MARCH 2018Viola was truly sorry.
She went to tell him so, fearful that she would find the Customs House deserted, a later search of Cable’s Wood revealing Saul’s body, swinging from a tree. He had saved her from the death-lick of the sea on the day of the gamekeeper’s funeral and this was how she repaid him: with humiliation. Viola had witnessed it all. Though it hadn’t really been her fault; it was that woman, yet again, stymieing Viola’s plans.
She lifted the hinged front desk and let herself into the back office. The place was ominously deserted, the first part of Viola’s premonition coming true. A small, oscillating fan turned its eye this way then that on the edge of the counter that ran beneath the sea-filled window. It wasn’t warm outside but the sun that shone into the office became trapped, magnified. Saul’s sketchbook lay open on the counter by one of the radio consoles, its pages riffling upwards at the attention of the fan, dropping down again as it rotated away.
Viola peered at the drawing-in-progress, a striped pencil resting in the fold of the book – proof at least that Saul was recently alive. It was a sketch of a gathering of herring gulls, a trio of them squabbling on the harbour railings, one directing its mean gaze to the viewer, one wide-beaked, mid-squawk, and another lifting into the air, splaying its improbably huge webbed feet. The drawing was good; Saul was good.
She flipped to the start of the book to see more and found sketches of Lark’s buildings – Customs House, Counting House, Provisions Store, Anchor – with Lowry-like figures populating the cobbles, then another of the harbourside from a different angle, taking in the masts of the boats, the chimneys of the smokehouse and the sun setting behind the hills. After that came portraits, Saul practising his mastery of hands by drawing the boatmen at work on the nets. Then followed a head-and-shoulders sketch of Leah Cedars, looking down pensively, black hair falling across a shaded cheek. In the corner of the page he’d drawn her full-length, striding, carrying an armful of folders.
Viola turned the page, snorting at what she saw next. It was a naked sketch – a cartoon fantasy version of Leah Cedars, hazy and curvy, with too much breast and thigh and hair, the eyes disproportionately large. Another naked drawing followed, altogether different. Here, the style was naturalistic and Leah was flawed, her breasts not inflated, her stomach not so perfectly flat. She was posed as if straddling the viewer, her hands between her legs, head tossed back, eyes closed. Open-mouthed, she was at the peak of pleasure.
Viola dropped the book; she didn’t like this image. She knew that Leah Cedars was having sex with both Mr Hailey and Saul Cooper, if Michael Signal was to be believed, but it suited Viola to think of Leah as stiff, ungiving, because if she really was the woman shown in that drawing, then it meant that she was powerful.
Viola headed back out again, across the cobbles, following the sound of familiar laughter drifting from the Anchor. The day had hit noon and the shutters and windows of the pub were cast wide to chase out the stale smells of the night before.
She walked a curve towards the building so as not to be seen approaching, positioning herself at an angle by the window to look in. Saul was there, on a stool at the bar, tipping back the last amber splash of a pint. Jed Springer removed the empty glass and replaced it with a full one. Viola wasn’t sure what was most shocking: the sight of Saul Cooper passing time with the waistcoated landlord, one of the brothers of the Council who had conspired against his beloved Leah, or that he was at least two drinks up at lunchtime, the Customs House sitting unmanned.
‘Bad Angel is about fucking right,’ Viola heard Saul say.
Jed Springer chuckled. ‘Too fucking right, and if…’ The landlord paused to look over his left shoulder, then his right, a little comedy routine – he wasn’t really worried about being overheard. He leant in close for the next bit. ‘If the mother is anything to go by, she’s got a tight Swedish pussy too, very nice, thank you very much.’
Jed made an okay sign with fingers and thumb, nodding enthusiastically. They both sniggered, the truth not important – schoolboys at the back of the bus. The men’s bathroom door swung open at the rear of the bar and Luke Signal sauntered out, still buttoning his fly.
‘Who’s got a tight pussy?’ he called across the room. ‘That you, Saul?’
More laughter. Saul gulped away the first few inches of his new drink. The mirth settled, the conversation stalled. Luke’s dark gaze wandered towards the harbour beyond the window and Viola snatched herself out of sight, pressing against the open shutters – not fast enough. There was a low, muffled exchange within and a smattering of derisive grunts. Viola peeled off and cut a slant across the cobbles, making for the stocks.
‘Hey!’ Saul’s voice halted her.
He didn’t run to catch her up. He took his time.
‘Where’s that dog of yours?’ he said, coming to stand beside her, too close. There was a sway to his body.
‘At home,’ Viola said, not looking him in the eye.
Then, quieter, he asked: ‘And my radio?’
Viola chewed at her lip.
‘What radio?’ She grinned, trying to be playful, reminding him that they were friends, conspirators.
‘Ah, don’t give me that, coycrock,’ he slurred. ‘The radio you used to play that stupid fucking trick on me. Hand it over.’
Her face fell, as if slapped.
‘What’s the matter?’ he sneered. ‘Don’t you like being spoken to like you’re a piece of shit? Fucking sucks, doesn’t it? Hand it over.’
He held out his hand.
‘I’m gonna tell Leah you were drinking with Jed and Luke,’ she hit back. She heard how she sounded – like a child, spiteful, hurt. She wasn’t his ‘cherub’ anymore.
‘You tell her what the fuck you like, coycrock.’ He gave an arrogant sniff. ‘Make up whatever shit you want. You’re good at that.’
‘She lied to me too!’
‘That right?’
‘You two are supposed to be together! I gave you a chance to fight for that. You could have been the hero that night, shoved him off the edge of the cliff, that… that…’ at a loss for words, she stole from Saul ‘… that piece of shit.’
He had to smile then, just a little. ‘Yeah, well…’ He sighed and turned to go back to the Anchor.
‘That’s it, is it?’ she said. ‘You’re just giving up?’
‘I’m going to finish my drink.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m thirsty, and because… what is it you say, or your mum told you? … you can’t run away from your fate.’
‘Fate’s fate,’ Viola muttered reluctantly.
‘Fate’s fate,’ he parroted.
Something passed between them then – a sadness. Viola shook it off.
‘But why drink with them?’ she implored.
He rolled his tongue across his teeth, looked out to sea.
‘Because I have to live here,’ he said. ‘And so do you. Which is why you hang out with that bunch of devil-worshippers, I’m guessing.’
‘You know they’re not. You know!’
Luke Signal emerged from the Anchor then and Viola watched him, over Saul’s shoulder, pint in hand, settling himself against the doorframe to observe their conversation. He nodded a greeting to her and she shivered, involuntarily.
‘We’re not so different, you and me, kiddo,’ said Saul, placing a heavy hand on Viola’s shoulder. ‘We’ve both lost the ones we love to Benjamin fucking Hailey.’
Her eyes were still on Luke, the two of them silently renegotiating their debt, so this summing-up of Saul’s almost flew past her ear. Almost.
‘What do you mean?’ Her attention returned to him, the childish voice back. ‘I haven’t lost anyone.’
‘No?’ Saul removed his hand, shrugged. ‘Whatever you say, coycrock.’
Then he walked away, back to his new friends, his old friends, his brothers, and Viola kicked at the stocks – hard – made the boards clatter in their frame.
He was right; she knew it.
In the run up to the mid-Lent play, the girls had not shown up at the stones. In the days after too, no sign. Viola threw back her covers every night at 11.30 p.m., put on her mother’s coat and sneaked out of the farmstead, skirting along the edges of the hallway to avoid the nosiest of the floorboards, stepping over the piles of brittle, incoming leaves. It wasn’t that she risked waking her mother who slept like the dead – an analogy Deborah Kendrick used commonly before the incident, and once inadvertently afterwards, leading to the most terrible silence. Viola’s tiptoeing was for Dot’s sake, dreaming by the stove behind the closed kitchen door. If disturbed, she would be too eager to come along.
The girls had given Viola their excuses.
‘We have to go and work on our project with Mr Hailey,’ Jade-Marie had said the last time Viola had seen them. They had exchanged complicit smiles, Anna sensuously winding a piece of blonde hair around a finger.
Viola refused to ask what the project was, or to suggest she should join them; she wouldn’t lower herself. She understood the games girls played, had observed and participated in far more than any of these three amateurs had. They were pushing her to ask the questions only to have the satisfaction of turning her down.
Oh, we couldn’t possibly say.
Oh, I doubt Mr Hailey could agree to anyone else joining in.
Once she had seen this play of theirs – the ‘project’ – she knew there would be consequences. Not that Viola was apportioning any blame to the girls – she wasn’t Leah fucking Cedars. The play had done what it set out to do: prick the island’s conscience. Souls had been sold to the devil, it said, and not the obvious ones, not the souls of those who tattooed their wrists and congregated at the Neolithic circle. But that play had been a hand grenade, and Viola was appalled at Mr Hailey for pulling the pin. She was even more furious that the Eldest Girls had trusted his guidance on this, without consulting her.
They were meeting at the stones earlier.
Viola worked it out when she arrived one midnight to find the detritus of a ritual recently discarded. She started coming earlier too, retreating to her old position, crouching low in the ferns to watch. The girls stretched their arms to the sky more desperately than before. They called out to the goddesses of nature, time, the sea, the earth, to Bethany Reid, to the lost fishermen, to their guiding saints, Rita, Brigid, Anne – mother of Mary – and to St Jade. To everyone, anyone.
Like before, Viola chose her moment to step forward.
‘I could have told you so,’ she said coolly, as she entered the circle of stones.
The girls’ arms drooped, swallowed by the folds of their voluminous nightdresses.
‘You were punished, I suppose,’ she went on.
They looked at their feet.
‘Why did you listen to that piece of shit?’ Viola watched the insult ripple through them. ‘In the end, he’s just a man. In the end they’re all like that, they let you down.’
She choked on these too-grown-up words, the emotion catching her unexpectedly. She was talking about Saul, she thought, but it was her dad she meant, and Seb. Their dying felt like a deliberate desertion, the worst betrayal ever.
Britta turned to the other two, that unspoken language passing between them, and they rejoined their hands, reforming their circle of just three, whispering one of their old incantations.
Clean we are, pure we be
Our minds fall open and we can see
Take the dark, turn it to light
Wash this away before the night.
They went back to the start, murmuring the verse again, faster, faster, Viola watching, thinking, I’ve lost them, I’ve lost the ones I love to Benjamin fucking Hailey.
But she would not be like Saul. She would not give up. She could still be the hero.
‘Speak to me!’ Viola begged.
The chanting stopped, the circle broke. They lined up to face her.
The coldness of their gaze was so unbearably painful.
‘You’ve been causing trouble,’ said Britta.
‘What?’ Viola didn’t understand.
‘You’ve been meddling in Mr Hailey’s business,’ said Jade-Marie.
Anna nodded, the final verdict. ‘And he told us that we are never to trust you again.’