Poppyland

by Raffaella Barker

  ‘Yes. Sorry. It was a mistake.’ Odd to be able to talk as though he is standing beside her, when she is a hundred feet beneath. But the vantage point of the cliff is not giving him any helpful moral high ground. She seems pretty annoyed.

  ‘What do you mean it was a mistake? We’re the only people on the beach. There is nothing for miles. Could you not throw it somewhere empty? Or even maybe just stamp it into the ground, or put it in an ashtray?’ She shrugs, steps back, and looks up at him again. ‘I don’t understand which bit is the mistake, when you deliberately throw something at someone. Or several someones. Us, in other words.’

  God, she is going on a bit. Ryder becomes aware that he has a big grin on his face now, it can’t be helped. She is very lovely. Girls like this are rare. It’s a good thing she doesn’t recognise him.

  ‘Er. Maybe you’re right; it wasn’t a mistake. I meant to hit you with a lighted cigarette,’ he says to tease her. It comes out a lot more combative than he means it to.

  She can raise one brow in an arch while the other stays still. She can’t know how captivating this is to him, nor that he suddenly doesn’t want her to recognise him. There is a gleam of laughter in her eyes, a spark of joy, and he’s certain she hasn’t recognised him. She might be flirting with him. Or is he imagining it? It is over fast, and she looks away with her smile.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. It hangs in the air like an invitation. Or that’s how Ryder interprets it. He doesn’t want her to recognise him now. He doesn’t want to hear that she is married, though the evidence is squatting next to her in the sand, unpacking the picnic basket she has put down. Maybe it isn’t her. Maybe it wasn’t her at Copenhagen airport in the winter either. Perhaps he just imposes his memory of Grace on to other women who look like her. The stillness of the air becomes the intake of breath between them. It’s her, all right.

  Behind Grace, the sea flattens to a silk skin. Still. There’s no movement, no time passing. Warm air like a sigh flows off the cliffs, on to the surface of the water. It settles glass calm, heavy, oily, sensuous. Not a wave or a ripple, but a lazy blue-green, flat like a bed, a whisper coming from the depths like wind through summer grass. She has sand on her fingers. Ryder notices this, and it is as if he has spoken it, for she runs the back of her hand down her skirt, shaking off the crumbs of beach, and tilts her head, squinting slightly to see him without shading her eyes. He realises that it is not so much that she doesn’t recognise him but that she cannot see him properly in the low sunlight. His pulse races faster as the possibilities this opens up spark and ignite into another flame of excitement shooting through him.

  A beep of a horn sounds behind him and Ryder almost jumps over the railing in surprise. He had not noticed the engine, the sidling yet sudden presence of Ed in his pick-up truck. He feels as if he is swimming up from the deep, breaking the surface and emerging somewhere brash and noisy. It surprises him to realise how intensely he had been moved in the previous moments. Or was it hours? Intoxicating. Surely what should be next in the programme for the day is more flirting, the magical disappearance of the children and a languorous hour or two of lovemaking with this woman who might be Grace. Nice fantasy, shame about the stark reality and the arrival of Ed. Ryder heaves a sigh.

  ‘God, I’m sorry, I was miles away. Are you early?’

  ‘Nope. Come on, mate.’ Ed squints at Ryder, his head against the sun, low now and flooding pink across the still sea. ‘I need to get back and tackle the rigging to get that sodding boat in the water before the owners arrive. We’ve got the tide for an hour or two now.’

  Ed gets out of the pick-up and, feeling in the breast pocket of his shirt, pulls out a packet of cigarettes and lights one, breathing a cloud out over the cliff edge as he rests his elbows on the rail next to Ryder and looks down. Cool purple shadows are drawing a new surface across the sand, bringing depth to the red of Grace’s skirt where it falls long in front as she bends to pull a garment over the head of the baby. Her hair falls across her face like another shadow; she doesn’t look up again, but murmurs something to the baby and bends to kiss the top of her head. The encounter is over.

  Ryder sighs again and turns to his friend. ‘I’m all yours, Ed,’ he says, rubbing his eyes, running his hand through his hair, kicking one foot against the tall white post with the life belt on it, and stretching tall, hands up in a spine-clicking arc, fingers interlocked and pulling the back of his head. His sketch pad is balanced on a post in front of him. He picks it up, sighing.

  Ed raises an eyebrow. ‘Where have you been? Away with the bleedin’ fairies or what?’ He scans the beach, his gaze moving past Grace and the children with not even a pause of curiosity. Ryder feels absurdly affronted. How can Ed not be intrigued by her? There must be something wrong with him. Ed digs his hands deep in his pockets and kicks a pebble into the dry grass beneath the railings. He purses his lips and half whistles, changes his mind and pulls his hands out of his pockets. Big hands, clasped now as he leans on the railings next to Ryder. A whiff of engine oil and a restless, slightly cross energy, emanate from Ed.

  Even though the shingle rattling in the creeping water is louder now, and the slap of a wave on the groyne is like the crack of a whip as the air cools and the pressure drops, her voice rises over the cliff – not loud, but clear and gentle. ‘Come on, you two, we need to go home before the tide comes in.’

  Ryder grins at Ed and, wanting to engage him too, looks down again. ‘Good view of Beauty on the beach from here,’ he says, his euphoric interest in Grace spilling out of him in an attempt to involve Ed. Ed doesn’t hear. Isn’t interested. Perhaps she just isn’t his type. Ryder was in Ed’s workshop this morning, the radio was on, sawdust filled the air and, to the left of the door, was a carefully pinned and displayed wall of topless models. At the time, Ryder glanced at them without thought, but now he wonders why he has never torn a page from a tabloid and stuck it on the wall. Is it a desire to remain aloof or a thin-blooded lack of any desire at all? Do all men secretly want a pin-up and he is therefore a misfit? Or is it just something some people like and others don’t? Simple. But hang on a minute, can anything where women are concerned be that simple?

  He tries asking Ed now. ‘Do you reckon every straight man has an inner yearning for a shag with a nameless model? Or is it just a fantasy that needs to stay fantasy?’ Ed carries on leaning over the railings, staring at the sea. His eyebrows, Ryder notices, are doing just what evolution intended them for; they are full of sawdust and even though they are like small haystacks, they look as though they might collapse at any moment and the sawdust will fall into his eyes. He doesn’t speak. Ryder opens his mouth to repeat himself, feeling foolish, but Ed has heard enough for it to be embarrassing so he can’t just change the subject. But before he utters a word, Ed shifts around, tosses his keys from one hand to the other, and looks at Ryder with mock severity, ‘For God’s sake, Ryder, get your dick out of your arse and stop belly aching. You’re not rarefied, you get laid like anyone else if you’re lucky. Come on, let’s go.’

  Ryder laughs. ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right. I think my version has suspenders.’

  Ed is on a different thought plane.

  ‘There’s something coming off the back of that wind,’ he grumbles, looking to the horizon, and he reaches in through the window of his truck for binoculars. ‘Yep, it’s looking dirty over there.’ He passes the binoculars to Ryder. Where sea and sky meet, so far away Ryder could swear he can see the curve of the earth, a black line is thickening. As if drawn by felt tip and then underscored, the darkness intensifies and Ryder sees it as a widening crevice pushing sea and sky further apart, though he knows that it is just rain seeping cubic tonnes of darkness and more and more water into the depths of the sea.

  ‘How far away is it?’

  Ed flicks his cigarette into the road behind him. ‘Dunno. I don’t think it’ll hit us, though. But I wouldn’t like to be out there tonight, the sea will be vicious. Come on, bring your colouring book and le
t’s go.’ He grins at Ryder and gets back into the truck. Ryder steals a last look down at the beach. There’s no one there now. Like a shaken-out tablecloth, the wind cracks back into life, the sea hisses a response, and sound is all there is on the beach, apart from the ragged-edged hole dug by the children. She must be on the path, the zigzag concrete road made for tractors to get down the cliffs and haul out the crab boats from the shallows. A wind gust knocks over the small jug of sea lavender on the table where Ryder was sitting and the flowers fall into his empty cup and saucer.

  Ed revs the engine. ‘Look, mate, I’m gonna go; you can stay here if you like and I’ll come by for you later, but I need the tide,’ he says, his demeanour relaxed but determined. No more hanging around.

  ‘OK, I’m in.’ Chucking some change on top of the fluttering paper bill, Ryder grabs his notebook and the rolled charts he never quite got round to opening, and gets in to the pick-up. As Ed accelerates away, Ryder sees a billow of red skirt and wind-flayed hair in the wing mirror.

  * * *

  Jesus Christ, it’s hot. Ryder’s suit suddenly feels like someone else’s bad joke. The road is frilly edged with cow parsley bobbing as it catches the breeze, tiny petals floating like confetti and the whole thing is festive and euphoric as if he is on the way to a wedding. This morning the countryside is alive with celebration, and being more accustomed to hanging out in the sea on rigs or in town on the boat, Ryder’s senses are dazzled. Or assaulted, more like. The joys of the morning are not penetrating as yet. Waking up in Ed’s house, on the sofa with a fuzzy head, and Ed’s kids heaped in front of the TV on various giant foam blobs, Ryder was overwhelmed by the noise and action. He couldn’t believe how lively they all were. And how callously oblivious to his presence. The television was unnecessarily loud, the cartoon creatures on it far too brightly green and cheerful, and Ed’s children, all in pyjamas with tangled mops of hair, were rolling and somersaulting among the foam blobs like wind-up toys. There seemed to be about six of them, though Ryder was sure Ed only mentioned three. Or maybe four. The noise was intense.

  Through the low window looking out on to the yard, Ryder could see Ed in his workshop, his cigarette billowing a cloud through the door. Verity, Ed’s wife, was clanking buckets and chatting to Ed as she fed her horses, unbolting stables to reveal straw-lined spaces markedly more orderly than the house. Feeling like he had missed the bus, Ryder got off the sofa, trying to pretend to himself that he was neither stiff from sleeping scrunched up, nor in the wrong place, given that it was ten o’clock and he was meant to be on the other side of Norfolk. Of course he hadn’t been given the sofa deliberately, Verity had shown him into the spare bedroom when he arrived, but when he and Ed finally creaked up the stairs last night, having seen the best part of a bottle of Scotch between them, Ed groaned on opening his bedroom door.

  ‘Bloody kids,’ he said, and tiptoed out to the landing where Ryder was leaning against a wall for extra support. Ed sighed, looking like his eight-year-old son for a moment. ‘Natasha’s in with Verity and I’m not going in her bloody bunk bed with Josie snoring away down below. I’m for the sofa, mate.’

  Ryder was drunk, but not so drunk that he could let his host sleep downstairs while he tucked himself into the spare bedroom on the upper floor, with Ed’s family in the rooms on either side of him. It wouldn’t be appropriate. ‘No, you’re not,’ he mumbled, blocking the way down the stairs with outstretched arms, swaying – deliberately, of course – to make absolutely certain Ed could not sneak through. ‘I’m heading for the sofa; you get some kip in that spare room you fixed up for me.’

  It would be a good idea to get out of the car and go for a walk or, even better, a swim in the sea this morning, but it’s a long way round the coast to Winterton, and Ryder’s adrenaline is pumping. He is anxious he might lose his nerve and bottle out of the christening and all it will bring up for him, if he doesn’t set off to get it over with.

  Immediately, he chastises himself; Christ, what a way to live, setting yourself up against even the gentlest occasion because you are so terrified of life. It’s got to change. Driving out of Ed’s yard, waved off by Ed with a small child sitting on his shoulders, Ryder experiences a pang of loss. Ed’s life, full of kids and Verity and boats and too much work and not enough money, adds up to chaos, but good chaos. Not something Ryder has seen much of, but he likes it.

  Passing the village where he saw Grace yesterday, Ryder takes his foot off the accelerator, seized with an irrational belief that she will open one of the doors of the flint-faced cottages and walk out into the sunshine. She doesn’t, even though he is convinced that the yellow one with a pot of vibrant-orange flowers on the doorstep is hers. He indulges in a moment of self-torture, imagining her with her husband, laughing and chatting over breakfast with the children playing somewhere nearby.

  Ryder’s phone trills, breaking this fantasy before he has time to imbue the husband with all the qualities he himself does not possess, as well as jaw-dropping good looks and a big job. It’s his mother.

  ‘Ryder? Is that you?’

  ‘I think so,’ he automatically teases her. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Yes, of course it is. Now will you be seeing the family before the christening? I mean Mac. And . . . and . . .’ Her voice tails off helplessly. Ryder swallows, touched by her determined bravery.

  ‘Mac and Lucy and the children? Sadly, I doubt it; I don’t think I’ll get there in time.’

  His mother sighs, but pulls herself together. ‘Well, it can’t be helped,’ she says brightly. ‘We’ve sent some flowers, anyway; they come with helium teddy bears which we thought the little girls would like.’

  ‘Good.’ Ryder is out of the village where he is sure Grace lives now, and the road zigzags towards a cornfield sprinkled with poppies, and, at its farthest limit, a knife-edge ridge where the corn ends and suddenly becomes the swell of the sea, the whole horizon high in the view, as if the sea is rising to fill the sky.

  His mother is still talking. ‘Good? Do you think so? I hope so. And Ryder, will you take some photographs? I would dearly like to see Mac’s daughters.’

  ‘Oh Mum,’ is all Ryder can say. He understands how much she would love to be here, and how impossible it is for her to come. And something soft in her voice tells him that she, like he, is thinking today how very lovely it would be to have some children to christen in their own family.

  ‘Mum, Bonnie would have had great kids.’

  ‘Yes.’

  His mother was crying. Ryder felt it wouldn’t take much for him to be crying as well. ‘And I will, too, one day. I hope,’ he says gently. He has never said this before, the notion of children has been even more taboo than the question of sex in his conversations with his parents. Not that they would mind the children talk, but Ryder has never wanted to face the unspoken monumental expectation of his mother’s that she will become a grandmother. And he has left it and accepted it as one of the many unacknowledged areas where a splinter of pain from Bonnie’s accident has lain festering for all those years. And in the end it was so bloody easy to say it’s a joke. Ryder presses one palm against his brow; he is hot, despite the breeze from the sea. He wonders if it’s the hangover talking, and if he has taken leave of his senses. But no, he is not bullshitting. He is quite sure that he will have children one day, and they will be great. And saying this to his mother is actually no big deal. Wow, and it’s only taken all his life to learn this.

  ‘Yes, you will,’ she says, very gently.

  Ryder pulls himself out of the reverie, rubs his hand over his eyes, and says cheerfully, ‘OK, Ma, I’ll take pictures for you, and I’ll come and see you next weekend. I must get on now, or I’ll be late for the whole thing.’ The signal cuts out at the perfect moment and the car swoops over a rise in the coastline with a church on top. There’s nothing else for miles, and in the distance ahead is the alien vision of the Bacton giant golfball, the early warning system.

  Chapter 12

  G
race

  Norfolk

  Waking up on the morning of the christening, I lie in bed looking at the ceiling, remembering the rivers and faces I used to make out of the cracks when I was a child. Lucy and I used to spend hours in bed in the mornings waiting for Mum, and we used to invent whole worlds through the patterns on the ceiling. I had forgotten it in New York, but here in Norfolk in Lucy’s spare bedroom, the ceiling is wall papered with tiny bunches of snowdrops scattered amongst pale green ribbons and I can imagine all the princesses and castles and exotic islands that we used to invent when we were small. Suddenly, as if conjured up by a genie, a small neon-green-clad princess with crown and sceptre appears by my pillow, breathing heavily.

  ‘It’s breakfast,’ she says, and hands me a half-sized tin of baked beans.

  ‘Great.’ I am hugely relieved the tin is not open, and amazed by the insight I am getting into the eating habits of three year olds. Or maybe it’s just Bella. Though it’s not what she eats that’s controversial, it’s just the timings.

  ‘I’ll get up and we’ll go down to Mummy, shall we?’

  ‘Mummy,’ says Bella dreamily, and climbs into the bed with me. She is so perfect I wonder if she can be a Stepford baby or a changeling from the Day of the Triffids. I still adore her after a whole day of being in charge of her and Cat. It’s a miracle. I thought I would feel like a changeling myself in the company of small children for a whole day, but it was great. I love them and they love me. What could be better? The beach was a great success and I had them in bed before Mac and Lucy arrived with Mac’s aunt Irene last night.