by Lissa Evans
‘You remember,’ she said. ‘Brighton.’
‘Brighton?’
‘I told you.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘I did, I said that I was going to the seaside for the day, with Mario, before he goes away. You’re in a daze at the moment. I wonder if I should try and get you some cod-liver oil, you might be anaemic.’ Vee reached for Noel’s lower eyelid and he jerked his head away.
‘I’m not anaemic, and that wouldn’t help me even if I were. Anaemia’s caused by a lack of iron, whereas cod-liver oil contains vitamin A.’
‘Yes, very good,’ said Dr Parry-Jones. ‘Besides, boys of Noel’s age are rarely anaemic, not being subject to monthly menstruation.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Reddish, ‘must we mention that at the breakfast table?’
Vee continued to give Noel an appraising look, and his eyes met hers and then slithered away, his expression one that she hadn’t seen on him for years: sealed, almost furtive. He was never going to be like Miss Appleby (thank Heavens), blithely broadcasting every idea that fluttered through her head, but neither was he especially secretive – a straightforward question usually gained a straightforward answer – but when she’d asked him where he’d disappeared to on the afternoon of Christmas Day, he’d muttered, ‘A walk,’ and she’d got nothing further out of him. ‘A walk’ that had turned him back into the silent ten-year-old she’d first met five years before. She’d wondered, briefly, if Major Lumb’s minx of a grand-daughter had seduced him in the woods, but the Lumbs’ house was empty and shuttered; Mrs Lumb, apparently, had had enough of the V-2s.
Vee found her glove in the side pocket. ‘I’ll try and bring you back a strand of seaweed. Remember you used to have one you told the weather by?’ Noel nodded, his expression softening a little. ‘Everything’s in the larder for this evening,’ she added. ‘I should be back before it’s dark, it’s only a little jaunt.’
She stopped to adjust her hat in the hall mirror, just as Mr Jepson left the kitchen.
‘I haven’t seen the sea since 1939,’ he said, pausing at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Funny to think of it.’
‘I’ve never seen it,’ said Vee.
‘Really?’ He said the word without derision – eagerly, as if lit by her own excitement. ‘Well, I’ll be very interested to know what you think. It’s one of those events that happen to most people so early that they can’t remember its impact. I hope it’s everything that you imagined.’
‘Thank you.’ Though what she imagined was the illustration on the packet of desiccated coconut she’d pounced on at the grocer’s (a reckless twelve points, but worth it for Noel’s face when he saw it): a tropical island with palm trees and yellow sands, and a sea of sparkling sapphire. Mario had already told her the beach at Brighton looked like a quarry; she’d be foolish to expect too much.
‘Last chance for a vacation,’ he’d said, his voice on the telephone interrupted by the usual clicks and buzzes and sudden gaps.
‘What do you mean, “last chance”?’
‘They’re sending us to France. Or maybe not France, maybe Belgium or Holland or some place with flat roads, you know. We’re due to leave next week.’
‘Oh.’
‘They’ve taken the trucks in for service. Can you meet at the train station Thursday? Early?’
A month ago she’d have refused, she was too busy, Thursday was the day she changed all the beds and shopped for fish – but after four weeks of odd surprises and switchback decisions and unexpected calls, she felt lighter, springier, like a flattened feather cushion after a good shaking, and all she could think of was one of Mario’s favourite phrases: ‘Ah, what the hell!’ After all, would Mr Reddish actually die if he had shepherd’s pie on Friday instead of something unsuccessfully masquerading as cod? And in any case, if Mario were going to Belgium or wherever, then this might be the last time that she ever saw him, and though she’d known that this interlude was bound to be short (she wasn’t a fool) it was still painful to contemplate that when he’d gone it would be straight back to the usual: Miss Appleby mooning over her forthcoming nuptials (should the bouquet be artificial or could she get away with snowdrops and ivy?), Mr Reddish reciting ‘The Flowers of the Forest’ whenever they had Scotch eggs, and Vee sitting in the middle of it all, knowing that the chances were that nothing unpredictable would ever happen to her again, at least not in a pleasant sense.
A thaw had set in overnight, and at Victoria Station, water was spattering from a gap in the blacked-out roof into a cluster of buckets. The floor was patterned with filthy footprints, the air wringing with damp, and every single person in the booking-hall seemed to be coughing. Vee, looking round for Mario and spotting him almost immediately – that great head above the crowd – felt as if she could have swatted the germs like flies.
She was disappointed, though not in the least surprised, to find that he had brought half a carriage-load with him: six other GIs, a Tommy and two girls, neither of whom looked quite awake. He always seemed to accumulate an audience, so that even when an evening had begun with a quiet drink, within an hour or two there were half a dozen simultaneous conversations, and tricks with coins and beer-mats, and great gusts of laughter. ‘Grew up in a big family,’ he said. ‘Can’t stand it when it’s quiet.’
‘This is Margery – Mrs Margery Overs,’ announced Mario, as they headed towards the platform. ‘You want to know anything about Sardines, you just ask this lady. We played it at the camp last week, thirty-five people in the john, two of them standing on the sink. Came right off the wall, looked like Niagara.’
‘Hey there,’ said one of the GIs, flipping a salute. The girls glanced at Vee without interest.
‘Hello, Marge,’ said the Tommy, grinning. He had terrible teeth, like little brown pebbles. ‘Have you heard the news?’
‘What news?’
‘Hitler’s going to be visiting the seaside too. What’s his favourite resort?’
‘How should I know?’
‘Braunmouth. Do you get it? Like Eva Braun. Not Bournemouth, Braunmouth.’
‘Oh yes, very good,’ said Vee, politely.
‘He’s told that one already,’ said one of the girls. ‘And we’ve only been here five minutes. Here, I hope we can get a seat, I’m dead on my feet. We’ve both just come off night-shift.’
‘Where do you work?’
‘The Woolwich Arsenal. Oh look, there’s Horsey!’ The girl waved at a long-faced GI who was leaning out of the train window, beckoning them towards one of the three carriages. It was already full, every seat taken in every compartment, everyone coughing, so that it was like entering a mobile TB clinic, and Vee found herself in the corridor wedged between Mario and the Tommy, and forced to talk to the latter, since his head was more or less at the same level as hers, while Mario was conducting a shouted conversation about the Rocky Mountains with a Canadian airman who was travelling in one of the luggage racks.
‘You want to hear another?’ asked the Tommy.
‘Another what?’
‘Go on, this’ll make you laugh. It’s like a riddle. Man goes up to a greengrocer’s stall and he says, “Four oranges, please.” So what song does the coster sing in reply?’
Vee shook her head, thinking about oranges; the glow of them, as if you could warm your hands; the peel drying on the stove-top and scenting the kitchen; the soft tear, like the noise of a ripped stocking, as you separated the segments. She’d been three away in a queue from getting some last week.
‘Can’t you guess?’ said Private Tooth Stubs.
‘No, I can’t.’
‘He sings “Can I? Four? Getcha?”’
‘What?’
‘Can I Forget You?’ – do you see? Can I. Four. Getcha. That’s the joke.’
‘Oh.’ She hoisted her mouth into a smile, just as the train started with a terrible lurch, and her head snapped sideways, almost knocking a fag out of a sailor’s hand.
‘Watch what you’re doing!�
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‘Sorry.’
‘You’ll like this one,’ said the Tommy. ‘It’s a bit off-colour, but I can tell you’re the sort who don’t shock easily. There’s this vicar, and he’s taking the collection, and he looks into the basket and there’s a packet of rubber johnnies in there, so anyway, he looks along the pew …’
Vee leaned away as much as she could, turning her head so that one ear was pressed against Mario’s chest. The padded warmth was like leaning against a lagged boiler and she could feel the rumbling vibration of his voice. Over the Tommy’s shoulder she caught a glimpse of the river, and then they were back among sooty warehouses and rows of chimneys, and sudden, startling swathes of open ground, with walls like broken combs and the flash of puddles among the ruins. She saw boys running across a wasteland, and a tabby cat sitting in a glassless window, and then they were crossing a viaduct and beneath them were allotments, with a spiral of pigeons rising above the rows of winter cabbage.
The train halted for ten minutes beside a roofless school, its playground turned into a timber yard, and then again on the edge of London, next to a ploughed field containing a scarecrow dressed as a land-girl. Rooks pecked around the furrows, undeterred. One of the Woolwich girls handed round cough lozenges that tasted of burnt paper.
Half an hour passed without further movement, and then a freight train went by with dreadful slowness, each flatbed loaded with a giant roll of cable; Vee counted forty of them before closing her eyes against incipient dizziness.
Mario was telling a story about an aunt of his who found a raccoon living in her laundry-room, and two Anzacs in the next compartment were quarrelling about someone called Beryl, and then the train started up again and crawled along for a mile or two before pulling into a siding to allow another goods train past, and the journey continued in a series of jerks and pauses so that it was almost midday by the time they reached Brighton, and Vee had twice had to take the humiliating via dolorosa to the lavatory – a thousand ‘excuse me’s and the knowledge that at least ten people directly outside the door could hear every rustle and splash. Outside the station, it was sleeting, and the road down to the sea ended in a view of coiled barbed wire and concrete barriers as large as tea-huts so they all had to straggle along the front to find the newly cleared gap in the defences, shedding members of the party to pubs and chip shops along the way, so that in the end it was only Vee and Mario who picked their way past a row of rusting swings and a closed ice-cream parlour, and on to the beach. The stones clacked and slid beneath their feet, and Mario took her arm.
‘Whaddya think?’ he asked.
For a moment she couldn’t answer. She’d thought of the sea as a painting. She hadn’t imagined the noise of it, the unchanging roar, the weight of each wave slumping on to the pebbles, the drum-roll drag of its retreat; she’d thought it would be blue, but it was the colour of wet slate; she’d thought it would keep to its own place, like water in a basin, but she was more than twenty yards from the slapping edge and her lips already tasted of salt.
‘Wanna go nearer?’ asked Mario. The sleet had flattened his curls and his face was raw from the cold. ‘Wanna swim?’ And, without warning, he picked her up and started running with her towards the waves and she had never felt so silly or so young, hanging on to her hat with one hand and gripping the collar of his coat with the other, screaming with laughter while sleet blew up her skirt and a group of sailors jeered from the promenade – and when, just feet from the water, Mario lowered her on to the shingle, she found herself lunging upward, one hand on his shoulder, to aim a peck at the great red face with its dented nose, though she only managed to reach as far as his chin. She’d forgotten the feel of stubble, like taking a thistle to your mouth.
‘What’s that for?’ he asked.
‘To say thank you!’ she shouted, into the wind.
‘Did I ever tell you about my brother Iggy and the crate he found washed up on the beach?’
He had, the last time they’d met, but she didn’t mind. The open section of beach took only a few minutes to cross, and then they returned to the promenade and walked arm in arm towards the pier, heads down against the weather. The turnstiles at the entrance had been wired shut; beyond them was a stretch of churning sea, the planking above it removed so that there was a gap of forty feet between the land and the rest of the pier.
‘To stop Ay-dolf hitching his yacht there,’ said Mario. Though the Führer would still have been able to use the helter-skelter and the shooting galleries and the concert hall at the far end. Vee thought of a painting that Noel had once shown her in a book – stiffly grinning soldiers seated on a merry-go-round, the wooden horses galloping in an endless circle from one war to the next …
Just across the road, two of the GIs were queuing for fish and chips, and Vee and Mario joined them, and afterwards idled around the souvenir shops before meeting the others in a pub. Vee sat with a half of shandy next to a decent fire, and let the conversation roar above her, Mario – as always – at the centre, the genial uncle, larger, older than the rest. ‘You didn’t get conscripted, did you?’ she’d asked him, once. ‘I mean, you’re not the right age, are you?’
‘No, a cousin of mine told me they wanted truck drivers, I thought I’d get to see a few new places – you know, I didn’t join so as to kill anyone and I sure as hell didn’t mean to kill anyone …’ It was one of the few times she’d heard him sound serious, his broad face suddenly sagging, wet washing on a line. ‘Hey,’ he’d added. ‘Did I ever tell you about the guy who smuggled a monkey on to the troop ship …?’
The sleet had turned to a pattering of rain as the party straggled back towards the station and then, just as they reached the section of open beach, there was a shift in the clouds and the sea lit up like a silver tray.
‘I said I’d get Noel some seaweed,’ said Vee, pausing. The water was actually changing colour as she watched, navy blue spilling across the dark surface, as if someone had kicked over a tin of paint. ‘Do you mind if I have a look?’
‘Plenty of trains,’ said Mario.
One of the GIs came with them, and Tooth-Stubs Tommy, still grinding out his terrible jokes; the three men clattered down the series of ridges that led to the water – now much further away than before – while Vee walked more slowly, eyes to the ground, failing to find any seaweed but stooping to pick up a long, smooth shell, shaped like the spine of a book and shining as if varnished, and an odd papery oval, as light as a slice of toast, but rough to the touch. Noel would know what it was. She wrapped both objects in a handkerchief and put them in her handbag, next to the butter knife Mario had insisted on buying for her, with ‘A Present from Brighton’ painted on the china handle.
‘Now I have to pay you something for that,’ she’d said, digging in her purse for a halfpenny. ‘It’s just a superstition,’ she’d added, ‘so it doesn’t cut our friendship.’ For she’d weighed the possibilities and had decided, with some surprise, and maybe a twinge of disappointment, that that’s what it was nearest to – a friendship. After all, in their handful of meetings, he’d never once tried it on with her; there’d been none of the usual forced steerage towards a darkened doorway (she was not inexperienced in such matters), no sudden hot breath on her neck, no fat-fingered unbuttoning or unzipping or unexpected bumping into unexpected bumps; neither, though, had there been any of the lingering looks or gentle hand-holding that (in films) indicated romantic interest; he had behaved towards her with easy, teasing good nature, in the way that a decent man might treat his sister, and Vee could only suppose that he was missing his family and that she herself was in loco Carmen O’Mahoney, and she wasn’t complaining, exactly. It was just that at certain moments – as when she’d been leaning against him in the train; the warmth, the solidity of him – she could remember what it was like to actually want to be kissed, properly, the way she’d been kissed at seventeen or so, before her sex life had become a series of expediencies. And, at such moments, she couldn’t help wondering
whether her farewell embrace with Mario, when it came, might possibly run to more than an amiable arm-squeeze – might even hold a dash of fantastic promise (Hey, honey, don’t forget me, I’ll be back …).
The rain began to fall more heavily, and she abandoned her search for seaweed and waited under the eaves of the shuttered ice-cream hut until the stone-skimming contest ended in victory for Mario. ‘The thing is,’ said the Tommy, swaying close as they walked back up the hill to the station, his warm breath sliming her ear, ‘I like to sink my stones and not flick ’em. If you get my meaning.’ This time she didn’t even bother to smile.
They heard the buzz of the crowd even before they saw it bulging from the station exits. Someone inside the concourse was using a loudhailer, the speech largely unintelligible, though as they neared the entrance, Vee caught the words ‘enemy action’.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked of a spivvy-looking type in a pinstripe suit.
‘Search me. No trains, anyhow.’
‘No trains?’ Noel would be cross, she thought. And worried.
‘I’ll go see,’ said Mario, wading through the crowd, Vee and the others following him like a string of barges. The amplified words became clearer. ‘ALL LONDON–BRIGHTON LINES CURRENTLY CLOSED DUE TO ENEMY ACTION.’
‘I’ll get bloody cashiered if I’m not on duty tomorrow,’ said a voice close to Vee’s ear.
‘Hoi!’ shouted a sailor. ‘You have to tell us more than that. When’s there going to be a train?’
More voices joined the first, and there was a surge from behind, so that Vee was pushed towards the barriers.
‘It’ll be a rocket,’ said someone. ‘The railway bridge’ll be out.’
There was another pulse of bodies, and Vee was thrust forward, pinned by her shoulders, her feet dabbing at the ground, and she reached out a panicked hand and knocked off a man’s hat. He twisted round, instantly furious, the hat already unreachable as it sifted down between the elbows.
