by Robert Edric
Now that he had seen the bruise, she made no further effort to conceal it from him.
‘He said he’d asked you for work,’ she said.
‘Not within my power. You know that. He knows it.’
‘He said you’d told him something or other just to get rid of him.’
‘I told him the truth.’
‘He would have said the same whatever you’d told him.’ It was her first concession, and he felt encouraged by it.
‘I wouldn’t lie to him,’ he told her.
‘You will eventually,’ she said. ‘Everybody does. Tell him what he wants to hear, I mean.’
‘Not knowing how important his return is to you and Mary,’ he said.
‘Everything he tells her to do, she does,’ she said. ‘She won’t deny him a single thing.’
‘I know. I saw her with him the other day, selling the tobacco.’
‘He made her pick those clothes from my wardrobe. Told me I had no cause to complain because I hadn’t worn them for years. Told me I’d let myself go.’
‘He can’t know how difficult it’s been for you, living here alone with your children to care for.’
‘No one’s suffered compared to him,’ she said.
‘That’s according to him, I take it.’
‘What else,’ she said. Her growing confidence – knowing that whatever she said would not be repeated to her husband – had made her momentarily brave.
They walked away from the gently breaking waves.
‘How’s Jacob?’ she said unexpectedly.
‘Not well. Have you seen him recently?’
‘I know Bail. Everybody does. He used to come out to work on the boats before the war.’
They stopped walking. She picked up a piece of cloth, shook the sand from it, examined it and then threw it back down. ‘Habit of living by the sea,’ she said. She looked out over the water. ‘There was a ship sunk during the war,’ she said, pointing to the horizon. ‘A coaster, nothing much. We had seven bodies wash up here. All within a few yards of each other. Happened one night, November time. We used to hear the planes often enough, with the airfield so near, but that one small coaster was the closest the war came to us.’
‘I suppose the tides and the channels would gather the bodies together.’
‘Some of them were laid so close and with their arms over each other, just as though they were holding each other up, trying to help one another out. Boys they were. One or two older men, but mostly boys. Someone from the Ministry came, and then a lorry full of coffins arrived a day later. They told us all to stay away, but we went out and pulled them all clear of the water-line. Instinct, see. She must have been carrying coal, because it all came washing up over the next few weeks. We had a field day. There were four of them never found. Must have gone down with her, I suppose.’
‘How was she sunk?’
‘We never knew. Most likely to have been a stray mine, they said. Either dropped from a plane or one of our own floated loose.’ She paused. ‘Does Jacob talk to you much about that place he was in?’
‘Not really.’ He hid his surprise at this sudden change in direction.
‘I saw that newsreel,’ she said. ‘People got up and walked out, said there should have been some warning. Woman sitting next to me just sat with her hands over her eyes asking me to tell her when it was finished. It was a terrible thing to see. Was it the same place?’
‘Possibly, or another like it.’
‘That poor man,’ she said. ‘We none of us know the half of it.’
‘Most – all – of his family were killed,’ Mercer said.
‘And that’s why he came here, is it? Some of the things they said had happened, you wouldn’t think one man was capable of doing them to another. There can’t be much left in him.’
‘Sorry?’
‘In him. Faith, trust in his – what is it – fellow man, that sort of thing.’
He remembered Bail using the same words. ‘I was thinking much the same,’ he said, and was about to say more when she suddenly turned away from him.
‘Behind you,’ she whispered.
He turned, expecting to see Lynch, but saw only another woman coming along the beach at some distance from them.
As she approached, Mercer recognized her as one of the younger women with whom he had spent time during those earlier, warmer evenings, one who had always responded to the calls and encouragement of the men. She was perhaps nineteen or twenty, only four or five years older than Mary, and he saw in her a great deal of what Mary might become were she to remain there.
She stopped only a few feet from them.
‘You two look cosy,’ she said.
‘We were just talking,’ Mercer said.
‘Did I say otherwise? All I said was you looked cosy.’ She turned to Elizabeth Lynch. ‘Your loving husband not around, I take it.’
‘In town,’ Elizabeth Lynch said, her face still half-turned from the woman.
‘That’s handy.’
‘I ought to go,’ Elizabeth Lynch said to Mercer.
‘Don’t worry – I won’t say anything,’ the woman said.
‘Because there’s nothing to say,’ Mercer said, his voice rising.
‘Right. No. Just the two of you miles from anywhere having a nice cosy chat.’
Unable to tolerate this intrusion any longer, and angry that he and Elizabeth Lynch had been interrupted like this when he might have learned so much more from her, Mercer said, ‘I’ll go. It was nice meeting you. Give your husband and Mary my regards.’
Elizabeth Lynch said nothing, knowing that all this was said solely for the benefit of the watching woman.
‘What about me?’ the woman said. ‘Wasn’t it nice meeting me? Don’t I get your regards?’
Mercer looked at her and she smiled coldly at him.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I know when to keep my big mouth shut.’ She reached out and turned Elizabeth Lynch’s face with her finger. Elizabeth Lynch did nothing to resist her.
Mercer anticipated that the woman might now regret what she had said and perhaps apologize for her behaviour, but she did nothing other than lower her hand and turn away from the older woman’s gaze.
31
Two days after this encounter, he set out from the tower with the intention of finding Daniels. He had not spoken to the man since they had carried wood together. He asked another of the men he encountered if he had seen Daniels, and he indicated the abandoned lighthouse, where he had spoken to him an hour earlier.
As he came close to the structure, he saw Daniels on the far side of it.
He turned at Mercer’s approach and came towards him. He pointed out to Mercer where the silt and shingle had combined to build outwards from the old shoreline, leaving the Light further and further inland as the years progressed.
‘Five years ago, the high tides covered its base,’ he said. Fifty yards of overgrown foreshore now lay between the building and the water-line. It was early evening, the light was already fading, and with the onset of darkness came the sharp smell of the sea.
Daniels invited him into his home, and Mercer accepted.
The house was as small and as crudely built as all the others. Heavy furniture filled the single groundfloor living room. It was considerably cooler inside the house than outside. Piles of papers, clothes and half-filled cases lay scattered on the floor and on each of the surfaces.
‘Have you started packing or not finished unpacking?’ Mercer said.
‘Both.’
Mercer had intended the remark as a joke, but he knew from Daniels’s tone that this was not how he had understood it. Either suggestion, Mercer saw – the twin notions of forced return and unwilling departure – implied more than Daniels was prepared or able to discuss with him.
‘Perhaps I thought she’d see the error of her ways and come running back here,’ Daniels said.
‘Her return must have been highly likely, surely?’ Mercer said, knowing
how dismissive the remark might have sounded.
‘Exciting place, London, especially during wartime,’ Daniels said. ‘The bombs and rockets might have added an unwelcome note to the proceedings, but apart from them, I’d say it was the place to be. She obviously thought so.’ He still loved her. He had lost her without understanding why she had gone, and her loss remained unbearable to him.
‘Will you leave a forwarding address?’
‘Do you mean will I tell Elizabeth Lynch where I’m going?’
It only then occurred to Mercer that if Daniels left the place without letting anyone know where he was going, then there would be no chance whatsoever of his wife ever finding him in the future. He knew with equal conviction that the woman was not coming back, that she had made a new life for herself elsewhere, and he wondered how many more years would pass before Daniels, too, started to move forward. Everything about the untidy, crowded room spoke of the emptiness at its centre.
Mercer picked up a photograph of the three of them together. He recognized the Old Light. He looked hard at the small child in the picture, held between both parents.
Daniels cleared a seat for himself and threw more wood on to the low fire.
‘He was five when that was taken,’ he said. ‘Same age the Lynch boy is now.’
It seemed an unnecessary, though pointed, comparison to make, and Mercer wondered if the child played any part in Daniels’s own cold regard of Lynch. Daniels took the photograph from him and stood it back in its place.
Thin curtains hung at the only window. They were holed, and frayed at the edges, and the evening sun bled through them. They were seldom opened.
‘This was never how I intended to live,’ Daniels said, indicating the room around him.
‘Would you have stayed in Denmark if your wife had settled there?’
‘Her name was Amelia.’ And even saying that much was almost beyond him.
They were interrupted by the noisy passage of two jet-engine aircraft low over the houses and the whole room shook in the turbulence of their passing.
‘You get used to it,’ Daniels said, smiling as Mercer put out a hand as though to steady himself. It was the first time in all his time there that the aircraft had come so close or flown so low over the place. ‘You should have been here a couple of months ago – one of them crashed.’
‘Here?’
‘Out on the water. Apparently, they’d been putting on a demonstration for some high-ranking visitors. The plane was climbing almost vertically when something went wrong and it started to lose power and to twist and turn. It must have been obvious to everyone watching that something was seriously wrong with it.’ He made a clumsy, spiralling motion with his hands.
‘Did the pilot get out?’
Daniels shook his head. ‘Apparently, he tried to get the plane back under control. And, having gone up, up, up, it flipped over on to its back, hung there for a few seconds, and then came down. I watched it from the dunes. We all did. Like with the bombs, somebody made the mistake of coming to the houses earlier and forbidding us to watch. I doubt the descent, if you can call it that, lasted more than two or three seconds. Straight down, both engines screaming away. It hit the water, but the tide was out. I expected an explosion, but there wasn’t one. It just hit the water and disappeared. Someone said afterwards that the canopy-release mechanism had failed and that even if the pilot had tried to get out, he wouldn’t have been able to. They had a boat waiting, but it found nothing. The few bits of wreckage didn’t surface for hours. The rest of it must have hit the mud and buried itself deep.’
‘Was the pilot ever found?’ Mercer said, remembering what Elizabeth Lynch had told him about the bodies of the seamen.
‘Not so far. There’s a marker buoy where they think the bulk of the wreck still lies, but they can’t even be certain about that, otherwise they’d have come and retrieved everything by now. They were all over the place for a few days, kept everyone away. I offered my services, but they turned me down. They looked in all the wrong places for stuff to wash up.’
‘And since then?’
‘The planes still come and go. No fancy aerobatics, though, no shows.’
‘There must have been any number of crash-landings over on the airfield,’ Mercer suggested.
Discussions were already under way in the town concerning the erection of a memorial to the Americans who had been stationed at the airfield, and to those who had died, either there or on missions.
‘There was never any church here,’ Daniels said. ‘It would have made a big difference. A chapel, even. The town was always too far off. When a boat was lost, or somebody drowned, then someone would come from one of the town churches and hold a ceremony on the shore.’
‘But it was never how the people here mourned their losses?’
‘They appreciated the gesture, but they knew that’s all it was. No, they mourned in their own ways.’ He took down a bottle from a shelf beside the hearth.
By then the new wood was burning and the heat and noise of the sudden blaze filled the room. Ash and dust spread from beneath the grate over the boards at Mercer’s feet. Sparks flew into the room and died before they landed; occasionally, a burning ember fell from the hearth and added its own distinctive aroma to the room.
Daniels poured them both drinks.
‘You’re right to think that I resent Lynch his two children when my only son died,’ he said.
‘You may re-marry and have more,’ Mercer said.
Daniels considered this and shook his head. ‘He’s four houses away and I can still hear him shouting at her, at them all, through the walls.’
‘You can’t have believed that he would have changed while he was away.’
‘At least not for the better.’
‘Did you try to persuade her to leave before he came back? Her and the children?’
‘Leave with me, you mean? She wouldn’t have done it in a hundred years. Whatever you might choose to believe now, having seen him for yourself, she has never been unfaithful to him, or disloyal. I told her once, drunk and angry, that she was a fool to stay with him and she hit me. I apologized, of course, but I’d said it and it was too late and there was no going back. Perhaps I was hoping she’d learn her lesson the way I learned mine.’
‘Whatever happened then, you seem to understand all this clearly enough now.’
Daniels refilled their glasses. ‘I’ve had plenty of time to think about it. She told me from the outset that Amelia would never come back here.’
Your own unfaithful and disloyal wife.
‘Most of the others thought they were being kinder in suggesting otherwise, but not her. And when I asked her how she could be so certain, she said she didn’t know why – just that she knew Amelia wouldn’t come back. She said she didn’t ever want to become an excuse between us. There was already enough uncertainty, she said, without us creating more.’
‘It was her way of telling you that she would not jeopardize her marriage to Lynch.’
Daniels laughed. ‘The boy was only a baby when they arrested him. It was her way of protecting her son – nothing to do with how she felt about Lynch.’ He drained his glass.
Mercer was not convinced by this, but he said nothing. Everywhere he looked in the place – in the houses and beyond – he saw the soil in which Daniels’s anger lay rooted. It was an open, exposed place, and yet there did not seem to be the smallest part of it which did not possess its secrets.
The last of the falling sun penetrated the shabby curtains, and Daniels moved around the room lighting lamps. The fire cast its own shifting pattern of shadow and light over every surface. The voices of the children could be heard outside.
‘They’ll erect a memorial to the air-crew who died,’ Mercer said.
‘Not here, they won’t. And they won’t put a stone up for that poor bastard who landed nose-first on the bottom of the sea. They’ll want something clean and solid and dignified.’
‘Unlike
the actual deaths of the men they commemorate, you mean?’
‘I sailed on a ship that sank forty miles off Cape Wrath. She wasn’t torpedoed or bombed; she was just overloaded and too old for the job. She started taking on water the minute we left Liverpool. Forty-seven men and only eleven of us were rescued. We had a corvette with us, but she was too busy running up and down the line to come back and take care of us. Friendly waters. Told us there was a boat coming out from Peterhead for us. Well, whether it was on its way or not, it never got there. Instead, we got two days of storms. I don’t hear much talk of that particular monument.’
‘Perhaps people need time to see all these things in perspective.’
Daniels looked at him in disbelief. ‘All they need time for is to forget,’ he said.
The clock on the mantel struck eight.
‘I ought to be getting back,’ Mercer said, and rose to leave.
32
Lynch approached him the following morning, and Mercer’s first thought was that the man had heard of his encounter with Elizabeth Lynch two days earlier. He braced himself against the man’s assault, relieved that he was alone, and that the men closest to him were at least a hundred yards distant. He saw Lynch coming and started walking away from him, depriving him further of the audience he craved.
He heard the man calling to him as he walked, but pretended not to hear, finally stopping and turning only when it was impossible for him not to have heard.
‘I’ve got work to do,’ he said as Lynch finally reached him.
‘No need to be so unfriendly,’ Lynch said. ‘I only wanted to ask a favour.’
‘What?’
‘I need a lift into town. If any of the drivers was going back there in the next, say, hour.’
‘Unlikely,’ Mercer told him.
‘But you could make it happen, right? If you wanted to. I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important.’
‘I need them all here,’ Mercer said. ‘The work’s behind.’
Lynch held up both his palms. ‘Only asking, mate, on the off chance. We’ll walk.’ He put his finger and thumb in his mouth and whistled loudly.
