FOR A FEW DAYS, HE COMES AND GOES LIKE THE TIDE, and landscapes change each time. He is bright or quiet. He can meet my eye. I trace the lines around his mouth and his gentle hands quiver. I don’t know if this is love or tenderness. He tells me about the rooks coming down from the sky, walking the old wall-lines at Jovey’s cottage, their pale-beaked faces bright-eyed and curious.
‘I gave them some of my bread. Just a little, to be friendly. At first, they scattered, but slowly, they started pecking up the crumbs, hopping back and forth and always sure to keep a sharp eye on me. Then later, one flew back with a blue mussel shell in his beak and dropped it in the grass, quite close to me. Like a gift. Made me feel like Elijah in the wilderness, it did.’
* * *
Every night, we find each other. Everything is familiar: the rain outside, salt on the lips, the tongue, hands holding on, the quilt on our bed.
‘If I could find a boat, I’d go down to the islands,’ he says. ‘Just down the coast towards North Berwick. Used to be hermits out there on the Bass and Fidra, too, I think. I’d fit in.’
‘You stay put where it’s safe. I can’t even think about you on the sea.’
‘Can’t fathom it, can you?’ he says, and I can smile. ‘But I wonder if I could get a boat. Think I could sneak by without being spotted? I think I could make it. The rooks could bring me one: a very large mussel shell. What do you think?’
He tumbles me on my back and traces my face with a finger, telling me that the Bass was named from the Gaelic root for forehead.
‘And Fidra?’
‘Norse for feather.’
‘It all comes together.’
‘Yes.’
In the morning, the sky is clear again and I hang up laundry in the garden. Miss Baxter comes home and pops round to tell me about noises she heard in the night.
‘Ghosts,’ I tell her. ‘Must be.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Perhaps.’
‘I think so,’ I say, trying to sound convincing. ‘I’ll listen tonight, too, and then we can confer in the morning.’
‘Yes. Let’s.’ She draws her cardigan close with one hand and smiles quietly, holding out a glass jar towards me. ‘I brought you jam from my sister. It’s blackcurrant. Only made with honey, I’m afraid, so it is a bit syrupy, but the flavour is good.’
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘That’s lovely.’ I take the jar and hope there’s nothing in the hallway behind me that might betray Stanley. Just in case, I won’t invite her in. I tell her it’s good to see her, that I would like to hear her news, but perhaps later? This might make it sound like she’s caught me at a busy moment. I stand with crossed arms at the door.
In the afternoon, I walk along the road to Gullane to buy bread, cheese, eggs if I can find them and a newspaper. News of more raids over London and reports of courage and cheerfulness, too. Most children are sleeping through the night. It is still comparatively easy to secure accommodation in country hotels. Everything will be all right. That is the message. Repetition of the experience tends to diminish rather than increase its effect. I will put the paper away before Stanley comes. Maybe use it to start a fire. The evenings are growing chilly.
It is odd that there is no mention in the paper of raids on Scotland, too. It isn’t just London or even the south. With all the airfields up here and Grangemouth, too, there are plenty of targets. When I went into town to visit my family in the middle of the month, Mum mentioned bombs in Marchmont, her lips pursed as she told me, as if no one should think of such a thing. But they fell anyway, regardless of what the Edinburgh folk might have to say. Five in one evening along Argyll Crescent, all unexploded, mercifully. And no mention in the paper. It must be the policy these days, keeping hush about specifics, though I wonder how they decide. Which bombs count? Which ones are worth knowing about?
When Stanley comes late in the evening, I make a pot of tea in the dim kitchen, and stir a spoonful of Miss Baxter’s jam into his mug for sweetness. Black bits float to the surface, giving it a scummy look. He lifts them off with the bowl of his spoon.
‘It’s not bad,’ he says. ‘Better than treacle.’
‘Can’t think where you’d find treacle these days. Do you need anything else?’
‘You.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘Let me see your face.’
‘You know what I look like.’
‘We can turn on a light. The blinds are down.’
‘Finish your tea first. You’ll be cold after a day outside.’ I don’t want to be prim, it’s the last thing I’m feeling, but the words come anyway.
‘Here, take my hand,’ he said. ‘It’s you who are cold. You’re shivering.’ He rubs the back of my hand, his fingers rough and gentle. ‘You’ll be needing gloves in this house. And it isn’t even really autumn. The geese aren’t back yet.’
‘I’m fine. Really. I am.’
‘So am I.’
He holds me. Everything else can wait.
Then he tells me why, the words finally drifting down to the floor.
He tells me about the last bad night, the constant flights and the roar, flames and blindness, the shattered planes landing. ‘We were worse than bridge-builders up there, or skyscraper men a hundred storeys above. We’ve got nothing tying us to the ground but gravity and that isn’t a friend. Back on the ground again and we can’t stop shaking, none of us, but no one talks about that. No one. A little whisky passed around, and we hold the flask in two hands, but then the planes need to be hosed out because that’s how you do it. There’s nothing left to lift. Just a slurry of blood and bone grime.
‘I spoke with the chaplain. Even managed to ask him about fear and he offered a prayer. Then he smiled and told me there was a job to be done and he knew I could do it. All the way back to the barracks, I kept saying that, repeating his words just under my breath like a spell. A job to be done, a job to be done. I didn’t decide anything, didn’t have to think at all, really, just kept pacing out those words. A job to be done. But I walked past the barracks, I did, and out to the road. Don’t know how I got there, out past the gate and there must have been a sentry. I might have spoken to them, I don’t know at all, but I know I was walking and kept walking till I found an army train heading north. Climbed on with a crowd of men, all tired out, all blind in the night and maybe I slept or maybe not, but soon enough I’d made it to Haddington, slipped away on the platform and walked home. No knowing how much shtook I’ll be in now. I just needed to be home.’
His eyes wide as he speaks, his fingers splayed and I surface somehow, listening. No lovemaking then, but he holds me and I cry.
‘I’m scared,’ I say.
‘Of me?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘No. We shouldn’t be. I just blew here on the wind. It’s just the after-echo of fear we’re feeling. Someone else’s fear.’
‘You’re too clever for this.’
‘It’s not cleverness. Just poetry.’
He leaves before dawn.
I take my suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and put a blanket inside. Socks. Another jumper. The wedding photo. From the kitchen, I take the jam, the Cunard teacup, a spoon. I know that none of this is a solution. He can’t stay and more furnishings don’t change that. But I don’t know what else to do, and so I follow him out to the sea like a ghost.
The air is heavy with sea before dawn. Sea or soundless cloud. I’d imagined a different kind of light, grey but dawning, and I’d hurry along the road, racing the band of light to the east, and catching Stanley before the bridge. But it isn’t like that. Instead, the haar is back and the world looks white and empty.
If I’m seen here along the high street, I can always say I’m heading into Edinburgh. Too early for the bus perhaps, but I could feign confusion. If I’ve already crossed the bridge when the soldiers spot me, the story stretches, and I’ll need to think of something else.
My head aches now, as with fever, and time and distances shudder through me. Edinburgh again and six years old, down in the Meadows with Jeanie, swinging arms and walking through the mist. The pathways were straight and the planted trees looked like the shadows of men. Jeanie ran ahead and I lost my footing on the slick wet grass. My knee stained green. When I stood again, she was so far ahead, a smudge, another shadow or just a faint reflection in a misted window, my own form doubled, my own arms swinging still. I stood, time-blind, unsure if I could catch up or simply stand and my reflection vanish.
Somewhere ahead, Stanley is hurrying through this same mist. If he makes it to the mine before me, I will never find him. I will need to turn back. I could leave the suitcase, though the army might find it. What would they make of that?
My ears feel fog-filled as I cross the bridge and pass the Marl Loch. There are no birds. A single silence covers the bay and the flat dune land beyond but my heart beats like something wild, a fierceness that helps me keep going. When I find Stanley, I can rest. He’ll show me the mine, and we’ll both burrow in.
A voice behind me calls stop.
A man. Not Stanley. I freeze, hold my breath as if I could disappear by stillness.
‘This way is closed.’ His accent comes through the mist behind me, strange and familiar. ‘Ah, it is you. But I have told you that this way is not for you. Are you … are you all right, miss?’ I do not turn and he steps in front of me. I can see now that it is the blond soldier. ‘You are far from home too early.’
‘I’m fine,’ I say, and I feel my lips thin. ‘I was walking.’
‘Yes. I was, too.’
‘I hadn’t realized that the coast was to be patrolled as well as mined.’
‘No. It isn’t. I was just walking. But it is not safe for you.’
‘And for you?’
‘I know where we put the mines. Here, let me take your case.’
‘No, I want to keep it.’
‘I did not mean to take it away. Only to carry it for you. You look worn out.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes. And lost perhaps.’ His voice is kind, safe even. By now, Stanley would be in the mine, so time doesn’t matter, does it? I wouldn’t find him now. The blond soldier holds out his hand and I let him take the case. He does not let his face express its weight, merely lifts it and continues to walk. ‘I will show you the blocks, if you like. They are finished now. Perhaps you would like to see?’
We walk together, and the sun must be rising now because the air itself is luminous, as if overexposed, though the fog still hides the shape of the land. My fingers feel numb with cold. Away to the right, there are trees. I can hear birds beginning to argue, their voices ragged in the damp morning air. A hill rises under our feet and he touches my arm, motioning away from the track. Here, the ground is rough, the surface churned by the heavy treads of tyres, and the grasses are all scraped away. At measured intervals, concrete blocks sit heavy on the ruined earth, row after row like something emerging from the soil, pushing up into the fog.
‘They look strong,’ I say. ‘And old.’
‘We just finished them last week. But you are right. They look as if they have been here a long time. Like standing stones.’
‘Do they teach you local history in the army, then?’
‘No. I pick up things. I am curious.’ I know he is looking at me, but I will not meet his gaze. Instead, I set my hand against the block, its surface ridged and rough.
‘Is he your husband? The man you are looking for,’ he asks. I want to hold stillness around me, to be stone deaf, but the soldier bends to meet my eye, smiles, and the stillness is gone.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘He … he shouldn’t be here.’
‘Yes. We can end up in strange places.’ He tells me then how he left his country last year. The sudden attack, the city under siege. Bombers destroyed the waterworks and left no water to drink, let alone to put out fires. So many fires. It doesn’t take long for a burned city to starve. Then horses were flayed in the street in front of the bank, its classical facade watching bone-white, respectable. Every day, he had to visit his father in hospital. Pneumonia and not unusual for an old man, but now? Such a peaceful sickness was strange as Grecian columns in the smoke. The hospital was modern, bright with windows, so much glass. And every night, more bombers. So the nurses moved the patients down to the basements. His father wouldn’t go. He wanted to stay near the statue of the Virgin. She would protect him, wreathed in stars. She was his only health, he said, and the doctor telling the son this story cried. Later, an American journalist came, his Bell & Howell camera strung around his neck. He filmed the shattered windows, the Virgin’s stars, and the quiet nurses carrying buckets. The son met him on the street and told him stories about the maternity ward in another hospital where the babies were tied to pillows because there were no unshattered cots. When the siege was over, the American would smuggle the footage home, the film wrapped around his chest like a bandage, newspaper around a glass, a hidden blade. The son would also slip away, taking a long escape from his homeland, a breath held until at last he pulled himself onto this grey and rainy island.
‘And now, I seem to be a soldier,’ he says. ‘I do not know if my father would like that. He was a peaceful man.’
‘So is my husband.’
‘Yes,’ he says, as if he already knew him. As if the fog hid nothing.
He tells me he can help Stanley and that I should trust him. I am not sure what trust means. Only that I am scared. And that doesn’t seem to matter.
‘It is getting cold,’ he says. ‘I can’t imagine that he will want to stay here longer.’
‘You won’t send him back.’
‘I said I could help. I will.’
‘The suitcase …’
‘Leave it with me. I will find him and he will have it.’
‘Is this risky? For you, I mean.’
‘I don’t think so. You should go home now. When I can, I will send word. Do you know Muriel? With the garden?’
‘And the pig. Yes, of course.’
‘I wondered if you might. Perhaps I can send you word through her.’
The fog lifts and all that is common and kenspeckle returns. The day beyond our words.