“No, it grows in the marshes.”
“Wonderful name,” said Eve. “Sand and bonfire, like a beach picnic.”
“It comes from ‘Saint Pierre’, in fact. Patron saint of fishermen.”
James was full of this kind of knowledge. He had a mystique, Olivia decided, that was inextricably linked to Shearwater House. She could see him returning year after year, teaching his children to gut sea bass.
Over supper Eve’s high spirits subsided, and conversation was more desultory than Olivia expected. Eve played with her fish while James asked Olivia polite questions about her family, her university course, her music; and Olivia watched Eve watching her, her mind as much on Eve as on the answers she gave James. She could see why Eve liked him, why she’d been pleased when he’d offered them his aunt’s house, but the two of them were strangely formal with each other, as though they didn’t know each other as well as Olivia had imagined.
“Where do your family live, James?” she asked.
“Some in London, the rest scattered to the winds.” James laughed, and Olivia caught Eve’s glance, a blankness in her face that might have been deliberate. She was conscious, now, of something else James had brought into the house: the possibility of competition.
Afterwards, they sat by the fire, listening to scratchy recordings of Glenn Miller and recounting the summer’s adventures. Eve was more cheerful again, telling James about the country fair in Wales where she’d found herself inadvertently bidding for a prize bullock, the cockroaches in the sleazy Carlisle guest-house, the shooting stars in Scotland. Olivia was glad: the silent Eve was disconcerting.
“We’re quite the seasoned travellers, aren’t we, Olivia?” Eve said.
“But nowhere else was a patch on Aldeburgh?” James suggested.
Eve raised her eyebrows in mock-challenge. “The sun shone all week in Cornwall.”
James laughed. “You can’t judge a place on the sunshine. That’s like judging a person on their bad moods.”
Eve frowned. She opened her mouth to say something, but James spoke first.
“We should have some Britten,” he said. “Do you like Britten, Olivia?” He squatted down beside the shelf of records. “You know he lived just round the corner? Peter Grimes: that’s a proper Aldeburgh piece.”
There was silence for a moment, then the expectant rustle of the needle settling into the groove. Olivia felt a quiver of recognition as the overture began. She could hear the barren coastline, and the turbulence of the sea. She’d missed her music this summer, she realised, both playing and listening. Funny how you didn’t notice until you heard something again.
“Have we got any of that whisky left, Olivia?” Eve stretched her toes towards the fire, flexing them like a cat’s.
“There’s whisky here,” said James. “Plenty of it.”
“No, we should drink ours.” Olivia got to her feet. “We bought it in Scotland, just down the road from the distillery.”
Three glasses had been set on the low table beside the sofa when she returned.
“Cheers,” Olivia said. “Thank you for having us.”
“You are lucky, James,” said Eve. “Have your aunt and uncle got any handsome sons we could marry?”
“Not any more.” James emptied his glass in a gulp. “How about a midnight swim? Either of you game?”
“Swim?” Eve laughed. “You’re not serious. The sea’s freezing.”
“It feels warmer at night, when the air’s colder. And the whisky’ll put some fire in your veins.” He clapped his hands together, suddenly energetic. “Come on: it’s a Shearwater tradition.”
The stony beach looked like a wasteland, lit by a moon as bright as a searchlight. Eve and Olivia hung back, their giggles silenced by the sight of the waves, dark grey and vigorous, thumping relentlessly onto the shingle.
“You can’t mean it,” Eve said.
James didn’t answer. He ran the last few feet to the edge of the sea and plunged in.
“Come on!” he shouted back at them.
Their shrieks of glee and horror drifted down the beach like the cries of seagulls, small and thin against the expanse of water and air. Olivia was soaked by the first breaker to hit her as she hesitated in the shallows, and Eve was close behind her.
It was too rough to swim properly, but they leapt over and through the surf, letting themselves be lifted and thrust back towards the shore, their energy focussed on regaining their footing as each wave receded. The stones underfoot, agitated by the undertow, crashed against their ankles and bruised their feet. But it was marvellous, exhilarating, life-affirming to ride the breakers as the night sky shimmered and trembled overhead. The constant movement of the waves and the effort it took to resist the tug of the current were enough, after the first shock, to block out the cold. The three of them whooped and splashed like children, the only figures to be seen along the whole length of the beach.
“We should do this every night!” Eve shouted, her voice a wisp of sound over the noise of the sea. “Catch me, James!”
Dragged apart from the others by the roll of a wave, Olivia watched Eve teasing and splashing, and saw the elation on her face as James pulled her over in the ice-cold water. A second later he hauled her up again, spluttering and laughing; shaking out her long hair, she reached her arms to grab his shoulders.
Olivia twisted away and plunged into the next wave. She couldn’t hear their voices now; in a lull between breakers she floated, watching the moon grow fat and bright as an invisible cloud drifted out of its path. The sea seemed to be calmed by its gaze, the rush of the tide slowed briefly.
For a moment, the water lapped placatingly around Olivia’s head and her spread-eagled limbs, softening the sting of whatever it was she felt: jealousy or loss or disappointment. The currents swirled inside her like pigments dropped into water, a churn of emotion she hadn’t anticipated. But the effect wasn’t entirely unpleasant; the ache of experience was almost welcome. This is something real, she thought. A moment to remember. She wished she could spin out forever the miraculous sensation of floating in the moonlight with the eddies and currents of the evening stilled, the pitch of Eve’s voice subdued by the wind.
Then she heard a shout and swivelled round to see James waving and pointing, wading back towards the beach with Eve following behind. Olivia watched their laborious progress through the waves, a film reel slowed to look like a dream. She couldn’t tell how long they’d been in the water. A minute or an hour: time moves at a different pace in the sea. She felt very cold now; her limbs had succumbed to a seductive numbness. She wondered whether she’d be able to fight her way out of the water, but as she struggled to right herself a wave broke over her like a gesture of farewell, sweeping her towards the shore.
“There.” James smiled as he wrapped a towel around his pale torso. “You’ve been properly initiated now.”
Eve slipped her arm through Olivia’s with slight ostentation, and they ran back to the house with teeth chattering and laughter spilling out into the darkness, their feet oblivious to the pebbles. The coast road gleamed, empty and pristine, as though it had been washed clean while they were gone.
“Hot baths,” said James, when they reached the front door. “There should be plenty of water. I put the immersion on.”
For a moment Olivia thought Eve might try to follow him, but after a second’s hesitation she smiled at Olivia. “We could both fit in the big one,” she said. “Save James doing the decent thing.”
James turned at the corner landing to salute them. “See you in the morning,” he said.
“Good swim,” Olivia called after him. “Good idea.”
Eve found half a bottle of cheap purple bubble bath in a cupboard and emptied the whole lot under the running tap. There was more hot water than they expected, and the bath was the deep old-fashioned kind with clawed feet that you could almost float in if you filled it to the top. They climbed in carefully, one at each end. Steam filled the room like hot breath, and the smooth sid
es of the bath, the brush of skin against skin, had a muffled feeling after the sharpness of stones and salt.
“This is like a sauna in reverse,” said Olivia.
“Mmm.” Eve shut her eyes. “I’m glad we got the cold part over with first, though.”
“We could do it the other way round tomorrow night.”
Eve groaned. “I didn’t mean it,” she said. “D’you think he’ll make us?”
Olivia ducked her head under the water, drowning the smell of the sea, then shifted her knee so Eve could do the same. Eve’s hair spread among the bubbles like a picture-book mermaid. It sometimes surprised Olivia, seeing her close up, that Eve wasn’t more beautiful. She had all the ingredients of beauty, a classic English beauty of fair skin and rosy cheeks, but the end result wasn’t quite what you expected. Like a portrait that fails to capture the essence of the sitter, although faithful to the line of the nose, the shape of the eyes, the colour of the hair. As though the painter had lost patience, and the final touches had been rushed. But even so there was something complete about Eve, a sense that she had grown into who she was going to be, that Olivia was conscious of lacking. Her own features, more angular, more surprising, seemed not to have found their final form. Olivia looked at her face sometimes and wondered where it was going.
“What do you think James meant,” Eve asked, sitting up and reaching for the shampoo, “by ‘not any more’, when we asked whether his uncle and aunt had marriageable sons?”
“Is that what he said?”
“Mmm.”
“I suppose they’re married already. Are their names in the visitors book?”
“The family don’t write in it. The immediate family.”
“You could ask James.”
Olivia shifted her leg so Eve could dip underwater again to rinse her hair. A heaviness was seeping into her body through the warm water, filling the space left behind by the bracing cold. She looked down at Eve’s face just below the surface, its expression made unfamiliar by the water’s refraction, and in that moment of silence she wondered what she was going to say when Eve came up again. It felt just then as though her words, even her thoughts, were outside her control; as though weariness and whisky and seawater had turned her life into a book she was reading, turning the pages to see what would happen next.
“You like him, don’t you?” said Olivia’s voice.
Eve smoothed down her wet hair. “Do you disapprove?”
“No.”
“Do you like him too?”
“Not if you do.”
Eve laughed suddenly. “God, Olivia; that’s so like you.” She laughed again, her face as alive as it had been earlier that afternoon when she’d first seen James. “You sound just like Sarah Brewster, Little Miss Eager-to-Please.” Then, manoeuvring herself upright, she stepped out of the bath and reached for a hot towel from the rail.
Olivia woke late the next morning. Eve was already in the kitchen, curled in the rocking chair by the window.
“You’re up early,” Olivia said.
“I don’t feel very well.”
Olivia narrowed her eyes, gauging Eve’s complexion in the morning light. “You do look a bit pale.”
“I feel sick,” Eve said, “and dizzy.” Her voice sounded plaintive, little-girlish. Olivia remembered her being ill at school, the way people rallied round. She unplugged the kettle and filled it under the tap.
“Probably the swimming. We must have swallowed a lot of sea water.”
Eve didn’t reply.
“Why don’t you go back to bed? There’s nothing to get up for.”
Eve shook her head. Something in her face provoked a flash of doubt, not unfamiliar, in Olivia’s mind. Had she said the wrong thing, last night? Surely Eve had laughed at her, not the other way round. Did she ever laugh at Eve?
“Maybe you’ll feel better once you’ve eaten something,” she said.
But Eve ignored the bowl of cereal Olivia placed in front of her. Instead, she sat across the table from James, when he came down, and watched him spread marmalade on brown toast. James ate in silence, and outside the windows the rain fell gently but steadily.
There was something in the air this morning, Olivia thought; a kind of agitation, as though they were being circled by a poltergeist.
“Was it always your aunt and uncle’s, this place?” Eve asked. “I mean, did they buy it, or inherit it?”
“They’re not actually my aunt and uncle,” James said. “It belonged to my great-aunt and uncle originally, then their daughter took it over.”
“So she’s a cousin once removed, not an aunt.”
“Something like that.”
There was silence again.
“Who’ll get it next?” Eve asked, after a bit. “The house, I mean?”
“Sally’s only fifty-five,” said James. “I don’t think she’s planning on giving it up for a while.” He pushed his chair back and started gathering the breakfast things off the table, though he’d only just finished his toast and Eve’s bowl was still full. “Have you got plans for today, you two? Have you been to Snape yet?”
“We haven’t been anywhere,” Eve said. “We’ve been waiting for you to show us round.”
That wasn’t quite true, Olivia thought. They’d managed to get three-quarters of the way around the country without James’s assistance.
“What about your parents?” Eve asked next. “Do they come here?”
James dropped a handful of cutlery into the sink with a clatter.
“From time to time.”
For a moment Olivia imagined she’d heard something uncharacteristic in his voice, almost a threat, but when he turned round again he was smiling.
“I know what we could do,” he said. “We could go to Leiston. There’s a museum there I loved when I was little. Steam engines and things. And there’s an exhibition about Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. The first female doctor, you know?”
But Eve shook her head. “Not today,” she said. “I’m feeling pretty awful, actually. Is there a chemist nearby?”
So then the others were solicitous, the awkward conversation and the plan to go out both forgotten. Olivia felt a wave of relief: she’d been afraid Eve would make herself ridiculous, with her insistent feverish questions. Eve was exasperating, but Olivia’s loyalty went back a long way.
“There’s a first aid box in the bathroom cupboard,” said James, and at the same time Olivia said, “I’ll go to the chemist for you.”
Eve shook her head again. “A bit of fresh air might clear my head,” she said.
The rain had slowed to a drizzle by the time Eve left, wearing a plastic waterproof over her T shirt. It was hard to credit the violence of the waves they’d swum in the previous evening, Olivia thought. The thin sliver of sea they could see from the front door looked quiet and tractable beneath the glimmer of rain: a docile blue, lapping peaceably over the pebbles.
Chapter 4
2008
The house was quiet when Olivia got home. The boys were all at school, Robert not yet halfway through his long day in London. She was conscious of the stillness; the empty rooms felt strange, like a stage-set without actors. Dropping her keys on the shelf by the front door, she went through to the kitchen to make coffee. This was a matter of habit – the cup she felt obliged to accept from Shirley stirred her sensory cravings rather than satisfying them – but today she really needed the caffeine.
Her arm throbbed, and a similar pain was starting up in her head now. She felt fragile, precarious; certainly not as composed as she’d seemed back there on the bridge. While she washed up the percolator, her mind darted restlessly between the violence of the assault and the coincidence of that encounter afterwards, throwing out questions like sparks.
Had she met her assailant before, perhaps snubbed him unwittingly?
Did James live in Oxford now, if it really had been James?
Would the boy in the hoodie do the same to someone else, now he’d got away with hitt
ing her?
She was surprised at herself, at her nervous excitement and the tremor in her hands. It occurred to her that if her life wasn’t so comfortable and her orbit so narrow she might have taken that momentary flare of aggression in her stride, and shame and self-pity surged through her, like hot and cold taps turned on simultaneously.
She set the percolator to brew on the stove, then reached up for a mug and winced at the stab of pain in her arm. There was arnica in the first aid drawer, a tub of ibuprofen in the bathroom, but Olivia found herself opening the drinks cupboard. Brandy, she thought; that was what you took to quieten the aftershocks, to brace yourself. She half-filled a glass, and before she could think better of it she emptied it down her throat and felt it course through her chest. Then she leaned back against the counter, letting the heat filter through her body while her gaze roamed around the kitchen, seeing her life in the weirdly enhanced perspective of the unexpected.
What would she tell James, if she met him again, about who she had become? Was this really her world, this pleasant kitchen with the breakfast things still stacked on the side, the pot plants along the windowsill, the garlic plait from the French market? Had she turned into a person too easily upset by trivialities?
She was tempted to pour herself another brandy, but instead she went upstairs, into the bedroom she’d once decorated with such care but had hardly noticed for years, then she took off all her clothes and stood in front of the mirror. She could see the bruise forming on her arm, the perfect fist-imprint with four separate darkening circles for the knuckles. Like a souvenir plate with a baby’s handprint on, she thought, and tears welled up in her eyes.
She stood there for a long time, and might have stayed longer if the smell of burnt coffee hadn’t started to creep insidiously up the stairs. Staring at herself in the mirror then, at her ludicrous midday, middle-aged nakedness, she was struck by the irony of life: by its reversals and interruptions, the way it offered bathos as an antidote to pathos. Humour, even: Olivia, fleeing down the stairs in her dressing gown to rescue the percolator (which was in fact beyond rescue, its handle melted and its insides scorched black), opening windows to let the smoke out before the alarms were triggered, running cold water into the sink to drown the worst of the damage. Olivia laughing, almost helpless with laughter about the pollution of her house and her state of undress, about the absurdity of being hit by a stranger in the middle of Oxford and meeting a man she hadn’t seen for twenty-five years immediately afterwards. Who could deny life its witticisms?
The Partridge and the Pelican Page 3
