Tamar

by Mal Peet

  She was crossing the yard again when she sensed him; she looked up and there he was, jolting down the track, bent over the handlebars. Not riding, but being carried. He looked awful, hollowed out. It was a wonder to her that she loved someone who looked that way. She held him for a while, then led him into the kitchen. Trixie was in the old armchair by the stove, talking to Rosa about the pictures in a book. The child shrank closer to her mother’s body when she saw Tamar. He slung the Sten almost carelessly on the back of a chair and sat down. Marijke put the kettle on the stove and stood with her back to the room. She was aching to look at him but did not dare to.

  Trixie said, “Tell us what’s happened.”

  Tamar looked over at her, but his eyes fixed on Rosa. He gazed at the child, who was hiding her face from him.

  “Tell us, Christiaan. You know you have to.”

  So he told them. He told them how many men there had been, how they had died, how long it had taken, the distance the bodies had stretched along the road. He told them what he knew about the killings elsewhere. When he had finished, Marijke put a mug of tea in front of him and then sat beside him. Without looking at him, she laid her right hand on his left wrist. For a long time there was no sound in the kitchen except for the soft little ticking made by the kettle as it cooled.

  Rosa was disturbed by the silence. She murmured complaints, dabbing at the pages of the book. Trixie hugged her, shushing her. Then she stood, lifting the child to her chest.

  “Come on, Rosa,” she said. “Let’s go and see what those naughty chickens are up to.” On her way to the door, she rested her hand briefly on Marijke’s shoulder.

  When the silence in the room became difficult to bear, Marijke said, “There’s soup left from last night. It’s not too bad.”

  He didn’t respond for several seconds. Then he said, “You see things . . . sometimes you see things that make you think the rest of your life is impossible. Just seeing them damages you so much, you think, I cannot go on being human.”

  Marijke wrapped her fingers over his clenched fist. He didn’t look at her.

  “I keep thinking about the Germans in the firing squad. Killing and then killing again and again, looking at the faces . . . How? How did they do that? I can’t . . . I can’t even imagine. But, the thing is, if you took one of those men and stripped away the uniform, and sat him next to me, how different would we be? Would you be able to see murder on his skin? Smell murder on his breath? And not on mine?”

  She could not tell if he expected an answer. She did not have one.

  “I feel,” he said, “I feel . . .” He searched for the word; the fingers of his right hand moved as if he were blind and groping for it. “Diminished. Ashamed. Because I watched all that killing, and when it was over, do you know what I wanted to do? I wanted to kill someone. Anyone. It seemed the only possible reaction to what I’d seen.”

  “I understand that,” she said. But she was thinking, Stop this. Please stop this, because I am going to have your baby. Let’s talk about that, instead.

  Then he did look at her, and she flinched.

  “Do you?” he said. “Well, I’m glad you do, because I damn well don’t. All this shit, this year-in, year-out bloody nightmare, is about difference, isn’t it? We tell ourselves we’re different from them. That we’re not like the Nazis. But this morning, I watched while they murdered a hundred and sixteen people. So I wanted to kill them. The sickness in those men, those Germans? It’s in me too.”

  She said, “Yes, it probably is. And that’s why we’re fighting, remember? We’re fighting for the right to choose not to be evil.”

  He pulled his hand free of hers. “I’m not sure. I don’t know if we can be good after all this.”

  “I don’t know either, but that’s not what I said.”

  She suddenly couldn’t stay with him. She stood, and he looked up at her, puzzled.

  She said, “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She went to the door and looked back at him. “Trixie’s going back to the asylum this afternoon. Maybe there are things Ernst needs to know.”

  “No. Ernst knows everything.”

  She was halfway across the yard before it occurred to her to wonder what he’d meant.

  Later they all ate the watered-down warmed-up soup, not speaking much. After Trixie had laboured up to the road, Tamar fetched the heavy splitting axe and carried it on his shoulder to the pile of wood that Marijke had lugged into the yard.

  Towards the end of the afternoon, when the low red sun peered under the curtain of cloud for a last moment, she went out to him. He had formed the split chunks of ash into a flat pyramid against the wall of the barn. He had built it with great care, each wedge snug to the next. She held her arms out, palms upwards, and he loaded her with as much wood as she could carry. It smelled like the leaves of a new book.

  In the kitchen she fed the stove and opened the air vent, then went into the washhouse and found her grandmother’s big jam pan and the cauldron they boiled washing in. She filled them with water from the pump and heaved them up onto the stove next to the kettle. She sat in the darkening kitchen for almost half an hour, waiting for the water to heat, wondering about the life she had inside her. Was it the size of a fingernail? Less than that? It was strange that something so tiny, just a little gathering of blind cells, could make her feel so tired, so altered.

  The room was warm now, and it was hard for her to get up from the old armchair. She went out to the washhouse again and lifted the zinc bathtub from the hook on the back wall and dragged it into the kitchen, positioning it on the worn rug in front of the stove. She was immediately taken back to her childhood, to a particular memory. She’d come indoors from play, after supper. It was harvesttime. How old had she been? Six? She’d had one of the new kittens, the one with gummy eyes, in her arms. Taking her shoes off in the hall, she’d heard laughter. The air in the kitchen was thickened by steam and by dusty light beamed in from the window. It smelled unusual. Her grandmother was kneeling on the floor beside the stove next to the bathtub, this bathtub, with the soapy flannel in her hand. Her grandfather was sitting in the tub, his hair wet, his pipe in his mouth, a glass of beer in his hand. His face and neck and the lower parts of his arms were a lovely colour, like sunlight on the bricks of the barn. The rest of him was white as milk. His clothes were strewn over the armchair. Both of them, Oma and Opa, looked round at her, smiling.

  Happy. Happy. Marijke tried the word in her mouth, speaking it aloud in the shadowy kitchen. She emptied cold water from the jug into the bath and then added the boiling water from the kettle. After lighting the lamp and drawing the curtains, she went outside.

  He was standing by the woodpile, watching the last rooks drift slowly back to their roosts on the heath. When he heard her approach, he turned, holding out his hands for her to see. The skin on the palms was shiny, and at the base of the finger with the ring on it a blister had formed and then split. A flap of pale skin with rawness under it.

  “My hands have forgotten how to do honest work,” he said.

  While he was taking off his boots in the hall, she heaved the cauldron and the pan from the stove and poured the hot water into the bath. She dabbled the water with her hand, checking the temperature, thinking, One day I will do this for my child. She could almost picture it, but not quite. When she looked up, her face was flushed and wet with steam and very beautiful. He stood just inside the door, looking surprised and a little awkward, but smiling. Actually smiling. He stood still while she slipped his braces over his shoulders, then she took hold of the front of the soiled shirt and led him over to the bath. She helped him undress, remembering the small starving boy who had once stood in the same place. He stepped into the tub and lowered himself, holding the handles on either side; his arms trembled, taking the weight of his body. He looked slightly absurd, like a man squeezed into a child’s pedal car.

  Marijke dipped the flannel into the water and
lathered it with the last precious sliver of the perfumed English soap. Kneeling, she washed his back and shoulders, working the knotty muscles with her thumbs until they began to give a little. Then she folded a towel and draped it on the tub behind him. He leaned back, closing his eyes and shuddering slightly as he did so.

  “Are you cold?”

  “Not really. A little.”

  She reached across him and opened the fire door of the stove so that he would be warmed. The flame light shimmered on his wet skin. When she turned to look at his face, his eyes were open and fiery wet. He wrapped his arms around her. She felt the heat and wetness of his body soaking into her clothes.

  “I love you,” she said. “Will it be enough?”

  At the Crooked Spaniards, Yoyo had used his shambolic charms to lure the waitress into conversation. She was a large middle-aged woman with an accent like melting butter. When we told her we were on our way to Cotehele, she waxed lyrical about the place.

  “Oh,” she said, “it’s like paradise and the Garden of Eden rolled into one.”

  Before we could get to this promised land, though, there was another pencil mark on Grandad’s map where a side road turned down to the river and then backed away again. Halton Quay, the place was called.

  It was in the middle of nowhere, but in some distant past it must have been important because the quay was built of huge blocks of yellowy-grey stone that must have been murder to bring there. The surface was worn and pitted like the sole of an old shoe. Behind the quay itself, there were two great square buildings made of the same stone. They had big arched entrances, but inside there were just a few metres of dirt floor that ended at walls of rough bare rock. The ground was littered with cigarette ends and beer cans. Someone, or some people, had recently lit a fire inside the first one; there was a circle of blackened stones and a sour smell of ash. I trod on a condom.

  The map showed me that we were standing on a sudden whimsical twist in the river. The Tamar looped out of sight between thick beds of reeds, their soft tufts exploding out of tall dark green stems. The water was exactly the same shade of blue as the sky.

  I remember Yoyo saying, “I don’t like it here much. It’s . . . what’s the word? Spooky? Shall we go?”

  And I remember feeling something similar, a sort of motionless shudder. I felt it again the following day, and then I knew what it was. Yoyo took two photos, but when he got the films developed, they hadn’t come out.

  No shots of Halton Quay, but ten of Cotehele. These are what Yoyo calls “the paradise pictures.” I fell in love with the place even before we got there. Cotehele has its own wharf, and the road takes you down there first. It’s another of those twisty, green-tunnel West Country lanes that don’t let you see anything unless it’s through a gateway in the hedge. We were almost at the wharf when I yelled “Stop!” because through one of those mean gaps I’d seen the river gleam at us. It was my first glimpse of it since Halton.

  We shinned over the gate into a lush meadow that tilted steeply down towards another great swathe of crested reeds, and beyond that the Tamar made a brilliant blue arc and vanished between two low ridges of shadowed trees.

  It was my real river at last: clean and high and clear and empty and slipping slowly through a landscape that cradled it. I sat down, not caring if I got grass stains on my new white shorts. Yoyo sprawled next to me and we gazed without saying anything. Away to our right, beyond a tumble of hedge, a ripening wheat field was fringed with glowing scarlet poppies. I’d never seen real poppies before, only the imitation ones made into wreaths propped against war memorials.

  I felt suddenly happy. A fat, fill-your-body-up happiness; a feeling so surprising and strong that it almost stopped me breathing. Yoyo and I were miles from home and friendless, but it was as if my body was one huge smile. The feeling I had was belonging, and it didn’t make any sense because I was a dyed-in-the-wool city girl. But that’s what it was, and it stayed with me for the rest of the afternoon.

  We parked down on the wharf, then wandered past the warm grey quayside buildings and up to the house itself. We paid our entrance fee and walked round to the front.

  “It’s not real,” Yoyo said, focusing his camera on the lovely jumble of roofs and gables, of chimneys and slender arched windows.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s exactly perfect.” He clicked the shutter. “And nothing can be perfect. Everyone knows that.”

  There are level symmetrical lawns and sunken flower beds in front of the house, and then a low stone wall. When you look over it, you can’t help letting out a little gasp, because the garden falls steeply down towards the river in a mad tumble of huge orange and scarlet and white flowering shrubs and unfamiliar trees. The mossy roof of an ancient stone dovecote rises from the mass of colour; as we watched, three white doves descended onto it as if they’d been expecting us. In the distance the Tamar is spanned by a viaduct, a dozen immensely tall arches of pale stone. It was built to carry the railway line from Plymouth over the Tamar, but you can almost imagine the Victorian owners of Cotehele arranging for it to be put there so that they could sit with their tea and watch the plume of train smoke cross the bridge.

  Nine of the photos of that afternoon are beautiful in a picture-postcard sort of way. The National Trust could do worse than use them in their brochures. It’s the other one I like best, though. Yoyo and I went down into the garden and came to a wooden open-fronted summerhouse, which is where I took it. The summerhouse is tucked in under a great cascade of leaves. It has a thatched roof, and Yoyo is standing beside one of the timber pillars that hold it up. Because the sunlight is so bright, the inside of the summerhouse looks as dark as a cave; and with his mussy hair and round glasses Yoyo looks like a sleepy animal who’s hibernated too long and just woken up to high summer rather than early spring. He’s wearing a black T-shirt with NIRVANA printed across the front in splattery red lettering. Yellow climbing roses are clinging to the pillar nearest him, almost touching his face.

  We stayed inside the summerhouse for a long time, stretched out on the wooden bench, listening to birdsong. A few people wandered through the garden, but they were mostly silent too and looked slightly dazed, as if they were lost but didn’t mind. At one point I thought Yoyo had dozed off, and I was just about to poke his foot when he spoke.

  “What time is it?”

  “Just after half past four,” I said. “I s’pose we should think about where we’re going to stay.”

  “We will stay here. Wouldn’t it be very nice to wake up in this garden? Just imagine. Or we could hide in the house. I bet they have those historical beds, you know, with the four posts and a ceiling.”

  Normally this would have earned him a kick and one of my sarky remarks. But not this time, because I was so happy and because, I admit, it was a little fantasy that appealed to me too. I wanted to stay in this perfect little world. But we left the summerhouse at last and wandered down through the garden towards the river. We got lost and didn’t care. When we accidentally found ourselves back at the car park, shadows were creeping towards the quay. The tide had turned and exposed a smooth bank of mud on the other side of the river; in the sunlight it looked like molten silver.

  The car was a furnace, and we opened all the doors to let it cool. I took the map and sat on a fat wooden bollard close to the water. Then it was as if a cloud had appeared from nowhere and parked itself in front of the sun. I felt suddenly let down. Not depressed, exactly. I can only describe it as that feeling you get when you have to go back to school after a perfect holiday. Reality tugging at you, like a friend you don’t really like. It was the map, I suppose. It reminded me why we were there, and of Grandad. I’d forgotten, completely forgotten. All that stuff had gone from my mind the moment I’d sat in that meadow and realized I was happy. Now it had all come back.

  Yoyo saw it in my face. He squatted in front of me. “Tamar? What’s the problem?”

  “Nothing,” I said, being pathetic.
/>   “Come on. All of a sudden you have a long face like a horse.”

  “Oh, I dunno. I mean, it’s lovely here and everything, perfect really, but I still don’t know what we’re doing. This whole thing is some sort of puzzle, we think. Right? But we haven’t worked out anything. Not a single thing. I don’t know what we’re supposed to be looking for. I don’t know if we’ve already missed things. I don’t know why we’re here.”

  “Mmm . . .” was all he said, after looking at my face for a minute. Then he put his hands on my knees to lever himself upright. He walked a few paces away and stood with his back to me, his hands in his pockets.

  “If I say what I think,” he said at last, “you will tell me to shut up like usual.”

  I probably groaned or something, but not enough to stop him. He turned and looked at me, serious.

  “The first time we talked about coming here, at your house, you said maybe there wasn’t anything to find. You said maybe your grandfather just wanted you to see the river with your name.”

  “Did I?” I’d forgotten that Yoyo had the irritating ability to remember everything you said to him.

  “Yes. And now we are here, I think you were right. Part right, anyway. It’s not just about having the same name. Other things are similar. What we see now is that this river is very beautiful, and so are —”

  “Yoyo, don’t start. I’m not in the mood.”

  He lifted his right hand to stop me. “Let me ask you something. Did your grandfather ever tell you that you were beautiful?”

  A ridiculous question. “Of course not,” I snapped. “He wasn’t like that. It’s not the kind of thing he would say.”

  Yoyo looked at the silver-blue curve of the river, the mirrored trees.

  “He is telling you now,” he said. He turned to me and smiled. “Better late than never, yes?”

  Gunnislake is a steep little town, an avalanche of houses clinging to the Cornwall side of the Tamar valley. The town is there because of the bridge. Until the Tamar Bridge at Plymouth was built, this was the first place up the river where you could cross by road. You can tell Gunnislake was important once, long ago. You can imagine travellers being glad to get there, climbing stiffly out of their stagecoaches after being jolted across Dartmoor. The Kings Arms Hotel had been built for them. It had an arched entrance off the street, tall enough for coaches, that opened onto a cobbled yard. The stable block was now a skittle alley. Even though the holiday season was in full swing, there were several vacant rooms. The landlord gave us a good looking-over, but when Yoyo paid for our drinks with one of Grandad’s fifties, he became much less hostile.