Peacetime

by Robert Edric

  Upon discovering that he would be required to remain at Fleet Point, Mercer had enquired about using the abandoned tower and had been told to go ahead, that it was unlikely to be demolished. In all likelihood, he guessed, its crude and unrendered brickwork would quickly succumb to the salt air and it would soon collapse and be lost.

  The building consisted of two rooms, one above the other. The lower space was damp and derelict, possessed no windows and had been stripped of its flooring and anything else it might once have contained. The upper room, reached by a simple wooden staircase rising through a central trapdoor, was dry and reasonably weatherproof, at least during those summer months, and it was here that he had set out his few possessions. He slept on a campaign bed, and one of the Trinity House quartermasters had provided him with paraffin lamps and a supply of food and water.

  He left the tower and walked around the perimeter of the workings. He made notes and sketches of what had been done and what remained to be completed. He imposed order where, as yet, little existed. He mapped out a plan of works in which he alone possessed faith. His masters and the planners elsewhere remained distant and faceless to him.

  He crossed from the site towards the open sea. The tide was out and the water shone in the distance. Several miles of marsh and exposed mud lay between him and the far low-water mark. When the water was high and the marsh covered, the broad drains were filled and running, and all too often work at the edge of the site had to be abandoned until the water fell. In places, the diggers had already undermined the banked drains and had caused further short-lived flooding. The last time this had happened he had accused the men concerned of negligence and the whole of the six-man crew had refused to resume work until the accusation was withdrawn. He had apologized to them, but had made it clear that his understanding of what had happened remained intact. There was no doubt in the minds of any of those involved that the drain had been deliberately breached. The flooding had lasted three days until the water had finally soaked away and the gap filled.

  Coming again in sight of the road, he was about to cross it and climb the opposite bank when he heard the sound of collapsing rubble behind him. He paused, listening as the bricks and shattered concrete fell and settled. But this did not fade as usual, and instead there was the sound of further movement, as though someone were moving across the unsteady surface. Signs had been posted warning the locals against trespassing on the site, and they were especially warned against letting their children roam the place. But he knew that little attention was paid to these warnings, and he knew, too, that he and his workers would for ever remain intruders, and that the people living there resented this intrusion onto land they considered they had every right to wander over.

  He climbed the embankment and searched the site, knowing that whoever had made the noise would now be hiding somewhere, and would, in all likelihood, be watching him where he stood.

  He searched as he had been taught to search, scanning the land beneath him from left to right at a steady pace, starting with the spaces closest to him and then broadening his scope to include the wider area. He saw nothing. A flock of crows rose from the rubble beside the tower. A fire burned on the distant airfield and a column of smoke rose unbroken into the air.

  He was about to resume his inspection, knowing that it would serve no purpose to confront whoever might have been there, when a movement caught his eye, and he looked more closely to see a man he did not recognize emerge from amid several pieces of sheeted machinery and walk to the road.

  He called out and the man turned and searched for him. Whoever this was, he made no attempt to run or hide, and instead he came further out into the open and waited beside the road as Mercer went to him.

  The two men stood several yards apart for a moment, until the stranger extended his hand and went forward. He walked with a slight limp, Mercer noticed, or, if not a limp, then with a certain weakness or injury which would not allow him to make a full and rigid stride. He carried a satchel over his shoulder, but this held no weight.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Mercer asked him.

  ‘Searching for buried treasure,’ the man said disarmingly.

  ‘Did you find any?’

  ‘Oh, bits and pieces.’ He patted his bag. It was immediately apparent from his accent that he was foreign. He spoke English well enough, but with the intonation and emphasis of a foreigner. ‘Jacob Haas,’ he said, introducing himself, and pronouncing the name ‘Ya-cob’.

  Mercer took his hand. It felt thin and insubstantial in his own, and the man withdrew it at the slightest pressure. He wore his frayed cuffs buttoned tight across his wrists, and the sleeves of his jacket were too long for his arms.

  ‘You’re Dutch?’ Mercer said.

  ‘I won’t congratulate you on your guess,’ the man said. He squinted against the sun, and Mercer indicated that they might both turn their backs to it.

  ‘Would you mind if I sat down?’ Jacob said, and the two of them sat against the embankment.

  ‘Are you working on the airfield?’ Mercer asked him. He knew that among the men tearing up the runways there were some foreign labourers, and a party of German prisoners of war – those who had even then, fifteen months after the war’s end, not yet been repatriated for one bureaucratic reason or other, and those who showed no inclination to leave. During the hostilities they had been imprisoned elsewhere, many of them in Scotland, and some in Canada, and at the war’s end they had been returned here to work prior to their release. Some among them had found even these spartan conditions preferable to what awaited them in Germany and so had requested to remain. Many had formed relationships with the farming families to whom they had been allocated, and some had courted local women and were hoping to make new lives here for themselves.

  ‘The airfield?’

  ‘I thought you might be working there. The demolition.’

  The man turned in the direction of the rising smoke. He considered this for a moment and then bowed his head. ‘I live here,’ he said. He indicated along the line of the road towards the town. ‘I came here a year ago. Before that I was in London and then Cambridge.’

  ‘A displaced person.’

  ‘That was my title.’

  ‘Are you here with your family?’

  Jacob shook his head. ‘Only me. I promise you, I have been well vetted by all the various authorities and boards of examiners.’ He continued to look down at the ground as he spoke, and Mercer sensed that he had said it all a hundred times before, and to inquisitors far more hostile and suspicious than himself.

  ‘I didn’t mean to pry,’ he said. ‘Forgive me.’

  ‘And you, I guess, are English,’ Jacob said. ‘Through and through.’

  Mercer laughed.

  ‘I did once work at the airfield,’ Jacob said. ‘But I wasn’t up to the mark. What is the expression? Oh, yes – I was found “wanting”.’

  Then, and afterwards, Mercer noticed, Jacob took great pleasure in using such phrases, as though he alone truly understood them and gained some advantage by this.

  ‘I tried to work there, but it was too much for me. I was told to go away and get strong. I returned several times more, but on each occasion I was unsuccessful. I know men who work there. They keep me informed each time more labour is required. I persist – I fail, but I persist.’

  ‘Is that why you came here?’ Mercer said. ‘Were you hoping for work?’

  ‘No. I came because the work here intrigues me. And because I have time on my hands. It is summer now, but that will soon pass, and, believe me, winter in this place is a very different proposition, a different world entirely.’

  It struck Mercer as the kind of melodramatic, portentous remark only a foreigner would make, but he said nothing.

  ‘So how do you live?’

  ‘By which you mean how do I feed and clothe myself.’ He plucked at his shabby sleeve as he spoke. ‘I manage. As you can see, I set my sights low. I may not yet possess the strength for the demoli
tion work, but I pick up odd jobs here and there. At present I am liming the walls of a pigsty, and after that there will be fruit-picking in the orchards. I manage. I make do with what I have. And I live alone, completely alone. You would be surprised how much easier life is that way. Please, don’t concern yourself. If there is ever anything I need of you, I shall ask it.’ He then quizzed Mercer on what was being undertaken at the site.

  Afterwards, they sat together in silence for several minutes. A dazzling light now shone on the distant water.

  ‘My father was a glass-maker,’ Jacob said eventually. ‘And his father and grandfather before him. All my uncles were involved in the trade. It was a family business. And those who were not directly involved with the furnaces and the manufacture and the finishing-work were employed in the warehouses we owned, in the offices which dealt with the accounts and sales, and in the wholesaling and retailing of what all these other men produced. My mother, her sisters …’

  He stopped speaking after that, and it seemed to Mercer that he had been caught off-guard by how much he had said, and how easily these memories had returned to him. He sensed, too, that a great and unbearable weight lay behind what little he had revealed, and Mercer made his own unspoken guesses as to what this might involve.

  ‘We smash glass by the lorry-load,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Everyone does,’ Jacob said. ‘What else is there to do with glass, but to smash it?’

  Mercer did not respond to this, uncertain how the remark was meant.

  ‘I should like very much to return and visit you here, Mr Mercer,’ Jacob said.

  ‘I’d appreciate that.’

  ‘I shall, of course, wait until your workers have departed.’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘Oh? Last week, I came along the road and several of them, presumably because they mistook me for a German, took it upon themselves to throw bricks at me. I still have the bruises.’

  ‘I can only apologize on—’

  ‘There’s no need. They made their point.’

  ‘Hardly any of them saw active service. They had no right.’

  ‘I agree, but they made their judgement of me, judged it right to throw their bricks, and so they threw their bricks. To them, it made perfect sense. Talk to some of the Germans – I’ll introduce you, if you like – I doubt you’ll find a single one of them who won’t have something similar to tell you.’

  Mercer knew that it was not an argument that might ever find its two sides converging to agreement, and so he acceded to the remark in silence.

  He was about to rise and return to the tower when they were both distracted by the same sound of unsettled bricks on the land opposite.

  Jacob was the first to stand up.

  ‘Wait,’ Mercer told him. He, too, rose to search the site.

  ‘Over there,’ Jacob said. He pointed to where rubble spilled onto the road.

  Mercer looked and saw Mary Lynch emerge from the mounds and come out into the open.

  ‘She lives here,’ Jacob said.

  ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘Vaguely.’ He watched the girl intently as she moved across the loose bricks.

  ‘I spoke to her for the first time this morning,’ Mercer said. It was clear to him that something about her sudden appearance, and so close to them, had unsettled the other man.

  ‘Has she seen us?’ Jacob moved to stand closer to him.

  ‘I imagine so.’

  The girl stood at the centre of the road and looked at them.

  Mercer started to raise his arm to her, but Jacob grabbed it and held it down.

  ‘Please,’ he said. He released his grip.

  The girl made no attempt to come any closer to them. She wore the same dress she had worn earlier, and stood with her arms by her sides.

  After several moments of this, she turned at a noise behind her, and both Mercer and Jacob watched as several other children emerged from the rubble to join her. They were all much younger, indistinguishable as boys or girls at that distance, and they gathered around her, as though waiting to be told what to do by her.

  ‘They shouldn’t be there,’ Mercer said quietly.

  ‘They go where they please,’ Jacob said.

  The two men watched as Mary spoke to these others, and then as she pushed them away from her. They left her reluctantly and walked single-file towards their homes.

  ‘How old, do you think?’ Jacob said.

  ‘The younger ones? Five, eight, ten.’

  ‘I meant the girl.’ But before Mercer could answer him, he picked up his bag and started walking away.

  Mercer watched him go. The man neither turned nor paused. At the first bend in the road he left it and followed his path across the open ground, his course marked by the posts of the abandoned airfield.

  When he was no longer visible, Mercer turned his attention back to Mary Lynch. He wondered what it was about her sudden appearance that had unsettled the Dutchman. He waved to her, but she made no sign in return. He called for her to wait for him, but as he left the embankment and started towards her, she, too, turned and walked away from him. He was at a loss to understand this behaviour, but guessed it was some game or other childish indulgence, and so instead of pursuing her, he crossed the road and entered again the wasteland surrounding the tower.

  3

  The following morning, she was waiting for him as he went outside. He ignored her, but she ran to join him. He turned to confront her.

  ‘You were talking to the Jew,’ she said.

  ‘His name’s Jacob, and he’s a Dutchman.’

  ‘He’s a Jew. Everybody knows that.’

  ‘Then perhaps they should learn some more about him.’

  ‘Like you have, you mean?’

  ‘No, not like I have; because I haven’t – not yet.’

  ‘He’s still a Jew,’ she said, but the vehemence in her voice had faded.

  ‘So tell me what you understand by that.’ He knew she was repeating what others had already said, and that any true prejudice was not her own.

  ‘That he’s a Jew, a Jew-boy.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And that he’s here to steal a job – to steal a soldier’s job.’

  ‘And which soldier would that be?’

  ‘I don’t know. It could be any of them.’

  ‘Do you see him doing that?’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Working. Dispossessing one of these welcomed-back heroes of his well-earned livelihood?’ He regretted the facetious remark, the easy advantage he had gained over her.

  She stood without speaking.

  He scrolled through the chart he carried, searching for the line of the drain he hoped to examine.

  ‘You could give him work here,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t have the authority. Besides, he wasn’t looking for work.’

  ‘He comes to the houses. Last time he was here he was trying to sell things made out of glass. Bowls and small plates, things for candles. My mother bought one, but the others told him to get lost. They told her it wasn’t a real bowl, that it was old glass he’d made into something. They told her she’d catch things from it.’

  ‘And what’s your father’s opinion of all this?’ He guessed that this was where her confused resentment originated.

  ‘My father’s not here. He’s in the Army, and won’t be home until next month.’

  ‘Home for good?’

  ‘We don’t know. What is there here for him now, she says. What is there for any of us any more?’ She looked around her as they spoke.

  The news of her father surprised Mercer. He imagined he had seen the man walking with her mother, seen them together amid the others at the houses.

  ‘And what about you?’ he said, lowering his voice.

  ‘Living here, you mean?’

  ‘Is there work?’

  ‘Not really. And whatever there was, I wouldn’t want it. Farm work that pays nothing and has you out in the fie
lds in all weathers.’

  ‘Is there nothing in the town?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘But no means of getting there and back each day?’

  ‘I’d live there,’ she said, brightening at the prospect, and then falling silent at her better understanding of the situation. ‘Is that a map?’ she said, indicating the rolled chart he carried.

  He showed her the plans, explaining what he was searching for. He appreciated the effort of her feigned interest.

  ‘They thought they might make some money by having the workers come to stay here,’ she said.

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘My mother. The other women.’

  ‘Not much chance of that, I’m afraid. They have a construction camp the other side of town.’ An old barracks, surplus to requirements, and being allowed to collapse around the men it now briefly housed. Leaking and unheated, and with the occupants constantly being forced to move from one hut to another as the buildings became uninhabitable. They were employed on a three-month contract. Some time during October, the work would be completed, the men dispersed or sent elsewhere, and the barracks finally abandoned.

  He showed her the course of the new drain he hoped to excavate.

  ‘There’s already drains everywhere,’ she said. ‘But they all flood.’

  ‘Hopefully, the work here will prevent that.’

  ‘It won’t matter if there’s nobody living here, will it?’

  ‘A minute ago you said you couldn’t wait to leave.’

  ‘I know.’

  He saw then the trap in which she was caught – the distance between her childhood and the enclosing past, and womanhood and the opening future she had yet to span.

  He indicated that they might continue walking as they spoke.