The Writing on the Wall and Other Stories

by Penny Edwards

  “Don’t tell me, Alan,” she replied, putting her hands to her ears. “I don’t want to know. I’m on holiday,” and she got the AA route planner instructions out of her rucksack so she could be as familiar as possible with her navigation when they were in the car again.

  It was four in the afternoon when they reached the nearest village to the lighthouse, but it might as well have been midnight. They called in at the mini-market to get provisions and were met by a very buoyant and, Florence thought, glamorous owner whose enthusiasm for the lighthouse was, to say the least, most encouraging and just what they needed to hear, as the cold and dark had left them a little dampened in spirit.

  “You’ll love it,” their enthusiastic mentor said as she bundled bread, cheese, milk, bacon and half a dozen eggs into a bright blue plastic carrier bag (which Florence was slightly dismayed about, but what with all the chatter she’d forgotten to produce the cotton bag from her rucksack). “Everyone does.”

  “Yes, we’re very much looking forward to it,” said Florence. “Did you know it was the first lighthouse to use an electric light?”

  The owner didn’t and didn’t seem to appreciate being told anything about the lighthouse she wasn’t already aware of. She stopped smiling and asked Florence for £8.75. Florence handed over a £10 note and while waiting for her change asked, “Am I right in saying it’s right at the bottom of the road, then left at the very end of that road?”

  “Yes, you are,” said the owner, in a flat voice that reminded Florence a little bit of the way some girls used to speak to her at school. It was odd and she’d never altogether understood it. She picked up her change, which had been left for her on the glass counter immediately above the bars of fruit and nut chocolate.

  Though she was loath to admit such a thing to Alan, it all became unnerving as they drove away from the village and Florence suddenly felt glad of her ghost-hunting experience. The terrain was certainly very dubious, causing the car to slightly rock from side to side and Alan to express fears about the tyres. He assured her they were going the right way several times, while Florence’s mind was never far from thinking about cliff edges, something certainly not helped by a triangular danger road sign they’d come across depicting a man falling down a cliff into the sea. Surrounded as they were by only black, a cliff edge was no more distinguishable than anything else.

  She asked Alan to stop for one moment so she could read the letter from the holiday company again. Despite Alan’s assurances, she felt they’d driven too far and should’ve reached the gate they were looking for by now. Her suspicions were right, so they were forced to reverse back quite a few yards before taking a left turning they’d missed, an action that made the darkness only more dubious and the ground beneath their tyres more precarious.

  But it did nothing to question Florence’s faith in her decision to come to the lighthouse, the imminent appearance of which excited her even more, and when it was finally before her, a dark, tall but well-built shadow that rather resembled one of Dr Who’s daleks, she thought, though she was never a fan of that particular programme, she tapped in the number to open the key box with great relish. She had to admit, she didn’t particularly like this arrangement. There was something far more reassuring about collecting keys from a person. The box opened and she collected the keys and as she walked back to the car she found herself caught up in a momentary feeling that the lighthouse could well have been following her. As they drove nearer, this feeling changed to one of almost being enveloped, but it was as exciting as anything she could remember and Florence found herself wanting, as children do on Christmas morning, to hurry things along and open the car door before the car had stopped. Getting their bags into the lighthouse was no mean feat as they battled against the wind, but their reward was most satisfying as the warmth inside enabled their muscles to relax a little and they took a good look around. The kitchen had obviously been renovated only recently and its pale blue and pine were a lovely bright contrast to the darkness outside. This was going to be very nice to cook in, she concluded. All mod cons. The sitting room was more old-fashioned with floral covering to the sofa and chairs that reminded Florence of her childhood, especially the chair near the window, which might as well have been the one favoured by her father, it was so close in shape, so that she could almost catch a glimpse of him sitting there with a newspaper and a cup of tea perched precariously by his left foot. That chair, that newspaper and that cup of tea were probably his best friends who kept him away from his family for many an hour while her mother, instead, made sure his surroundings were clean and his tummy was fed. She thought her mother was probably bored a lot of the time and that her mind was quite empty of anything that might possibly stimulate it.

  So Florence made it her business to keep finding things out for her mother to think about when jobs that hardly required any thought at all took up so much of her life. She supposed it had helped create some particular connection between them, though at the time Florence just thought that all children were born partly to entertain parents who had the hard task of bringing them up. But the facts in themselves did little to encourage the idea in either of her parents’ heads that maybe she needed this brain of hers to be more formally led and challenged, mainly because her father was never part of these conversations and took only a minimal interest in her schooling; so when, at the age of fifteen, she had watched him come into the house with news that a secretarial school was opening only a mile or two away, her professional life before marriage was well and truly set. The facts, though, never went away and even when her mother became so ill and up until a week before her death, Florence was still making her smile with the knowledge she’d discovered that the hazel dormouse loves residing in honeysuckle, which was probably why there was an odd lump of its bark strips all clustered together at one end of their plant. Unfortunately, she hadn’t yet seen the animal himself. Her mother had died six days later and though she may not have known it at the time as she was preoccupied with a whole series of funny tummies and horrible headaches, her heart had broken a little because of the underlying knowledge that this was one less person in her life who’d appreciated and known her really well.

  “I’m going to put some soup on,” she told Alan. “I think we need a little warming up,” and she marched into the kitchen to try the new appliances and find out exactly how she was going to get on with them. The wind was whipping itself up into quite a frenzy now. Her only understanding of how far off the sea lay belonged to her mind’s eye and the pictures in the brochure that had originally caught her attention, for there was no hint of it in the pure darkness that existed outside the window and she closed herself and the kitchen in by pulling the curtains to. She’d seen enough darkness for one day and basked in what felt like the beauty of bright lights, reminding herself that this lighthouse was indeed the first to use electricity.

  She opened the carton of winter vegetable soup and wondered exactly how wintry runner beans were. Nevertheless, it would do them both good.

  She liked the royal blue tableware very much. It had always been a colour she’d fancied, but, for some reason, Alan had never been keen, preferring instead a conservative white with only the tiniest hint of pattern. Maybe he thought it a bit too modern for them, but she’d often thought there was an energy about this blue she found pleasing. The soup was ready and, if the hob was anything to go by, she was going to get on very well indeed with this oven.

  *

  Sometimes, when they got up in the mornings, and this was particularly the case on holidays when there was no Mildred to visit or no choir practice to think about, Florence found she missed the children and their enthusiasm for the day ahead. And when she saw, for the very first time, the amazing vista before her from the kitchen window the following morning, she couldn’t help that desire for them to be there and for all of them to share it.

  “Come and have a look, Alan,” she shouted enthusi
astically towards the bedroom from where she could hear her husband emerging. “I can see France,” and a memory flittered across her mind.

  “Do you realise where we’re standing?” Alan asked as he entered the kitchen, articulating something that sheer exhaustion had prevented him from doing the evening before.

  Yes, she did. It was where Guglielmo Marconi had stood in 1898. She looked across to Alan. It was good to see him looking more relaxed. He’d been looking a bit tired of late. But this morning he had a colour back in his cheeks she hadn’t seen in a while.

  “Let’s have a walk after breakfast,” she ventured. “It’s beautiful out there and it most likely won’t be fine all week. We’ll have to wrap up, though. It was mighty cold when I just went out to the bins.”

  They were still both admiring the view, something that could quite easily take up a whole day.

  “Do you remember that day we went to Calais?” Florence queried.

  “Gosh, yes, that was a rough day.”

  “Yes, I don’t think Tom enjoyed that very much,” and they both smiled a little, not in any unkindness, but because of a shared history and a time lapse that allows the odd smirk at things that haven’t gone quite to plan. “I’m not sure if he’s ever been on a boat since,” she continued and Alan didn’t reply, so he obviously couldn’t think of an example of such an event either.

  He couldn’t think of a time when Tom had talked about being on water. Poor thing. He’d been pretty poorly.

  “Now, today’s the sort of day we should’ve gone.”

  Yes, it certainly is, she thought. When they’d landed at Calais the rain had been relentless and they’d parked themselves in a small, family restaurant for shelter, though they’d been worried how Tom was going to cope where there was food. But it had been all right. It was the sort of sickness that disappeared after they were on dry land.

  In her mind she saw vividly the restaurant with its faded net curtains hung from halfway down the window so that it was just possible to see the tops of heads considering the menu, deciding whether or not it was appetising enough for them to use it to shelter from the rain. Most did. It wasn’t difficult to attract customers on such a grisly day.

  Alan looked at the tranquillity before him and envied the sea its calm. It had been five days since the doctor had told him it was cancer. The fact that it hadn’t surprised him had done nothing to stem the shock of realising that his life really was limited, a fact he’d rarely embraced in any meaningful way when health had been on his side.

  He didn’t know when he was going to tell Florence. Percentages had been told him systematically by a doctor who didn’t seem to appreciate how similar his delivery was to that of an insurance salesman. The odds weren’t completely dismal and if he had an operation in the next month, there was room for optimism. He loved Florence, a fact that had been part of his life for nearly forty years now. He loved the way she’d always been satisfied with things, the way she’d embraced life and simply got on with it. So many people seemed discontent these days. It was an age of spoken hurt and complaint and her stoicism was something that he saw to be increasingly rare. It was as if girl guides had given her a manual for life that she’d continued to refer to. But her mind, something that interested him enormously, and her inquisitiveness, which always made the most stimulating of conversations, could also be quite claustrophobic, something he’d realised only in the last five days and with considerable consternation. There was no escaping Florence’s desire to get to the bottom of everything and though he’d always enjoyed her interests and shared in them, he had no wish for her to pursue his illness in this way. He smiled to himself because it wasn’t an unkindness in Florence. Far from it. And not even an insensitivity, for in her telling to friends about the dysfunction of the cells in their bodies, she genuinely thought she was being helpful. It was the sort of thing she would want to know, so why wouldn’t they? He’d watched as they tried to change the subject but had never had the courage to interfere because telling Florence not to find out facts would be like telling her not to be alive. But, at the moment, he didn’t feel he could bear the inevitable array of facts and figures that would follow his revelation. He would tell her after the holiday and the holiday would be the reason why he’d left it so long.

  He took a deep breath and began to quietly sing. Slightly startled, because Alan wasn’t given to doing this very often, Florence gave a quizzical glance. Alan held up his right forefinger, asking her to wait as the sense of it might become clear. She listened carefully to the words, which told of ships trying to find the English Channel in fog, helped in their quest by this particular lighthouse.

  “I can see you’ve been doing your research as well,” she said, pleased at her husband’s enthusiasm, which came as an unexpected surprise. “I think what we need to do is find the English Channel for ourselves.”

  *

  Over the next few days they did a lot of walking and Florence did quite a bit of talking. She told Alan about the house at the bottom of the cliff that once belonged to Noel Coward and they chuckled about some of his sillier songs while Florence remembered her mother and the way she would softly hum some of the more reflective ones, their notes lingering in her head a little while longer than she wanted them and reminding her of when she would follow these notes around the house, half hoping her mother would soon finish them and talk to her instead.

  Alan congratulated himself on his ability to conceal his horrible fear, which he was determined would not interfere with Florence’s obvious enjoyment, even though the fear surged inside him so powerfully at times that he could almost feel himself wanting to vomit it up. At night-time, when he was confident Florence was asleep, he got up from their bed and, with hardly a sound, took himself off into the living room, opened the curtains slightly and looked out onto the vast darkness, which could be broken only by speckles of light coming from the ships as they crossed to and fro. His stomach rose; then it fell. He had his own tidal wave rising and falling alongside them.

  When he left the room, Florence opened her eyes and could just make out the shape of the dressing table opposite her. This was the third night Alan had got up. It wasn’t like him. He was usually such a sound sleeper. If anyone had had a broken night’s sleep during their marriage, she had been the one tip-toeing downstairs to make herself a cup of tea. He seemed a bit distracted at the moment. And he didn’t seem to be the slightest bit interested that Marconi had carried out important research in this lighthouse.

  She must’ve dozed off a little for she was suddenly startled by dazzling light shooting through the curtains and onto her face. The gravel outside their bedroom crackled, almost like rice krispies, she thought, then stopped. But the lights continued to illuminate her face and she sat up for there was no chance of any sleep. It was disconcerting because there was no one in the other flat. As a slight fear started to creep up on her, she rationalised the presence of others by saying to herself that maybe a family had arrived from a long distance, maybe they’d just got off one of the overnight ferries. As her body gradually woke up, she could hear the sound of a car engine gently purring, but there were no voices and no sound of car doors. She got up. Neither the lights nor the engine seemed to have any intention of switching off. The night storage heaters were throwing out a lot of heat, which was very welcome. Even so, Florence wrapped her dressing gown around her and made for the living room.

  Alan was startled as she came in. He was lost somewhere between his illness and the life he’d already enjoyed, so when Florence entered he was thinking something about a day they’d had out in Wales and how he couldn’t remember the name of the pub they’d gone to. He did remember a delicious cottage pie.

  He apologised for having woken her, but she assured him he wasn’t the cause of her wanderings. She told him about the car that didn’t seem to care how much petrol and battery power it used and confessed to finding
it a little worrying.

  “I was wondering if anyone was in trouble,” she offered, not entirely clear in her mind whether it would be safe to go outside.

  “Can I see?” her husband asked, so she took him back to their bedroom so he could see and hear for himself what she was talking about. The car lights were still on and the engine still running.

  “I really think someone needs help.” But Florence was nervous.

  They put cagoules over their dressing gowns and wellies on their feet and unlocked the main door. The biting wind flew in and nearly took their breath with it. Florence reached for the large torch they’d brought with them, took it off the shelf by the door and switched it on, making it possible for them to see the small eating out area with its table and chairs thrown all over the place by weather showing little pity. They stepped over them, hardly hearing their feet crunching against the stones below. Opening the outer gate, they were greeted by even stronger winds, so they held one another’s hand, both for the practical reason of ensuring they remained standing and to comfort the other’s trepidation.

  When they got to the car, they could see a man in the driving seat. As they drew nearer they saw his face was contorted.

  “Quick.” Florence opened the driver’s door.

  The man was holding his left elbow with his right hand, unable to speak because of the pain he was in. He let out a shriek when Florence moved a bit towards him but managed to point to where the pain was when she asked him.

  “I think he may’ve injured his collarbone,” she shouted at Alan, for the wind made it virtually impossible to communicate. “It would be best if we could get him indoors.”

  She asked the man if he could walk. He nodded and began to ease himself out of his seat. Both Florence and Alan bent towards him, but there was little they could do without fearing they may hurt him further.