The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  In the village she hurried up Church Green Road towards the Rectory Cottages in the hope of catching Felix. He had said three o’clock, but that wouldn’t be soon enough. She turned the handle of the gate, keeping half an eye on the gardens, and she saw a shadow move, on the vegetable patch.

  A man was slinking towards the raised wooden hutch at the rear of the patch, a hatless man in a brown overall coat like a factory worker, with white hair oiled to his head and a small sack in one hand. Horror is a magnet, Honey thought, as she watched him unlatch the little hutch, dip his hand in and take one of whatever creatures were inside. The melancholy sound she had heard that morning came again, three notes high, two low. And then it stopped, and a thin scream chilled her. He did it again, and again, and again. The sound was like the mice fighting behind the Steadmans’ skirting boards, the panicked rabbits at catching time in the back garden. You could not un-see or un-hear anything, and yet she wanted to look, the way she had wanted to look at the sheet being pulled back over Dickie’s blue and white shoulders.

  The man turned, saw her and stopped. He greeted her with a crooked smile, yellow and courteous. ‘Afternoon, miss.’

  ‘Afternoon.’ The small sack moved in his palm. They could not have been bigger than swallows, the little creatures, and they cheeped hysterically. But swallows didn’t stay in England over winter.

  ‘What are they?’ She gestured to the wooden structure. Now the odd little song inside it had resumed.

  ‘Oh, these?’ He looked down at his sack. ‘Swallows. For the pot.’ He winked.

  ‘Eat all sorts during the war.’

  ‘That’s right, miss.’

  ‘Is Felix here? Felix Plaidstow? I’ve come looking for him. I’ve seen him here before and I thought this might be his billet.’

  The man’s face puckered. He had something slow-thinking, slow-moving about him. The bag made a sudden lurch and he looked as if he wanted to be getting it to the kitchen. ‘There’s a lot of men come in and out here. I’m only employed to help cook and garden, miss.’

  ‘He has the dog. The greyhound. Nijinsky.’

  ‘Oh, him.’ The old gardener’s face stayed blank. ‘Well, I’d better . . .’ He gestured to the door.

  ‘Is he in there?’

  ‘No. They don’t come for lunch. Don’t come till later.’

  ‘What do you mean, come?’

  ‘You ask a lot of questions for someone who ought to know better. If I asked as many questions as you, I’d, well, I’d . . .’ He let the words hang and before Honey could press him further he had slouched with his struggling little bag towards the open back door.

  Something about his unkemptness haunted her. She looked again at the sign. Rectory Cottages. But there was nothing ecclesiastical about anything she had seen there. Except perhaps that first evening, hoods on heads. It floated in her vision, at the corners, like something a medium in a tent might conjure up for you in their glass ball, that you couldn’t quite see fully; the men at the tablecloth, bolt upright, the white cloths probed by the shapes of their noses, their brows.

  She took a step closer to the wooden hutch. The things inside it were scratching. And then a different scratching sound came much closer behind. A cold wetness wriggled into the cup of her hand. She jumped out of her skin.

  ‘Nijinsky.’ She breathed out. The dog jerked his muzzle along the length of her arm. His nose was chilly but the breath that came out was hot. A drip congealed on the back of her knuckles.

  ‘There’s no teaching him.’

  Felix stood at the ribbon’s length. She detected some kind of distance in him. He seemed to look cautiously at her, his head tilted sideways, eyes pinched. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

  Her hand dropped to the dog and she stroked its grey ears. ‘I need to borrow a car. Will you come with me?’

  He almost spluttered with laughter. ‘Are you out of your mind? Where are you off to now, Hercule Poirot?’

  She felt heat in her face and eyes and he saw that laughter wasn’t what she had hoped for. ‘Do you have a car?’

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘But what about . . . the people you know, in there?’ A woman was approaching from along the road; her shabby coat chimed recognition in Honey but she didn’t know immediately why. She racked her brains to think where she might have seen her and realised it was the woman in the post office, the one who had complained about her stolen dog.

  Felix took Honey by the elbow and guided her away from the cottage’s garden fence round to the back of the allotment. ‘Honey, I don’t think it’s likely that the Ministry for the Protection of the Arts will grant you loan of a car. I told you what they do in there; they shift paintings, artefacts. It’s important work.’

  They stayed tucked close to the cottage walls until the woman had passed.

  Honey looked down at Nijinsky. Felix had clamped his hand around the dog’s muzzle. Its silvery tail was wagging, thumping the wall. A strangled whine escaped its nose. He caught her eye. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He let his hand drop. Immediately Nijinsky shook himself out. ‘Sorry I pulled you sharply. It’s just that I can’t be seen wandering about the Ministry.’ There was a flush in his cheeks that could have been anger or guilt, or anything. Again, fresh coffee was on his breath. It only then occurred to Honey what a strange scent it was, one she didn’t smell often, because of rationing. There had been excitement in the hut when Beatrix received coffee. He must have a contact in the Ministry of the Protection of Arts or whatever he had called it, someone who could get coffee. He peered around the corner of the building, then seemed to follow the path of her thought to the ministry garden, where the wooden hutch stood.

  ‘They keep birds, you know, for suppers.’ He gestured and Nijinsky began to whine. ‘Hush, hush. He gets excited.’ Felix held her gaze.

  ‘Is this where you live?’

  ‘Golly, no. I only help out some of the time.’

  ‘I see.’ She looked over his shoulder back towards the road. The streets were quiet and a fragile breeze blew and it seemed for a second as if Bletchley were the calmest, safest town in the whole of England.

  Felix took a step forward, placing his fingertip on the exposed skin at the base of her throat. He pushed the blouse collar aside to where the bone was warm. His finger was cold. The dog was wriggling about their legs, at the hems of their coats.

  ‘It’s rare to find someone in such a small place,’ he said, ‘that you feel kinship with so soon.’

  The timbre of his voice had dropped. The tendons inside her neck, where his breath now brushed, seemed to swell and then slowly melt. Her hand fell onto the dog’s head. ‘Or maybe you believe,’ he said, ‘it was only a matter of time before our paths crossed. Tell me what’s happening to you, Honey, tell me and we can make sense of it together.’

  The urge was in her hands again, the same urge she’d had after the restaurant, when she had wanted to take his coat belt knot. Now she wanted the woollen lapels of his blackoutcloth coat braced tightly between her fingers. But instead she pushed her palms flat on his chest. ‘I need to find a car.’

  Felix took a step back. His blue eyes dropped. He pulled the ribbon of the dog closer. It stopped whining for a second and looked up, appealing. His hand fell to its bony brow and massaged a small circle, the dead finger hanging aloft.

  ‘That girl you know. The aristocratic one. She has a car.’

  ‘Beatrix? She won’t lend it to me. She’s working back shift and anyway I don’t know where she’s billeted.’

  ‘Where do you need to go?’

  ‘Hastings.’

  He frowned. ‘Hastings? It’s miles away. Why—’

  ‘Never mind why, I just need to go.’

  ‘We can go by train.’

  Honey shook her head. ‘I don’t trust them. They’re unreliable.’

  ‘But . . .’ He looked around him, as if an excuse might present itself on the fence. ‘What about the petrol ration?’


  ‘Beatrix knows a man. My stepfather will be able to—’

  ‘Is that who you want to go and see?’

  ‘No.’ She breathed deeply. The air carried the faint tang of cookery now from beyond the cottage’s back door. ‘My mother.’

  ‘Honey, I can’t – I can’t come with you. I want to, but . . . I have a shift. I should leave now, in fact. I don’t think they can spare me.’

  ‘I thought you were on nights. We can make it back.’

  ‘Where are you going to find a car?’ She couldn’t understand his sudden belligerence. This morning he had been the picture of help. She watched him inch his back towards the house. He had pressed himself against the wall, against the white harl. Nijinsky watched her with globular eyes, blinking. Then Felix moved forward again, sweeping her with a sudden compulsive clutch into an embrace. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I think I might know someone who can help.’

  He called her attention with a tuneless blast of the horn, and it was the last thing she expected to see outside the window of Yew Tree Cottage: a truck, filthy with brick and wood dust, a pickup truck with a scorched and worn logo on it, rusting at the corners.

  ‘Where on earth did you find this?’

  ‘Just . . . I know a few people. Drivers for the Park and whatnot.’

  Nijinsky sat perk-eared in the middle of a cracked leather bench. Foam bled from between the stitching. She minded her skirt as she sat, for the leather looked hardened enough to snag. ‘Sort of thing a builder would use. Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful. Just – it’s extraordinary. Have you seen this?’

  From the dashboard she picked up a tiny wooden Madonna and child, pink, white and blue. There was a scattering of them, crosses and tiny little metal-carved prayer books and miniature charms of golden urns clustered into one corner beneath the grimy windscreen.

  With a swift hand Felix scooped the lot up and tossed them into the glove compartment. She opened her mouth, but by then he had put the key in the ignition and the sound covered up her words. The truck was noisy and between the engine growls and the greyhound whining it was difficult to talk. Once or twice she caught Felix looking at her; at her stockinged ankles or the curve of her cheek. The journey took over three hours including stops for fuel, and despite the bleakness of the mission and her rising nerves at its outcome Honey found that as they neared the coast, and the sea smell began to permeate the cab of the truck, she couldn’t help but feel lifted.

  The light was beginning to dim into late afternoon but it was still bright enough to make out the froth tips on the waves below. The rocks and sprouts of sandy grass at the side of the road were so dry and alien compared to Bletch-ley’s dense hedges and fields. Instead of cloying railway coal and baked brick smoke there was iodine and sea brine in the air, and although ominous concrete barricades lurked in the shallow waters not far from the cliffs, their presence didn’t spoil the ocean’s freedom.

  The seafront had been sandbagged. Battlements, coloured slush by the tide, sagged in piles, some crusted over with seaweed in tiny ragged lines. As the truck rounded a bend in the road the fragile white stucco of the seafront houses came into view, like brittle icing on a wedding cake; a cake that couldn’t exist any more now rationing had put paid to sugar. The road was winding and high, and the wind shook through fissures in the wagon’s frame, making it sway. Honey felt vertigo, thinking of the coastal drives Joan Fontaine had taken with Cary Grant and Laurence Olivier.

  Felix swerved to avoid a creature at the side of the road. Nijinksy wriggled round in his seat to look and began to bark. It was a stoat, or perhaps a tiny thin hare, galloping to safety. They veered dangerously close to the edge and in her mind she saw the door swing open – the passenger door; she saw herself dangling over the cliff, clinging hold of Felix for her life and then . . .

  He righted the truck and soon they began their descent towards the promenade.

  ‘I’ll find somewhere to park and take him for a walk.’ At that word the dog perked up and began to stamp on the seat with his haunches, struggling into song.

  ‘Won’t you come up for something to drink or eat?’

  ‘I can find something on the front. I don’t want to intrude.’

  ‘Really it wouldn’t be—’

  ‘You want to explain to your mother what you are doing taking lifts from men in rusty trucks, with whining greyhounds?’

  Honey looked down. ‘My mother did more outrageous things in the last war.’ He didn’t see the funny side. He looked embarrassed and began threading the ribbon through the dog’s collar. Why don’t you get him a proper leash, she wanted to ask, but she didn’t. Instead she stepped out of the cab, minding her shoes in the sand that had leached from the seafront.

  The wind pinched; still, it felt milder than at Bletchley. There wasn’t the biting frost, only a cold, salty moisture.

  She found the hotel she wanted. The Pavilion, right next to the Alhambra, one of the stucco white-cake buildings on the seafront. Up close they needed a clean.

  There were day-trippers and Christmas holidaying troops, women skipping and two little boys firing guns made of sticks and cockleshell bullets at each other on either side of a sandbag bank. A gash in the landscape, like a missing tooth, showed where a building had been blitzed to rubble. It was two doors down from the theatre where her mother was performing, and it sent a jolt of memory shocking through her: two years ago, Christmas in London, when the Empire came down and the dancers had to be carried out on their backs, blood trailing down pink stockings. There was something so horrifying about their spoiled beauty. Fairytales and plays had brought Honey up to believe fragile dead women were somehow beautiful: Snow White, Aurora, Ophelia. But there was nothing somnambulant or sensual about the bruised dancers, or their screams or the dirt and the rubble crushed into their clothing and skin.

  She turned away from the theatre into the hotel lobby. It was a crumbling thing, more boarding house than seafront palace, but they had made an effort, with gilded tassels on cheap drapes and factory-produced furniture polished to a shine. The lobby was sparse and stained patches on the wallpaper showed where furniture had been removed. A sign hung in black ink on white paper: ‘The Government has commandeered our furniture and other equipment, distributing it to war purpose buildings all over the country.’

  A porter intercepted her and asked if she was looking for anyone. She dropped her voice but when she said her mother’s name – as she knew it would – the fuss began. He snapped his fingers, and a sorry-looking girl in boy’s livery appeared with her hands held out for Honey’s coat. Protectively Honey clung on to her lapels. The porter mouthed the name elaborately to the concierge, who placed his pen down and ferried her to the reception desk. The receptionist made a telephone call – ‘She’s not in her room. She’s at the theatre. No, she’s in her room. She’s answering’ – and ushered Honey into a lift, meeting her eye with an offer of tea being sent up ‘or anything, anything you wish for’.

  Honey felt her heart sink a little. She didn’t like it, this nasty little pantomime. It always made her feel horrid. She hated her mother’s reputation marching before the family, like a gaudy trumpeter with a pompous flag. She realised then that perhaps at Bletchley, one good thing had come of her place in the war: she was nothing special there, she was only a typist.

  The lift operator had been given a look by the concierge. Now he passed the look on to the waiter he met in the corridor, who leapt aside and stuck his arm out as she passed as if to protect her derrière from the horror of touching something as filthy as a wall. Honey dipped her head. They passed two women with arms full of wrapped Christmas gifts and she felt a stab of shame that she had not even thought to buy anything for anyone yet. At the end of the corridor a plaque labelling The Lilac Suite had been recently screwed to freshly painted white wood. She knocked and waited.

  ‘Come in.’ At those two words she knew that her mother wouldn’t bother to get up off the chaise.

  Marth
a Isolde Deschamps was sprawled at an angle facing the door, one leg tucked beneath her on the chaise and the other splayed in a straight white cubist line towards the floor. The crisp slope of the chaise back shot her waist skywards; the image was topped by her round porcelain face and blurred black hair. She was wetting her lips delicately with a teacup.

  When she saw Honey she leaned forward and chinked it onto its saucer, on a spindle-legged table beside her. Everything in the room was bone-thin: the carved legs of the couch, its narrow upholstered cushions, Martha’s long, straight legs and her muscular fingers. She was a woman who carried her power in her muscles, and carried not an inch more of anything to impede it. Her black hair was dyed, very thick, brushed, oiled and set until it shone like hot wax. Her mouth was thin and wide. Lips that had once been sensuously big took up the better part of her jaw, now toned and tamed into an even pair of lines that she painted a dangerous red, always, whether on stage or off.

  Her personality too was carefully cultivated. Not extravagant, not Victorian, not chic, nor flippant, nor flapperish, nor kind, but designed to instil curiosity in the beholder. She was warm, and yet the coolness of her voice always made one feel – even Honey, but certainly maids, and most definitely gentlemen – that there was something she wasn’t telling you, either out of politeness or otherwise.

  She was wearing huge white silk trousers that clung to her bony hips and flared at the base, concealing most of her freakishly long feet, which ended in bending acrobatic toes, the nails painted to match her lips. Often Honey had brought a friend back from school, university or somewhere else, and they pulled her aside late in the evening to whisper, ‘Your mother is nothing like what I expected.’

  ‘Have a cake, dear.’ She pointed at a tray of fancies, iced in pastel shades with white-line patterns glooped on the surface. ‘I don’t know whether they’re edible, I haven’t tried one.’

  This was always the first battle. Food. Her mother had wanted her to take up ballet when she was a girl, but as if to challenge her to its discipline she would also always present her with sugared things after every class, twirled and iced like precious gems. She herself would never touch anything of the sort. She picked at meat and never ate bread or fruit. She lived off eggs, poached, scrambled, boiled, coddled. Honey lost the challenge every time, but then she had never wanted to be a ballet dancer anyway.