by Tessa Hadley
James pretends to be angry that he was too young to fight and do his bit, but really the faces in those photographs are too quenched and completed, he’s tired of them. Arthur tried to enlist but they turned him down because of his varicose veins. Two of Connie’s brothers were with the Tyneside Irish at the Somme, but she never cared for them much, she only wrinkles her nose when Ellen kindly tries to include them in her sorrowing. Anyway, they both came back, and they’ve been boozing and fighting their way round the docks ever since.
— Let’s go for a swim, Connie says. — Let’s walk down in our swimsuits.
— You can’t do that, says James.
— We’ve done it every day. No one cares.
— It is Sunday, says Ellen warily.
The idea of the two of them flaunting themselves in the public street fills James with a boiling rage that somehow has to do with the dead soldiers. He thinks Connie is unpatriotic, shameless.
— I wouldn’t allow any wife of mine to go parading round with nothing on in front of everybody, he says hotly.
Connie is delighted. — ‘Allow’, Jimmy Mac? You won’t ‘allow’ it? Who d’you think you are, King of the Hottentots or something?
The weather’s changing anyway, and Ellen decides it’s too chilly for the swimsuits. They go and walk on the front and have their photograph taken sitting on an upturned boat, then struggle across the pebbles in the sea wind, the girls clinging to James, Ellen’s beret blowing away and bowling off down the beach, James running like mad after it. He feels excitedly that they’re all on the brink of something new, an entirely new way of living, apart from their parents. Anything could happen. They’re all three laughing, Ellen too; she has forgotten to be mournful and dreamy, in spite of her dead friends. When he snatches up her beret she comes running after him, full tilt into him, almost knocking him over, so that he has to catch her to save her from falling. For a moment they’re staggering together, she’s warm in his arms – thanking him in breathless, gasping sentences, admiring how fast he runs. He doesn’t let go. He kisses her beside her ear, a sort of kiss, though he hasn’t kissed anyone since he was a baby. He can smell whatever it is that she puts on her hair. Over her shoulder he can see Connie pretending not to see them, crouching down to poke at something she’s found among the pebbles.
To his surprise, in the evening Connie comes back with him on the train to Newcastle. She says she has to visit her dad, who isn’t well. (‘Stomach,’ she says shortly when he asks what’s wrong.) The two of them mostly sit in silence. Their mood is flat, the sea air has taken it out of them. Without Ellen, they’re returned to all the ordinary things they know of one another. When Connie closes her eyes, the purplish-red lids seem unnaturally large below her neat definite eyebrows; her face is more naked than when her eyes are open and vigilant. She asks about his work at the boatyard and he makes it sound more important than it is. He says he’s responsible for ordering the timbers and fittings, whereas in reality he’s just answering the telephone and running errands.
— Ellen likes you, Connie says. — You could get a job with her dad’s firm.
James frowns suspiciously, but he doesn’t think she’s teasing. He reminds her that he’s going away.
— Oh, you and your old running away to sea. I don’t know why your heart’s so set on getting yourself drowned.
It’s true that James was taken aback by the sight of the churning, pounding sea on the beach this afternoon, as if he’d somehow left it out of his calculations. He sees the sea in the docks every day but that’s different – still and filthy.
— I won’t drown, he says sturdily. — I’m lucky.
— Ellen’s a nice girl. You could have a good life here.
But he’s only just seventeen, it’s too soon for him to be thinking of getting wed. Girls are always wanting to talk about weddings. There’s no one else in their compartment; the little train dawdles through the evening rain. — Look what I found on the beach, Connie says, fishing in the purse she carries. — Close your eyes. Open your hand.
She used to give him sweets like this when they were children.
He closes his fingers around it. It’s nothing much – just a bit of sea-washed glass, smooth to the touch, a frosted blue. She tells him to keep it safe when he goes away, says it’s her luck added on to his.
The Trojan Prince, carrying a general cargo of manufactured goods and foodstuffs, goes aground on rocks off the west coast of Canada, one evening of storm and fog in February 1923. Two men row heroically to shore, running a line from the davits of the trapped lifeboat, making it fast around a tree when they reach land. One by one the crew crosses to safety, the Captain last, hand over hand along the rope. Clinging on to that rope, sometimes the men are dangling fifteen feet above the waves; sometimes they’re plunged fifteen feet deep beneath. The wind screams. Black walls of water pick up a ghostly illumination from the swirling snowflakes.
When it’s his turn, apprentice James McIlvanney can’t get rid of the idea that everything is happening in a story, to someone else whose role he seems to be carrying off convincingly. To his relief it turns out that this someone is not a coward: he’s resourceful and determined and strong enough. Here he is, swinging above the terrible sucking water, above his certain death if he falls in. There’s a rhythm to it – if you let the rhythm take you, then you know how to let go of the soaking slippery rope with one hand, twisting and lunging your body forward in mid-air, then clapping your hand on the rope again, farther along. He learned this when he was a boy climbing trees with his mates. He’s hanging on for dear life. There ought to be somebody to see it. Then he’s plunged under the water and his lungs are bursting. He loses his left plimsoll in the crossing, also the bit of blue glass Connie Chappell gave him.
Somehow they all hang on. It’s a wonder that there is no loss of life among the forty-two crewmen. But the ship can’t be saved: it breaks up on the rocks over the next few days while they wait for rescue. Where they have got ashore is an uninhabited outcrop west of Vancouver Island, covered in scrub and stunted trees. They make a fire, and boil hot water to drink by melting the snow. The wireless operator didn’t manage to signal their position before the wreck, and they can’t find anywhere now to launch a distress rocket. The next day, when the storm subsides, the men go back on board to rescue what supplies and foodstuffs they can – mostly canned fruit. James finds a spare black boot, among the clothes they bring. Some of the men break into the bonded store, to get at the spirits.
The Captain sits apart from the rest of them, inconsolable at the loss of his ship. No one takes any notice of the four apprentice boys. James has time to think about the enormity of the task he has undertaken: acquiring the necessary knowledge to navigate the ocean using the stars. He makes up his mind to draft a table of all the subjects he needs to know, setting out the period of time he will dedicate to each. He resolves to adhere to this timetable even while he’s in port, instead of going ashore with his shipmates.
James imagines telling all this to Connie when he gets home.
He’s sorry that he lost the little token she gave him, which he kept in his pocket through all the first hard months of his apprenticeship at Dartmouth, but it doesn’t matter. She won’t care, it was only a bit of glass.
On the third day they’re spotted by Japanese fishermen, who alert the Bamfield lifeboat. Then they’re taken by cutter to Seattle, and after that across Canada by train to St John in New Brunswick. From St John, James sends a postcard to Connie, telling her that he’s all right. On board the Royal Mail steamer that takes them home, the officers and apprentices travel first class; the shipwreck has made them famous. Lady Furness, a patron of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, helps James read the menu, which is written in French, and organises the apprentices in a tableau – ‘Survivors’ – to entertain the other passengers. They sing ‘Eternal Father Strong to Save’.
When they dock at Liverpool, Connie is waiting for him.
He knows he ought to marry Ellen Pearson and get a house full of furniture.
But he can’t. He won’t.
Because the Night
THEIR PARENTS HAD fantastic parties, they were famous for it. The bath in the downstairs bathroom would be filled with ice, and then with bottles of Veuve du Vernay. All this was paid for on their father’s entertainment account at the import–export company where he was managing director, and a lot of the guests would have to be dull Anglia World people to make this all right. But the Anglia World people didn’t stay that long, and when they’d gone the party atmosphere changed, it was taken over by their parents’ real friends, the ones they still had from university, or the ones their mother, Peggy, had met as a teacher and a painter.
When they were little Tom and Kristen were allowed to stay up late and run around, although it wasn’t the sort of party where anyone else’s children were invited. The au pair was meant to put them to bed but often the au pair – Annegret then Sylvie then Bengta – would be partying too: Annegret drooping her head shyly, tipping the drink from side to side in her wine glass, being chatted up by some teacher from Mum’s school, Bengta dancing barefoot by herself, to Blondie or David Bowie or the Eurythmics. If it was summer there would be coloured flares burning among the flowers in the beds, grown-ups swinging in the dark in the two hammocks slung between the trees.
Tom was always good at inventing games, but the ones he made up on party nights were wilder. The children withdrew from the lit-up house; afloat in the dark, swollen with music and voices, it was hardly recognisable as the ordinary space they knew in daytime. Their house was on a hill at the edge of one of those minor towns in Surrey that are clustered up against the skirts of London; once it must have been in the countryside, but newer houses had been built around it, and pieces had been chopped off from their garden to go with each new one. But still they had a lawn with flower beds, and some huge old trees, and beyond that a tiny wood, about a third of an acre. At the back of this wood – reached by an earth path which wound past the tank with the oil for the central heating and the outhouse where the bikes and the lawnmower were kept – there were a couple of old greenhouses not used for anything. The children weren’t supposed to play in these because of the broken glass, and because in one of them there was a deep well with a square stone across the top. But on party nights the greenhouses became their base.
Kristen wore the gauzy frilly Ossie Clark her mother had been married in, pulled up above her Brownie belt so she didn’t trip on it; Tom would be in his soldier suit, red jacket unbuttoned, his pistol in its holster slung low on his hip. Their gym daps gave them extra silence and speed. Kneeling among the baked-dry leaves on the stone floor of the greenhouse with the well, they made plans. If the weather had been fine, the glass panes would hold in their pocket of heat long into the evening, pungent with the green smell of tomato stalks, even though no tomatoes ever grew in there any more, only fleshy tall weeds that spurted up wherever the rain leaked in, then died and parched to ghosts in the dry spells. The greenhouses were built of brick to about waist height; an aisle ran between raised beds of dry earth and shelves of empty flowerpots.
Kristen was assigned the easier tasks for their raids on the party, filling their water bottle at the tap in the kitchen, stealing food from where the buffet was laid out. Tom would try to put something alcoholic into his Action Man flask without being spotted. The grown-ups were their enemies, or at best neutral. As well as food and drink they took trophies: their mother’s silver watch, left by the kitchen sink when Peggy washed her hands after putting out the party food; the keys to the Audi. Tom outrageously once even took a picture from the wall – not one of Peggy’s, but an ink drawing by a man friend of hers, of a woman’s ugly naked bosoms all by themselves, not attached to any other part of a body. The children hadn’t known how they hated it until Tom lifted it coolly from its place in the hall and put it in his rucksack. They always put all the trophies back, next morning.
In these games Kristen worked herself up into a fever of resentment against the grown-ups, which she never felt the rest of the time. Ordinarily she was passionately attached to her family, also to Annegret and Sylvie and Bengta in turn (and for ever, after they left); she was homesick whenever she was parted from them. At the parties, her feeling of alienation from them all was like a hunger in her chest: whatever she and Tom took wasn’t enough, couldn’t fill this greedy, aching, thrilling space.
That was when they were little. Tom didn’t want anything to do with the parties any more, he made a retching noise at the idea of their parents and their parents’ friends dancing and messing around in hammocks. When a party was planned the summer he was sixteen, he arranged to be out all night, staying with boys from school. Lots of things had changed since the old days. They didn’t have au pairs any more. On Sylvie’s last morning, when Jim had to drive her to the airport very early, she had left a message beside Kristen’s pillow, written in lipstick on a tissue; Kristen unfolded it and gazed at it every night before she went to sleep, breathing its perfume, until the tissue dissolved into pink dust.
Now Kristen let herself in at the front door every school afternoon with the key which she wore around her neck on a string. Stirring up the empty air in the hall, she was alert to the secret breathing of the house, the boiler clicking and creaking as the heating came on, the tiny thudding of the cat stepping downstairs. Kristen didn’t hate her girls’ independent school; she had plenty of friends and did reasonably well in most subjects. But when she shut the door behind her it was such a relief to be alone, away from the jostle of green uniforms – dropping her briefcase, pushing off her outdoor shoes without undoing the laces, then standing in her socks in the kitchen (which the cleaner would have tidied), making strawberry milkshake and toast with peanut butter. Watching children’s TV, sitting among the big floor cushions in the glass extension room, she seeped back gradually into her real self. The knowledge that her mother would be home in an hour (Dad picked up Tom and they came later) was a cocoon, keeping her safe, yet also apart and immune.
As long as the Pune wasn’t around.
Sometimes when Kristen thought she was all alone in the house, she’d suddenly hear him moving about upstairs, or using the lavatory (which he didn’t bother to flush), or running water into the kettle in the kitchen. He didn’t speak to her – even if sometimes he came in and sat watching television with her – but his being there spoiled everything. He was supposed to live with his own mother half a mile away on one of the new estates (ghastly but expensive, Peggy said), though he was twenty-one, old enough to have left home long ago. But he moaned on to Peggy about his mother, he claimed she was driving him mad, he followed Peggy around going over word by word whatever latest awful thing his mother had said, which Peggy analysed with the special air of patient, amused exasperation that she reserved for him. His dad was dead, or had left home, or something.
Peggy said to the Pune that there was always a room for him in their house, by which she meant the room which used to belong to the au pairs; he said their house was the only place he could express what he really felt. And so he began to use this room as his own whenever he stayed, filling it with cigarette smoke, and cassette tapes, and bottles of the pills he had to take, and dirty clothes he never sorted out for washing (the cleaner wouldn’t go in there). He never opened the curtains, he slept in late: Kristen guessed that often he only got out of bed when she came back in the afternoon after a whole day of travelling and lessons and playtimes and school dinner. Tom started calling this room the Pune-hole.
Peggy had taught the Pune when he was still at school. She wasn’t the ordinary kind of teacher, she worked with the kids who needed special help, which usually meant very thick or very naughty, but sometimes meant weirdos like the Pune (whose real name was Simon), clever but out of their mind. She had helped him through his A levels and then to get into Sussex University, where he had lasted one year before coming back to live with his mother ag
ain.
— It’s funny how although he hates his mother so much he can’t get away from her, their dad said.
— Well of course, darling. That’s the whole point.
The Pune only loved their house when Peggy was in it. Alone there with Jim or Tom or Kristen, he was crucified if they spoke to him. Mostly, until Peggy was home, he skulked in his room, only venturing out to refill his mug with the horrible coffee he made, three heaped teaspoons of granules, no milk or sugar. He was tall and skinny, with bad posture and glasses with thick black rims; he pushed back the greasy hair flopping in his face with a twitching movement, so that the naked long cheekbones and jaw-line beneath were visible in flashes. When he sat with Kristen in the afternoons he reacted to the TV programmes as if she wasn’t there: groaning, dropping his head in his hands, giving off shouts of derision like gunshots. He used their ornaments for ashtrays.
When Peggy came in, hallooing at the front door with her ringing, singing voice, the Pune would home in on her straight away, like some needy kind of pet. (They’d had a grown-up cat like this once, who meowed without stopping and sucked Tom’s sleeves.) Peggy would make a point of coming in to kiss Kristen, asking how her day had been at school, how she’d done in her French test.
— All right, said Kristen, altering the position of her head around the kiss so as not to lose sight for a moment of the television screen. — Not too bad.
