THE BOOK OF LEAHSpend too long admiring someone from a distance and you convince yourself that you know them, but it’s an ambush. So it was with Ben.
We were formally introduced on the first day of school, Miriam Calder drawing us into a circle in the staff room. She took hold of him by his upper arms and manoeuvred him forward, as if he were a small boy who might need some cajoling to join in with the silly girls. He smiled awkwardly at us, at this unnecessary, quite literal, manhandling.
Miriam’s voice came like syrup: ‘Now then, ladies, I’m sure you’d like to welcome the lovely Mr Hailey to St Rita’s School.’
‘Ben,’ he corrected as he began his round of greetings – the primary teachers first, then an unimpressed Ruth French, followed by Barbara Stanney, who grasped his hand and shook it with the same manic passion she applied to the keys of the chapel organ.
‘Yes, Benjamin Hailey,’ said Miriam, as if his first name, the full version of it, belonged to her.
I could feel the heat rising up my neck as he worked towards me, greeting our part-time assistants next, reaching down for the hand of Faith Moran, who was matched in height by some of the juniors she helped to teach, then Dellie Leven, who gave a quiet ‘hello’.
My turn.
‘Hi, Ben,’ I said in a voice as cool and dry as the hand he placed in mine. Then I spoilt it by gushing, ‘It’s so good to have a man on the team at last!’
My cheeks stung with the too-muchness of myself.
A man – he was certainly that. Tall, clean, vital, yet vulnerable-looking, boyish. He was an exotic blond, his gaze narrow and green. Ask, and it shall be given you, says the Gospel of St Matthew, seek and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. I believed in the notion, but this was an extravagance, obscene. Ben was a white rabbit being pulled from a hat, a coin appearing from behind an ear. I wanted to laugh at the outrageousness of it all, which would have been preferable to my actual response – withdrawal. Our greatest fear is not that we’ll never receive the thing we long for, but that we will, and then what?
I ignored him, stretching only to pleasantries in the corridor, and, like the other women, I helped to nudge him through the timetable of the day. He fell easily into the role of the hopeless boy, not knowing where anything was, how anything worked. Merrily, we played the eye-rolling matriarchs, smug in the solving of his problems. It was a smart initiation. Mr Crane rarely breached the threshold of our staff room, unless announcing something important or calling us to prayer. We weren’t used to a man in our small, private space. Ben made himself as unthreatening as possible.
Yet still I hung back. I watched Barbara Stanney giggle with him at the kitchenette, transformed into a young woman again in the flow of his jokes and patter. She would bump her hip against his impishly, put a hand to his back – ‘Oh, stop it, Mr Hailey, what are you like!’ Even Ruth French dropped her defences early, delivering cutting assessments of Ben’s shirts and ties, snorting at the way he’d styled his hair. From her, this was acceptance, even affection. Each of my female colleagues was gifted their own individual way to be comfortable in his presence; I remained empty-handed.
One lunchtime in the staff room, he shared his desire to move on from his boarding situation with the widow Esther Deezer. The others cooed their dismay at Esther’s treatment of him – the meagre meals, the strict curfews. (‘Have you told her you’re not one of those fellas from the telephone company?’) I, meanwhile, affected a lack of interest. I slipped off my heels, hooked my feet beneath me on one of the low, soft chairs, as if I was at home, as if I was alone. I chewed on an apple and looked down into a book.
I kept an ear out for what was going on, of course. It was Faith Moran who proposed the Billet House on the edge of estate land where the harbour master, Abe Powell, lived with Saul Cooper, our Customs Officer, and Reuben Springer, a boatman and occasional barman for his brother Jed who ran the Anchor. The young Cater brothers lived there too, Mark and Andy, both farm labourers, along with Luke Signal, a wiry lad always in an oversized wax jacket, recently apprenticed under my father, the gamekeeper. This was much to the annoyance of Mary Ahearn, Jade-Marie’s mother, a rugged woman, capable, strong. She had been my father’s deputy for the last fourteen years and had long thought the senior post would go to her as my father prepared to hang up his boots. Then along came Luke, a male heir, and we all knew how that was likely to work itself out.
It was a bad idea for Ben to go and live in the Billet House, though it was hard to express why. The lodgings were basic, a little harsh, suited to a certain kind of man. They were built in 2002 not long after the Great Drowning, when ten new workers were hired from the mainland to replace the lost and needed to be housed all at once. It had been a necessary move – the recruitment, the swift construction – but was considered clumsy, as if the Council believed the only problem to solve in the wake of the accident was one of economics, of hands on deck. A couple of those drafted-in men married into the community, but most of them left.
Every one of the Billet House’s current residents was, in himself, a respected islander, but all of them there together, in that place… it gave me a creeping, anxious feeling. If I could have found the words to explain my misgivings, still I’d have kept them to myself. Around Ben, I was bound tight. I was gagged by my knowledge that he was the Knight of Cups. That he was meant for me.
I believed that unequivocally. His arrival was no coincidence, not a hopeful connection between a random card and an existing passenger list. He was a supernatural gift – and this terrified me, rendered me mute, taciturn at best. It was a disaster. Ben was building an idea of me from a distance, as I was of him, but all he could see was someone serious, difficult, prissy. If only I’d behaved like the old me – sweet, eager Miss Cedars – she was so much easier to love.
Then the rains came.
I told Margaritte of my predicament with Ben one Tuesday evening and my need for some kind of intervention. She had picked the heads of the clover that lived in the cracks in the path leading up to her door. To these, she added some leaves from the climbing ivy at the front of her cottage and pressed them with a stem from a potted jasmine. She wrapped them in paper, muttering as she folded, and told me she would drop them on Ben’s doorstep at midnight. To her, it was a cure as straightforward as a painkiller for a headache.
Margaritte said the subsequent downpour was an answer to my wish; the universe listening and responding. I said that the September rains always found a way in, it just happened to be my classroom’s turn to be flooded.
Michael Signal, my eldest Fifth Year, received the first torrent. The storm growled its approach and when the clouds gave way, so did the ceiling tile above his head. He leapt from his seat, yelping. My pair of Fourth Year girls, Eve Grogan and Abigail Pass, squealed with delight – ‘Michael’s wet himself! Michael’s wet himself!’ – until the ceiling tile above their heads gave into the second spill, destroying their felt-tip diagrams of erosional landforms. That second deluge, the one that fell on the girls, I am willing to believe was divine interference – or divine punishment. Against whom do ye sport yourselves? says the Book of Isaiah. Against whom make ye a wide mouth, and draw out the tongue? No one but yourselves, that’s who.
‘All of you, up!’ I yelled. ‘Into Mr Hailey’s class! Off you go!’ They made swift armfuls of their bags and books, bumping one another out of the room, exhilarated by disaster.
‘Michael!’ I called. The boy turned to me, bedraggled. ‘You’re already wet, so you might as well be the one to fetch Mr Huxley from the harbourside.’
Our caretaker spent his mornings by the water once he had opened up the school, boat maintenance and net mending being his second skills.
But Ben was all of a sudden there, in my classroom, throwing down a heavy cloth bag, clattering tin buckets beneath the ceiling’s streams.
‘It’s alright, Michael,’ he said. ‘No need for Huxley. You get dry in my classroom. Mrs Leven can find you a towel. I’ve got this.’
The boy left and Ben dragged a ladder in from the corridor, grinning, as thrilled by this crisis as the children were.
‘I’ll go and assist Mrs Leven,’ I said, feeling surplus to requirements and doubting Dellie’s ability to handle all sixteen of our students at once.
‘No,’ said Ben, ‘I’ll need you.’ He gave me an even bigger grin, a disarming one. ‘I’ll need someone to pass me tools.’
My eyes went to the heavy cloth bag he’d thrown down at safe distance from the pooling water. His initials and surname were etched onto the fabric in marker pen. B. E. Hailey.
Elijah? I wondered. Ezekiel?
He set up the ladder near the source of the first torrent.
‘You brought tools?’ I said.
Miriam’s story about the single rucksack – I had believed it. He’d left everything behind, I’d decided, physical and metaphorical. But the tool bag couldn’t be the single bag, else how did he get all those shirts and ties here, and the tacky product he was putting in his hair, and the something he wore on his skin that smelt of coconut?
‘Yeah. I brought tools. That’s okay, isn’t it?’
‘Of course!’ I said. ‘Of course! Sorry!’
There it was – a glimpse of the old Miss Cedars. Sugary, apologetic.
He crouched at my feet and opened the bag. The buckets, half full, chimed tunelessly, the first streams settling to heavy drips. Ben stood up, a torch in hand, and caught me staring, solemnly reappraising him.
‘What?’ he asked with a cautious smile.
I shook my head. ‘Nothing. Sorry. Hadn’t we better crack on?’
He climbed the ladder, and I passed him a large screwdriver, then a knife, as he prised out the dampened tiles above us. While he worked, he explained that he had brought a large crate of equipment from the mainland too, along with his tools. Saul Cooper had hoodwinked Miriam Calder with that just-one-bag story no doubt, knowing she would spread word fast and wide, bedding in suspicion about our newcomer right from the start.
Inside this crate were science-lab essentials – microscopes and Petri dishes, three-way switches and soldering irons, boiling flasks and Bunsen burners. Ben said he’d got a sense from his telephone interviews with Mr Crane that there would be very little apparatus to play with at the school. He’d even made an advance order of chemicals to arrive with him on the August ship. Everything was stacked up in Esther Deezer’s front room and would need fetching across to the school soon, since Esther didn’t believe in using her front room for anything, not even for tea with Father Daniel when he did his rounds.
‘So, all I need now,’ said Ben, as he passed down the sodden tiles, ‘is for someone to help me steal a gas canister from the kitchen?’
‘What for?’ I asked.
‘To make fire!’ he pronounced in a conjuror’s voice.
He hauled himself up into the crawl space above the classroom to find the source of the leak. It took us about an hour to fix it, me making trips up and down the ladder, holding torches, passing pliers, finding cloths and nails. At one point, Ben requested a fifty-pence piece, as if I would have one on my person. I laughed, thinking it a joke, but he genuinely needed it.
‘You settle everything at the end of the month,’ I found myself explaining, ‘at the Anchor and at the Provisions Store. There’s little reason to carry cash.’ It was not the first everyday and obvious thing that he had needed spelling out to him. His delight at these details, his amazement even – it could make you feel weird and backward, but also exceptional, glamorous.
I went into the other classroom to retrieve some change from Ben’s jacket and, after returning and handing over the coin, I offered: ‘The black thing in your pocket with the money…’ I’d pulled out a smooth, almost-alien object to get to the coins below. ‘Sorry, that was rude,’ I countered swiftly, speaking only to the movement of him above me in the darkness. ‘You don’t have to say, it’s just that…’
‘The iPhone?’ he called down.
‘I thought so!’
‘It’s the SE. I left too early to get the Eight.’
I had seen them before, in pictures, online – Smartphones – seen older versions in the hands of tourists. I had never touched one.
‘I can’t get used to not carrying it with me,’ he yelled.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Of course.’
I had read an unfathomable article about phone addiction in a mainland magazine. It was illustrated with an image of a couple sitting together but alone in bed, their faces illuminated by the blue light of their handsets. After holding the delicious weight of Ben’s phone in my palm, I thought I might begin to understand the attraction.
‘I have music on there, you see.’ I could hear him grunting with effort, had no idea what trick he was pulling off with that fifty-pence piece. ‘I take pictures with it too, so it’s not completely useless. Same with my iPad, I brought that as well.’
When he descended, his shirt was smutted, his knees damp. There were cobwebs in his hair. Our students next door had been let go for lunch, making the dash across the playground from main house to canteen in the still sluicing-down rain. We had missed out on teachers’ first dibs at the hot plates, so stayed behind to clear up the damage.
I took down the classroom portrait of St Rita, her eyes rolled back, the beam of light striking her forehead. Ben watched me wipe dry her face and the frame, as he worked the mop across the floor.
‘That St Rita,’ he said, ‘she’s a Catholic saint?’
‘Well… yes and no,’ I replied. ‘Augustinian, certainly. She’s the patron saint of impossible causes.’
‘And abused wives,’ he added, ‘and heartbroken women.’ A man who did his research.
‘Heartbroken and abused are the same thing,’ I said, returning St Rita to her nail on the wall, ‘wouldn’t you say?’
He gave me a sideways look.
I faltered, ‘Y– You wouldn’t?’
He pressed his lips together as if shaping an answer but returned to his initial point. ‘What I mean is, you’re not Catholic, here on Lark?’
‘Oh, it’s a leftover,’ I told him, ‘that’s all. A Catholic missionary came here in the… gosh, I don’t know, centuries ago, and he named the chapel, and the school was named for the chapel, and sometimes history wins over religion. Plus, we like the saints.’ I nudged St Rita, making her level. ‘So, we’re not Catholic, but we’re not Protestant either really. We’re not anything. We’re just… our own thing.’
‘You can say that again!’ He laughed, mopping a figure of eight with a flourish.
I couldn’t help but smile wide. My Knight of Cups was coming alive right before me, now that our talk had evolved beyond timetables and the right cupboard in which to find teabags. He was not what I had observed from a distance, was more than a man-shaped wish fulfilled. He was real, completely real, and I could not entrust him to Miss Cedars only to watch her lose her nerve again. So, I spoke in a new tongue.
‘You can say that again!’ I said, imitating him, coyly. Then, bolder, I added, ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ I adopted the same mischievous tone he’d used when talking of stealing gas canisters, of making fire, this Prometheus in our midst.
He stopped and considered me. I didn’t flinch from his gaze.
‘Your hair really is black, isn’t it?’ My hand went to my crown. Years of unwanted patting had created a reflex. ‘I’d read that black hair was a thing here, but…’ He paused. ‘It’s almost, sort of navy in the light, isn’t it? No, not navy, but…’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That girl in Year Twelve has it too.’
‘Britta Sayers. One of the Eldest Girls.’
‘Yes. She and her –’
I cut him short. I didn’t care that he had brought up the Eldest Girls in conversation, not then. I cared that we were straying from what was supposed to happen next.
‘It’s lucky,’ I told him. ‘My hair.’
‘Is it?’ He smiled, waiting for the punchline.
I nodded, let my hand fall away from my head, and in my newly found voice, the voice of Leah, I asked him: ‘Would you like to touch it?’