At Salt Winds, as at the orphanage, there was a proper time to bathe, and a proper time to do homework, and a proper time to go to bed. It was Virginia’s job to lay the table for supper every evening and to do the drying-up afterward, and on Saturday mornings she helped Lorna change the sheets on the beds.
All the boring routines were instigated by Lorna or Mrs. Hill, and all the best ones involved Clem. Virginia used to go along the lane with him and Bracken every morning, early, while Lorna got breakfast ready. He would hang his binoculars around her neck and let her walk on the wall.
“There’s Mrs. Hill, turning into the lane,” he said, a week or two before Christmas, as they trudged toward Tollbury Point with their collars turned up. Virginia squinted into the wind and Bracken yapped.
“All right,” said Clem, “here’s a challenge for you. How many birds can you spot before Mrs. Hill draws level? And you can’t just say you’ve seen one; you have to name it properly. If you get five or more, I’ll give you the top off my egg. Ready? Go!”
“No, no, no, I’m not ready! The binoculars are still in their case!” Virginia had already whipped her mittens off, but she was all fingers and thumbs in the cold, and she couldn’t open the clasp. She jumped up and down and laughed giddily, as if he were going to tickle her. Clem hauled himself onto the wall and stood beside her in the blustery cold, and although his gloved hands looked clumsy, he removed the binoculars from their leather case in no time at all, deftly pocketing the lens caps.
“Now,” he said, as she lifted the binoculars and swept her gaze across the marsh.
“Herring gull,” she squeaked, pointing with her free arm. “Two of them.”
“Oh, all right, but you score half marks for herring gulls.”
“That’s not fair,” she protested, half-indignant, half-amused. Mrs. Hill was almost upon them—she could hear the squeak of the pedals on the wind—and there wasn’t time to argue.
“Oh, oh, oh! There! An oystercatcher!”
“Let’s see ... Very good!”
Virginia swung the binoculars slowly from side to side.
“Oh, over there! Look! Starlings! Thousands of them! I think I just got about a million points.”
She lowered the binoculars and he clapped his hands to his cheeks in mock despair. “Blimey, Vi, I can’t be having that! I’ll be owing you egg tops for the rest of my days.”
Virginia twirled delightedly on her toes. Clem threw his arm around her shoulders, and she had to grab on to his coat to keep her balance. Side by side they watched the cloud of starlings as it rode the wind, twisting and curling over the marsh like smoke.
“Bonus question for an extra million points,” said Clem. “What’s the name for a flock of starlings?”
“Murmuration,” she shot back, before he’d finished asking, and it was his turn to laugh. He pulled her closer and she huddled against the rough wool of his coat.
Mrs. Hill bustled in and out of the dining room as they ate their breakfast. She was full of chatter that morning: there’d been yet more air raids on London, and there was something wrong with the back tire on her bike, and the wind was like a knife today—oh, and she’d met the postman on her way from the village and he’d given her the mail for Salt Winds.
Virginia had never received a letter in her life, so she was puzzled, as much as excited, to receive a cream envelope with a stamp and a postmark, and her name and address in fancy copperplate. It looked too expensive to rip, so Mrs. Hill helped her to slit it open with a clean knife.
Master Theodore Deering requests the pleasure of your company on the occasion of his eleventh birthday.
Tuesday, 31st December, 2 o’clock till 5.
Thorney Grange, Tollbury Point.
RSVP
“Oh,” she said. If she could have pocketed it discreetly and burnt it in secret later on she would have done so, but the others were waiting. She handed the card to Clem, who glanced over it and passed it to Lorna.
“Requests the pleasure,” he muttered, slicing the top off his soft-boiled egg and sneaking it onto Virginia’s plate. “Typical Deering. You’d think the boy was being knighted. Or married.”
Lorna set her teacup down and read the invitation studiously, as if there might be more to it than met the eye. She flipped it over to make sure the reverse side was blank before reading it through again.
Virginia watched and waited, knotting and unknotting her fingers, but nobody seemed inclined to speak. Clem went back to his newspaper.
“I don’t have to go, do I? Please?”
She was so vehement that Clem raised his eyes from the Times and stopped chewing. A question began to form in his expression, but he didn’t have time to phrase it.
“Yes, you absolutely do,” Lorna replied, pocketing the card. “Pass the marmalade, would you? And don’t pout.” She began spreading margarine over her toast with brisk strokes of her knife. The decision had been made, and now they were going to eat their breakfast and talk about something else.
Virginia picked up the marmalade jar and affected an interest in the handwritten label. She’d penned it herself back in February, while Mrs. Hill padded about the kitchen, stirring the preserving pan and grumbling about the shortage of oranges.
“Hello?” Lorna was waiting.
Virginia wasn’t a natural rebel, and her heart thundered as her fingers closed over the lid of the jar.
“I just ... I don’t see why I have to go.”
“Don’t you?” When Lorna shut her eyes like that she became cold and untouchable, like a statue in a fancy garden.
“It’s not going to make any difference to Juliet,” Virginia mumbled, addressing the butter dish.
Clem let slip a quick smile.
“Please don’t be stupid,” Lorna retorted, reaching across the table and prizing the marmalade from Virginia’s grasp. “It doesn’t suit you.” Her voice was languid, but her fingers felt strong and cruel, as if she had it in her to smash the jar against the wall.
A small difficulty arose when Lorna remembered that the Women’s Institute was holding a New Year’s Eve party too, and that she’d volunteered to spend the day making preparations at the church hall. A few days after Christmas the chairwoman rang to remind her, and after she’d put the telephone down she tutted, but couldn’t see a way around it. She couldn’t let the committee down, and therefore she couldn’t deliver Virginia to the Deerings’ house in person. Clem would have to do it.
“Clem?” she called out, on the morning of the thirty-first. She already had her coat on and was stuffing extra pins into her wayward hair: no easy feat with a mock-apricot flan in one hand and a bag of bunting in the other. “You promise you won’t forget about Theodore’s party this afternoon?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“No, I won’t forget.”
Lorna’s eyebrows rose fractionally and she scooped her handbag off the hall table. “It starts at two o’clock. His birthday present is on the kitchen table, as is your lunch. Virginia, I never got to lengthening the hem on your red frock, but I think it’ll look all right. At least it’s clean.”
Virginia nodded. She wished she had trouser pockets, like Clem, so she could stuff her hands inside them the way he did, and lean against the doorframe looking bored.
“Bye,” Lorna called over her shoulder. Sometimes she thought to blow a kiss when she was on her way out, but she didn’t have a free hand that day.
The sky looked hard, like a sheet of hammered metal, and the wind sounded tired, as if it were looking for somewhere warm to rest. After an early lunch, Virginia stole up to her room, lit the gas fire, and curled up on her bed with a pile of books. Even though she was on her own, all her movements were slow and soft, as if by making herself inconspicuous, Theodore’s party would pass her by.
It was no use. She’d just found her place in Tales from the Arabian Nights when Clem arrived, carrying her coat and scarf over one arm. She turned the page, pointedly, but he didn’t go away.
“I suppose we’d better go,” he said apologetically.
Virginia sighed and closed the book, but made no further move. Clem came in and sat on the end of the bed.
“What is it, Vi?” he wondered. “Why don’t you want to go?”
She frowned and leafed unseeingly through her book. If there was anyone she could tell the truth to, she supposed it was Clem, but how could she say it without saying Mr. Deering saw me in my pajamas and made me feel like I wasn’t wearing anything at all? She blushed hotly, but Clem was waiting for an answer and his eyes were on her face.
“I just don’t like him much.”
“Theodore?”
“... Hmm.”
“No. Well, that’s fair enough. He is a bit of a tick.”
Virginia smiled dutifully, but Clem was still watching, and he was so attentive that for a moment she thought he’d understood; actually understood, without being told. She ran her damp hands over her skirt. There was a sour stain on one of the pleats where she’d dripped milk at breakfast, and she fixed her gaze on it while she waited for his reply.
“Look, Vi, I know it’s a bore, but it’s only a few hours. You’ll survive, won’t you? Make believe it’s for king and country. I’ll never hear the end of it if I let you stay home.” He smiled halfheartedly, without quite meeting her eye. “Pop your smart dress on and run a comb through your hair, there’s a good girl. Look sharp, though; we really do need to get going.”
He shook the coat out and laid it over the bedstead. Virginia tried to imagine herself saying no, but it was impossible. She would never be able to refuse Clem anything; there was always going to be too much at stake. You couldn’t be too careful. Sometimes things were lost in the blink of an eye; in the slippage of a second. These things happened. She already knew that, before the plane fell from the sky.
It was merely because she was crossing the room to fetch her dress that she noticed the airplane. The whole thing was over in thirty seconds, and she would have missed it from the bed or the wardrobe.
“Look!” she cried. Clem turned back from the landing and crossed her room to look.
It was the grace of the thing that astonished her in retrospect. You’d expect a burning fighter plane to make a great hullabaloo: howling engines, roaring flames, a great boom as it hit the ground nose first. But if this one made any noise at all, Virginia didn’t notice. All she recalled, later on, was the slow arc it traced through the sky on its way down, like a spark floating from a bonfire. Even the explosion was gentle from their vantage point: a little orange flower that budded, bloomed, and withered, all in a moment, far away on the edge of the marsh.
She thought it was over and turned to Clem, full of astonished questions, but he was shaking her by the shoulder and pointing.
“There!” he whispered. “Over there!”
She looked and saw another bit of bonfire ash, but this one was smaller and blacker than the first, and it drifted very slowly onto the marsh. It didn’t explode as it touched the ground, but disappeared among the long shadows and reedbeds.
“A parachute,” he said.
Virginia stared, and Clem was gone. By the time he returned with his binoculars there was nothing left for the naked eye to see except a thread of smoke and a twisted bit of metal, which might easily be a shrub, or a wooden post, or a bit of flotsam that the tide had left behind.
“I thought so!” he said, lowering the binoculars and passing them to her. “It’s an enemy plane. A Messerschmitt.”
Virginia swung the lenses back and forth over a blur of greens, grays, and browns until she found the piece of metal. It was part of a wing, and it was marked with a black-and-white cross. She searched for some sign of the airman, but there was no movement. There weren’t even any birds cascading through the sky or ruffling the waters. The whole stretch of marshland had an innocent air, as if nothing had happened.
Clem took the binoculars again and stood for a long time, scanning the scene.
“Poor bastard,” he muttered under his breath.
“Do you think he’ll drown?” Virginia asked, noting how grown-up and unperturbed she sounded. This was partly because he was a German airman—not a Mr. Rosenthal, but a proper, uncomplicated, enemy German—and partly because she didn’t quite believe he was real. The plane had swooned so gracefully, from her point of view, and the marsh looked so tranquil, that it was hard to imagine a real man out there, flailing in mud and sweat and parachute silk.
“He must be two miles out, at least,” Clem replied, which was as much as to say, “Yes.”
“Will anyone go to him, do you suppose?”
Clem swept the scene from left to right and back again, as if searching for an answer to her question. “Who, though?”
Looking back, she realized that this was the moment in which everything started to decelerate. Time slipped into a heavier gear the second Clem frowned and scratched the back of his neck and wondered “Who?” He began to pace up and down the room, and she was too slow to follow the direction of his thoughts. She was simply glad that he seemed to have forgotten about Theodore Deering’s party.
The wardrobe door swung open of its own accord, and Virginia remembered she was meant to be getting changed. She hoped Clem wouldn’t spot the red dress and was relieved that he didn’t seem inclined to. He didn’t give the wardrobe a second glance, even when he nearly walked into it, but every time he passed the window he stopped and frowned at the view. He kept taking his pipe out of his pocket and tapping it against his chin.
“You’re right,” he announced suddenly, stopping in the middle of the floor.
“What about?” Virginia was half thinking about the crashed plane. The red dress was dimly visible in the wardrobe behind him, and she was trying hard not to look at it. It was hateful, with its tight collar and sash and fancy sleeves. Worst of all it was too short, which was all right when you still looked like a child, but not when you were starting not to.
“You’re right,” Clem repeated. “Of course you are. No one else is going to risk their necks for some Jerry.”
Virginia tore her eyes from the wardrobe and stared at Clem.
“What ... ?” She’d let her attention wander and missed the crucial moment—the link, the key—that would make sense of what he was telling her. He darted from the room and Virginia followed with her mouth open, feeling stupid. By the time she caught up he was sitting on the wooden chest at the top of the stairs, tightening the laces on his walking boots.
“Where does Lorna keep the flashlight these days?” he puffed as he leaned over, tugging on the rusty strings.
“The bottom drawer in the kitchen,” said Virginia. “But—”
“Go and fetch it. And there’s a length of rope in the toolshed: bring that too.”
“Go, go! Quickly!”
She obeyed because he was Clem, and because he seemed so certain. As she went downstairs and rummaged in the kitchen drawer, she tried to marshal her own ideas in opposition to his, but it was hard—very hard—like trying to sprint underwater. The coil of rope was hanging on a nail in the shed, and she wondered about thrusting it under the hedge and telling him she couldn’t find it, but even as she wondered, she was unhooking it and running back to the house with it.
Clem was in the hall, buttoning up his coat—the big gray one that went all the way down to his shins—and Bracken was prancing about in expectation of a walk, his stubby tail aquiver. Virginia stood and watched as Clem pocketed the flashlight and slung the rope over his shoulder. All of his movements were quick and calm, but he was breathing rather heavily, more like someone returning from a long walk than someone about to set out on one. “Rope, flashlight, brandy ...” he muttered, patting his pockets.
“Don’t go,” Virginia pleaded, pointlessly, when the time for protest was long gone. He ruffled her hair, smiling faintly, and reached for his hat and gloves. She looked up at the folds of skin at his jaw and the graying hair at his temples and felt love rising like sickness from her stomach. If she opened her mouth to speak again she thought she might retch, so she didn’t risk it.
“Now listen,” said Clem, as he batted the dog away. “If I do find this poor chap alive, he’s likely to be in a bad way, so you’ll need to be ready when we get back. Can you see to it?”
Virginia stared at him dumbly.
“Can you see to it, Vi? Light a fire in the spare room, put some blankets on the bed, boil up a big kettle of water ... that sort of thing? Maybe root out the first aid kit; I think it’s in the bathroom cupboard.”
She nodded.
“If I’m not back before your mother, she’s not to fret. Just tell her—”
“Can’t I come with you?” She had to ask, although it wasn’t what she really wanted. What she really wanted was to wind the clock back ten minutes so that she could watch in absolute silence as the Messerschmitt crashed and Clem—none the wiser—wandered off down the landing. There’d be no jumping up and down this time; no childish “Look what I can see!” She’d delve inside her wardrobe while the explosion flowered and wouldn’t breathe a word.
“Don’t be soft,” Clem replied. There was an edge to his gentleness; a testy reminder of all he’d ever told her about the dangers of Tollbury Marsh. “Off you go now, and do as I say. Tell your mother I won’t be long. If there isn’t any sign of the poor devil after—” he looked at his watch “—after an hour, I’ll give it up and come straight home. All right?”
Virginia followed him outside, shivering in her pleated skirt and cardigan. They both lowered their heads against the wind before setting off down the lane, Bracken bounding back and forth between them. Clem’s boots made prints in the thin mud, so she placed her feet in them, like the page boy in “Good King Wenceslas,” and tried to imagine a miraculous warmth coming up through the soles of her shoes. It didn’t work. Her legs were bare above her ankle socks, and she could feel the goose pimples on her thighs where they brushed against one another.
A little way along the lane there was a break in the flint wall and a flight of steps—the old harbor steps, as they were known—that led down to the marsh. Clem stopped and turned.
“Listen, Vi, I’ll be fine. The marsh is in a good mood this afternoon.”
She glared at her shoes and nodded.
“Go back now,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders. He looked huge in his coat and boots, and Virginia was suddenly afraid of him. Everything around them looked dead: the empty lane, the church tower, the treeless horizon. She wondered whether anyone else had seen the German airplane. She half wondered whether she and Clem had made it up between them, but she could still see the wing, like a deep dent in the steel sky, and a twist of smoke above it.
“Theodore’s party will be starting,” she observed wanly.
Clem held her at arm’s length and squeezed her shoulders. They stood like that for a moment and looked at one another, while Bracken scuttled through the dry grasses and weeds at the foot of the wall, urgently sniffing and cocking his leg.
“Take Bracken back with you,” Clem said, as he let her go. “I could do without him under my feet.”
They hadn’t brought a lead, so Virginia had to pick the dog up, and by the time she’d done it Clem was several yards out from the wall. Bracken whimpered and scrabbled and twisted in her arms all the way back to Salt Winds, and she kept thinking she was going to drop him. When they got home she gave him a biscuit from the tin. He wasn’t supposed to have them at odd times, but he sounded so unhappy and she wanted to cheer him up.
Bracken took the biscuit and carried it to his bed, where he set it down between his front paws and licked it. Virginia leaned against the stove and tried to massage some warmth back into her ears. “Hot water,” she said aloud. “Hot water, blankets, and a fire.”
Theodore’s birthday present was lying, neatly wrapped, on the kitchen table. It was obviously a book. Virginia picked it up and turned it over in her hands, and hid it behind the flour bin so that it wouldn’t be the first thing Lorna saw when she came in. Lorna was going to be livid about the party, and no doubt Mr. Deering would make sure they felt awkward about it too. It was hard to worry about all that and at the same time remember everything Clem had asked her to do. Hot water and blankets, and a fire in the spare room. And where did he say the first aid kit was kept? And when would Lorna be back? And how was she going to explain what had happened?
She found the first aid kit and put the kettle on the range to heat, but then she lost track of what she was meant to be doing and wandered back to her bedroom. The gas fire had been blazing all this time, so she turned it off and let the chilly colors of the marsh invade her room, changing all the pinks into grays and blues. Clem had left his binoculars on the windowsill and she picked them up, but just to hold them on her lap and mess about with the focus.
She shut the wardrobe door but it swung open again, and she kept glimpsing the red dress inside, turning gently on its hanger.
When the front door banged Virginia lifted her head and dug her nails into her palms. “Clem?” she said, quietly inquiring. She hadn’t realized how dark it had gotten: the marsh and sky were almost merged.
“Clem?” Lorna cried, leaping up the stairs two at a time. “Clem? Where are you? Did you hear about the German plane?”
Lorna ran along the landing and burst into his study, but then her footsteps halted.
Virginia heard uncertainty in the sudden stillness. She stole along the landing and watched from the doorway as Lorna unwound her scarf and dropped it, absentmindedly, over the back of Clem’s chair. Downstairs, the sitting-room clock began to strike, and Virginia counted all five of the chimes in her head before Lorna sensed her presence and turned.
“What on earth—” Lorna reached for the light switch and they both screwed up their eyes against the dazzle. “What’s going on? I thought you were at Theodore’s party?”
Virginia didn’t reply.
“Why are you in your old clothes? Where’s Clem?”
Virginia had been calm up until then—almost lethargic—but now her heart began to flounder like a fish caught in a net.
“He felt sorry for the airman,” she said. She wanted to sound cool and reasonable about it, but her voice had taken on a breathy vibrato that she couldn’t seem to control. “I tried to stop him. He said not to worry if you were back first; honestly and truly he said not to worry—”
Lorna took Virginia by the shoulders and sat her down in the desk chair. It was obvious she felt frightened, but her hands didn’t shake as some people’s might; they gripped very tightly.
“Look at me,” Lorna said, but Virginia couldn’t raise her eyes beyond the pale green collar of Lorna’s blouse and the silver necklace that dangled in the shadow between her breasts. When she breathed in, she could smell the cold outdoors on Lorna’s skin and clothes.
“Tell me exactly what you mean,” Lorna went on. “What did you try to stop him from doing?”
“From going out on the marsh. He went to help the German pilot.”
Lorna didn’t ask anything else, but Virginia could see the pulse flickering in her neck and feel her grip growing ever more rigid.
Lorna made a telephone call and people began arriving at the house: a police constable on his bike, several neighbors from the village, a woman with an apple cake, the vicar. Mrs. Hill came, ashen-faced, in a taxi.
Virginia weighted the front door open with the umbrella stand and people drifted in apologetically, glancing at one another and whispering—if they dared to talk at all. Lorna paced up and down the kitchen, fiddling restively with an unlit cigarette, and barely seemed to register their arrival. She kept picking at her lower lip, and it started to bleed.
Mrs. Hill slumped at the table and wept into a red handkerchief, while the woman with the apple cake wondered aloud where she should put it. The young policeman fumbled in his pocket for a strip of matches, cleared his throat, and asked Lorna if she needed a light, but she stared back at him as if he were speaking in Chinese and carried on pacing.
The vicar opened the back door and a few people, including Virginia, went outside and leaned over the wall. The wind had got up, and the stinging smell of the sea blew in their faces. One of the men had brought a flashlight, and he broke the blackout rules by switching it on, but there was nothing to see except a few bleak yards of grass. “Clem!” he shouted, and the others joined in—“Clem! Cle-em!”—but their voices were guzzled up by the wind, and after a couple of minutes they gave up and trooped inside again.
Mr. Deering rolled up to the house eventually, with a smooth crunch of tires, and Lorna went outside to meet him. She let him kiss her on the cheek, and they talked for a few minutes on the doorstep. A few people got to their feet when he entered the kitchen, and the vicar shook his hand. He sat down at the table, his fingers steepled against his lips, and everyone grew more alert. The policeman took out a notebook and licked the lead of his pencil.
“So,” said Mr. Deering, his eyes falling on Virginia. Someone pulled out a chair and pressed her into it, and she thought how sleek and sober he seemed tonight, with his black eyes gleaming like shards of coal. She tried to picture him the way he had been in September, dissolute with grief and vomiting on their lawn, but all that was gone; it seemed impossible, unthinkable—a delirious dream. He stretched his legs under the table and crossed them at the ankle, and as he did so his shoes brushed her bare legs. He sighed, as if weighed down with anxieties, but Virginia saw the minute smile that lurked beneath his heavy eyelids and under his moustache.
“So, Vi, Clement left you on your own while he set off on this ‘mercy mission’? Is that correct?”
Nobody called her “Vi,” except for Clem. Virginia wasn’t going to answer, but Mr. Deering seemed prepared to wait, so in the end she nodded briefly. The policeman began making notes in a laborious longhand.
“I must say I’m surprised,” Deering remarked, accepting a cigarette from Lorna. “I know Tollbury Marsh as well as he does, and I wouldn’t have risked it today, with the tides as they are.” He put the cigarette between his lips and removed it again. “Not without exceptionally good cause.”
“Oh, but that’s not true!” Virginia leapt from her chair. “Clem said the tides were all right today; he said the marsh was in a good mood.”
Mr. Deering laughed bleakly and shook his head.
“Mr. Deering knows the marsh better than most,” someone said, reprimanding her, and there was a murmur of agreement around the table.
“Clem knows the marsh,” Virginia retorted, gripping the sides of her chair. “And he promised he’d be back. He said we absolutely mustn’t worry, even if Lorna—I mean, Mother—even if she got back before him, and she’s barely been back an hour, so ...”
Her voice petered out and she shrugged. She’d offered exactly the same reassurance when everyone was arriving, and she was aggrieved that nobody seemed inclined to give it weight. The apple-cake woman shuffled uneasily, as she had done before, and the vicar smiled at Virginia without quite meeting her eye. The police constable stroked his moustache and made a half-hearted note in his pad.
“Right enough, Vi,” said Mr. Deering, the words drifting lightly from his lips and twining with the cigarette smoke. “Hope springs eternal.”
The police constable cleared his throat and put forward a few questions of his own—“What time did Clem leave? Which direction did he take? Was he carrying anything with him?”—which Virginia answered as best she could, although she hesitated over the question of time.
“It was after one o’clock and before two, but I’m not exactly sure ...”
The policeman rattled the pencil against his teeth and told her to think carefully and try her best to remember. He wrote down everything she said, read it out loud, reread it in silence, and closed his notebook.
“Well,” he sighed, sitting down and accepting a slice of apple cake. “I think we’ve done what we can for now?” He shot Mr. Deering a querying glance, and Mr. Deering nodded his assent.
Virginia looked at them all: the familiar, the semifamiliar, the strange. They seemed large and looming, like creatures of a different order whose ways she’d never understand. She sought the plainest English words she knew.
“Aren’t we going to go and look for him?”
A burst of wind made the kitchen window shudder, and the pulsating orange embers inside the range glowed red. A piece of coal crumbled and fell. Nobody looked at Virginia, not even Mr. Deering. He just smoked and scattered ash on the tabletop and gazed into space.
“You heard what Mr. Deering said.” The vicar looked at her over the top of his glasses, as if he thought her impertinent. Mrs. Hill mopped her cheeks and took a long, shaky breath. “It’s too risky, love.” She screwed the handkerchief into a ball and pressed it against her mouth.
Virginia narrowed her eyes and berated them soundlessly, barely moving her lips. What did you come for then? She stared at one of the whorls in the wooden tabletop and made it into an island, a solid fragment amid miles of sliding sands and waters.
“Will you excuse me?” Lorna stood up very suddenly and her chair rocked backward. “Sorry.”
Mr. Deering glanced around and started to stand, but Lorna walked out of the room and ran upstairs before he could even say her name, or try to stop her.
“You can come home with me tonight, if you’d rather,” said Mrs. Hill as she and Virginia stood by the open front door. She’d folded the red handkerchief into a tidy square and put it in her pocket, as if to say enough is enough, but she couldn’t stop her eyes and nose from watering, and she kept swatting irritably at the drips.
“No.” Virginia hugged herself and shivered. “Thank you.” People were starting to drift away now, and they all seemed to want to touch her as they squeezed past. Some of them patted her on the back or the head; others squeezed her shoulder.
“Are you quite sure?” Mrs. Hill peered back inside the house as she knotted her headscarf. Mr. Deering was making himself at home, strolling about the downstairs rooms with his hands in his pockets and a freshly lit cigarette in the corner of his lips. His hat and coat were still hanging in the hall. Virginia listened to his silky tread for a moment and pulled her cardigan tight, but in the end she shook her head.
“I can’t. I promised Clem I’d be here when he gets back.”
Mrs. Hill stared at her, and slowly nodded.
“All right,” she said, placing her damp palm against Virginia’s cheek.
Virginia left the front door on the latch so that Clem could get in without knocking. She scurried upstairs, keeping close to the wall where the shadows were deepest, and didn’t stop to spy on Mr. Deering until she was almost at the top.
As soon as the neighbors were gone he went back to the kitchen to cut himself a second wedge of apple cake, and then he resumed his tour of the ground floor, dropping a trail of crumbs and ash behind him. He paused every now and then to look at the photos, or the Meissen teacups, or the sliver of night between a pair of half-closed curtains. Of course people eat and smoke and fidget when they’re on edge, but all the same he didn’t look like a man whose oldest friend was lost on Tollbury Marsh. She wished Clem would burst in now and catch him at it.
Mr. Deering popped the final piece of apple cake into his mouth and unstoppered the whisky decanter, emptying what was left into a clean glass. Something squeaked and bumped upstairs in the bathroom, and Virginia heard the slosh and spill of water. It happened again—the squeaking, bumping noise—and she recognized the sound of enamel pulling on skin. Lorna must be taking a bath.
He’d heard it too; she could tell by the way he looked upward, toward the noise, as he drained his whisky. Oh God, thought Virginia, crossing her fingers. Come back, Clem; come now. Perhaps she said part of her prayer out loud, or perhaps she moved too quickly, because all at once Mr. Deering was gazing at her over the rim of his glass. He raised it a little, as if to drink to her good health, and smiled like a man who’s been gifted with good fortune.
The bolt on the bathroom door was inadequate; she’d always thought so. She’d point it out to Clem just as soon as he got back. It was tiny, and the screws on the bracket were loose, too; anyone trying to break in from the landing could do so with a modest shove—as she had just done. All the same, she wiggled it across as far as it would go and leaned back against the door.
She thought Lorna would be angered by the intrusion; that she’d bring her knees up to her chest in a swirling flurry and hide her nakedness as best she could. But she just lay in the bath with her legs straight out in front of her, her hair floating around her shoulders like pale seaweed, and said, simply, “Have they gone?”
Virginia had never seen Lorna so unguarded; so lacking in ceremony. It unsettled her because she wasn’t sure what it meant.
“You’re having a bath.”
Lorna closed her reddened eyes. “Sorry. I just had to get away. Have they all gone now?”
“All except Mr. Deering.”
“Oh.” Lorna fished a cloth out of the water and laid it, dripping, across her face, so that nothing was visible but her mouth. “Oh, hell.”
Virginia stared at the pliable pallor of Lorna’s grown-up flesh. She couldn’t envy it—not exactly—but even in the midst of this crisis it caught her interest. Lorna’s legs seemed completely different in substance from her own. They were like the soft white lumps of wax you pick off the side of a burning candle and mold between your thumb and forefinger. She wondered whether Mr. Deering had ever molded them between his fingers, and then she caught her tongue between her teeth, as if to bite the thought away and spit it out.
Lorna dragged the cloth from her face and stared back at Virginia.
“Are you staying?”
“I’m not going downstairs again while he’s here. Not until Clem gets back.”
“Stay, then. I don’t mind.”
So Virginia sat down on the linoleum floor with her back against the tub and her feet pressed against the door. Puddles of cold water soaked through her skirt.
“You’ll get wet,” Lorna murmured, and Virginia could tell she had her eyes shut.
“It doesn’t matter. What will we do about Clem?”
Dripping fingers touched her softly on the head and played with her hair. For a long time Lorna made no reply, and Virginia thought she hadn’t heard, but then she said, “You’re very fond of him, aren’t you?” as if it were something she’d just realized.
Virginia dropped her chin onto her knees and they sat together in silence while the bath went cold. The water from Lorna’s hand filtered through her hair and dribbled down her neck, but she didn’t move away. She listened to the dripping tap and improvised little bargains with fate. If I can count to ten in French between two drips then he’ll come ... If I can say my twelve times table without a single mistake, one sum per drip, then he’ll come ... Eventually, as if granting a concession at the end of a hard-fought inner argument, Lorna said, “He loved you too. He loved you for your gratitude.”
The past tense felt like a kick in the stomach, and for a few moments Virginia could hardly breathe, let alone move. As soon as she was able, she staggered to her feet and flung the bathroom door wide open.
“Oh.” Lorna sat forward, her hair trailing over her face like a tangle of fine wires, and held out a spongy hand. “Listen, Virginia, I didn’t mean it badly—”
Virginia hovered in the doorway, ignoring the outstretched hand. Outside the house a motor coughed and rumbled into life, and they turned their heads in unison toward the sound.
“Is that Max?” Lorna whispered. “Is he leaving?”
Virginia went to the spare room and peered down at the driveway . She could just make out the majestic bulk of the Austin 12 as it maneuvered in front of the house before inching its way down the potholed lane and disappearing into the darkness. She waited a couple of minutes, and even then she ventured downstairs with caution. He’d left a folded note on the hall table.
There was a wild lumbering and sloshing from upstairs as Lorna climbed out of the bath.
“Has he gone?” she shouted.
Ladies, I hate to leave you alone at such a time, but Theo will be missing me. I’ll drop by first thing. In the meantime, if there is any news—or should you want me for whatever reason—don’t hesitate to call. You know I’m at your service, day and night. M. D.
Lorna appeared on the landing, tall and dripping in a gray towel. She looked like something out of a myth; a river goddess in a sleeveless gown.
“Yes, he’s gone.”
Lorna nodded slowly.
“For now,” she murmured, as if she’d read the note, word for word, right from the top of the stairs.
Midnight came and went, but they forgot about the New Year—or if they remembered, neither thought it worth mentioning. Lorna sat at the kitchen table, shivering in her dressing gown, while Virginia paced about in search of things to do. She boiled the kettle and stoked the range and hung Clem’s pajamas on the rail to warm. She took Bracken outside. She brought the kettle back to the boil and then did nothing with it. Neither of them said much.
When Virginia was drying up she found a tin at the back of the cutlery drawer, full of string and drawing pins and candle stubs. She took out all the candles—some were an inch high, with black pimples for wicks, but they were better than nothing—and proceeded to place them in all the marsh-facing windows of the house. She was breaking the blackout regulations, but she didn’t care.
When all the windows were lit, upstairs and downstairs, there was one candle remaining. Virginia melted the base and stuck it inside an empty jam jar, pressing it down until it stood unsupported. Then she thought for a moment, before lighting the wick and starting up the attic stairs.
The round window was like an eye in the east-facing gable, staring blindly over miles of bare darkness. Virginia placed the jar on the sill and knelt beside it for a while. It was cold in the attic, with the wind creeping under the slates, and her cardigan was thin. She wanted to look out into the night, but all she could see when she tried was her own face reflected in the glass.