The Long Room

by Francesca Kay

  Stephen was wrong about the complete absence of people. When he and Alberic got back to the quay they saw a man in yellow oilskins sorting out some tangle or other in the bottom of a rowing boat. ‘Go ask him,’ said Alberic, prodding Stephen with an elbow.

  ‘Why don’t you? I don’t know what to ask. I don’t know what we want to know or really why we’re here.’

  ‘You must be the one to ask in case I will not understand his rural accent. Ask him how to get across to the other side of the water.’

  Through the sound of wind and clattering lanyards, Stephen called down to the man in the boat, who looked up in some surprise, his head below the level of the ground.

  ‘I say, could you very kindly help us? We’re trying to find a way that will take us over there, to that side of the river.’

  The man was mightily amused. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you could walk there but you couldn’t do that from here – you’d have to start from somewhere else.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘From Aldeburgh, in point of fact.’

  Alberic, listening intently, poked Stephen again. ‘We will go there in the car,’ he hissed.

  ‘Oh, right. Well, thanks, that’s very helpful. So we simply make our way to Aldeburgh and from there it will be obvious, the path?’

  ‘It may. It’s quicker, of course, by boat.’

  ‘Of course. So, I don’t suppose …?’

  ‘You don’t suppose quite right. But mind, when you find the way, and it’s a fairly long one, you won’t be let onto the Ness.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The man laughed out loud. ‘It’s the Ministry, isn’t it? Everybody knows that it’s a prohibited place under the Act. Mind, they’re not testing bombs there any more, it’s all radios and suchlike now, but it’s top secret still, and besides, the previous tenants left behind enough unexploded ordinance to blow you and your friend to kingdom come.’

  Alberic intervened. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘my friend here is an official of the Ministry of Defence and he actually has clearance.’

  ‘Then clear your own way, squire. No boat round here will land you except you have a permit from the powers that be in writing. An official permit. Now you’d best make tracks for Aldeburgh, if that’s where you’re going, for this rain will come down harder soon and later there’ll be snow.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Stephen, turning after Alberic who had begun to walk away in the direction of the car. He caught him by the arm. ‘Look, I’m sorry but you heard what he said. This is becoming a wild goose chase; now that we’ve seen enough to know we’ll never get there, we should simply cut our losses and drive home.’

  ‘What does it mean, a wild goose chase?’

  ‘A hopeless quest. That’s what it means – a mission doomed to fail.’

  Alberic gave Stephen a disdainful look. Rain was dripping off his nose. ‘I am disappointed. I took you for a man. To come all this way, for nothing? Let us chase that wild goose then. If you never try, you always lose.’

  Goaded, Stephen squelched after Alberic to where they’d left the car. He wanted to protest. He wasn’t here for gulls and avocets. He couldn’t care less about the Ness. He was here for Helen. But now the weather was so grim that waterfowl were seeking shelter and no one but a mad boatman would dream of being out of doors. He opened his mouth to speak but something about the set of Alberic’s shoulders made him close it. This new steeliness of Alberic’s was a powerful deterrent and Stephen did not even dare suggest they stop for a hot drink.

  As they neared the car, Stephen remembered the necessity of petrol; perhaps there would be somewhere on the road to Aldeburgh; a place that he already knew to be about ten miles from here. If not, they’d be stuck. He considered alerting Alberic to the situation but, once again noting that stern profile, kept his counsel, while hoping he had taken the swift onset of darkness into account. What they also needed was a map.

  In the car, Alberic relit his pipe and closed his eyes again. Stephen kept his peeled for garages but there were none along the road. He calculated that he had enough fuel to get to Alde-burgh and back, but not to London, or to Didcot.

  They came into Aldeburgh by the main road and followed it to the centre of the town. Even in the rain Stephen could see that it must be a lovely place but he was not in a position to appreciate it now. ‘Get as near as possible,’ Alberic instructed. ‘From here we will walk south.’

  ‘But it’s a very long way away,’ objected Stephen.

  ‘No it’s not. We came a roundabout way by road but now we go straight down.’

  In dreams, in nightmares, this is what you do: you stumble over shingle in your slippery-soled shoes, you sink deep into it and the hard stone sucks your ankles; although you trudge for miles, you get nowhere. In the end you are exactly where you started; there can neither be an end nor a beginning when time has stopped, when sky and sea and land are of one substance and that barely substance but a nothingness of grey. Only the black struts of the groynes define an edge, and a flock of birds. The struts are the twisted limbs of the dead and when the birds, disturbed and nervous, take wing and swirl into the air, they disappear against the stormy water. When the cold rain turns to hail the cruel sting on your face is mirror of the stones in which you’re drowning. You’re a prisoner or a slave, you’re completely worthless, and the wind – it is so loud it is deafening your ears, you will never hear again. In the distance, but always in the distance, never coming closer, is that wilderness of concrete and barbed wire where hidden bombs tick in their shallow graves. You have crossed these battlegrounds before: the monstrous towers of Didcot that overhung your childhood also cast their shadows on Harwell’s nuclear reactors: the Atomic. Radiation seeps into the ground and into water, from there into your teeth and bones. Daddy worked at Harwell, he was a war hero but no one ever told you where he’d gone; it must have been the Bomb that got him and vaporised him like an angel in a halo of white light. In infant school we all did bomb drill: quickly, everybody, duck beneath your desks, stick your fingers in your ears and do keep calm. If you stick your fingers deep into your ears you hear the sea, the whisper of the sea not the thunder that the sea is now. Mrs Medlicott in her shell-pink jersey, cradle my head between your breasts, be haven, harbour, place of rest, this nightmare drags on and on.

  Abruptly his fellow-traveller halted. He had been tramping steadily ahead of Stephen, saying nothing. Now he said: ‘It’s getting dark.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Soon we shall not see our hands before our eyes.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Better we go back now and try again tomorrow?’

  ‘Much better.’

  There’d be time to dissuade Alberic from his cock-eyed plan this evening, when they were in the dry and in the warm. But warmth and shelter were a long way off and there were miles of shingle still to go in the gathering dark and biting cold. When later he recalls that winter journey, Stephen will hardly know how they managed to stagger back to Aldeburgh through the scourging rain but somehow they did, and finally they reached the sanctuary of the car. By then both men were drenched and shivering hard. There was snow in Stephen’s bones in place of marrow. ‘What now?’ he asked.

  ‘We find our hotel and we change our clothes.’

  On the long trail back, Stephen had sought to fortify himself with images of snugly curtained rooms, thick carpets, roaring fires and rare roast beef, a traditional hotel in keeping with Alberic’s sumptuous tastes, a place where Helen might possibly call in for a glass of wine with friends on Christmas Eve. But it soon turned out that Alberic had a different sort of establishment in mind. Having consulted a note he had made in a small black book, he directed Stephen back onto the main road in the direction of Woodbridge and to a breeze-block prefab building that adjoined a dismal-looking roadside inn. There were no other cars in the car park and no one in the vestibule or in the unlit bar, although the door was open. Stephen, trailing water, expected Alberic to
walk straight out again, seeing his mistake, but no, he marched up to the counter and banged his fist down hard upon a bell screwed into the wood, next to a plastic Santa. After he had rung it several times, a boy quite clearly roused from sleep, emerged through a beaded door screen.

  ‘Reservation in the name of Stevens,’ Alberic said tersely. ‘One room was it?’ smirked the boy, handing Alberic a key.

  The room provided no surprises but at least there were two beds. As soon as the door had closed behind them, Alberic began unselfconsciously to strip off all his clothes and when he was quite naked, he hung his sodden coat and suit on hooks fixed to the wall. Bending to open his suitcase, he took out of it a white towelling robe and a pair of slippers. ‘I’m going to have a long hot bath. Did you see a bathroom?’

  ‘Along the corridor, I suppose.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Left to himself, Stephen took off his coat and jacket. He had a clean shirt in his bag but no other trousers; if he pressed himself against the rusting radiator that was just warm to the touch, this pair might dry a little. Luckily this morning he had remembered socks. Parting the grimy slats of a venetian blind he looked through the window at the late afternoon outside. What next? he asked himself aloud.

  Quite a long time later, Alberic came back. ‘Your turn. But I should warn you that the water is not running hot. However, it is somewhat less chilly than the rain.’

  ‘It’s snowing now,’ said Stephen.

  In his tepid bath he tried to scoop his scattered and fragmented thoughts together. The haze of unreality that had pervaded the whole day – and the past fortnight maybe – had been scoured away by the rain and hail, and it was as if he had been flayed. His hopes had formed a soft layer against the asperities of this world – thistledown and velvet – and now that they had gone, he was cruelly exposed. He looked down at his flaccid body, lapped by an inch or two of brackish water, and hated what he saw. He needed a new strategy, a new suit of armour. But first he needed petrol and the answers to some questions: why hadn’t Alberic booked that dismal room in his own name and what was he really looking for in Orford? Stephen had chosen to believe him when he said he loved bird-watching – or at least to close his ears to any undercurrent – because he didn’t have the heart for disbelief. And the man had said that he was lonely. That was something Stephen understood. Things sometimes must be what they seem or all men would be lost in the cunning passages and the wilderness of mirrors. Stephen had had enough of living life as if he were enclosed by icy walls, and to free himself had placed his faith in what he saw before him. How else do people love? But God only knows how he should live now, in the knowledge that he had been so mortifyingly wrong.

  He got out of the bath, dried himself approximately on an exiguous square of towel and put his wet trousers on. It was almost as cold inside this flimsy building as it was outdoors. In the room, Alberic was lying on one of the beds, his head propped on a pillow, an incongruously white sprawl against the orange of the dirty counterpane. His robe was untied and had fallen slightly open, revealing pale skin sparsely stippled with grey hair. He looked Stephen up and down. ‘Have you no dry clothes?’

  ‘I have a shirt. And socks.’

  ‘You are going to catch your death. Better you borrow a pullover; there’s a red one in my suitcase.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Stephen undid the catches of the case with caution, afraid of what it might contain, but there was nothing in it except neatly folded clothes. The red jumper was very bright and adorned with a motif of golf clubs. Stephen put it on. ‘We’re running low on petrol,’ he said.

  ‘So now you tell me? Why you don’t think of it before? Where do you think you will find some, tonight or tomorrow?’

  ‘Possibly I should go and look for a garage now.’

  ‘If you ask my opinion, yes. You should definitely go, and you should hurry. Things will not stay open late tonight.’

  ‘There’s bound to be somewhere on the main road.’

  ‘Well, you hope.’

  ‘Do you want to come with me?’

  ‘No. Thank you, I stay here.’

  ‘What about dinner?’

  ‘I will probably make do in the bar next door. I am sure that they sell crisps.’

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘For a change! If you do find a petrol station, you can also buy some food.’

  ‘I had rather imagined that we would spend the evening in Orford.’

  ‘There was nowhere in Orford we could stay.’

  ‘Oh, but, Helen …’

  ‘Ah. Yes, so here is an idea: you go and see if you can find her too. After you have found the petrol, okay?’

  ‘Shall I take the room key?’

  ‘I shall not lock the door.’

  Stephen put his tweed jacket on over the red jumper, collected the crescent moon from his overnight bag, picked up his sopping overcoat and said goodbye. Alberic, apparently intent on lighting his pipe, said something in reply that he did not hear.

  Snowflakes like particles of dust milled in the sulphur light outside the door of the motel. Now there were lights on in the bar. Someone in there would tell him where he could buy some petrol; he went in. The sleepy boy was lounging on a bench with a girl whose blue hair stood around her head in spikes like a sea urchin’s. Ooh, they couldn’t be sure, at this time of day, and it being Christmas Eve and all, but he could try a place about ten minutes down the road.

  Indeed there was a small garage a couple of miles away but the owner was just locking up. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. Desperation swept over Stephen like a tidal wave. He’d never get out of here. He caught hold of the man’s hand. ‘I have to get home for Christmas,’ he pleaded. ‘My mother is dying. This Christmas is her last.’

  The man began the slow process of unlocking the pump and the doors. When the tank was full, Stephen followed him into the garage and spotted some tourist maps of the area on a little stand. He bought one and tipped the garage owner. ‘Safe journey then,’ the man said. ‘Sorry about your mum.’

  ‘Thank you. And a merry Christmas.’

  One task successfully accomplished. Now for the rest. Stephen got into the car, studied the map and took a new way back to Orford.

  *

  It’s Christmas Eve. Coralie Donaldson is staring abstractedly at the glowing filaments of the gas fire in her sitting room, holding her son’s Christmas stocking on her knee. The stocking was once his father’s: an old Army-issue sock, sludge green. Every year since Ste was one – twenty-seven years therefore – this sock has been set reverently beside the fireplace or, when there were no fires, by the closest equivalent, and yes, of course, a gas fire needs no chimney but that’s never been the point – and tonight she does not know what she should do. She’s in a very melancholy mood. This should be the happiest of nights but instead a deep grief has drifted over her like the dust that falls when you take some long-abandoned object off the top of a wardrobe, or the threads that mat in your mouth when you walk into a spider’s web that you had not seen was there, and that almost choke you. That’s how she feels: as if something too difficult to swallow was sticking in her throat. Should she put the stocking there, as Stephen would, if he were here, and fill it later, as she always did? Should she lay the Baby Jesus in his manger? In the old days Stephen had loved these rituals. And now they’re nothing but a shared amusement, a small diversion for the two of them, but then that’s not nothing, is it?

  A cold foreboding of a time when she would have to spend her Christmases alone crept over her. She knew how lucky she had been. Stephen was a good boy and a loyal son: he’d never once said that he would rather take a holiday away at Christmas, or go skiing, or spend the time with friends. Young people do, don’t they? They jet off to exotic places like Jamaica in search of winter sun, which is perfectly understandable when you consider how interminable and drab the English winters are. Sun is good for aching bones. But Stephen’s never expressed any such desire, although he must kno
w people with nice big country houses where Christmas would be fun. The sort of houses where they have trees as tall as real trees in forests, scenty pines, and huge log fires in their halls. Other people’s children of necessity spend Christmases with in-laws, leaving their own mothers to make shift as best they may. One day Stephen will have in-laws – well, she ought to want him to have in-laws – but it’s not that thought which is making her feel sad. It’s hard to put a finger on why she feels afraid but it’s obvious why she’s worried. He had sounded very strange in that telephone call last night. Ill maybe, or maybe drunk, although that’s not a possibility she’d welcome. It has crossed her mind that he might have made the call under duress. How else to explain its oddness? She had seriously considered informing the police. Called away on Christmas Eve for operational reasons? Well, yes, if it were wartime, that would be reasonable, what else could you expect? No respecter of high days and holidays, the enemy; emergencies happen in their own time, not to plan. But it is peacetime now. Or more or less. Stephen’s job, as far as she knows, and though she asks no questions she is not ignorant, has not before these past few days required him to work out of hours and at weekends, so what is happening now?

  And besides the worry about Stephen, she has many practical concerns. As always, by this time, she has everything all spick and span and ready for tomorrow: the spuds are in their water bath, the carrots and parsnips scraped, the sprouts prepared, the stuffing in the fridge. Stock, bread sauce, brandy butter, mince pies, yes. The one thing there is left to do is to pop the turkey in to roast. But when? Stephen had been so vague. I’ll get there, Mum, he’d said, or rather, slurred. But when? He didn’t say. He couldn’t say and now she’s in a quandary. A turkey needs at least six hours, even when it’s on the small side, what with time to rest and so on. Normally they would eat at one. She’d set her alarm for five o’clock; leaving plenty of time for a cup of tea and unforeseen occurrences, she’d have the oven heated up and the bird in it at seven.