“This is my daughter,” said Maggie. “Ella, this is our neighbour, Mrs Armitage.”
They eyed each other warily, waiting to see if the other one would crack and give away their secret.
“This is my worksheet,” Ella said at last. “I’m doing numeracy today.”
“That’s nice.”
“She’s home-schooled,” said Maggie. “Ella, when you’ve finished that sheet you can go and play outside.”
“Should I do some drawing?”
“No, you need some fresh air.” She ruffled Ella’s hair. “Fresh air and fresh hair. Just in case you meet a bear.”
“Why do I need fresh hair to meet a bear?”
“So you taste good when he eats you, of course. All finished? Off you go.”
“There aren’t any bears here, though,” said Ella, sounding as if she thought bears might be possible.
“No. No bears.”
“Are you sure, Mummy?”
“I’m sure. Go on, off with you.” Ella headed obediently for the door. “No, put your coat on first. And some shoes. No, the shoes by the door.”
Ella sat down and tugged at the Velcro fastenings of her worn trainers. “Should I wear my wellies?”
“Your trainers are fine. Go on. Mrs Armitage and I are going to have a cup of tea and talk about grown-up things.”
Mrs Armitage would have preferred Ella to stay. Now here she was, in a strange kitchen with a strange woman who was making them tea so they could talk about grown-up things. She reminded herself that there was only one person to blame for this, and sat down at the table to peek at Ella’s worksheet. It was to do with multiplication tables. She had no idea whether this was appropriate for Ella’s age or not.
“It’s very quiet here,” Maggie said, her words coming in short little bursts between tasks. “My husband –” she turned the tap hard so the water gushed out, turned it back to slow it again – “my husband chose it.” A sharp movement to shut off the tap again. The washer must need changing. “He likes the quiet.” The click of the kettle as it fitted onto its base. “For us, at least.” The clink of china as she took two mugs from the cupboard. “He goes to work. And our son Jacob goes to school. And I look after Ella.” The rattle of spoons in a drawer. “And that’s us.” She sat down at the table. “How about you?”
She’d forgotten she might have to trade some information in return. “I don’t work. I live alone. My husband died in a boating accident.” Her trio of conversation-stoppers. Maggie took the shock well, pausing only a moment in the making of tea and the arranging of the tin between them.
“Would Ella like a biscuit?” Mrs Armitage asked, as neutrally as possible. She’d chosen this box specifically because of its abundance of foil-wrapped and chocolate-coated extravagances.
“We’ll save her some,” said Maggie, her fingers fluttering over the selection. “She’ll like the ones with wrappers on, I think. And maybe some of the chocolate ones.” Her con-spiratorial smile was frighteningly endearing. It took an effort to keep her own answering smile within bounds. “How many do you think I can give her before I’m officially a Bad Mother?”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t have children.” The final brick in her defensive wall. Now there would be no more questions about her, and Maggie would feel compelled to fill the silence between them with information of her own.
“Then you’ll be the best judge of all. They don’t let criminals become judges, do they?” She laid five biscuits aside, then chose one for herself, a wispy wafery thing that seemed more crumbs than anything else. “I think this will be a good place for the kids, don’t you?”
Personally, Mrs Armitage couldn’t think of anything worse for children than being dragged to a village at the end of the world with one shop and dubious public transport links, but she was here to discover, not to challenge. “Maybe. Do you feel settled here yet?”
“My husband – Richard, he’s called Richard – he chose it.” Maggie was crumbling her biscuit between her fingers. “I said that already, didn’t I? I’m sorry, I’m out of practice with conversations.” Her face was very vulnerable. “If I talk too much, tell me and I’ll shut up. Richard says I talk too much sometimes.”
Richard was sounding like more of an arse with every word Maggie spoke. “Have you been married long?”
“Since just before Ella was born. Jacob isn’t my son, you see, Richard already had him when we met. He was a single dad.” Maggie laughed. Her biscuit was entirely crumbs now, a heap of fragments on the table. “They’re like unicorns, aren’t they? You read about them in books but you never imagine you’ll actually meet one.” She reached for another biscuit, broke off a piece and lifted it to her mouth, but did not eat it. It was like watching an actress with a cigarette; the pose and the pantomime were perfect, but each time she stopped short. “Do you like to read?”
“Sometimes.”
“I’d like to write. That’s one of the reasons why we moved here. So I’d have a good environment to write. But if I’m any good, I should be able to write anywhere.”
At Maggie’s elbow was a stack of exercise books Mrs Armitage had assumed were for Ella. “Is that what you’re working on? Is it fiction?”
“Yes, I suppose. Although it feels real to me when I’m writing it. I feel a bit trapped here, you see, and writing everything down is a good way to escape for a while. Richard’s very stern with me.”
“I hope you’re stern back.”
“We have the most amazing fights.” Her smile was conspiratorial, as if she was sharing a private joke. “Sometimes I think we might bring the cliff down. Only when the children are in bed, of course. You shouldn’t fight in front of them, should you?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I don’t think anyone knows really. It’s all made up in the end, isn’t it? Maybe we’re all just characters in a book somebody wrote and we don’t realise it.” Her laugh was thin and unconvincing. “I’m talking rubbish again, aren’t I? If I’m not careful you’ll put me out for the bin men. Would you like some more tea?”
“And you home-school Ella?”
“It’s better for her. Apparently. I wonder sometimes. But I love her so much, I don’t know if I could stand letting her go. That’s really selfish, isn’t it?”
“I couldn’t really say,” said Mrs Armitage, since Maggie seemed to be waiting for her to say something. They both reached for the same biscuit at the same moment. In the moment of awkwardness that followed, Mrs Armitage wondered what she was trying to achieve. She would drink the last inch of tea in her mug and then leave, and this peculiar family could carry on being as peculiar as they wished without her knowing any more about it.
“You know what I’d like to know,” said Maggie thoughtfully.
“What’s that?”
“The only things I know about you are that you live here, you don’t work, you don’t have children and your husband died in a boating accident. And asking why or how about that would be rude. But going on and on about myself is also rude. And I do want to know about you! I really do! So what I thought we might do is, I’m going to ask you some questions about your life, and if you don’t want to answer you can reply by, I don’t know, talking about the weather or lobbing a biscuit at me or something, and then we’ll both know where we stand.”
Mrs Armitage could do nothing but laugh.
“How did you meet your husband?” Maggie asked.
“We were at school together. Although we didn’t know each other then. Then we met again when we were twenty-four and both joined a sailing club.” She was surprised by how fresh and bright these memories were, how happy they made her. The crack of the sails and the plummy shouts of the instructors; the way the sea looked as it rushed past her nose when she hung out of the side of the boat, straining to counterbalance the weight of wind. Even then she’d daydreamed about how good it would feel to let go, finding the calm below the surface of the water, because really, how much wetter could they poss
ibly be? And my goodness, how wet they’d always got! They came home soaked and shivering even when the weather was relatively kind and the sun shone. She remembered the cheerful warning of the man who ran the club – “Owning a boat is like standing in a cold shower throwing fifty pound notes out of the window.”
“A sailing club!” Maggie’s voice was warm and encour-aging. I like you. You’re interesting. Your story is worth sharing. “What did he look like? Was he handsome? Was it love at first sight?”
Perhaps not love for her, but something instant, something that mattered. Standing in the queue to pay, and making eye contact with the boy whose thick fair hair and well-cut face had already caught her attention. The moment of recognition as the name of their school rose in their minds like a fish, first inklings of a deeper recognition. Astonishing how she could recall all of this in the few seconds it took her to take yet another biscuit, snap it in half and then in quarters, and pop the first fragment into her mouth. “Yes, he was handsome. Very.” What she thought might have been called classic good looks. Like a film star, but from the Golden age, when the men used to wear suits and brush their hair very neatly. Even when he came home from work sweaty and covered in oil and glue, he used to look as if he’d been made up by the props department to look like someone who’d done a hard day’s work. “He used to tell people that he fell in love with me the moment he saw me. Although I don’t know that I believed him.” Astonishing to remember a time when his declaration, “I’m in love with you, you know. You’re the only one for me” had prompted not a melting at the very core of her, but simply incredulous laughter.
“That’s very romantic. Was he a romantic sort of person?”
“I – yes, I suppose he was. He believed in following his heart. That’s how we ended up living here. He had some money from his parents and instead of training as a solicitor and buying a flat in London, we bought our little house and he found work at a boatyard.”
“Did you mind? Would you have preferred London? Tell me to stop if you want, I’m not good at knowing when to shut up.”
“If I minded I wouldn’t be answering. I certainly would not have preferred London. I like to be near the sea.” How long had it taken her to accept that this was her life, her actual life? That she had met a man who, against all prob-ability, worshipped her, in all her awkwardness and all her strangeness, who was willing and even eager to indulge her reluctance to work and her passion for a life lived as much as possible in the water? That the cottage on the cliffs was theirs, that it would never be taken away from them? Of course there was the ever-present gnawing of the sea, but the cliff-edge had been much farther off then, so that even when she stood at the end of the garden and listened hard there was only the faintest sigh of water. I live here, she would remind herself every morning when she woke up. This is my place. This is my man. This is my life. The sense of undeserved perfection was so strong that when the disaster had come, it had felt like a relief.
“So how did he die?”
“He took the boat out one evening when it wasn’t really safe. There was a storm warning, but he went anyway.” For a moment it was difficult to breathe, then the feeling passed. “He liked taking risks. He said life wasn’t worth living if you didn’t. I wouldn’t go with him, I said it was too dangerous, so he took his friend instead, and somehow they got into difficulties and the boat went down and they went down with it. It was a stupid accident.”
“That’s very sad.”
“Yes.” She pushed away the memory of how she had felt when she saw the men coming up the front path towards her front door. She’d known immediately what they were going to tell her. “But I got over it. I made a new life for myself.”
“Sometimes I think life would be easier if I lived alone,” said Maggie. “I mean, I love Richard. I do. But I wonder how much good love really does us. I was – I was with someone before Richard, you see, and I thought that was how love was meant to be. Then I met Richard and everything changed. And when he found out I was leaving him, he was so angry with me –” the tin of biscuits was earning its keep; Maggie’s long fingers hovered over the diminishing selection and chose another victim to reduce to crumbs. “And we’re back to me again. I need to work on my manners.”
“Does your ex-husband ever try to get in touch with you?” Mrs Armitage asked, suddenly inspired.
The biscuit snapped between Maggie’s fingers. “What? Why? Have you seen anyone? Was there anyone else outside?”
“There was no one but me outside,” said Mrs Armitage. Then, because she disliked inaccuracy in any form, “or at least, no one else that I could see. I suppose there could have been someone lurking behind a tree or something. But I didn’t see anything that seemed odd.”
“He was so angry,” Maggie said, as if she wasn’t really listening to Mrs Armitage’s reassurances. “He threatened Richard, and he threatened me. We’ve had to move so many times – I thought we’d be safe here, it’s so far away from everywhere, but he keeps finding us and I’m never sure –” She looked at Mrs Armitage anxiously. “At least I think he keeps finding us. Sometimes I wonder if it’s Richard making it happen so I’ll do what he wants. I think I see him sometimes, but then I’m not sure. I mean, what if it’s Richard who’s trying to keep me trapped?”
“I really couldn’t say,” said Mrs Armitage cautiously.
“He says he wants to keep me safe. But sometimes I think he wants to keep me in a safe. I’m talking about myself again, I know I shouldn’t. It’s too much when we’ve only just met, isn’t it? Too much, too young. We need to let our relationship grow up a bit.” Her hands were shaking. “Have I convinced you that I’m not worth visiting yet? If not, I’ll make some more tea.”
While Maggie was occupied, Mrs Armitage lifted the cover of one of the exercise books and peered in, only to let it fall again when Maggie turned around.
“You can read it if you like,” said Maggie, looking hopeful. “It’s not finished, is the only thing.”
How little could she get away with reading? At least if she was reading, she wouldn’t be expected to talk. She read the first few pages to the swoosh of the boiling kettle. Then she read a few more. When she reached the end of the first exercise book, her tea had grown cold.
“You don’t have to be nice about it if you don’t like it,” Maggie said, and laughed. “But I do wonder what you think.”
“It’s very interesting. Is it based on your life?”
Maggie shrugged. “Isn’t all fiction based on people’s lives?”
“You know,” said Mrs Armitage, “if you’re not happy, you could always leave your marriage.”
“We’re not really married,” said Maggie unexpectedly. “I mean, we are but we aren’t. I call him my husband and he calls me his wife but it was difficult enough getting away from that other one, so I never got around to getting divorced. So before Ella was born, we went to a jeweller’s and he bought me two rings and we started telling people we were married, and that was that. I forget myself sometimes.”
Mrs Armitage couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so she kept silent. Against all probability, there really was a strange and dangerous man who stalked this family and threatened their safety. Or – an alternative explanation – a man whose demons were not outside the walls of his house, but inside the bones of his head, using the threat of a bogeyman to keep his family from putting down roots and growing strong and independent. In either case, there was something strange going on in this house. Of course, all families were peculiar if you looked closely enough.
“It’s so nice of you to come here and listen to me and bring me biscuits,” said Maggie. “I know I must sound absolutely mad. It’s a bit disorienting, moving somewhere new. Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m even really here. And I’ve been so sleepy! It must be the sea air, mustn’t it? They say the sea air makes you sleepy, don’t they? And there’s so much air here. I mean, I know there’s the same amount of air everywhere but it does feel as if
there’s a little bit more than the average when you live right in the sky like this. It’s got to be good for us all. We’ll be happy here. Don’t you think?”
She wasn’t even convincing herself, Mrs Armitage re-flected. The knowledge was written in the silence behind Maggie’s eyes, even as she tried to fill the spaces in between with words.
“I’m going home now,” she said firmly. “I’ll take the cliff-path back. It’s quicker. If you would like to come and visit me, go to the end of your garden and turn along the path. It passes right by the bottom of my garden.”
“Richard doesn’t like me going out to visit people. He worries that – he – might see me and do something to hurt me.”
But, thought Mrs Armitage, which he does he mean? Which do you?
“Goodbye, then,” she said. Feeling the need for a formal gesture of parting, she held her hand out for Maggie to shake, only to be startled when Maggie took it between hers and held it for a moment as if it was something very fragile and precious.
“You’re so kind. Thank you for listening to me and not laughing.”
“None of it sounded like anything to laugh about,” said Mrs Armitage. She freed her hand as gently as she could, and took the back door into the garden.
Beneath the apple tree, Ella was threading tall strands of brown, seedy grass into her coat-sleeves – one of those inexplicable games children seemed to create from nothing, with no visible component of joy and no logical end-point. As Mrs Armitage passed, she walked beside her to the end of the garden.
“I couldn’t come yesterday or the day before that or the day before that because Mummy wasn’t asleep,” Ella said. “Are you cross with me? Did you come here to tell Mummy I forgot to come?”
Mrs Armitage kept her face neutral. It wasn’t Ella’s fault she had all the self-centred egoism of a small child, the belief that all the calamities of the world weighed solely on her narrow shoulders.
“I came to bring your mother some biscuits,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, she doesn’t know you come to visit me, and if you’re waiting for me to tell her, she never will know. Have you said anything to her?” Ella was tugging at the stalks gathered in her sleeves as if they were hurting her. “And why have you filled your sleeves with grass?”
Underwater Breathing Page 12
