Devils, for a change

by Wendy Perriam

  She had even heard Norfolk called an island, cut off from the main north-south axis of the country, a remote and lonely backwater, closed in on itself. But Robert had transformed it, thawed and tempered it, altered its whole mood. Strange how he could change things – even grimy London sparkling gold as they left Cranleigh Gardens in the early hours and drove first to Leicester – a brilliant orange sun bursting through blue mist to transfigure dingy streets, and matching the red-gold of her excitement. It had been shining ever since, as streets gave way to fields; the harsh but honeyed scent of hay replacing petrol fumes; every tree and hedgerow lushly green.

  Robert had reached his hand out, touched her fingers. ‘I never thought you’d come.’

  Nor did I, she’d thought, but hadn’t said. Why had she come, when she was still wary of him, nervous; had spent two whole months avoiding even one more weekend at his home, despite frequent invitations? Because she craved to see her own home and he’d suggested it himself.

  ‘I’ve got to drive to Leicester anyway. There are still problems on that house I built and the client’s in a tizzy – poor sod, I hardly blame him. The builders have been useless, dragged their feet for weeks, then sent a quite inadequate report. I promised him I’d go up there myself, try to sort things out. Why don’t you come with me? We could drive from there to Norfolk – it’s not that far – and once I’ve shown you my house, you can show me yours, show me where you grew up as a child, take me to your convent.’

  ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘Why not? I’ve heard so much about it, I feel I ought to see it, to prove it does exist.’

  ‘I couldn’t. They might see me.’

  ‘I thought you said the walls were ten foot high.’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  It had taken days and days to talk her round. So many fears had crystallised; fear of Robert – being away with him, alone with him, away with any man; fear of Reverend Mother, whose pale and bony hand might reach out and claw her back if she dared approach that near; fear of her parents rising up and chiding her as she crept back to their village, walked across their graves; fear of re-finding Gloria – or worse, not finding her. She even felt a certain aversion to Robert’s client, a Mr Dermot Frazer. He was the one who had delayed him on St George’s Day. And what would he think if his erstwhile architect turned up with a woman? Would she be Mrs Robert Harrington, or merely some vague friend?

  ‘Neither. You’ll be my professional partner. I’ve just founded a new firm – Harrington-Reed Associates, specialists in open-plan convents and high-rise hermitages with all mod cons.’

  Is that why she’d agreed? Because Robert made things fun, refused to fret or agonise, made her fears seem spoilsport or mean-minded? Or was it because she longed to see the sea again? She had been so close to it in Sussex, could have slipped out at the conference, taken a short bus ride to the coast, or driven from Robert’s lighthouse in less than half an hour. Yet she hadn’t even glimpsed it, might have been in Staffordshire or Shropshire for all the sense she’d had of being near the sea. The Sussex coast was different, anyway – white cliffs instead of flat and windy marshes; plush green downs in place of sea-stained saltings. She’d been a foreigner in Sussex; was a foreigner in London still, a country girl who felt increasingly the tug and pull of home. She had to see that North Norfolk coast again, see the dunes grey-shadowed by the clouds, the mud-flats loud with birds. June had produced a heat-wave which made London fretful, feverish: hard hot pavements which blistered feet as well as fraying tempers; claustrophobic buildings trapping fetid air. Even Cranleigh Gardens seemed stifling and on edge – Delia sitting her exams, Di worried about bad business in the shop, Liz love-lorn, missing Harry.

  She kicked her sandals off, ran down to the sea’s edge, felt the icy water lap across her ankles, washing off the grit and fumes of London, all the Kingsleys’ tensions, all her own fears and apprehension. She was here – she’d made it – despite all the voices which had said ‘no’, all those inner admonitions, chidings from her conscience, warnings about commitments; that crazy mix of terror and elation at the thought of closer ties. Even now, she felt the need to put more space between them; was glad that Robert had stayed up on the sand, trailing a swatch of bladderwrack behind him, like some slimy crested tail. They were sleeping on that sand tonight; side by side, with no dividing wall. Robert had offered her the best hotel in Norfolk, and she’d asked if they could camp. She had never camped, not even as a child. Her mother had forbidden it, as being messy, risky, and too much extra work. All her girlhood, she had longed to pitch a tent, cook beans in billycans, have canvas or the sky above, instead of a boring plaster ceiling.

  Liz had seen it differently, been suspicious of her motives. ‘I’m sure it’s just another sneaky way of warding Robert off. I mean, zipped up to your ears in your own private sleeping bag, instead of lying in his arms in a nice big double bed.’ Liz had said a lot of things: how she ought to see a doctor, get fixed up with a diaphragm or fitted with a coil; ought to have her hair re-bleached; ought to buy new and sexy clothes. She’d refused all the suggestions. She was a child returning to its home, needed only child’s clothes – shorts and sandals, a summer skirt or two. And nothing would induce her to see another doctor; have rubber corks or metal plugs shoved right up inside her, a stranger’s hands exploring her most private parts.

  She kicked up sprays of water, curled her toes against the cool and clammy sand. She’d been sweltering on the journey, despite the open sunroof – a sticky, almost feverish heat, which seemed to be coming from inside, panting from their bodies – hers too close to Robert’s in his scorching scarlet car.

  She suddenly ran back to him, found him on his knees with a piece of broken razor-shell, inscribing their initials on the sand. She noticed how the R and H entwined, one growing from the other, embedded in the other. ‘It’s fantastic here,’ he grinned. ‘I never thought I’d see a beach so absolutely deserted – well, not in England anyway.’

  ‘It’s just knowing where to look,’ she said. ‘The sea is pretty dangerous at this particular point, so it’s not much good for swimming. That keeps the crowds away. And that road we took is really just a track …’

  ‘Don’t remind me! I’ll need four new tyres by the time this weekend’s over. Or shall we stay here all our lives, sleeping on the sand, eating whelks and sea-birds – or at least sausages and mash? I’m starving now, aren’t you? Shall we go and get our gear, pitch camp, cook those bangers?’

  ‘We’ve only just had lunch.’

  ‘Only just? That was hours ago. It’s six o’clock, d’you realise?’

  ‘It can’t be! It’s still so bright and sunny.’

  ‘It’s the longest day today, though; won’t be dark till half past ten. And don’t forget, once it’s dark, we’ve got our little errand.’

  She shivered in the sunshine. The sky was still unbroken blue, yet she could feel grey clouds closing round her head. She slowed her pace, feet dragging through the heavy clotted sand.

  ‘Come on now. You promised, darling. You’ll feel better once it’s done.’

  The ‘darling’ stopped her dead. He had never caned her that before – nor had anyone. She could feel the word reverberating between them still, sending out small shock waves of mingled pride and fear. ‘Darling’ signalled affection and concern, but also implied an intimacy which she had neither earned nor sought. She felt a sudden rush of panic, an overwhelming urge to run away, pelt straight back to London – not just to avoid him, but to renege on that rash promise. What he called her ‘little errand’ was a huge and frightening undertaking, requiring courage and decisiveness she feared she hadn’t got.

  ‘Where you going, Hilary?’

  ‘Just to get the camping things.’

  He overtook her, helped unpack the car. They walked back to the beach together, lugging sleeping bags and groundsheets, food and water, pots and pans. She tried to kick her fear away, let the strong waves suck it back and down, in the same wa
y that they pounced on bits of flotsam, spat them out as foam. It helped her to keep busy, so she worked as Robert’s tenderfoot, surprised by all the equipment and utensils, all the complications. Camping wasn’t simple, after all. Each small task took time, demanded skill: setting up the stove, getting it to light, despite the amused defiance of the wind, keeping sand out of the sausages, not spilling precious water, making cups stand steady, not losing spoons or salt. She was soon ravenous herself. Everything seemed sharpened by the fact they were outside – smells, taste, appetite itself. She finished off five sausages and half a can of beans, which she relished more than Mrs Frazer’s salmon mousse and raspberry cream pavlova.

  Robert scoured the plates with a piece of kitchen paper. ‘Right, now pudding.’

  ‘We didn’t bring a pudding, only cheese and fruit.’

  ‘Yes, we did. I put it in myself.’ He scrabbled in the box, produced a small but heavy package, circular in shape, gift-wrapped in gold paper. ‘Here you are – a present.’

  ‘Another present?’

  ‘Yes, a real collector’s item.’

  ‘But you already bought me the dragon and the…’

  ‘Open it, go on.’

  She tore the paper off, drew out a rusting tin, dented on one side, its label torn and stained. ‘Whatever’s this?’

  ‘Condensed milk, vintage 1940. It’s older than I am, came from my mother’s larder, part of her stockpile for the war. She was turning out her cupboards once, when I was just a student of nineteen, told me to use it in my coffee. But I could never actually bring myself to open it, not in all those years. It seemed part of history, part of her. She’s dead now, sadly, died the year my son was born.’ He paused a moment, as if in silent mourning, trickling sand slowly through his fingers. ‘You’d have liked my mother, Hilary. In fact, in some ways you’re alike. She was petite and fair, with that surprising mix of serenity and passion which I love so much in you.’

  There was a sudden nervous silence, as his sadness seemed to clash with her own embarrassed pleasure. He brushed sand off his trousers, reached out for the tin. ‘Yes, I’ve had this more than twenty years. In fact, the longer I kept it, the more it became a sort of relic, if not to say a treasure. My Ma paid fivepence for it, yet a dealer offered £20, just two months ago.’

  She glanced at it with new respect. ‘We can’t eat £20, Robert, and anyway I wouldn’t dream of opening it. Relics have to be preserved.’ She had a sudden grisly image of the precious Brignor relics: the bones of their Holy Foundress, brought from France; a fingernail torn from an obscure and early saint, which had been presented as a gift by an older richer Order. Both were enshrined in heavy gilded caskets, knobbed and bossed with jewels. It had been her job to dust the caskets, guard the bones.

  Robert rummaged for the can-opener. ‘No, they don’t. All I’ve been doing is waiting for the right occasion and someone worthy of it. How lucky that I’ve found them both.’ He touched her hand a moment, eyes still on the sand. ‘It’ll be our manna in the desert.’

  She watched him struggling with the tin, trying to pierce the rigid metal. Its rust and stains seemed strangely out of place beside the brilliant orange brashness of the plastic cups and plates. ‘But supposing it’s gone bad?’, she said, crumpling up the gift-wrap.

  ‘It won’t have.’

  How could he be so confident? That milk was nearly half a century old, could surely never last that long without rotting, putrefying. She could hardly bear to watch as the sharp tooth of the can-opener bit into the rim. Would he open up a tin of writhing worms? If it has gone off, she told herself, then everything between us will go wrong, our relationship will sour, will never last. But if it’s still unspoiled and fresh, then …

  ‘Perfect!’ Robert said, wrenching off the lid at last, and sniffing at the contents. ‘A little stickier and darker than it was in 1940, but otherwise unscathed. Now the next big question is, do we spoon it or spread it?’

  ‘Oh, spoon it,’ she said fervently. It was far too rare and precious to be smeared on bread like common margarine.

  He found the fold-up camping spoon, dipped it in the tin, held it to her lips. She was suddenly alarmingly aware of his solidity, his closeness, the faint and mingled smells of sausage, sun-cream, sweat, which seemed to breathe out from his pores. He had still not kissed her, never even tried, yet this act seemed more intimate than kissing. He was standing over her, blocking out the sun, the hard insistent spoon still nudging at her lips.

  ‘Go on, darling, swallow.’

  She swallowed, both the ‘darling’ and the milk, was startled by their sweetness – milk and honey. He went on feeding her with the same eager concentration with which he built his shelves or drove his car. Her teeth were twingeing on the almost sickly sweetness, but she somehow feared to say she’d had enough. He was allowing her to step into his past, drawing her into his family, his childhood, as she had included him in hers. She could feel time rushing back, could see his mother stocking up that larder, maybe wondering if she’d survive the blitz to produce a son at all.

  Robert scooped a swag of milk from where it had dribbled down her chin, put his finger in her mouth for her to suck. She almost gagged on it, felt invaded and yet bonded, joined by just one finger in a strange and dangerous intimacy. His skin was slightly salty, undercut the sweetness of the milk. He shifted even closer, ran the same damp finger round the outline of her lips. She pulled away, uncertain how to handle all the confused and threatening feelings churning in her mind – her body, too, agitated, restless. She was not a child, however much she craved that state as being simple and uncomplicated, yet she was still unsure how to respond to him as a woman.

  ‘My turn now,’ he ordered, squatting on the sand and tipping back his head. She knelt in front of him, as if this were some strange sacrament, some secular Communion. Her hand seemed not quite steady, as it moved towards his mouth. He held it at the wrist, joining them once more, then licked the milk slowly off the spoon. She could see his teeth, his tongue, the whole soft pink private chasm of his mouth. How intimate mouths were, how almost dangerous.

  ‘That taste really takes me back, you know.’ Robert had his eyes closed, as if to relish the full flavour. ‘We used to eat the stuff in sandwiches when I was eight or nine.’

  ‘So you’re a spreader, really?’

  ‘I’m a spooner if you spoon.’

  She flushed. ‘I can make a sandwich, if you like. We’ve got a loaf of bread we haven’t touched.’ She scrambled to her feet, glad of an excuse to break the handcuff of his fingers round her wrist. ‘Shall I cut it thick or thin?’

  ‘Break it into bits and we’ll give it to the gulls. I’m so full myself I couldn’t eat another crumb.’

  ‘But what about tomorrow?’

  ‘I thought your Gospels told you not to take thought for the morrow.’ He was already tearing chunks off, flinging them around him. The sky was wild and white with wheeling gulls – stabbing beaks, swooping wings, soaring jostling bodies. She hurled a piece herself, trying to reach the highest ones; remembered how she’d watched them as a child, longed to have their wings, so she could fly with them to heaven. She had always seen the sky, then, as a sort of lid to heaven, put on upside down, keeping in all the gold and glitter; only gleams of it escaping on bright days like today. Lonely, in the evenings, she had looked forward to the people she would meet up there – and talk to – not just all the saints, but people from her school-books who seemed interesting, exciting: people like Wat Tyler, Robin Hood.

  They’re rotting, she thought suddenly, not up there at all. The bread fell from her fingers as she gazed up at the sky. It was as if she had picked up the can-opener and peeled back the lid from heaven, found it empty, gaping; all its former inmates turning black and wormy in their coffin-tins; Robert’s mother rotting, not pale and sweet and wholesome like her milk, but rancid flesh breaking down to bone – skull and bone and nothing.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Robert asked, as he po
unded back to her. He had been running up and down the beach, throwing bread amidst a hail of birds.

  ‘Nothing.’ She watched a wave erase his jumbled footprints from the sand. ‘Nothing,’ she repeated; saw their Holy Foundress’s bones, no longer honoured in their jewel-encrusted casket, but scattered to the winds.

  Hilary stood within the shadow of the high stone wall, the letter in her hand. It felt huge and heavy, as if also made of stone. After months of indecision, she had written it in minutes, just a week ago, though only because Robert had insisted; more or less dictated those stiff and hurting phrases.

  ‘I am writing to request formal dispensation from my vows. Though I entered in good faith, believing that this was my true vocation, I now feel that I should be living out a lie were I to continue in the religious life, especially as …’

  The letter had to go to Rome, but must be sent via her convent and her Abbess. Robert had suggested that she deliver it in person on the first night of their trip, as a symbolic gesture, denoting her new freedom, proving the courage he admired. She wiped her free hand on her skirt, palm damp with perspiration. She felt no shred of courage, only abject fear, a sudden surge of loss and longing, as she stood outside the walls which had enclosed her all those years. They seemed taller even than she’d seen them in her mind, rising steep and dark to meet the darkness of the sky. She listened for some sound, but the whole night had been muzzled with a tight black gauze, stretched taut and straining over every field and copse, forbidding any leaf to stir, any bird to flap. The air was sultry warm still, scented velvet air, which made her feel she had travelled not just twenty miles, but to a foreign country. Brignor was a cold land, with sharp frosts and cutting winds.

  She had first entered it in winter, her parents’ tense farewells a cloud of steamy breath as they turned away, growing smaller, fainter, as Mother Mistress surged and swelled to fill the hole they’d left – two parents in one tall and ice-cold nun. She had also left in winter, stumbling over bare and barren fields, a north-east wind scything through her play-clothes, her feet and fingers numb.