These were the places where the sea gave things up, where for centuries people had gathered driftwood or searched for the men lost at sea.
But this smell was different. It seeped into her nostrils like smoke as she climbed the steep part of the path to the top of the cliff. Then as she topped the rise it hit her, a wall of stench so solid you would have sworn you could reach out and touch it. She clapped her hand over her nose and mouth. Ahead of her the bare path led over the thin grass of the cliff edge. On the right a song sparrow was perched on the stone wall, singing as though all was well. In every direction, there was nothing out of the ordinary to be seen.
It could come, then, only from below the cliff, where the ocean flung itself on jagged rocks, inch by inch over the years undercutting the cliff. Tirza put down her blueberry pail, lay on her stomach and wriggled cautiously over the tufts of spare grass until she could put her head over the edge of the cliff. Down below, something seemed at first to have changed the lie of the land. Instead of the usual ragged jaws of broken rocks, all she could see was a great smooth mound of grey boulder lying where the sea broke against the foot of the cliff. A giant of a boulder perhaps fifty feet long. As the waves broke over it and sucked back again, the boulder – as large as some of the smaller islands out in the bay – lolled sideways, then washed back. The sun ran glimmering over its slippery side, turning it almost silver in places. Then it rolled once more, and Tirza realised that it was not a boulder mysteriously misplaced, but a whale. A dead whale.
She could see one of its eyes now, staring dull and blind at the sky. Its tail lay flaccid amongst the vicious rocks. Whales sometimes became stranded, she knew that. But they were apt to beach themselves where the shore sloped gradually and the tide rose and fell many feet, trapping them unexpectedly in shallow water. She had never heard of one coming ashore like this at the foot of a cliff amongst broken rocks. Surely the creature’s subtle senses would have warned it off a high shore?
There was no sign of injury, but it was undoubtedly dead. Suddenly she remembered the depth charges. Had the whale been killed by them? Bombed from above as it swam innocently in its native ocean? Or killed by the pressure from the explosion which could rattle windows even on shore? Or had it simply been stunned, so that it swam in confusion, deaf and blind, until it foundered on these terrible rocks? A powerful wave of grief and anger rose up in her.
She crawled backwards away from the vertiginous cliff and stood up. Uncertainly, she looked around. She supposed she would have to tell someone, not that there was much anyone could do. No one could reach the whale where it lay, either from the top of the cliff or from the sea, which was studded here with treacherous underwater reefs. For some reason, perhaps simply because it was the nearest house, she looked over towards the Tremayne place. That shade was still raised. Could Simon have been back there, since their visit all those months ago? As she watched, she thought she saw a movement inside the window, a pale gleam like bare flesh against the glass. Then it was gone. She shook her head. Probably just the reflection of a cloud, but maybe Simon was there. She set off at a trot, jumping the stone wall and crossing the parched knee-high grass of the ruined lawn.
When she reached the cellar door, she saw that it had been wrenched right away from its frame and lay on the gravel path, leaving the dark hole of the cellar fully exposed. She couldn’t think why Simon would have done that, but it did look as though he might be inside. She made her way through the cellar full of flowerpots to the wine cellar and the coal store. There were bottles lying on the floor with their necks broken off, and a dense smell which rushed from her lungs straight to her brain, weirdly dizzying. Flies crawled about in sticky dark patches of liquid on the concrete. At the top of the cellar steps the door stood ajar. The aband
oned kitchen looked the same, but when Tirza came out into the main hall of the house, she sensed something in the air that made her pause. There was a feeling in the house as though there were people here, more than just Simon. And a smell too. Not just the closed-up, abandoned smell the house had had before, but other smells – cigarettes, and dime-store perfume, and an acrid musky smell.
‘Simon,’ she called out uncertainly. Then louder, ‘Simon? Are you there?’
There came a rush of sounds, rustling and smothered voices and a small crash as if someone had dropped a shoe.
‘Simon!’
She started up the stairs. As she rounded the bend in the staircase at the half-landing, she came face to face with two people. One was a girl from Flamboro, some friend of Clarice’s. Her hair was all over her face and she was buttoning up her blouse. The other was a soldier she had never seen before. He was carrying his uniform thrown over his shoulder and wearing nothing but a pair of khaki underpants. He reached out and grabbed her, pulling her against him so she could smell him, and it seemed to her that he smelled even worse than the whale. That, at least, had been a smell from the sea. The man smelled of the cheap hair oil that slicked down his black hair, and of old ashtrays, stale sweat and that same foul musky odour. The hair on his chest was thickly matted and scurfy.
‘Hello there, darlin’,’ he said, taking a handful of her hair in one hand and pushing his face up against hers. ‘You come for some too, have you?’
Then he thrust his other hand between her legs, groping and probing with his fingers. Instinctively she doubled up. She twisted away, yelling something, she didn’t know what, then she kicked him with her heel on his bare shin, ducked under his arm and ran. Stumbling, half falling down the wide staircase. Behind her she heard them both laughing.
