From a Distance

by Raffaella Barker

  He walked along the beach, stepping over rope and buoys that held the fleet of small boats safe in the harbour. Nets hung out to dry, fishermen sat in groups, mending them, or smoking as they hammered planks back on to their boats, and beyond them the tall grey harbour walls gave protection. He could feel every particle in his body that had strained and tensed for so long begin to settle. He couldn’t yet contemplate his return to Norfolk. He’d stay a while. He sat on a bench and stared at the gentle waves and an hour passed.

  For a few days, Michael explored. He visited Paul and Sheila again. Paul took him to the studio, showed him the paintings he was working on, introduced him to an artist with a studio next to his and a potter they met in the narrow Newlyn Street. He brought them all back to the house, where Sheila was having tea with another couple, Simone and Ivor, both sculptors, and a much older Russian woman who had been a ballet dancer. They sat at the rickety table, pouring whisky into their tea, smoking non-stop and arguing. Ivor drained his cup. ‘Is it possible to paint a conscience in a landscape?’

  ‘Why should you?’ demanded the ballet dancer.

  ‘Why shouldn’t you? Simone’s voice was gravelly. ‘How d’you expect anyone to work without the shadow of the war hanging over everything they do? It’s in the nervous system of our whole generation.’

  ‘There’s a lot else to explore too,’ said Sheila, who clearly wanted to mollify the Russian, who had twisted on her stool with her back turned to the group. ‘There’s a lot of change and hope among the chaos.’

  ‘There’s more chaos than anything else,’ said Paul. ‘Hard to imagine a new world order just yet.’

  Michael had never come across anyone like these people, though Paul was adamant they existed in Norfolk too.

  ‘Artists I know here went up to your neck of the woods there before the war. Art’s alive everywhere, you see it once you look,’ he said firmly.

  Michael was intrigued. Paul seemed able to live outside the restrictions of office work, or classroom, or even a regiment. He liked the idea of belonging to this group of people, they were engaged with the act of being alive, but to an extent, the attraction for him lay in the very fact that he was so removed from the artists. He was an outsider. These personalities were intriguing, alluring even, but he knew he could not become one of them. Before the war he and his friends sat in pubs and talked about politics and beliefs, but not with the fire he saw in Paul, Simone, Ivor and the Russian. Not with the whisky either, he thought wryly. He had been younger, of course, but where he had grown up, society was small, parochial, safe. Here it was different, but maybe that was what the war had done. Not that they talked much about what they had experienced. Even the most loquacious of Paul’s group skirted around what had actually happened on the battlefields. Michael thought of his local town, the sleepy market square, the dances in the room behind the Red Lion pub once a month, the local station, the medieval church, built to impress by Norfolk’s wealthy landowners and traders hundreds of years ago.

  On the other side of England lay this wild Atlantic coastline, where a storm could wipe out a whole community, where the sea was a constant supply of contradictions, and the land was harsh. Paul and Sheila’s friends weren’t local, they were a community of poets and painters drawn to this extreme place, and working and living extreme lives. The cottages they rented near Land’s End on the moor among the tin mines were primitive and hard to reach. The art they made was complicated, inaccessible.

  Michael, used to looking at a few landscapes and bird paintings in the Castle Museum in Norwich, was both intrigued and cautious. He was out of his depth. The real question, as he saw it, was whether he, or any of them for that matter, could ever belong to anything or anyone again. Everything he had known had been blown apart, and he couldn’t imagine how it could come back together as a whole. He was grateful that he had found lodgings in Mousehole, and not in a cottage six miles from the nearest village with no running water or electricity, out on a weather-lashed peninsula like two newly arrived friends of Paul and Sheila’s. A bohemian hovel, said Paul, and although it sounded romantic, Michael had no desire for that version of romance. He would walk up the hill behind the village and on for miles, beyond the small farms and hamlets and into the wild where the sky seemed to tear him open. He lay on the grass with the wind like a lullaby, and larks singing around him and the spring earth warming up beneath him and the peace was intense. Sometimes it rained, and he stayed, lying with his face to the sky, eyes closed, drops splashing on his skin, sliding like tears across his cheeks, cleansing him. He had never noticed so profoundly before that he was alive.

  In The Ship, a few days after he moved into Verity’s house, the publican’s wife Esther stopped him as he was leaving one evening. She had freckles and fly-away hair, and a flustered air, accentuated by her crumpled apron which she smoothed as she talked as if soothing herself.

  ‘Reg thought you might be looking for work?’ she said. ‘Only my brother grows flowers for Covent Garden Market. The plots are up past your place, going up to Raginnis Hill. He needs a man to cut and carry them to the Penzance train.’

  Michael heard himself say, ‘Thank you, that sounds just the thing.’

  He hadn’t expected to work outside, but he was excited. Another new departure. He had the farming skills he’d learned at home. He could apply them to flowers. He noticed Esther’s eyes were wet and teary, awkwardly he passed her his handkerchief.

  ‘Thank you, it’s just that sad,’ Esther sniffed. ‘William lost his arm at that Verdun. I know we should be grateful, and we are. He’s alive, and that’s what matters, but seeing him up with the flowers and not able to do so much any more. Well—’ she pressed the handkerchief over her face.

  Michael spoke gently. ‘I can start as soon as he needs me. Shall I go and find him tomorrow, would that suit him?’

  Esther nodded, ‘It would suit him. Thank you.’

  Delaware’s bookshop was tucked on a corner behind the Temperance chapel. Outside, two elderly men were netting, their wooden chairs precarious on the uneven path, the cloud from their pipes forming and dissolving like speech bubbles around their rumbling conversation. A green painted shelf of battered paperbacks priced at tuppence each stood outside the door. Most days, Michael pored over them, mentally earmarking them in different sequences. Sometimes he lined them up chronologically, sometimes alphabetically, sometimes he narrowed his choice to a top three. He had been thrilled to find the bookshop. Sheila had told him about it when he picked up a novel by Aldous Huxley in her kitchen.

  ‘Borrow it. I’ve just read that one. If you like it, you’re in the right place. Go to Delaware’s bookshop, they’ll have far more books you’ll want to read in there than Penzance Library. Whenever I visit Mousehole I go there.’

  Michael wrote down the address, but until he started work, he had kept away. Buying a book felt like an admission that he was not returning home, as well as an extravagant use of the tiny amount of money he had left from selling his watch in the jeweller’s near Penzance station. Once he had a job, there was no longer a need to pretend he was going anywhere. With his first week’s pay Michael headed for Delaware’s. Tall and confident with money in his pocket, he jangled his small change as he walked. Today he would buy a book, and tomorrow he would take it up the hill at lunchtime and read. His working day with William began at dawn, and by one o’clock, time was his own. The afternoons stretched like a glorious kingdom ahead of him. He would read, and think, and sometime, someday, he would work out what he was going to do. Books would help.

  It was after four o’clock when he reached the shop. Today he worked longer than usual. He had cut a frame of violets and another of anemones and packed them in stiff boxes for the train. He had taken the flowers to the station in Penzance, and then driven William Coyne, his curly-haired boss, to the hospital to sign up for a prosthetic arm. William was stoic, ‘I was never very clever with my hands any rate,’ he joked. ‘I reckon I write my name as good with
the left one and I don’t know who would see the difference.’

  Michael crouched by the bookshelf outside the window, the sound of shutters closing above him forcing his eyes to race along the spines. He had to buy something before the shop shut. Anything would do. There would be other times when he could make his choice in a more leisurely fashion.

  Moonfleet leapt out at him, familiar: he’d read it in his early teens, though this was a different edition to the red hardback with Johnnie’s bookplate in the front. Michael turned it over. The paperback cover displayed a watercolour of a tall ship, sails set beneath a sky where the moon gleamed as bright as a golden guinea. A children’s adventure story, set in Cornwall. He couldn’t remember Johnnie actually reading it, but he must have, he would have loved it. Even better down here in the place it was set. Known as the family bookworm, Michael had a ritual for reading. He had a den in the hayloft, lined with an old Turkish carpet his mother had been throwing out due to the moth holes in it, and an Astrakhan coat that had belonged to his grandfather, and which he had taken from the attic. He didn’t need a ladder, he could swing up on the beams and posts of the hay barn wall, and he would lie there all afternoon in the summer holidays, reading or listening to the sounds of the day passing, his brother whistling to the dogs or an engine firing. He loved the languor of his body combined with the action of his imagination as he read, and the reality of life going on outside around him.

  Turning the paperback over in his hand, Michael dug into his pocket for change and entered the shop. It was quiet, the musty smell of books tinged with an exotic scent he couldn’t place, and Michael blinked in the gloaming as he stepped towards the desk to pay.

  ‘I’d like this please.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Michael had been preoccupied with the small thick paperback, enjoying the silky texture of the cover, the illustration, the font elaborate, embellished to suggest the swashbuckling nature of the book. Only when the shopkeeper spoke, did he realise it was a woman.

  ‘Moonfleet. Have you read it before?’ She turned the book over. She had beautiful hands, with a tiger’s eye ring on her middle finger. Michael’s gaze moved up smooth arms, bare to the elbow, and swept across her shoulders. Her face was framed with dark hair, strands of which fell across the fabric of her yellow dress, and his heart jolted in surprise. Everything about her seemed to gleam, from the mother-of-pearl clasp in her hair to her dark eyes, her gaze meeting his, to her skin, peachy in the unlit shop. She smelled of the musky perfume he’d noticed when he came in, and the raw promise of it jumped down his throat. He swallowed, hesitating.

  ‘No. I mean, yes. Yes. Sorry, yes, I have, but a long time ago, before I’d ever been to Cornwall.’

  She had the book on her lap now as she adjusted her hair, twisting it up and sliding a pencil through the knot to keep it out of the way. She repositioned the clasp and looked up. She had fine brows, arched and delicate. ‘It was my brother’s favourite book.’ She held the paperback flat between her palms, weighing it up.

  He laughed, ‘Mine too, well, he had a copy, and I think he read it. I read it, anyway.’

  Felicity looked up from the cover, their eyes met, held a smile. Michael felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck, and his voice was hoarse. ‘I think he read it,’ he repeated.

  Felicity reached for a sheet of brown paper. ‘My brother always said it chose him, because he was given three copies on the same birthday.’ She fumbled and dropped the book. ‘I feel bad about selling it, but—’ she broke off to search on the floor. Michael couldn’t take his eyes from the curve of her neck. There was a glimpse of pale skin at the top of her spine where her dress opened and she was pink in the cheeks when she straightened up.

  ‘It’s going to a good home,’ she said.

  Michael laughed. ‘You don’t know that,’ he protested.

  ‘I do,’ she said simply.

  Their eyes met for a moment or an aeon, Michael wasn’t sure which.

  ‘Don’t worry about wrapping it, I’ll take it in my pocket.’ He leaned to pick up the book and, unexpectedly, his hand brushed hers. He was close enough to lick the musky rose scent straight from her skin. Embarrassed, he leapt back. Reversing out of the shop, he was on the street before he noticed he was holding his breath.

  He went back to the bookshop the next afternoon. It was almost five, and he’d read half the book in the sun on the hill, glad to escape the cloying smell in town of the day’s catch. Driving a load of lilac and cherry blossom past the fish hall after lunch today, Michael had almost retched at the sight and smell of blood and scales pouring into the gutters. It was warm, the fishermen swept and hauled buckets and trays, their sleeves pushed back, thick wool solid and un-pliable as armour in the heat. Michael couldn’t wait to escape up to the hill.

  When he arrived home with his copy of Moonfleet the evening before, he’d questioned Verity casually, and sure enough, she knew the bookshop girl.

  ‘Felicity? She’s the only Delaware left here. When they were small she and Christopher, her brother, were never apart.’ Verity led him into the hall, and stooped, scrutinising a small oil painting of Mousehole, painted from the hill Michael walked to every day. ‘That’s by her mother, Aileen. They were wild little things, Aileen never kept house much. Some cousin of Francis’s, I can’t remember exactly. Losing Christopher killed her, there’s no doubt. He died in Normandy, though it wasn’t official for some time. She knew, a mother always does, they say. Poor Felicity kept on hoping until the final telegram came.’ The painting depicted two small figures, blue coats wide like kites, scampering away, caught between their own energy, the gravity of the hill, and the breeze playing in the long grass. Michael squatted next to Verity, haunted. His mother waiting at home, the simple camaraderie of siblings. Captured then in a sweet, almost throwaway painting of children, lost for ever now one of them had died.

  ‘There.’ A soothing hand on Michael’s shoulder and Verity straightened the painting and patted his back. Michael rubbed tears from his face and followed her through to the sitting room.

  ‘I knit a lot,’ she said, gesturing at a corner where baskets bursted with knitting and soft lumps of wool.

  ‘What happened to their father?’ Michael asked.

  Verity arranged herself in a chair, and picked up a pair of stout wooden needles from which a square of grey wool dangled.

  ‘Tristram? Very handsome. He took on that shop and made it in to something. His own father had run into the ground what with the drink and the Great War. Tristram brought it back to life.’ The click of her wooden needles was regular as a heartbeat. Michael saw her gaze move from the wool to the chair opposite hers, on the other side of the fireplace.

  ‘Francis played chess with him every week. They kept it up, even through the blackout, you know. The only blessing is that he didn’t live to know what happened to Christopher. Went up to London to show some books to an American businessman and the bombs at night took him. 1941 it was.’

  ‘And Felicity lived with her mother then?’

  ‘Yes, Aileen was never much around the house, not a homemaker really, but it’s a lovely spot, their place. You’ll know it. The last house after the violets. The one with the orange door.’ She chuckled. ‘Felicity painted it, she reckoned it suited the flowers. No one else around here would have chosen that colour.’

  ‘I’ll look out for it,’ Michael stood up, restless, for what he didn’t know. He was meeting Paul and Sheila in Newlyn for a drink. Verity’s final words stopped him in the doorway. ‘It’s a shame for her, it really is. Tomorrow we’ll be in church for Christopher. Would’ve been his birthday, and it’s not even a real funeral, there’s been no body brought back. There won’t be, will there?’

  Michael shook his head, ‘No, there won’t.’

  He didn’t stay long in Newlyn that evening, and although he longed to ask more about Felicity, he didn’t say a word. Walking home in the moonlight, he pondered his next move. He could bring flowe
rs, he could ask her out, he could leave a note at her house. It seemed terribly important not to do it wrong, though he couldn’t for the life of him think what ‘wrong’ might be. He wanted to impress her. Perhaps by mending her car, if she had one, or rescuing her from danger. Ridiculous. Chastising himself, he fell asleep. In the morning the only idea he’d hit on was to buy another book.

  He was in good spirits as he strolled towards Delaware’s. He and Will had planted out three terraces with sweet pea seedlings and tiny snapdragons. The work was satisfying. Sunlight formed a silver skin on the horizon and he’d managed to see Felicity’s house. Cornflowers in the garden, a sculpture of a girl sitting coiled like a cat, and the orange door, exotic and eye-catching like Felicity. He reached the bookshop in a heightened state of apprehension. The shutters were up, a hand written sign tucked into the frame announced: ‘Delaware’s is closed until further notice.’

  Michael’s disappointment rocked him, and his stupidity. He knew she had gone to her brother’s memorial today. Of course she wouldn’t be in the shop. He stared at the door, ashamed that he had forgotten this occasion that meant the world to her. He snorted a sigh, looked up at the shattered facade. Then the door opened. On to the step came Felicity, her arms wrapped around herself, narrow as a shadow in her black dress. Her head rested on the doorframe, her eyes were lowered. Michael thought she looked like a medieval painting. Untouchable.

  He was about to wave and walk away when she sniffed. He was close enough to see that her eyes were red, she pressed her fingers into them, dropping a limp yellow flower.

  ‘You’ve had a big day,’ he said. It didn’t seem right to pretend he didn’t know.

  She shuddered. ‘It was awful.’ She turned back into the shop, speaking over her shoulder. ‘Would you have a drink with me?’