by Janet Few
Even when he was well, Edward had been retiring, standoffish even, inept in social situations and reluctant to form friendships. Since his illness, the strangeness of his behaviour had placed him even more firmly on the side-lines. He had managed to acquire a small rowing boat, which he kept in the harbour. The local fishermen resented his ineptitude but Edward seemed unaware of their derision. He was insensible to the fact that they viewed him as someone from up-country, an outsider, a toff, not one of them. He would return from a morning spent rowing aimlessly round the bay, perhaps with a couple of mackerel to show for his efforts. These he would solemnly present to Mrs Stanbury who would dutifully prepare them for their tea. In his lighter moods, Edward spoke eagerly to Amelia of the camaraderie he shared with the other fishermen but she was astute enough to realise that he was deluding himself and that he would always remain on the periphery. Alone. Unreachable. Broken.
Night time was the worst. By day, Amelia could sometimes imagine that this was simply an extended holiday, taken purely for pleasure but the hours of darkness held unseen terrors for Edward. Each evening they would prepare themselves for bed but Edward would use every excuse to postpone the moment when he must join Amelia under the coverlet. It wasn’t that the proximity to his wife was distasteful, he was fearful of sleep and the horrors that it might bring. Obsessively, he fiddled with the items on top of the chest of drawers, assuring that cuff-links, brushes and pomade jars were neatly aligned. He would pace the small room restlessly, as the pearlescent moon cast liquid shadows over the bay below the cottage. When he did eventually lie down, at Amelia’s insistence, sleep eluded him. It was often the early hours before he drifted into fitful slumber. For Amelia, undisturbed nights were a distant memory, something that belonged to her single days, to days before Edward had come back from the war, a hollow, damaged, barely recognisable version of his former self. She had learned to cope with the cards that life had dealt them. She had had little choice. So now Amelia too approached the coming of darkness with trepidation. Would this night be one when Edward had one of his turns? Would he wake, screaming, sweating, writhing, rejecting all her overtures of comfort?
***
Mrs Stanbury’s cottage, situated as it was at the end of one of Clovelly’s few side streets, was comparatively peaceful for the Collins. Two things served to mar their quietude. Firstly, that autumn, Mrs Stanbury’s married daughter came from Swansea to take up residence in the third bedroom at the back of the house, for the duration of the hostilities. If that was not bad enough, with her came her infant son, Stanley, who was given to raucous night-time wails. These nocturnal disturbances, left Edward trauma-struck, undoing the benefits of their first months in the serenity of Clovelly; months that had soothed and nurtured, as Amelia had hoped they might.
Then there was the family in the adjoining cottage. The husband and a son, who seemed a little simple, worked a fishing boat. Apparently, the eldest son was away at sea but there were several younger children and an older daughter who was in service elsewhere in the village; she visited occasionally, when she had a half day. Edward had tried to claim some sort of ownership of the family, dogging the footsteps of the father, Albert, badgering him with questions about fishing, expressing opinions on matters of the sea about which he knew little and about which the canny fisherman knew everything.
Watching from the upstairs window, Amelia’s stomach knotted as she witnessed Edward being rejected ignored and ridiculed by the villagers. She flinched as Albert and his son hurried down the street with their heads bowed, as if they were trying to avoid Edward’s importunities. It wasn’t that they meant to be cruel, they had a living to earn and could find no common ground with a “blow-in” from up country. Edward even attempted to engage the oldest daughter, Daisy, in conversation when he spotted her visiting the family. He couldn’t seem to grasp that it might be inappropriate to accost a young, unmarried woman in this way. Edward spoke fondly of Daisy to Amelia, describing her as ‘the flower of the flock’ and ‘his Marguerite’. Amelia knew better than to be jealous. She understood that the feelings that Edward had for the young woman were not sexual; he would have been mortified if anyone had suggested that this was the case. Daisy was enigmatic, earthy, far removed from the porcelain, middle class women with whom Edward had come in to contact in his previous life. His regard for Daisy was a chivalric respect for the unattainable, the other-worldly and not that of a married man looking for a diversion.
The mother, Polly, was a prickly, unpredictable woman. In an unusually gossipy mood, Mrs Stanbury volunteered some information about her neighbour.
‘Well, you’ll find her a little odd,’ she said, adding, ‘she’s got worse since her lad died back along and she frets about their Leonard being at sea. His ship was torpedoed you know.’
Amelia did not know but Polly was not alone in having a family that was being moulded and defined by the impact of the war. It was a few days after this conversation that Amelia was accosted by Polly as she walked up to Ellis’ shop. Without preamble, Polly had waved an admonishing finger in Amelia’s face.
‘What’s that husband of yours sniffing round our Daisy for?’ she’d demanded.
Before Amelia could gather her thoughts to respond, Polly had continued her diatribe.
‘She’s a good, respectable girl, brought up in a chapel-going family. She don’t want naught to do with the likes of an old man like him and him married too.’
The angry woman had paused to draw breath before issuing her final gibe.
‘What’s to do with him anyway?’ she’d asked, rhetorically. ‘Is he mazed or summat? All that shaking about and don’t think we’ve not heard ’im hollering and screaming in the night, fit to wake the dead. Should be up the asylum if you ask me.’
With that, Polly had turned on her heel and entered the shop, leaving Amelia gazing after her, dumbfounded. She was thankful that this exchange had not been witnessed by Edward. It also made her acutely aware that her husband’s tentative recovery was constructed on decidedly flimsy foundations.
Amelia was always punctiliously polite when she saw Polly but she resented the threat that the family posed to Edward’s gradual but fragile, journey back to normality. The mackerel season finished and Edward lost interest in fishing, although he muttered about perhaps going out for winter herring later in the year. Ever more confined as he was by the four walls of their room, he became increasingly distressed by the goings on in the neighbouring cottage. Polly’s incessant cries of, ‘Alb, where youm too?’ or ‘Have you chopped the kindling yet Mark?’ and her continual noisy bustling round the small girls at the tail end of the family grated on Edward.
Schooldays gave daytime respite but one tea time, the commotion from next door made it clear that the youngest child, Rosie, had failed to return home. Amelia cringed and looked anxiously at Edward, as the sound of Polly berating the other children for not keeping an eye on their youngest sister could be heard through the walls of the cottage. Doors slammed as the older boys set off in search of the missing child.
‘There’s a child lost Edward,’ said Amelia, ‘we should offer to help search.’
‘She can’t have gone far,’ replied Edward, who was cowering in the chair.
He no longer felt the need to cover his ears at every loud noise but the din from next door had clearly unsettled him.
‘We need to help dear, folk will think it odd if we don’t.’
Even as she uttered it, the irony of this statement was brought home to Amelia. Despite all her efforts to conceal her husband’s most acute eccentricities, Polly wasn’t the only villager to have remarked on Edward’s strange behaviour.
‘Will they take lanterns Amelia? I can’t stomach the lanterns.’
Amelia knew that Edward was always reluctant to go out after dark and that the swaying lights disturbed him.
‘Hardly, dear. It is several hours before dark and surely we will find her by then.’
Edward seemed reassured by this. H
e removed his carpet slippers and placed them precisely under the bed, equidistant between two other pairs of shoes that were there. He put on a thin coat and stout footwear, clearly resolving to join in the search. Amelia donned hat and gloves, even in Clovelly she maintained certain standards. Firmly securing her hatpin, she followed Edward down the stairs to offer their assistance.
‘I don’t want to speak to that woman,’ said Edward, referring to Polly. ‘I’ll look for the girl but don’t make me speak to her.’
‘We need to know where’s best to search,’ said Amelia, gently. ‘There’s no point everyone looking in the same place.’
‘I’ll go up the top by the Court Gardens,’ said Edward.
Amelia sighed. Edward spent all too much time in this part of the estate. She suspected that it was because he hoped to catch a glimpse of Daisy, as she went about her work in Gardener’s Cottage.
‘Surely the child wouldn’t go right up there,’ said Amelia.
Defying all logic, Edward was fixated on the likelihood of Rosie being in the Court Gardens. Realising that he would not be dissuaded, Amelia let him go and he strode off up the street. Clovelly families never locked their doors but Amelia did not feel that she was on friendly enough terms with Polly to enter the cottage unheralded, so she knocked, timidly.
A girl of about six opened the door. She had clearly been crying and Amelia correctly guessed that she had borne the brunt of the blame for her sister’s absence.
‘I hear your sister’s missing,’ Amelia said, kindly, ‘I wondered if I could help.’
‘There’s folk out looking all over,’ said the child, ‘I thought she was behind me as we ran down from Wrinkleberry but then I looked and she weren’t there no more. I’m to stay here now in case she comes back by herself. She’s only started school this few weeks since. She will be all right, won’t she?’
The child was obviously looking to Amelia for reassurance, reassurance that Amelia felt ill-equipped to offer. A wooden cross on the outskirts of the village was a potent reminder that missing children were not always restored safely to their families. Amelia knew that the child in front of her would be well aware of this. The tragic tale of the two young girls who had gone missing some fifty years earlier was woven into Clovelly folklore. Accounts of their fate reverberated down the cobbles of the present, an ominous echo, a reminder of life’s vulnerabilities. As Amelia was wondering how she could comfort the young girl, who plainly felt responsible for the loss of her sister, the child’s father, Albert, returned home. Dressed in his fishing gear, it seemed that he had been called from his work to search for his daughter. Anxiety etched in his face, he looked at Amelia uncertainly.
‘Can I help?’ she asked. ‘My husband has gone to look up in the Court Gardens. Where would it be best for me to search?’
Albert hesitated, incapable of coherent thought and unable to make a decision.
‘We have to find the maid,’ he said, almost as if Amelia hadn’t spoken. ‘We have to. I don’t know how Polly will cope if she were to lose another child. Rosie is our baby, she’s only a little mite.’ He repeated the mantra, as if by that very repetition he would make it so, ‘We have to find her.’
***
They searched frenetically, fruitlessly, looking in places where no child could possibly lurk. Dusk claimed the cobbles and weariness sent searchers back to their homes. As Amelia reluctantly retraced her steps back to Mrs Stanbury’s, a shout went up from the end of the street.
‘We’ve got her, she’s found!’
Mrs Abbott, who Amelia recognised from the sewing circle, was in full flight down the road, dragging a dishevelled small girl behind her.
‘Daft maid came back to your old house after school,’ said Mrs Abbott to Albert. ‘Seems odd when you’ve been moved this year since but I suppose she found herself alone and just turned up on the doorstep. She’s been sat in my kitchen with a nice bit o’ bread and jam. I’d no idea folk were worried until Mrs Stanbury knocked and said you was all frantic.’
Rosie ran indoors, oblivious of the commotion that she had caused. The good news rushed down the street faster than a flood tide. Villagers came to express their relief, or to check if the rumours of Rosie’s safe return were true. Rosie’s brothers and sister arrived home and joined in the excited chatter. Time passed. There was no sign of Polly, or of Edward. Amelia felt out of place amongst the family and close friends who were fussing round Rosie and enjoying strong tea from thick china mugs. She left quietly.
***
In the melancholy of the darkening churchyard a swift shadow moved across a gravestone. The intertwined roses carved on the top of the cross were thrown into sharp relief by the deepening dusk. The shadow took form. A weeping woman clung to the base of the cross. Forsaken, bereft, she sobbed alone. Edward, having hunted somewhat cursorily for Rosie in the region of the Court’s walled garden, heard the sounds and approached, thinking that it might be the young girl. The clouds scudded across the moon, giving him sufficient light to see that this was no child before him. Empathy was not an emotion that was familiar to Edward but he knew that, if Amelia were there, she would have approached this distraught woman, who was prostrate on the dampening grass. He hesitated, recognising that here was Polly, his bête noire.
From somewhere in the horrors of his past, two lines of poetry rose up to hammer at Edward’s consciousness. “In an obscure night, Fevered with love’s anxiety”. When Edward was at the depths of his own despair, the chaplain had given him a copy of a poem, explaining that the words spoke of man’s struggles, struggles that were a prelude to salvation. For this woman there was no salvation, nor, he thought ruefully, had he been saved. As Edward gazed helplessly at the scene before him, the words whispered and settled like a sigh. He racked his brains for the poem’s title. The Dark Night of the Soul, that was it. Chillingly apt. As Edward witnessed the woman before him, wrestling with her own demons, he acknowledged that here truly was a fellow human being, who was fevered with anxiety borne of love. Before Edward could decide how to approach Polly in her suffering, she became aware of his presence and hastened to her feet, brushing grass and leaves from her skirt as she did so.
‘Time to go home,’ said Edward in an unexpectedly compassionate tone. ‘Let’s see if she has been found.’
***
In the November night time, Edward joined the watchful fishermen on the Look-out; he stood with the group, yet he was apart. Damp Woodbines gripped in their gums, the Clovelly men exchanged a few words in undertones. No one addressed Edward and he was unsure how to initiate a conversation with these men who, despite all his efforts to fit in, led lives that were so different to his own. Edward had braved the terrors of the swinging lanterns to come to the Look-out because it was what the men did. No one had asked him to accompany them in their boats and Edward lacked the confidence to drift for herring on his own. Fishing was far from his mind. A conversation he had had with Daisy earlier in the day was tormenting him. She had been unusually forthcoming when he had encountered her on her way back from a first aid lecture at the New Inn. She had been animated, full of all that she had learned. Yet Daisy had seemed unsettled and had spoken of changes that the New Year would bring. She’d asked him about the places he’d been.
‘There’s so much more than Clovelly,’ she’d said. ‘Look at my brother, travelling all over, getting away.’
‘But you are happy here aren’t you?’ he’d replied.
‘Maybe, just for now,’ she’d said, after a pause.
Was she thinking of leaving the village? Edward was unsure of his reaction. He reasoned she would probably marry soon. Not that he had heard her name linked to any of the village lads. Perhaps she had a sweetheart who was away at the war. Yes, surely she would marry but on the rare occasions when he had thought about this mythical future husband, he’d envisaged someone local. Since he had arrived in Clovelly, Edward had enjoyed seeing Daisy about the village now and again, admiring her confidence, her vitality,
her difference. Her very presence was energising. It had not occurred to him that she might leave and that she would no longer touch his life.
It was past midnight and all eyes were trained on the molten sea, seeking the gleam of oil that heralded the arrival of the herring.
‘There they be!’, was the sudden cry.
Galvanised, the fishermen pushed past Edward and rushed towards the harbour. Ignored and alone Edward hesitated. Should he follow them? Dispirited, he wearily turned for the cottage that he could not bring himself to call home. The worst of his terrors were abating but he knew that he was not yet better. Would he ever be better? He dragged himself up the stairs at Mrs Stanbury’s and faced Amelia who was sitting up in bed waiting for him. He shied away from looking directly at the flickering candle.
‘I’ve been thinking about getting away,’ he said, ‘applying for engineering jobs overseas. There are plenty of openings in South America.’
Amelia raised her eyebrows. She was not sure whether to encourage him in these unrealistic ambitions or to point out that there were days when he could barely cross the street.
‘Yes,’ he was saying, ‘when this is over we will go abroad.’
Over, thought Amelia, would it ever be over? A twisting worm of apprehension made her wonder if the horror was only just beginning.
10
1918
Daisy alighted from the train at Torre Station, a worn carpet-bag in her hand. She looked around her and breathed deeply, taking comfort from the familiar sea air. Gulls wheeled above her, as they did at home but the cobbled streets of Clovelly were distant now. This was to be her adventure, her new beginning. She had finally broken free, discarded the sad associations that had oppressed her. Here at last was an opportunity to strike out on her own, to leave behind the places that reminded her of Abraham.
