Peacetime

by Robert Edric

  ‘My wife’s parents lived here. They both died and she took over their house. We had nowhere else, especially once the war started. Like my own father, I was away more than I was at home with her. We lived in Peterborough before coming here. She hated every minute of it. Here, I mean; not there. We, too, had a son. When the war started and they came to put in the guns, everyone was evacuated for three months. She went to stay with friends in London and our son died there. He was seven.’

  ‘I’m sorry. In a raid?’

  ‘Cerebral meningitis. A week after they arrived. I was away at sea when it happened and unable to return for almost two months. When I finally got back to her she was a changed woman. Everyone else had come back here by then, and she had come with them. She stayed here for a further year. Everyone spoke about her grief and about the balance of her mind being affected. I came home as often as was possible, but it was too little. After the death of our son, nothing was ever the same. She blamed herself for having taken him to London, and she blamed me for having forced her into making that decision because of my absence. I loved her. I loved her before and I loved her afterwards. Unfortunately, I fooled myself into believing that this love would be enough, that it would matter to her, and that it would continue to bind us together. I daresay if the war had ended sooner and I’d been able to come back permanently to her … There was a coroner’s inquest on our son. It wasn’t until he was dead that they finally decided on what had killed him. It was ten days before I learned. Radio silence.’

  ‘Is he buried in the town?’ Mercer asked him.

  ‘London. His name was Lars. I doubt she had much say in the matter. I last saw her ten months ago. We visited his grave together.’

  ‘Did she move back there?’

  ‘I think she would have gone anywhere to get away from here. I tried to persuade her to return to Peterborough, but she spoke so disparagingly of the place, and of our past there together. And just as I didn’t learn of my son’s death until long after the event, so, too, I had no idea that she was actually leaving me until long after she had gone.’

  ‘Could you not have gone with her?’

  ‘She told me not to. For several months I had no idea where she was staying. She sent a note telling me she was fine and that I was not to look for her. And so I stayed where I was, with no way of contacting her. This was where she would contact me.’ He dug his heel into the sand. ‘I even kept alive the hope that she might one day return here. You must have realized by now that those people born here are tethered to the place.’

  ‘Like Elizabeth Lynch?’

  ‘Like Elizabeth Lynch.’

  ‘And so you stayed and waited.’

  ‘I’m waiting still.’

  ‘When did you last hear from her?’

  Daniels shrugged, then said, ‘Forgive my disingenuousness. Four months ago. The end of April. The second anniversary of our son’s death. She wrote to ask me why I hadn’t gone again to his grave with her. There was no return address in the note. No indication of how she felt other than to let me know that she was angry and disappointed in me. I wrote to everyone we had known in London, but no one knew where she was. Either that, or she had warned them against telling me. It is hard to persist under such circumstances.’

  The two men walked a short distance back from the encroaching water. Mercer helped Daniels carry the wood he had gathered. Several small pieces were left behind and lost to the waves. Daniels held Mercer back from attempting to retrieve them.

  ‘What do you do here?’ Mercer asked him.

  ‘The same as the rest of them.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Gather driftwood, watch the horizon.’

  Mercer understood precisely what he was being told and signalled to Daniels that he would ask no more questions on the subject.

  They both looked back to the horizon, where nothing but the faintest of smudges marked where the vessels had been.

  ‘Will you go back to her if she writes and asks you to?’

  Daniels shook his head. ‘I fool no one but myself that that is likely to happen. I’m still waiting, but I can’t honestly say that I know what I’m waiting for any longer. Perhaps by waiting I merely maintain a state of grace, or something equally fanciful. Perhaps there is nothing else I can do and I am not yet prepared to admit that, not even to total strangers like yourself. She won’t write, Mr Mercer. Our son died, and whichever one of us she truly holds responsible for that, she can no longer bear the thought of us being together.’

  ‘So you make provision for winter, and yet you prepare to leave before it arrives.’

  ‘I daresay there isn’t a man, woman or child here that doesn’t suffer some similar delusion.’

  ‘You don’t delude yourself,’ Mercer said.

  Daniels considered this for a moment and then continued walking.

  Mercer followed him. It was beyond him now to ask him his wife’s name.

  ‘If I don’t burn it, someone else will,’ Daniels said as they rounded the final slope of the dunes and the line of houses came into view.

  They paused briefly to look over the site and the men working there.

  ‘Surprising how quickly you forget what it all so recently looked like,’ Daniels said. ‘Another delusion. We believe in permanence and yet it exists nowhere.’

  ‘Perhaps if the world were re-made in the smallest of pieces and at long intervals.’

  Daniels was about to respond to this, when he saw Elizabeth Lynch standing in her open doorway and watching them approach. She returned indoors as they drew close.

  ‘Will you leave before her husband returns?’ Mercer asked him, knowing immediately how Daniels might misinterpret the question.

  ‘Lynch? I doubt it.’ He led Mercer to where a mound of wood lay piled against the wall of a derelict outbuilding, and through which grew a mound of nettles. A short distance away lay the rotted keel of a shallow boat, its few remaining spars rising above the grass.

  ‘I doubt the place would provide a single man with an honest living these days,’ Daniels said. He dropped the wood he carried and went to the remains of the boat. Several gulls rose at his approach, flapping urgently to get airborne ahead of him.

  11

  The same few women watched him cross from the tower to the houses. It was clear to him that they all knew what was happening, and that they had each already formed their own understanding of the situation. He wished Mary or Elizabeth Lynch had been among them to greet him and to guide him through this gamut of undiverted glances and unspoken thoughts. He wished, too, that he had been able to find something to take to Elizabeth Lynch other than the few tins of food he again had with him. As before, it seemed more like a payment than a token. It was not a large package, but nor was it one he could hide from the watching women, or one he might carry beneath his arm as though scarcely aware he had it with him.

  He reached the road’s end and raised his hand to those gathered there. They responded immediately, and two of the younger women came towards him.

  ‘What’s she cooking for you, then?’ one asked him.

  He told her he didn’t know.

  ‘Not exactly renowned for her dinner parties,’ the other said.

  ‘It was still kind of her to offer,’ he said.

  ‘Why? Get all lonely, do you, sitting in there night after night by yourself?’ She patted the arm of the other woman behind his back. ‘You should have said. We could have done something about that.’ They burst into laughter and he did his best to laugh with them.

  They came to where the others stood and the two women detached themselves from him. Someone asked him about the work and he told them what he could. A good deal of what he said, he imagined, would be repeated later to husbands and brothers.

  The door to Elizabeth Lynch’s house opened and Mary appeared. She beckoned to him. Mercer excused himself and went to her.

  Elizabeth Lynch waited inside for him. ‘You’ll be used to them by now,’ she said nerv
ously.

  ‘I suppose me being here and the work must be a constant source of conversation.’ He looked for Mary, but she had left the room.

  She nodded, avoiding his eyes. ‘I’m no different,’ she said.

  The door at the bottom of the stairs opened and Mary came back in to them.

  It was immediately clear to Mercer that she had made a great effort with her appearance. She no longer wore her threadbare dress, but one which had obviously been her mother’s, and which had been altered to fit her. Her hair was fastened back from her face, revealing more of her tanned forehead and her ears. The dress was cut higher on her neck and she wore a silver chain around her throat.

  Her mother, too, seemed surprised by her changed appearance. She herself wore the clothes she had worn all day, and she looked down at herself and then at her reflection in the mirror above the mantel at this unexpected appearance of her daughter.

  ‘You look very … very—’ Mercer began.

  ‘Sophisticated?’ Mary said. ‘I look sophisticated. Perhaps even elegant.’ She pretended to draw on a cigarette and then to blow out the smoke through the o of her lips.

  ‘You’re wearing lipstick,’ her mother said.

  ‘Hardly,’ Mary said, but without conviction, and then with pleading in her eyes for her mother to say no more.

  ‘I was going to say you looked very smart,’ Mercer said. ‘But “sophisticated” and “elegant” would be more appropriate.’

  The predictability of this remark disappointed her. ‘You might as well have said “grown-up”,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t know she’d gone upstairs to change,’ Elizabeth Lynch said. ‘I didn’t know you were changing. I suppose I ought to do the same.’ She looked anxiously from the cooker to the already laid table.

  ‘You ought,’ Mary said. ‘I can watch this.’

  ‘I wish I’d had something better to bring,’ Mercer said. ‘Wine, perhaps.’

  ‘Wine?’

  ‘Or flowers. Something less …’

  ‘Ordinary?’ Mary said, drawing a sharp glance from her mother.

  ‘And predictable,’ Mercer said.

  She came into the centre of the room and her mother told her what to watch on the cooker.

  ‘She’s never had wine,’ Mary said to him when her mother had left the room.

  ‘Whereas you, presumably, drink it all the time.’

  ‘Most nights,’ she said. She sipped from an invisible glass.

  They heard the woman’s footsteps above them.

  ‘That lot outside will all now be wondering what she’s doing drawing the bedroom curtains. Perhaps you ought to go and stand in the doorway to let them know where you are.’

  Believing her concern to be serious, he took a step towards the door, but she held his arm and told him to stay where he was.

  ‘Where’s your brother?’ he asked her.

  ‘He’s staying along the row. She thought it would be too much, what with all this fine cuisine and everything.’ She went to the cooker, raised the lid of one of the pans there and pulled a face at its contents.

  ‘I am aware that you don’t want me here,’ he said in a sharp whisper.

  ‘But you still came.’

  He had expected her denial.

  ‘It would have been ungracious of me to refuse.’

  ‘So you said. She feels beholden to you for the food.’ She indicated the package beside him. ‘Now she’ll probably do it all again and make an even bigger fool of herself.’

  ‘Only you think that,’ he said. He regretted not having brought a bottle of whisky from his own small supply, but he knew the woman would have felt even more uncomfortable about taking that from him.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Mary said. ‘Potatoes and fish. Hardly the Ritz, is it?’

  They both laughed.

  ‘And when did you last dine at the Ritz?’

  She pretended to think. ‘Months ago now. Have you ever been there? Seriously.’

  ‘Never.’ It was a lie.

  ‘But you’ve been to other restaurants?’

  ‘Of course I have. I mean, yes, a few.’

  She turned her back on the cooker. ‘He bought me this chain when I was born. It’s supposed to be silver. I was christened wearing it. “Mary” was his choice. His mother was called Mary. He never had two good words to say about her, so God knows why I got landed with it.’

  ‘Don’t you like it? It suits you.’

  ‘I don’t care one way or the other. Besides, not much I can do about it while I’m stuck round here, is there?’

  ‘So when you leave, will you change it?’

  She clicked her fingers. ‘Like that.’

  Like that, he thought. You’ll walk away, turn a corner, change everything about yourself – your appearance, your past, your name – and become someone new and completely different. If he’d had a drink in his hand he would have raised a toast to this coming transformation. He saw again how vital this self-belief was to her.

  ‘It makes you look older,’ he said. ‘The dress.’ It was true: she now seemed two or three years older than fifteen instead of the two or three years younger she had seemed to him in the presence of the other children.

  ‘You’re just saying that,’ she said, but was unable to mask completely the flattery she felt.

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘It’s one of hers cut down,’ she said.

  ‘So? It suits you.’

  ‘Like my name,’ she said. She hooked the silver chain onto her bottom lip, released it, and said, ‘She makes me keep it locked away. Not locked, but hidden. They were arguing once and she said he’d never once bought her anything like it.’ She lowered her voice.

  ‘I can see that it means a lot to you,’ he said.

  ‘I used to think it was really valuable, precious. I used to imagine selling it to a jeweller in one of the bigger towns and getting a fortune for it.’

  ‘I have something similar,’ he told her. ‘From my mother. She gave it to me when I went overseas. A ring that had belonged to her father and his father before him. It had a reputation in the family as a lucky charm.’

  She looked at his hands and saw nothing there. ‘And then one day, thinking you didn’t need it any longer because the war was over, you took it off, and an hour later they sent you here.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  They laughed again.

  They both looked up at the sound of footsteps above them. Mary returned to the cooker.

  ‘She’s coming down,’ she said, and as she spoke her mother could be heard descending the stairs.

  He knew how self-conscious Elizabeth Lynch might be at making her own entrance, and so he went to stand beside Mary at the cooker and pretended to show an interest in what she was doing. She understood this and raised her voice as the door opened and her mother returned to them. She had changed her clothes, and she, too, had fastened back her hair.

  Mercer remarked on her dress.

  ‘I’ve had it for years,’ she said, and the one flat note of unhappy realization in her voice made clear to him the truth of this.

  ‘It’s her best dress,’ Mary said. ‘I told her she should put it on before you got here.’

  Elizabeth Lynch nodded. ‘She wants everything to be something it isn’t,’ she said. She looked fondly at her daughter, who looked back at her with an equal affection.

  ‘Now we’ve both embarrassed him,’ Mary said.

  But the woman did not properly understand her, and so she smiled and nodded again.

  12

  He was working on his charts the following day when someone entered the room below and called up to him.

  He went down and saw Mathias Weisz waiting there, inside the doorway and close against the wall.

  Outside, a group of men swung sledgehammers into a tangled mass of wire and brick. Beside them, an even larger group of men tried unsuccessfully to coax a generator into life.

  ‘I think they’re having some problem
s,’ Mathias said. He took off his cap and held out his hand to Mercer.

  ‘Have you come alone?’

  ‘Am I under armed escort, do you mean?’ Mathias said.

  ‘I meant Jacob.’

  ‘I see. No. I am alone. I’ve been sent on an errand. One of our own pumps refuses to pump. A worn seal. I’ve been sent to – what is the word? – scrounge? But I see you have problems of your own.’

  ‘If there isn’t a problem they’ll create one and then all gather round it for an hour.’

  Mathias made a circle with his thumbs and forefingers. ‘Six inches.’

  ‘Are you flooding, too?’

  ‘In places. Nothing serious.’

  ‘I’m surprised they didn’t follow you in,’ Mercer said, indicating the men outside.

  ‘They didn’t see me. I came along the shore and up the side of the culvert. If you know where to go, you can walk for miles around here without being observed. Believe me, it was one of the first things I learned to do upon being afforded some degree of freedom.’

  ‘Come up,’ Mercer told him. ‘I need to clear a few things away.’

  Mathias followed him up the open staircase.

  ‘Jacob and I appreciated the other evening,’ he said, looking around the familiar room.

  ‘Did he get home all right?’

  Mathias fluttered his hand. ‘He overestimates his own strength sometimes.’

  ‘Or denies his own weakness.’

  ‘Whatever. He quickly exhausts himself. He imagines himself to be recovered, when, in truth, it will take much longer than he is prepared to allow.’

  All of which means you probably carried him the last part of your journey home.

  It was warm in the room, and sweat shone on Mathias’s face. He took out a white, perfectly folded handkerchief and wiped his brow. He saw Mercer watching him.

  ‘My mother always used to insist that no matter where I was, whatever conditions I was living under, I should always endeavour to have a clean handkerchief with me. She said it would keep me civilized long after all those other civilizing influences had gone or seemed too far away to matter any longer.’