by Ann Swinfen
When men had finally been able to climb down the cliff where Martha had thrown herself, racing to beat the incoming tide, they had found, as they suspected, that she had been killed at once. Billy, still gripped in her arms, was alive but unconscious, cushioned by Martha’s body from the worst of the rocks. His spine was damaged. He lay in a coma for three weeks, then at last began to live, and to breathe by himself, and – eventually – to walk. But his long period in hospital put him two years behind at school. His twisted leg and back debarred him from sports. And it was difficult for him to make friends. His screaming nightmares, his blackouts, his sudden panics, frightened the other children. No wonder, then, that he had never married.
No wonder, either, that he could not cope with the farm. No wonder it looked so shabby and unloved. But he did not deserve this final blow. Inwardly, Tirza raged. She wanted to hit something, to blame someone. When Simon had been killed in Vietnam, she kept demanding, Why? He had survived the Korean war, when he was constantly exposed to danger. Why did it have to be his helicopter, why that pilot who strayed over enemy territory? Did you have to believe that it was predestined? And that whatever we do, we are helpless? One of the things she had been fleeing all these years was this fear of an immutable fate. That long-ago summer she had become entangled with Sandy and Martha. By her own will – or not? In the years since, she had never been able to decide whether – if she had acted differently when she took Sandy’s final letter to Martha – all their lives might have been changed. Or whether Sandy’s departure and Martha’s death had already lain there ahead of them all, when the first strands of that summer had begun to weave together.
She wanted to believe that she had some control over her own fate. But she was afraid.
At last she stood up, wincing as her knees snapped. The road to the schoolhouse seemed longer than it used to, when she went unwillingly to lessons. The building had been extended, and the old dusty playground covered with concrete. As she walked past it the children came streaming out for their lunch hour, some of them running home across the village, others opening Snoopy and Mickey Mouse lunch-boxes, to eat under the shade of the same old maple that had stood there in her schooldays.
She climbed up the field behind the school, her calf muscles protesting. It was a relief to find that it had not been built over, as she suspected it might have been. The path over the shoulder of the hill and through the forest was clear and well trodden. Either Christina herself made regular trips to the village, or people from the village walked this way to visit her. Looking down the glades under the trees, Tirza could see here and there the sudden burst of autumn glory – a birch dangling leaves like gold pennies, a maple so brightly scarlet it seemed to be on fire. And in the spaces between the trees, the ocean. Slate blue shot with glassy green, laced with foam as the breakers rolled in and threw themselves against the booming caves under the cliff. Ebb and flow, spring tides and neaps, balmy weather and hurricane. Always changing, yet for ever there. And away over this same sea, her own small cottage and her cat faced her grandmother across those three thousand miles with the running tide between.
She walked softly down to the cabin. Smoke was rising from the fieldstone chimney. The morning’s rain had penetrated to the clearing, and damp leaves stuck to her shoes as she approached the door. It stood open, as it had always done except in the worst weather. Inside, she could see a figure bent over the stove, leaning short-sightedly close to the cookpot. A rich aroma of clam chowder – warm, sea-scented and nutty – filled the living room, which had grown smaller, surely, and even more cluttered with untidy piles of books and pieces of driftwood, and sketches laid down to dry and forgotten about.
‘So you’re here at last, Tirza,’ said Christina, without turning round.
Tirza drew in her breath sharply, and stepped over the threshold.
‘How did you know?’
Christina turned and grinned at her roguishly.
‘Oh, I haven’t become a seer in my decrepitude. Pete Flett’s youngest lad Paul brought me a quart of clams this morning and brought me the news too. And my hearing has grown sharper, to make up for my deficiencies of sight.’
She raised her face and Tirza kissed her, noticing that her right eye was filmed over and milky.
‘I get by well enough,’ said Christina, answering the unspoken question. ‘Certain busybodies have tried to persuade me to go into a home, or move in with Billy – who, of course, is no kin of mine. Not that I hold that against him. The selectmen wanted to buy the land again, but I’m not likely to sell it to them now. What use would the money be to me, compared with the roots of my blood and being? Cut yourself some bread, child.’
Tirza did as she was told, accepted the bowl of chowder she was handed, and sat down opposite her grandmother at the table, where every scratch and dent was like the features on the face of an old friend. They ate in comfortable silence, mopping up the rich juice with their hunks of bread.
‘Paul lays a crab line in your cove down yonder,’ said Christina, ‘whenever he’s home from medical school.’
‘What happened to Stormy Petrel?
‘Your father kept her until he died. Kept her in good trim too. She was sold with the rest of his property.’
Christina cut a piece of blueberry pie and pushed it across the table.
‘You’re still baking?’ Tirza asked.
‘Ayuh. But there’s no cream to go with it, now there are no cows on the farm. I miss it, but no doubt it’s better for me to do without.’
When they had eaten their pie and washed it down with glasses of the well water, which was as sweet as ever it had been, Christina got stiffly to her feet and went to a corner beside the bookcase. She began to tug a large cardboard box towards the table, and Tirza lifted it up and carried it across.
‘When they were going to sell your father’s things, Billy asked me if there was anything I wanted. I saved these things for you. Go on, child, open it. They’re mostly your own belongings from your bedroom.’
A lemon scent rose from the box. A layer of southernwood was spread over the contents, just inside the lid. Southernwood, for its long-lasting properties. Southernwood, called by some, old maid’s comfort. Southernwood, given as a pledge of love. Tirza lifted the objects out of the box one by one. There was the patchwork quilt from her bed that Miss Molly had made for her seventh birthday, and the china-headed doll from Germany that Mrs Larrabee had given her from the shop. Her pocket knife, which she had unaccountably left behind when she went off to her vacation job at the diner. The Rubáiyát and the book of Audubon bird paintings, richer and more stunningly beautiful than she had remembered. Simon must have spent a fortune on it. An oval Shaker box, decorated with a primitive picture of a red barn.
‘They’re all there,’ said Christina.
Tirza unpacked the boxes and stacked them up. Inside the smallest was the picture of Sandy beside his Spitfire. It had faded to a soft brown.
In the bottom of the cardboard carton there was something bulky.
‘Lift that carefully,’ said Christina. ‘There is something wrapped up inside.’
The soft lumpy object was Miss Susanna’s last hooked rug, the patchwork rug for which they had drawn the pictures at that long-ago tea party.
‘Miss Molly left it to you in her will, with the request that I should look after it until you came back.’
‘I can’t think why you should all have been so sure I would come back,’ said Tirza a little resentfully.
The rug had been wrapped around a small leather casket.
‘I don’t recognise this.’
‘It’s your mother’s jewellery. There isn’t anything of great value, but a few things have been in the family a long time. There are some old Indian pieces of silver and turquoise that my mother left to me. Nathan was going to give them to you on your twenty-first birthday.’
Tirza looked at the treasures of her childhood spread out on the table, and she wanted to say, But all these th
ings are dead.
‘You can do with all this whatever you want,’ said Christina. ‘Throw them away, if you like. But I thought the choice should be yours.’
‘That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?’ Tirza said, fingering the rug. ‘Do you know what I’ve been talking to Billy about this morning?’
‘Of course. I knew what the provisions of the wills were. Nathan told me all the details before he died. I said he could never count on your coming back. But he wanted you to have the choice.’
‘How long has Billy been ill? I mean, with cancer? I never asked him.’
‘Five or six years. Not long before your father died. He has suffered a good deal, but I don’t think he has put up a fight. From the start he was resigned. Too resigned.’
Tirza looked at her curiously.
‘You sound as though you think he could have done something to resist it.’
Christina spread her hands and shrugged.
‘The strength of the warrior lies in the mind more than in the body.’
Tirza opened the box containing her mother’s jewellery and laid it out against the dark old wood of the table. It seemed to have no connection with her.
‘So you didn’t think I would come back.’
‘Not as long as you blamed yourself for Martha’s death.’
Tirza’s head snapped up.
‘What makes you think that I blamed myself?’
Christina laid her hands over Tirza’s. ‘Child, I saw you that last evening with Sandy on the path by the cove. I was gathering firewood in the forest just above, and I saw you together. You were like two lovers. Then I heard you had been seen coming from the farm when the Tremayne house was on fire. And then Martha jumped from the cliff. You hated her for her affair with Sandy, and you blamed yourself for her death.’
Tirza turned her hands over and gripped Christina’s.
‘For years I did. You’re right.’
‘But now?’
‘I’ve met Sandy’s son. He’s about the same age as I am. Did you realise Sandy already had three children?’
‘I suspected he was married.’
‘Did you? From what Alex has told me – the things Sandy said about Martha – and what she said to me that evening... Perhaps it would have happened anyway, once she knew he was leaving.’
‘She had become unbalanced, you know, after Will’s death. And she had always been a difficult girl, who flew into rages if she couldn’t have her way. I think she made demands on Sandy he didn’t want to give in to. She had probably created a whole fantasy in her mind.’
Tirza gave a sharp sigh and stood up.
‘Poor Martha. She was so beautiful, and I always wanted her to like me, but she never did.’ She heard another voice echoed in her words. Oh, I know you despised me... But I admired you so much, and I wanted to be like you.
‘Come on, let’s clear this table, and then I’ll fill your water tank from the well.’
When the dishes were washed and the water carried, Christina lit a kerosene lamp against the growing dusk and closed the door of the cabin.
‘I’ve never wished you happy birthday, Tirza.’
‘Oh, I’m too old to celebrate birthdays.’
‘Nonsense. You aren’t much more than half my age.’
‘Remember that discussion we had once? I marvelled that you could have built this house when you were an old lady of forty?’
‘Yes, and I said that when you were that age, it wouldn’t seem so old.’
‘I still think you were marvellous.’
‘Thank you for the compliment.’ Christina sat down in her old rocker and clasped her hands in her lap.
‘And now have you made your choice about the farm and the land? Will you come home?’
Tirza linked her fingers together.
‘I have a home, on the other side of the ocean. I bought an island in Scotland, with a cottage and a pier. I have a cat. And I have friends in the village on the mainland. I’m putting down roots.’
‘Well, you already had roots there. My father came from the Highlands, remember.’
‘So he did... I don’t know... Is it possible to live both there and here? To have a foot on either side of the ocean?’ She laughed wryly. ‘To bestride the ocean like a colossus?’
For a long time they were silent, while the cliffs echoed to the running tide and the wind – rising with the onset of darkness – thrashed in the trees.
‘In Vietnam...’ said Tirza, ‘Simon and I... we slept together. For two wonderful, strange weeks. In the middle of all that ugliness and pain and violence, we had this magical time of peace and extraordinary joy. I’ve never felt like that before or since... After he was killed, I found I was pregnant. It was the only thing that kept me going. It was as if, carrying his child, I had to go on living, survive the ambushes and shellfire, the crazy risks.’
She lifted her face to Christina, and tears ran thinly down her cheeks.
‘I felt that the baby... somehow, it would mean that Simon hadn’t died altogether. But I lost it at five months. I’ve never told anyone before. They patched me up – I had to go to one of the forward field hospitals. They told me to go home. But I didn’t have any home. Less than ever.’
She held out her hands.
‘Why is it that everything I touch is blighted? I sow death in my footsteps.’
‘No!’ said Christina, getting up and striding to the door. She threw it open and the wind and tide rushed in like a voice crying out.
‘You can’t live in the past. The past is a country of the mind – we wander there like dreamers in a shadowy landscape that hides its meaning from us.’
‘I don’t mean to live in the past,’ said Tirza quietly. ‘I’ve been running away for years to try to escape it, yet it was always there. At the same time I kept seeking out danger. It was as if...’
She stopped.
‘As if... I had to keep testing my right to be alive. Martha died. Billy was terribly injured. Sandy – I thought – had been killed after he went back to the war. Then Simon was killed. By going constantly into danger, I was offering myself up to death. It was a kind of sickness. Only in the last year, living in Scotland, with the sea as my neighbour again, have I begun to feel... not healed, exactly, but as though something within me was turning.’
‘There are seasons in our lives,’ said Christina, ‘a pattern, like the old Indian cross within a circle. Our lives move round the circle, but not always at the same pace. You have been caught too long in the north, which teaches strength and endurance through suffering, but you don’t have to remain there. When you were young, you ran away. And losing Simon and his child must have seemed like an echo of what had happened with Sandy and Martha. But you also moved on. Do you think the work you have done since then has been worthless? You have focused the world’s attention on poverty and suffering which would have gone unheeded. Was that worthless? You have inspired operations and campaigns to relieve hunger and ignorance. Was that worthless?’
Christina drew a long breath.
‘Once, you were courageous. Has that vanished? Are you going to remain fixed, speared for ever on past tragedies? Remember the other quadrants of the circle. The west gives rain, the south warmth, and the east peace and light. You have the rest of your life ahead of you. Live it. The only way to find joy is by creating it.’
Tirza came and stood beside her, and put her arm around her grandmother. Once, Christina had seemed so tall. Now she barely reached Tirza’s shoulder, but the wiry back was as straight and springy as one of the trees in her own forest.
‘I will try,’ she said.
Acknowledgements
Many people have sustained me during the writing of this book. Tracking down research materials was made easier by the following people: Sheena Alexander, Gordon Dow, Marilyn Pettit, Tanya Swinfen-Wilkes, Pamela Tulloch and Mark Wilkes. Cindy and Graham Forbes checked the MS with the benefit of their own expertise – Cindy as a New Englander and Graham
as a farmer. My husband, David, philosophically endured gloom, enthusiasm and scratch meals.
Although I did not know Maine in Tirza’s time, it shaped me in childhood, and I have carried the place and the people with me ever since. And ever since have felt uneasy out of sight of the sea.
The Author
Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in England and partly on the east coast of America. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Classics and Mathematics and married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for a postgraduate MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching. In 1995 she founded Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public.
Her first three novels, The Anniversary, The Travellers, and A Running Tide, all with a contemporary setting but also an historical resonance, were published by Random House, with translations into Dutch and German. The Testament of Mariam marks something of a departure. Set in the first century, it recounts, from an unusual perspective, one of the most famous and yet ambiguous stories in human history. At the same time it explores life under a foreign occupying force, in lands still torn by conflict to this day. Her second historical novel, Flood, is set in the fenlands of East Anglia during the seventeenth century, where the local people fought desperately to save their land from greedy and unscrupulous speculators.
Currently she is working on a late sixteenth century series, featuring a young Marrano physician who is recruited as a code-breaker and spy in Walsingham’s secret service. The first book in the series is The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez, the second is The Enterprise of England, and the third is The Portuguese Affair.
