From a Distance

by Raffaella Barker

  ‘Oh! It’s already beautiful, and I haven’t seen what’s inside. I love this, I could make a design from it.’ The brown paper was decorated with little drawings of Felicity, miniature stick portraits of her busy doing all the things she liked. Picking flowers, painting, slicing vegetables in the kitchen, sitting in a chair, reading, with her cat on her knee, stirring dye in a tub, leaning across the screen-printing table, walking on the hill, her scarf flying, and finally, one quick sketch of her hugging Michael, a whirl of stick arms and legs and him with his cap on, a smiling pin man.

  Felicity bent her head over the parcel, still not opening it. ‘This must have taken for ever. It really could be a design, you know. I can’t believe you did this and I didn’t see you.’ The paper crackled as she carefully undid it, folding the layers, unveiling the rectangular board within. ‘Oh Michael,’ she said.

  He had painted a lighthouse, red and white in a cornfield on chalky cliffs. He had painted it simply but with much detail, secretly stealing time over the past weeks. He had hauled out his memories of childhood and among them found himself back at a place he’d loved. He would share it with Felicity. The lighthouse stood on the cliffs near his own home, and was the place he had held most dear in his childhood. As he painted his memory, he wished with all his heart he could take Felicity and their child there.

  She propped the painting on the sofa. ‘It’s lovely. Like something out of a children’s book. Is it real? A real place, I mean?’

  He nodded. ‘It’s Kings Sloley in Norfolk, I played there as a child with my brother. The lighthouse keeper’s sons were in both our classes at primary school. Then they moved away, and the next one, Mr Perkins, wouldn’t let any of us near the place.’

  He peered at his picture. He hadn’t thought much about what it would actually look like to someone seeing it for the first time, and he was relieved. It looked all right.

  ‘The Lighthouse was where I first flew a kite, and where I learned to ride a bike. I dream about it sometimes, but it’s always distant.’ He stopped speaking. That music had got right under his skin. All of this was new. He realised how little he had shared of himself with her, how generously she had shared with him.

  Felicity’s eyes sparkled. ‘I’d love to go there. I’d love to go with you there.’

  He squeezed her hand. Opened his mouth to say something eloquent, meaningful, but he couldn’t. He dropped her hand, ‘Anyway, I thought it might be useful. You need an image for your business, and I was thinking a new name might be the thing. You know, “Lighthouse Fabrics” or “Lighthouse Designs” or something? I can adapt this to make it your insignia, if you like it.’

  She hadn’t spoken. Oh damn, he’d got it wrong. He’d had a nerve hadn’t he? Trying to get involved? Ah well, the picture would look okay hung somewhere in the house. Wouldn’t it?

  ‘Don’t worry my love,’ he said softly. ‘You don’t have to like it.’

  Felicity threw her arms around his shoulders, her smiling kisses engulfing both of them. ‘Like it? I love it, I love it. It makes such perfect sense.’ But you haven’t signed it. Come on.’ She let go of him and turned to the inkstand on the desk in the corner. ‘Make a mark, Marker,’ she said and twirled the canvas to show the back. Michael signed it, scratching his initials on the canvas, circling them. Felicity took it, removed a watercolour of a church seen through foxgloves, and hung it on the wall. ‘Lighthouse Fabrics it is,’ she said. ‘You’ve given me something to last a lifetime, you know.’

  The baby, Christopher John Mohune Delaware, arrived at dawn on a spring morning. Michael and Felicity had spent the evening before writing his names, changing the order, arguing over where the Mohune should go to sound the most dashing. Michael balled up the paper they had scrawled on and threw it into the bin as the midwife bustled in. Audrey Castleton, Arthur’s sister-in-law and the village midwife in attendance. A brisk woman with a firm manner, she helped Michael stay calm.

  ‘It’s all right, you know,’ she glanced at him as she filled the kettle for the tenth time.

  ‘It is?’ Michael stared back, and clenched his fists at his side to stop himself clutching her arm.

  ‘You’re boiling the kettle again.’ She laughed, ‘I’m only making a cup of tea for you and me. There’s nothing to worry about, you know.’

  Occasionally he found himself laughing at his fears. He was every man. Thousands had been there before him, and thousands were still to come. Men who had been through war and pain, yet found themselves floored at the prospect of someone they loved in discomfort. From the sounds Felicity made, when he entered the room to see her, it was clear that ‘discomfort’, Audrey’s word, was a ridiculous understatement. Felicity’s hair was sweaty and lank, and her eyes hollow with exhaustion. It had been a long night. He wondered when he might be hit with a sense of elation at the prospect of new life beginning, but frankly, it seemed terrifying. So when Michael found a pair of sloe dark eyes gazing at him, solemn and lit with surprising gravitas, he wasn’t expecting to feel anything. A clawing, soaring, sky high, primordial rush of love swirled and settled in a cavity of his heart that had, little though he’d known, rattled with emptiness. Love expanded, filling the aching emptiness left by Johnnie’s death. Michael sat on the bed next to Felicity, staring at the extraordinary new being who had arrived in their midst. They were complete now. And Michael suddenly knew just what his mother and father had lost.

  ‘He’s called Kit,’ said Michael. ‘This is our son, Kit,’ and he tucked him in Felicity’s arms and the three of them slept.

  Kit was an equable soul, and his tiny presence prised open the protective shell of closely guarded intimacy that Michael had built around himself and Felicity. Now there was a living embodiment of their love. Their friends and neighbours breathed a sigh of relief and welcomed Kit into their hearts. In the first weeks of his life, Sheila Spencer visited almost daily, sometimes accompanied by Paul. Sheila brought warm loaves, newly baked; Paul helped Michael put up a lean-to porch on the house to shelter the pram Michael’s former landlady Verity had given them. No matter how the rain squalled that spring, baby Kit lay asleep, snugly wrapped and dry, covered by the big navy blue pram hood, dreaming of the sea he didn’t yet know.

  Felicity, to her own surprise, took motherhood in her stride, though her focus changed. Now she worked intensely for shorter stretches of time, and she brought her life into her designs, so whatever she was doing, she would look for the shape or form of it and transcribe it onto paper and then to a screen. She and Michael spent summer hours with Kit kicking his legs on a blanket spread on the grass, and Felicity drew the wild flowers, dissecting speedwells and buttercups, forget-me-nots and purple loosestrife, ladies smocks and the vivid pink flowers of the wild sweet pea to find the forms for her designs.

  Kit’s arrival opened another channel in Felicity’s creative vision. Sketches of everything flowed from her: spoons and bars of soap, sea birds and even a line of kitchen chairs dancing along the border of a wavy stripe. Sometimes Verity offered to take the baby for a walk. She wasn’t the only one to give Felicity help. Michael, raised on a rural farm with few neighbours, had not realised how a community looks after its own. It wasn’t uncommon for Michael on his way back from the workshop to see his baby son sailing down the hill towards the harbour in his pram, pushed by Esther from the pub. Or, when Michael stopped by the grocers in Love Lane, he might find Kit’s pram again, and Kit, propped on a cushion, regally accepting all attention from housewives queuing with their ration books, while Verity bustled with pride and love for this baby.

  September came. Felicity and he had talked so much about what would happen when he went, it had almost lost its significance, but since Kit arrived, Michael felt every beat of his heart bringing the moment closer. He could no longer let his mother suffer his loss as well as Johnnie’s. The baby was flourishing, Felicity was well, happy, engrossed in her son and her work, and Michael knew that the life he loved was becoming too real. Soon it would be
all he knew, he was ready to lose himself, to dive into the fathoms of love and never leave. It was becoming more difficult every day.

  Walking to the workshop, he took a detour early one morning up to the top of the hill. A skein of geese, their silhouettes soft indigo against the sky, flew over him, the rhythmic scraping of their cry like a bow pulled across a violin. The light changed imperceptibly as the days drew in, and low rays poured onto the sea, tinting the familiar view sepia. At high tide, the ocean glimmered like a glass pane, and it seemed fuller than Michael had ever seen it before. It wasn’t yet eight o’clock and the day was warm already. He’d left Felicity dressing Kit in their bedroom. Michael lit a cigarette, and smoked it hard so the ember burned bright and looked back at the cottage. It contained everything he held dear. He wondered where he would find the heart to take with him.

  Later that morning he returned home to find the baby lying on a rug in the garden kicking his legs beside Felicity. Her skirt, a newly finished design, was decorated with ripples of migrating geese in blue, grey and purple flying across the fabric. It felt significant to Michael that it mirrored what he’d seen up on the hill. Her hair tangled loosely down her back, her arms were tanned from the summer outside, and she drew quickly, covering pages of a sketchbook with line drawings, while Kit played beside her. Michael took a snapshot in his head. A memory. A piece of his heart to take with him.

  He knelt beside her. ‘Come on, we’ll go for a picnic. Let’s get our things now, and swim at the cove before the tide turns.’

  She put her pencil down. ‘What about work? I’m so behind, I—’

  Michael pulled her to her feet. ‘We’ll leave work behind for today.’

  Felicity’s eyes widened, and he saw tears rushing into them, but she nodded and stood up. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  Michael had booked a ticket on the sleeper from Penzance that night. Earlier, he bathed Kit in the china washstand in the bedroom. His hand cradled the baby’s head and he leaned close, storing memories of his son, whispering lines of his favourite poems in a mad belief that Kit might one day remember them. Michael studied Kit’s eyelashes as they swept his cheeks, the dimples banded across his tiny hands, his inverted baby version of knuckles. Kit’s tiny grasp, surprisingly firm, wrapped the full might of his baby strength around Michael’s forefinger. His skin was soft, slippery in the water, smooth as marble, flawless. His legs kicking delight, constantly moving, his mouth pursed to blow bubbles of concentration. He was extraordinary, Michael thought. He’d read once about an experiment where an athlete mirrored every movement of a tiny baby over the course of one day. It had floored the athlete. Kit, he thought proudly, would run rings around any of them. Kit crowed with laughter then looked surprised, he had made a new noise, and startled himself. For a moment it seemed he might cry, but he righted himself, and his eyebrows, finely drawn above eyes dark as obsidian, rose to an arch. Michael tickled his tummy and he laughed some more. Kit was exhausted by the time Michael had fed him his bottle and put him, warm, milky and almost asleep, in his cradle. Saying a silent goodbye, Michael breathed in the soft sweet smell of his son and prayed never to forget.

  The Indian summer was at its golden height. Michael fastened the strap of the wristwatch Felicity had given him. ‘Time will run back and fetch the age of gold’. This was his age of gold. He was in it right now, and he could not fool himself that it would come again. He stood on the threshold of the house, Felicity was in her studio. He would go to her in a moment, and then he would leave for the station. He shut his eyes, the better to experience the scents of the evening, the salt on the air, cut with a hint of woodsmoke and the waft of dry grass. He could hear the gulls in the harbour, the clatter of dishes in a house nearby, and the sharp lilt of children playing on the beach below.

  Michael found Felicity emptying a rag bag, scraps of fabric tumbled around her on the doorstep where she sat, and she had begun to fold cloth pieces into piles. ‘Order out of chaos,’ she said, her voice sharp, and bright. She was keeping busy. That’s what she’d said she would do when he left. ‘I’ve got all this to untangle,’ she waved at a basket holding a nest of coloured thread. ‘It’ll take me a while.’

  Michael sat down next to her on the step, and dropped a kiss on her bare arm. ‘Kit’s asleep,’ he said.

  The smell of bacon frying drifted up from the village, and in the shade, the air had the cool edge of autumn.

  She nodded. ‘He’s tired after today, all the sea air on our picnic.’ She was calm. Michael was afraid that if she cried, he wouldn’t be able to leave. He pulled her towards him in a tight hug. She yielded against him her cheek on his shoulder. ‘Time for the train, are you sure you want to come to the station?’

  She lifted her face and darted her eyes to his, then away, but he caught the sheen of unshed tears. ‘Of course I’m coming. Verity’s come to sit with Kit, she’s in the kitchen. Let’s go.’

  As they walked out of the gate Michael turned and looked back. Already it wasn’t his life any more. The open casement, the red checked curtain fabric at the kitchen window, the hydrangea climbing up to the sill of Felicity’s room, all were simply abstract shapes now he was leaving them. He turned to face the road ahead, holding hands with Felicity, and he tried as hard as he could not to cling to her fingers.

  Saying goodbye to Felicity was like a nightmare. He was somewhere far away when he kissed her, her face blurred, smeared with tears. She wasn’t crying, he realised, they were his tears. He floated above his own body, through their last farewell, and as if from a great height, he saw himself pull away from her and step up on to the train as the whistle blew. It was a nightmare that could have no end. He leaned out of the window, trying to say something. What on earth was he trying to say? She shook her head, walking down the platform, her eyes locked on to his as the train began to move. He was shouting something, but no sound came out of his mouth and the engine gathered speed. Suddenly there was no gaze between them. Only distance. All he could see was the shape of her, her outline delicate, hard to make out, everything so blurred. Her figure flickered in the gloom of the station. She was waving, blowing him a kiss, she smiled, her handkerchief balled in her hand. His eyes smarted, he dashed a hand across them, and she wasn’t there. Gone. Out of his life with one breath. Darkness fell inside him. A flame had been extinguished. The train curved away, the setting sun reflected off the sea and bouncing through the row of carriage windows. The glass panes, the passengers within, glowed like facets on an amber necklace until the sun slowly slid beneath the horizon.

  It was some time before he looked inside the basket Felicity had given him. The train was quiet. Michael shared the carriage with one elderly man who, having glared at him for a bristling couple of seconds, announced pugnaciously that he would get off at Exeter. Then he shook out his newspaper with a crack and held it up in front of his face. The pages fluttered like a trapped moth until Michael stood up and closed the window, but the man didn’t speak again. Michael was left to his thoughts. They were desolate. Opening the basket, he decided, was the last act that connected him to Felicity, and he wanted to savour the moment.

  Once his companion had gone, the carriage was his alone, and he was ready for the final act of parting. The train hurtled through St Erth and Liskeard, St Germans and Saltash and out of Cornwall, as Michael spread the picnic on the seat next to him. There was bread and a piece of cheese, apples, a pork pie wrapped in a napkin, and a bottle of beer. He ate slowly, the taste of the bread, the smooth earthy beer they always drank on picnics was evocative of home. Home? No. A place in his past. Felicity and Kit would go on being there. Michael saw black through the window and thought that an abyss lay outside the train carriage as it thundered through the night. He put the picnic tin back in the basket, and noticed that at the bottom was a cushion. Made by Felicity. Every stitch was hers, the green and blue seahorse fabric was the same as the curtains in their bedroom in Mousehole. He pulled it out of the basket, and buried his face in it, it sm
elled of her. He shut his eyes and breathed as much of her into himself as he could. It would be nice to lie on, and with this thought he turned the cushion over on the seat beside him. The other side was embroidered with an intricate picture of a lighthouse. His lighthouse. Red and white in the landscape he knew so well and which she had never seen except in his painting. Scattered like daisies in the grass at the bottom of the picture, the words, ‘light of my life’. The carriage had been empty since the elderly man had departed at Exeter. Michael lay down, tucked the cushion under his head, and slept.

  Returning home was every bit as difficult as he had imagined. Norfolk had changed as much as he had. The scars of war were raw, and Michael found himself close to tears much of the first days. He didn’t have any part of himself spare with which to miss Felicity as he sat on the bus through the dereliction of Norwich’s bombed streets. Even though clearing up was underway, even though there were busy shops and the glimpse of the market with its striped stalls and colour, Michael was wrenched by what he saw. On the familiar journey towards the coast, he was disturbed by the quantities of debris, sheets of corrugated iron that lay in fields next to rolls of rusting barbed wire. It was worse than Cornwall because in his mind it still looked as it had before the war. He had not anticipated the scars of those five years would still be raw. Buildings sagged, exhausted, surrounded by long grass, the windows like staring eyes, blank and baleful in their neglected state. Others were neat and clean. He noticed a cottage where a woman swept the step, a brown hen pecking contentedly behind her. He saw a spaniel lying flat in the sun on a lawn next to the long shadow of a great cedar tree. He walked the final leg of the journey.

  It was a whole day since he’d left Mousehole, and it felt like several lifetimes since he’d last walked in the gate and up the path to his parents’ house. His journey was over. His only certainty, his one conviction, was that he was here to stay. He didn’t know anything else, and he couldn’t bear to think, because every thought turned like a magnet seeking its pole, to Felicity. It was late afternoon when he finally walked into the kitchen at Green Farm House and picked his mother up in his arms. His heart slipped a beat, there was so little of her. She was as light as a shuttlecock, he could have held her up for an age, and he did, spinning round with her in the kitchen, with Badger, the collie dog, barking and the door wide open to the yard. Michael didn’t want to put her down. He didn’t want to see that his mother, like Badger, was stiff now, and his father, whom he could see walking up to the house through the yard, was bent and slow. He didn’t want to stand alone in the kitchen with her and experience for himself Johnnie’s absence.