by Robert Edric
As Mercer watched all this, he saw Lynch draw Mary to him and stand close behind her, his arm firmly across her chest, his hand clasping her shoulder. He leaned forward and kissed the top of her head, his eyes still fixed on Mercer.
Mercer wanted the girl to struggle free of him and stand apart, but she did nothing to resist him. Lynch pressed his face to the side of hers and she tilted her head to avoid his mouth – though whether to accommodate or to avoid him, Mercer could not be certain. Lynch said something to her and Mary raised her arm and waved at Mercer, who, guessing what the man had said to her, turned his back on them and walked away. Even at that distance, he could hear Lynch’s forced laughter above the noise of the flames.
In the tower, Mathias waited for him behind the door.
‘I saw what was happening,’ he said. ‘I can watch from down here without being seen.’
Mercer motioned above them. ‘How’s Jacob?’
‘Sleeping better. His breathing remains difficult and he still sweats heavily, but I sense some degree of stability. Perhaps he is recovering from his journey.’
It was something in which neither man could truly believe.
‘His limbs shake all the time,’ Mathias said. ‘Even beneath the blankets.’
Mercer told him he intended going into town – he would find an excuse to be driven – to gather together whatever medicines he was able to buy. He would also visit Bail, find out what had happened at the yard, and let Bail know that Jacob was safe. He still did not know for certain if Lynch had been there, or even if Bail had finally been evicted from his home and his livelihood.
‘I saw Roland,’ he said. ‘He told me to tell you that he’d see you again once you were both safely home.’
‘He creates fantasies within fantasies,’ Mathias said. They were interrupted by a sound above them, and went up to find that Jacob, having attempted to push himself up from his pillow, had slipped from the mattress and hit his head on the boards. He had cut himself beneath his eye, and Mercer attended to this as Mathias helped him back into bed. He looked no different to Mercer from when he had left them three hours earlier.
Later, approaching noon, Mercer sought out one of the drivers and told him to take him into town.
41
He visited both the town’s chemists. A ‘summer cold’ was all he told them, feigning casual uncertainty and disbelief, and adding that he thought several of the other workers were also suffering. He did not delude himself that the few unprescribed remedies he was able to buy would reach the cause of Jacob’s suffering, but they might at least alleviate his fever and the worst of his physical aches. And even if they only allowed him longer spells of unbroken sleep, he reasoned, then some good might come of them. He convinced himself of all this while he lied to the chemists, rubbing his sore throat and wiping imaginary sweat from his brow.
Arriving at Bail’s, he was dismayed to find the gates padlocked and a large sign already in place warning trespassers to keep out. The notice had been posted by the new owners. The building in which Jacob had lodged, and in which Bail had maintained his forge, had already been half-demolished, and the exposed shell now stood derelict and open. He looked to the edge of the yard and saw that the house in which Bail had lived was also being torn down. A bulldozer pushed flat what remained of the walls, and diggers scooped the rubble into the backs of waiting lorries. He had grown accustomed to change over the previous months, but it shocked him to see how quickly and completely it had taken place here.
He walked towards the house and saw Bail standing by the drain at some distance beyond the flattened building. He called to him, but Bail gave no indication of having heard him, and so Mercer went to him, careful to avoid attracting the attention of the men undertaking the demolition work.
Bail stood with his back to him and stared into the water of the drain where Mercer had seen the swan. The surface of the channel was coated with a grey scum which clotted in curves in the stagnant water. A short distance away, a mound of rubble from the house had been shoved over the low bank and into the water.
‘Did you know that all this was so close to happening?’ Mercer asked him.
Bail nodded, still without turning.
‘You must have known for months.’
‘So what? So why didn’t I do something about it instead of pretending everything was going to be all right? So why didn’t I try to make a proper go of the place, pay back the bank and keep everyone out?’
‘I didn’t mean to criticize.’
‘Perhaps because I’m no different from all those tens of thousands of others who thought they were owed something, a breathing space, a chance to take stock and catch up. Perhaps because I believed everything I was told. Get the war out of the way and the future will take care of itself. Well, not here it didn’t, not here.’ The man’s disillusionment and sense of betrayal were complete.
‘Jacob’s safe,’ Mercer said eventually. ‘He’s with me.’
‘I guessed as much.’
‘He’s ill, worse. I know how much you did for him. I know what your trust and friendship meant to him.’
‘Yes, well …’ Bail said, meeting Mercer’s eyes for the first time. ‘I doubt he lives in much hope of anything from anyone else.’
‘Mathias is with him.’
‘And what’s he going to do? Wait until you’re not looking, get the nod from Jacob and then smother him with a pillow?’
‘You surely don’t believe that.’
‘No, but I can see it’s something you’ve not given any thought to.’
This further hostile remark made Mercer even more wary of him, and he made no response to it.
‘That bastard Lynch was here,’ Bail said. ‘Arrived just as this lot got here.’ He jabbed his gloved hand over his shoulder, unable to look around him and face what was happening there. ‘Waited for them to break open the gates and then came in with them, swearing and cursing and shouting the odds about what he was going to do to the filthy Jew, about what a disgrace he was and what he deserved.’
‘But why? He doesn’t even know the man,’ Mercer said.
Bail looked at him coldly. ‘There’s always somebody asking, “Why?” Always somebody standing off to one side and asking, “Why?” I don’t bloody know why. Why does there have to be a reason? There isn’t a reason. The man makes up his own reasons. He was never any different – always looking for someone weaker than himself, someone to blame for everything that was wrong in his own life. Perhaps that’s why. Perhaps it’s as simple as that. I doubt it’s the kind of explanation that would satisfy a man like you, but perhaps it’s all there is for the rest of us.’
‘And presumably Jacob had already gone.’
‘I got him out the back while they were still smashing down the gates and threatening to shoot the dogs. They came early. I was expecting a few more days. I went up there and helped him get his things together. He left a lot of stuff which I boxed up and put in the house.’ He looked at the flattened building. ‘And then they came for that, so the stuff’s out in the yard. Nothing he’ll want, nothing valuable. A few books and clothes. He left his crucible and tongs and the other bits and pieces of his glass-making.’
‘Are there any of his bowls?’
‘Smashed. Every one of them.’
‘Does he know?’
Bail laughed. ‘Know? He did it. There’s me rushing round gathering everything together for him, shouting at him to get out, and what does he do? Goes straight to the cupboard where he keeps them all, takes them out and then smashes them one at a time, piece by piece, smash smash smash.’ He made a throwing motion into the water. ‘And those that didn’t shatter into enough pieces for him, he crushed with his foot.’
‘Didn’t you try to stop him?’
‘Why should I? He would just have done it later. I didn’t see this lot look too carefully at everything they smashed to pieces. I was born in that house. So, no, I didn’t stop him. I just let him get on with it while I grabb
ed what I could of his other things. They were through the gates by then.’
‘And you, no doubt, confronted Lynch while Jacob made his escape,’ Mercer said.
‘He could scarcely walk, especially with his bag. If he made it as far as you then he must have dumped half of what he set out with. I stopped Lynch at the forge door. He’s not so keen when people stand up to him.’
‘Especially people cradling iron bars?’
Bail smiled. ‘I told him Jacob was long gone and that I had enough on my hands with everything else that was happening to bother with him. They were all over the place by then. They wanted to know who Lynch was and what he was doing there. He took himself off into town after that.’
An oil drum floated beneath them, the sheen of its spilled fuel spreading slowly in its wake.
‘Do you have any idea what medicines Jacob was taking?’ Mercer said.
‘I asked him once, but he wouldn’t say. He said they were all useless. I never asked again.’
A bulldozer approached close to where they stood, pushing a mound of bricks and earth ahead of it.
‘They shouldn’t come so close to the drains,’ Bail said. ‘They haven’t got the first idea.’
Mercer told him that he had to leave. ‘I’ll tell Jacob I saw you, shall I?’ he said.
Bail nodded. ‘We sort of fell against each other for support,’ he said. ‘I lost my brothers and he lost his sister and everyone else. We just fell and leaned together waiting for the first one to move.’ He breathed deeply and then blew out his breath.
‘I saw a swan here once,’ Mercer said.
‘They nested further along the drain. They won’t be here for too long now, not with all this going on.’
Mercer could think of nothing more to say to him, and so he left him and walked back into the centre of the town and the waiting driver.
42
Upon his return, he saw that the fire outside Daniels’s house still burned, though much lower now, and was more ash and charred remains than kindling or flame. Daniels himself stood beside it and several others congregated a short distance from him. Neither Lynch nor Mary nor her mother were among them.
At the site, the workers were preparing to leave. The foreman told him of the day’s mixed achievements and delays, and he could imagine how little had been done during his absence. He waited until the last of the lorries had gone before going inside.
Mathias was waiting for him. He stood at the barely open door and watched as the last of the lorries manoeuvred onto the road.
Mercer spread out the medicines he had collected. Mathias watched him, but with little interest or enthusiasm.
‘They ought to help,’ Mercer said, but he, too, lacked conviction. ‘How’s he been?’
‘Sleeping, mostly. He was woken once or twice. Lynch was here.’
‘What did he want?’
‘Just to bang on the door, shout for you, and to rant and rave. He was convinced you were inside, hiding from him. I think he’d been looking for you on the site.’
‘Did he know either you or Jacob were here?’
‘I doubt it. He just wanted to make his presence felt and to put on a show for the others.’
‘Others?’
‘They’ve been standing round that fire all day. He had his daughter with him. He shouted up for you to show yourself and to look out at her. He said that if you were too much of a coward to reveal yourself to him, then you could at least be man enough to answer the girl.’
‘Did she say anything?’
‘Not a word. She came back alone, later. She knocked and called two or three times, and then she left again. I think her father was somewhere on the site with the men.’
‘When was this?’
‘An hour ago. I considered letting her in, but there were workers nearby and they would have seen. I thought of letting her in to sit with Jacob until you got back. I need to see Roland, to try and talk him out of doing anything stupid.’
You’re already too late, Mercer thought.
‘From what you told me of your encounter with him this morning …’
Mercer held open the door and Mathias went, promising to return as soon as possible.
He climbed to where Jacob lay. The tremor of his limbs was more marked than earlier, and sweat still coated his face and chest. And looking down at him, and knowing that Jacob might not now even be aware of his presence, let alone respond to him, he saw how futile his errand had been, how pointless his absence at such a critical time.
He knelt beside Jacob and told him what he had managed to buy, then told him of his meeting with Bail. But Jacob gave no indication of having heard him. His eyes flickered restlessly beneath their closed lids. Mercer wiped his face and hands and slid a clean pillow beneath his head. Jacob groaned as he did this, and Mercer turned away at the sourness of his breath. He wiped the damp cloth over Jacob’s lips.
He sat for an hour at his chart table, uncertain how much of the day’s anticipated work had been completed, and he saw again what a clean and ordered fiction the charts represented, how little of the place’s true history or geography they revealed. He saw, too, and not for the first time, what necessary deceits he himself had perpetrated at that crucial time in the place’s history: he was no longer the man standing at the calm centre of the rising storm, no longer a mere observer, someone detached and apart from the lives and events already meshed and spinning unstoppably towards their conclusion there: he was a part of that storm, and, possibly, in all he was there to demolish and to build anew, its most potent and destructive current.
He fell asleep where he sat, and was woken by someone knocking softly on the tower door. Imagining this to be Mathias, and waiting until he was certain it was not Lynch, he went down.
He opened the door and Mary came quickly in.
By then the sun was much lower, and the inside of the tower was filled with its yellow light.
She stood to one side, waiting for him to close and bolt the door behind her before speaking.
‘You and your father were here earlier,’ he said, unwilling to listen to her excuses.
‘He said you’d go out to him if I was there.’
‘And this morning’s little performance?’
‘He was just angry.’
‘He’s always angry.’
‘He was mad that Daniels was leaving.’
‘Why should that matter to him?’
‘Because it’s Daniels who the others trust. He said that Daniels was abandoning them all, that he’d betrayed them.’
‘Did Daniels say he was going?’
‘He burned everything he owned.’
‘What else did your father say?’ It was clear to him that Lynch had had no idea that Mathias and Jacob were in the tower when he had come there earlier.
‘He said that he was going, too. I told him that I was going with him, and my mother grabbed me and asked me what I was talking about. He waited until I’d told her I was leaving and going with him before telling me he had no intention of taking me with him. He let me say it. He stood and smiled and nodded at her while I said it.’
‘Proving another of his points. Letting her know what lies ahead of her.’
‘She knows that well enough.’
‘You still said what you said to her.’
‘And he made sure she heard every word of it. I told him he’d promised me and he told me to go to him. He grabbed me and shook me and shouted in my ear to ask if I was hearing him any better. He laughed at me, at us both. She told him to go back out and to carry on picking a fight with Daniels. She said Daniels was ten times the man he would ever be.’
‘And so, presumably, he hit her to prove her wrong.’
She took a deep breath. ‘He went on hitting her. Those outside must have heard the noise she made because someone knocked on the door and shouted in to ask if everything was all right. Daniels came, too, and shouted the same. He banged on the door. My mother shouted that she was fine and fo
r everybody to go away and leave her alone. He hit her again, but she didn’t make any noise after that. He was hitting just her instead of both of us. He made that much clear to her. He kept asking her if she’d had enough, because he hadn’t finished yet. She shouted for me to go upstairs to Peter.’
‘And?’
‘And I went.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He waited until everybody had gone and then he went out. I thought he might have come here again.’
‘Do you think he might have done what he’s been threatening, and gone for good?’
She shrugged. ‘He had nothing with him.’
‘Had he been drinking?’
She nodded.
A noise from above distracted them both.
‘I have to go back up,’ he told her, still unwilling for her to accompany him and see Jacob there.
‘Is it Mathias?’ she said.
‘Yes, Mathias.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘I saw him leave earlier. It’s Jacob, isn’t it?’
A further noise silenced them both.
‘He’s ill,’ Mercer said. ‘They were both here earlier when you and your father—’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I saw the two of you carrying him last night. I watched you from the dunes.’
‘I have to go back up to him,’ he said. He climbed the stairs and she followed him.
Jacob had again half-fallen from the mattress and Mercer pulled him back onto it.
‘What’s that smell?’ she said.
Jacob had vomited onto his blankets. A clear, viscous pool. She wiped the bulk of this up with newspapers and then soaked a cloth and dabbed at what remained.
