For their honeymoon they took Thomas’s car – it would always be ‘Thomas’s car’ – and drove east. They spent their wedding night in a profoundly uncomfortable bed and breakfast on the outskirts of Ipswich. This was not in their plan but night was falling and they found they could wait no longer, so they stopped at the first place they saw, only to find a creaking bed, paper-thin walls and a landlord whose expression alone would have pickled onions. Every time they tried to do more than hold hands, the bed’s clattering betrayal sent them off into lust-stifling giggles. They finally managed to make love as man and wife, some time after midnight, leaning against a chest of drawers in the one corner of the room with trustworthy floorboards.
‘Funny,’ Sally said over breakfast, as they devoured the limp bacon and glistening eggs set before them by the landlord – whose face implied he had stayed awake as long as they had – ‘funny. We’ve done this so many times before and yet, simply because of that little ceremony yesterday, we’re now above disapproval.’ She held out her hand to admire her simple ring. ‘He probably thinks this is just another curtain ring, but now, I don’t care.’
They drove on to the Suffolk coast and spent two nights in a hotel on the Aldeburgh sea-front. Their room overlooked a stretch of shingle beach where the fishermen hauled their boats clear of the water on old motorised winches. Catches were sold on the spot, out of ramshackle huts black with creosote and patched with roofing felt and squares of tin. Edward left the windows open so they could roll around on their wonderfully silent bed and hear the waves break and drag through the shingle. For hour upon hour they rejoiced in their new, sanctioned rights to one another. They ventured out once or twice, to walk by the sea or visit the hotel restaurant, but they felt vulnerable in their new status, soft and newly hatched, and they soon slipped back to their room out of the public eye.
At night they sat entwined in darkness on the window seat with the quilt around them. His torso hot against her back, his breath on her neck, they watched as the beach was taken over by the scavenging, lovemaking and territorial disputes of countless cats that seemed to melt away with the return of daylight.
They had to return home cruelly soon for Edward to return to the last weeks of his duties in the bookshop and Sally to oversee as much redecoration of The Roundel as her parents were able to pay for. They had been driven out to their daughter’s new home just once, when Sally could persuade them into Thomas’s car. Her father thought it was a ruin, and her mother declared it creepy but, after a lifetime of paying rent, they were impressed that she had become a property owner through a simple act of generosity. Behind their eagerness to have the place decorated and furnished lay a discreetly conveyed fear that a fairy godmother so plainly capricious in her dealings with the material world might suddenly change her mind.
In fact, the fairy godmother was relieved to have one less thing to tidy up before her departure from society. As The Roundel filled with the eye-watering smells of paint and putty, the date approached for Dr Pertwee’s installation on Corry and her rooms became a turmoil of book and paper. Miss Murphy, the bookseller, was summoned to make a bid for a small landscape of volumes, and was deeply impressed that such a distinguished authoress counted her young employee as one of her friends. Just three Sundays after their wedding, Edward and Sally rose at dawn and drove Dr Pertwee to Dorset, along with the small trunk of possessions to which she had miraculously managed to reduce the clutter of a long and fruitful life. Men being forbidden on the island outside Visitor’s Day and the harvest celebration, Edward helped a fisherman load the trunk on to his boat, took the liberty of planting a formal kiss on the old woman’s cheek, gave Sally’s arm a squeeze, then stood on the quay to wave them off.
The two monastic islands, Corry and Whelm, female and male, loomed up out of a dazzling, millpond sea. Sitting beside Sally in the bows of the little boat, Dr Pertwee patted her hand and sighed with mock homesickness.
‘Oh well. If push comes to shove, at least it’s not too far for me to swim,’ she joked. ‘Or I could always steal a boat.’
Corry had a grove of pine trees reaching almost to its sandy shore, which was protected by great boulders, their undersides greeny-purple with weed, their tops mussel-crusted. By the time the boat pulled in, a deputation of women had gathered on the sands to greet them. Sally was astonished to see two of the stronger ones stride, fully dressed, into the water to seize the painter and tug the craft through the surf, their skirts swirling, blackened, about them in the brine. Not all were nuns. At least, not all were dressed in habits. Several contented themselves with stout brogues and serviceable tweeds that would not have raised a second glance at a point-to-point. Dr Pertwee had fallen silent. Sally wondered if she were nervous. A tall, thin nun, benefiting from all the flattering elegance of the wimple, stepped forward.
‘Welcome, Alice. Welcome to Corry,’ she said and kissed the new arrival’s cheek before hugging her warmly. Sally suddenly realised she had never before heard Dr Pertwee addressed by her girlish Christian name.
The others drew, smiling, around, touched Dr Pertwee’s back or shoulder, then briefly clasped her hand. There was a sudden, tremendous sense of transition, of, quite literally, passing over to the other side. Introductions were briefly made. The two women with wet skirts took the trunk from the fisherman, who remained respectfully in his boat, and the crowd began to wind up through the wood towards the abbey.
Dr Pertwee broke away from the Mother Superior, to clasp Sally’s hand again and murmur wryly, ‘My dear! With all these pine trees and soft-spoken, shady women, I feel quite as though we’d crossed the Styx!’ She dropped her voice to a satirical whisper, ‘Though I suspect they keep cats instead of a three-headed dog.’
Sally was not to know that the same thought had occurred to Edward. Waiting on the quay among sunburned holiday-makers who were taking photographs of each other with the crowded harbour as backdrop, he watched his new bride borne inexorably out to sea and felt the sense of her loss as a wrenching in the pit of his stomach. She looked back over her shoulder and smiled at him a few times, then she seemed intent on a conversation with Dr Pertwee and did not turn again. Her face became indistinct as the boat grew ever smaller. When he could stand it no longer, he tore himself away from the sight to explore the sea-front until her return.
He had a cup of strong, milky tea in a drab café, where the air was thick with cigarette smoke and bacon fumes, then walked by gift shops encrusted with vivid clusters of buckets and spades and little patriotic flags for sandcastles. Even outside, the air was unpleasantly sweetened with smells of toffee, candy-floss, frying onions and hot children. He sought refuge in a second-hand bookshop. He was casting a half-hearted professional eye over their stock when he was delighted to find a first edition of A Husband’s Love by one Alice Pertwee. Smiling, he leaned against the dusty shelves and read the contentious opening page:
If the husbands of our nation were less inclined to take the pleasures of the marriage bed for granted and their wives were less afraid of a little instruction in the god-given pleasures of the flesh, there would be a substantial drop in the number of sour faces encountered across the nation’s breakfast tables and a concomitant fall in incidences of prostitution, adultery, divorce and syphilis.
Then he fainted. For the second time since his introduction to The Roundel, he sensed Miriam’s presence. Again he felt her anguish, but this time it was joined with stabs of real, physical pain as though a small, feminine boot were treading on his outstretched neck. He smelled an indescribable human foetor – a stench of unwashed bodies, excrement, putrefaction. Then, unmistakably, he heard his sister’s voice turned against him in anger.
‘Here! Sir?’
‘Are you all right young man?’
‘He’s coming round.’
‘Open that window, Cyril!’
He regained consciousness to a trio of worried faces.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, fighting off a wave of nausea. ‘I must have fainted.’
‘Shouldn’t read such strong stuff at your age,’ the proprietor laughed, retrieving Dr Pertwee’s book from where Edward had let it fall. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Yes. I think I just need air.’
‘Well there’s no shortage of that here,’ the second man told him.
‘You were shouting the place down,’ said the woman. ‘Screaming and moaning! We thought someone was being attacked, didn’t we, Cyril? Then we found you on the floor here having a turn. You should be more careful.’
His cheeks hot with embarrassment, Edward thanked them all profusely and paid for A Husband’s Love. He pressed it into Sally’s hands when she returned, a little tearful, from Corry. She was overjoyed and began to read it immediately in the car, turning pages, rapt, beginning conversations she allowed to wither as the text stole her attention. He told her nothing of what had happened. He did not see how he could even begin to explain, and feared where his words might lead.