SATURDAY

I

With the bright sea at his feet and at his back a black rock, John sat listening on the shore:

‘… warm in the water like a bath, it’s so shallow – Hester do go in…’

‘Look what’s this one then, all spotty like an egg; what is it Eve, did you see one like it before?’

‘… a cowrie, I think – and if I don’t play at all today I won’t be able to do any at all tomorrow – my fingers will hurt and be stiff…’

‘I shall not go in, however warm, however shallow. A cowrie, yes – how many have you there? They’re fortune-teller’s shells, if you know how to use them.’

‘… three… four… five… once I caught a shell alive… Walker give me that one there, there, there by your foot…’

‘John asleep again, I see. What have you done with my cigarettes?’

‘… a necklace of them like this, maybe a starfish in the middle…’

‘A whole day without music. What a waste.’

‘Where else but where you put them – shall we eat? I’m hungry and the bread is still warm… sing then Eve, if you must, there was singing before anything else… No, don’t wake him, don’t be unkind!’

‘… don’t feel like singing, my head aches. Oh, blow it the other way, can’t you…’

‘It’ll keep away flies.’

‘… and besides what have you done with Alex?’

‘Yes, where’s my brother? I want to show him these: thirteen… fourteen…’

‘I recall a poem once in my youth, in those days when we memorised them and they lodged in there – the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea, it went – I don’t recall the rest – and at that time I had an opal ring and honestly thought, honestly thought, look hard enough Hester and you’ll see the white waves moving…’

‘Remember we used to keep the shells that were still on their hinges and you’d try and keep pennies inside? Sing for us, Evie, go on… oh, look, where have you been – I’ve been waiting and waiting! Look what I found!’

‘No doubt did you please you could marry with ease…’

‘… still warm, thank you – and is there cheese?’

‘When young maidens are fair many lovers will come…’

‘But you’re not fair, my darling, are you? Clare, now, she’s fair as the moon…’

‘And no maiden either!’

‘But she whom you wed should be North Country bred… give me the knife.’

‘… fair little sister, never growed up – show me your treasures then…’

‘I had thought Elijah might join us this time, really I did, but his times are in his own hands, I daresay – oh, careful now, mind John…’

And John, sand kicked into his eyes and the shade retreating from his feet, sat up, took the bread that was offered to him, and said, ‘It was always a favourite song of my mother’s, that one, though I don’t think she’d ever been north.’

After they’d eaten, and all but Hester had wandered out towards the long shallow pool that lay between them and the sea, John said: ‘I think I’ll go for a walk.’ Hester waved something between a farewell and a blessing, and resumed her watchful cross-legged position on the red blanket.

He’d woken that morning resolved to take his leave – the notebook left for the other man, the letter folded twice, the painted Puritan saluted at the door – but somewhere along the way he’d been caught up again, helpless, Elijah waving them farewell at the door, and delivering (or so John thought) a slow complicit wink. Still sleepy when they set out, he dozed fitfully in the moist hot air of the car, so that he only recalled waking now and then to see rabbits poisoned by farmers shivering at the roadside, and pylons coming at him across the fields like high-masted ships of the line. Stumbling to his feet, he’d seen a car park sloping to a quayside, where a boy sat cross-legged trailing a crab-line in green water. There was the familiar scent of clean air and salt and something deeper underneath, of fragments of fish dropped by gulls and drying out in hidden places, and seaweed dying on beds of rock; and above the calling of the gulls, the rushing and receding he’d once taken home in the coils of a shell that he pressed to his ear in winter, when there seemed no possibility of the sun ever shining again.

Returning now to the car park, uncertain of his way, he looked out to the line of dark squat shrubs that marked the beginning of the salt-marsh. The child had abandoned his fishing lines and now leant against the hull of a blue-painted tender, scratching patterns on the tarmac with a piece of flint.

The marshes were reached from a narrow raised pathway along a bank that formed a kind of sea wall. As John set out on the path he paused to let a toad cross; it splayed out its soft patient feet and crept past, a pulse throbbing in its stomach and its butter-coloured eyes rolling thanks. To his right as he walked were the long narrow gardens of the last houses before the sea; to his left, several feet below, was the low stretch of land that was drowned and revived every day by the industrious tides. It was an indistinct landscape riddled with irregular channels that ran into and out of each other everywhere he looked. Late in the day water would seep from under the soft mud and trickle unhurriedly in fine rivulets, gathering speed until the tide was high.

The land through which these channels ran was piebald green and blue, covered in grasses and fat blades of samphire or broad patches of sea lavender, its flowers so fine it might have been a bluish mist settling at ankle height, rolling in from the sea. It was impossible to believe it could ever have been underwater, but here and there a fine dark lacework of seaweed lay on the tips of the grasses, hanging like cobwebs in a forgotten room.

It was not a wholly unfamiliar scene – his brother had taken him to places like it often over the years. ‘These salt-flats are an eerie sort of place,’ Christopher had written to him, soon after he moved to the coast: ‘You couldn’t possibly stand alone out there under that massive sky and not feel something.’ On his first visit John had seen how empty it was, and how doleful, and felt nothing but the damp chill of a winter morning. That a man’s spirit could be brought low by nothing more than empty sky over empty land was absurd, he’d thought, and thumped his brother’s shoulder with cheerful force as they walked home.

He came down from the raised shingle track onto a broad stretch of cracked mud on which white salt stains glittered. Above him the sky was bright and the small hard sun pricked at his scalp. From away to his left, deep in a channel he couldn’t see, a curlew began to sing with a bubbling call that might have come from underwater.

He stooped to pick a head or two of sea lavender, wincing as the sturdy sharp stems rasped against the flesh in the crook of his fingers. The flowers were papery and dry, and held no scent. ‘All will be well,’ said John hopelessly to a herring gull dozing on a wooden boat nearby. ‘All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.’ It was plain the gull doubted this, and with a tired thrust of its wings it abandoned its wooden perch. John, who hadn’t noticed the boat when first coming down from the embankment path, walked curiously over. By far the largest of the crafts stranded on the marshes, it was an ugly, ill-proportioned, unpainted thing, with no rudder, mast or sail that he could see, as unseaworthy as a garden shed. A black stovepipe stuck up from the roof of the cabin, reaching down to a grimed oven that could just be seen through the centre of the boat’s three windows.

Moving a little closer, setting his feet carefully on the few raised firm patches between the damp rivulets of mud, John peered in. The window on the left was half-open, and swayed now and then in the breeze, sending the reflected sun sliding back and forth over the smeared glass. Three pans, untidily stacked, sat on the stovetop; a clean towel hung on a wooden rail. On a shelf nailed over the stove was a tin can with its bright label turned to the wall, and a childish egg cup with a blue stripe. If he stood on tiptoe it was possible to see, in the centre of a pine table pushed under the window, a stack of blue napkins ironed into neat squares, and a magazine with half its cover in shade, and half bleached pale by the sun. The boat was stranded in a stretch of damp mud as pale as the cap of a mushroom – no-one could possibly reach it from the soft wet marshes without floundering. A set of tracks, plainly showing the paws of a curious dog, led halfway to the tilting hull and back again at the anxious call of its master. Where the drier marshes met the mud several wooden planks were stacked, caked with mud and in places draped with seaweed. They made a dry path out to the boat a short distance away, but there were no marks in the mud. John watched it awhile, half-expecting to see a face at the window, but there was only his own, thinner than he remembered it, and anxious under an untidy thatch of hair.

Turning away, he returned to the path and followed it towards the empty horizon. Small furtive movements came from the grasses and sea lavender at his ankles, and sometimes a gull screamed out. Behind the stranded houseboat, beyond the embankment path, a line of pine trees showed black against the empty sky. Pigeons squabbled in the branches, bursting out of one tree and furiously into another. John watched them, peering through the black thicket. The sun raged at him – he felt it burning through the thin weave of his shirt and sending the blood to his head, where it beat implacably behind his eyes. A woman and child coming down the shingled path looked at him, startled, as they passed, the woman tugging at the boy’s hand to walk a little distance away from him. She had a pleasant soft face tanned by a week’s holiday; the boy was small, thin-legged, inquisitive, his green T-shirt still damp at the edges from the sea. Not sharing his mother’s suspicion, he eyed John frankly as he passed, taking him in with the same joyful interest he showed in the deep-cut channel and the listing boats.

‘Look, look,’ he said, seeing the window on the houseboat swing open and shut. ‘Is someone in there? Can we see? Do they live inside?’

‘I don’t think so. It’s too old. No-one lives there now.’

The two stood side by side at the edge of the pool of mud, dampened by thin channels of rising water. ‘Yes they do, they do – look.’ The boy jumped up and down to see better. ‘They’ve had their dinner, look.’ The woman peered in. ‘A long time ago, maybe. There’s no-one there now.’

‘But I want to go inside!’ His voice rose with indignation.

‘Well. You can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why do you think?’

John had almost reached the path. Beside the wooden houseboat, the boy tugged thoughtfully at his T-shirt. ‘Because it isn’t mine?’

‘That’s right. It’s not ours, so we can’t go in.’ The woman smoothed his hair, then said: ‘Listen! Can you hear that funny sound again?’ She stooped to crouch beside the boy and turning him towards her put her head beside his. ‘Be quiet, and listen, there it is again!’

The child cupped his hands behind his ears and pulled them comically forward, straining into the breeze. John heard it too: the mournful bubbling call not far away now, hidden somewhere in the marsh. ‘It’s a curlew,’ he said, not quite to himself. The boy heard him and turned sharply.

‘That man said something!’ he whispered loudly, looking at John with astonishment. The woman stood and turned to John, her eyebrows raised.

‘It’s a curlew,’ he said again apologetically. ‘You can tell because he sounds like he’s singing under the sea. Like there are bubbles coming out of his beak.’ He smiled at the boy. ‘Listen. Can you hear it?’ There was nothing for a while, then it came again, starting on a high fluting note and falling unevenly through a scale. ‘You’ll know it when you see it,’ said John, ‘because his beak turns down at the end, like this.’ He made a curving gesture, and the child glanced quickly at his mother – could this be true? – and back, wide-eyed, at John. ‘Watch out for it,’ he said. ‘It won’t fly very high. It’s just a brown old thing, really. Quite ordinary. You wouldn’t notice it, in a crowd.’ He smiled at them both and turned back to the path.

‘Thank you,’ said the woman, smiling uncertainly at him. Then she said, ‘Say thank you!’ and the boy did, twisting the green fabric of his T-shirt around a dirty thumb.

When John was only a few feet along the embankment path he heard the call again, and the young child shouting. They’ve seen it, he thought, and hoped they’d not be disappointed.

Late in the afternoon he found Hester sitting alone with her back to the rock, her hands clasped over her stomach. ‘You’ve been gone a long time. I was worried – it would be easy to get lost, out there. I did once.’ She gave the impression she’d done so only out of choice, and enjoyed every minute of it.

‘I heard curlews singing, and the tide coming in – look: I picked some sea lavender.’ He’d tied the bunch with a ribbon of grass, and blushed when he gave it to her.

‘John! How sweet you are, and the flowers won’t fade, you know – there are bunches in the glasshouse someone must have picked just when the last century turned. Sit down, won’t you, and have a drink with me – let’s see if it’s kept cold, all tombed up in the sand…’ John took a bottle of beer from her and sank into the meagre shade. There was no sign of the rising tide – the sea was as far away as ever, and hadn’t yet reached the long pool which was busy with children, and with old women who’d wet their feet and go no further.

‘You’re all alone here, then?’ He fell to wondering where Eve might have gone, and whether she’d kept the sun from scorching her skin. He thought of the curlew’s call, and wished she’d heard it too.

‘Clare’s over there’ – Hester jerked her head to the left, where he could see the girl stooping to the sand, her amber hair falling over her eyes – ‘collecting shells. She’s making a picture in the sand – a tree, I think – it’s not very good.’ She paused, scratched her head, and seemed about to speak, but changed her mind. ‘Alex has been swimming but he’s there now, can you see? He seems to have made a new friend.’ Not far away, between their disarrayed blankets and books and the shallow pool, Alex crouched and spoke to a child. Leaning forward John saw the green T-shirt and recognised the inquisitive boy from an hour or so before. ‘Oh yes, I spoke to him earlier on the marshes – his mother can’t be far away.’

‘Children adore Alex – they climb all over him like he’s a friendly dog.’ She watched the two with such pride and gentleness, it transformed her face: her fine eyes seemed to broaden and spread, pushing at the lines and furrows that coarsened her features, making her, for a brief moment, handsome as a healthy girl. Catching John’s eye, she flushed, and the effect fractured; she looked, he thought, rather astonished, guilty, as if she’d been caught out in a secret vice. ‘Here comes Clare,’ she said, rearing up on her knees and waving the bunch of drying sea lavender over her head: ‘Move along a little, John – the shadows are getting longer now, there’s plenty of room.’

 

II

Things have changed – I can feel it from here. My mother used to go out on to the doorstep at the end of summer and scent the air like a dog and say, ‘Change of season coming,’ and go back inside and put the kettle on as if she felt a chill. It was always hard to believe she could be right, but it would never be long before the leaves turned. I saw it happen yesterday: not just the end of the heatwave – though thank God, I think it’s coming – but one complete and final change, as if the tide’s going out and won’t ever come back again.

In the house where I grew up, there was a painting in the dining room. I always took the same seat at the table (even now I’ll sit with my back to the window and with the wall to my right, if I can – anything else makes me uneasy), and I could see it as I ate. Years later I found a copy and meant to hang it in the shop, although I never did. The picture shows a woman in a black dress with a pale anxious face, sitting at a dinner table. You can just see a man sitting almost out of the frame, and he’s talking to her, but she isn’t listening – she’s looking straight out of the canvas. She has a small mouth, and it’s half-open, as if she’s waiting for someone and has just seen them coming. She has a glass of red wine in her hands, and on the table in front of her there’s a jug of wine so dark it looks black. There are lamps with red shades, and the flowers on the table are red, and red catches the silver candlesticks and the ice bucket on the white tablecloth. The whole painting is saturated with colour and light, and seeing it there was like finding a gap in the drab walls of the house, with something realer and more vivid just the other side. When I was young it used to frighten me – I didn’t think a painting should look at me like that. Sometimes I’d stand directly in front of it, and see my own reflected face laid over hers, and I would wonder which of us was painted, and who was watching whom.

Everything that happened today brought that painting back to me as clearly as if it were hanging on the wall between the windows. I’ve been outside them all looking in, or thought I had; it has been as though I were holding them in my hands between the covers of a book, so that when I grow tired of them I can set them all down and find a better story elsewhere. But I begin to feel myself being drawn against my will – it’s as if one day I passed that painting and from the corner of my eye saw the woman in the black dress reaching out to give me a glass of wine.

After I came back from walking on the salt-marsh I sat with Hester for a long time. The day I saw her first she’d looked at me as if I’d been numbers scribbled on a piece of paper that could be added up, and I felt as if she knew me then as well as anyone ever has, or is likely to. I wish I hadn’t described her as ugly. I’ve seen what happens to that face of hers when she looks at Alex – her bright dark eyes seem to refine and illuminate the rest of her, and make her beautiful.

We sat together watching the emptying beach. I could see the child I’d spoken to, playing with Alex in the shallow pool between the rocks and the sea – I remembered wondering where his mother had gone, but by then it was late in the afternoon and I was tired, and my head had begun to ache. The pieces of rock where we sat soaked up the sun, and sent its heat into my blood and bones. Every time I opened my eyes I’d see Hester still sitting like Buddha with her legs crossed, patiently watching Alex playing with the child, and each time the tall boy with his hair lit amber by the sun and the child in his green T-shirt would be further away until we couldn’t hear them laughing and shrieking in the water any more. When I closed my eyes for the last time it must have been to sleep for a long while, because I was woken by the sound of footsteps thudding into the sand. At first I thought it was my own blood beating in my head but it grew nearer and louder, and when I looked up a woman was running towards us with her arms outspread, shouting. When she reached us she kicked up the sand and it went in my eyes, and for a moment I was blinded. I turned away and cleared them, and recognised her as the woman I’d last seen on the marshes, telling her son to thank the strange man who’d known the sound of a curlew.

She’d been crying, and must have come a long way – sweat dripped from her forehead into her eyes and ran down with the tears and gathered into a stream under her chin. ‘Have you seen him?’ she was saying, ‘my boy – he’s in a green T-shirt – have you seen him? I’ve been looking and I can’t find him. He was with a man with red hair – did you see him?’ All of this came out between deep rasping breaths, and her eyes were so wide I could see the whites of them all around. I tried to get up but my legs had gone to sleep, and I had to brace myself against the rock. Hester took her by the shoulders and said, ‘Calm down sweetheart, calm down, stop and breathe. That’s right, we’ll find him, he won’t be far. That’s right; that’s right.’ She said those last words over and over until it was really just a soft and soothing hiss: ’ssri, ’ssri… Then the woman recognised me, and turned her body slightly to catch me in her distress. I felt it reach me – the pulse in my head began to beat harder and faster. The woman’s anguish was horrible – although she was calmer she shivered violently, and the skin was drawn tight across her cheekbones, making her seem to have been starved in the short space since I’d seen her last. Hester remained as she always was, a solid calm presence, still murmuring to the woman so that she too had to lower her voice, although she asked the same question over and over – ‘Have you seen him? Where’s he gone? Did you see him? Where’s he gone?’

Hester questioned her, as if she had authority over her and the whole beach and everyone on it: the poor woman had fallen asleep, beaten into the shade by the sun and worn out by the wind. She’d watched her son from the corner of her eye as he played with a kind young man on a half-empty beach where surely no-one was ever lost or hurt. He was a talkative boy and trusting, but not stupid; sure he’d talk to strangers but not go anywhere with them; he knew better than that. She berated herself for having fallen asleep – ‘But he seemed so nice, just a young man, not much more than a boy himself really; they were just over there and I was so tired…’ While she was still talking, pleading partly for help and partly for forgiveness, Hester – still gripping the woman’s hands – turned to me and said, very calmly and quietly, ‘Can you see Alex?’

My eyes were still sore from the sand and my vision was blurred, but I shaded them from the sun and scanned the beach back and forth two or three times. The light coming back from the hard-packed white sand was so dazzling I felt it pierce through to my already aching head, and it was hard to tell what was heat-haze pooling on the beach, and where the sea began. I could see Clare crouching by her collected shells nearby, making spirals out of cockle shells and not noticing the tension that had suddenly bound us tightly to a stranger. Our three shadows reached her red plastic bucket and made it dark, but she didn’t look up. Further off a tall pair made thin and fragile by the distance walked slowly at the water’s edge. ‘I can’t see him.’ I said. ‘I don’t think he’s there.’ My words went further and did more than I meant them to. The woman had given in to Hester’s soothing, but when she heard me she stiffened, became combative. ‘That man he was with, the young man with the red hair, he’s with you?’

‘He’s with me,’ said Hester.

The other woman had been holding Hester’s hands, or letting her own be held, but when she heard this she pulled them out, and her eyes, which hadn’t left the other woman’s face, narrowed with sudden distrust. I felt the air change slightly as her anxiety flared into anger. She’d been angry before, but it had been turned inward and made into guilt. What I’d said gave her liberty to fling it at other targets. Hester stepped away from her and held up her hands like someone fending off a blow. The woman said ‘What…’ and shook her head violently. ‘What? He’s with you? Then…’ Stumbling on the sand, which must have burnt her bare feet, she moved quickly round the blankets and books and empty water bottles that staked our claim to the beach. ‘Ben?’ She pushed past me, not maliciously but because she couldn’t really see either of us any more. ‘Ben, are you here, can you hear me?’ She slid behind the black rocks we’d been leaning against and raised her voice. It was compressed by the rocks and I thought: He wouldn’t hear you, even if he was nearby, even if we were keeping him out of sight. ‘Answer me, darling. Mummy isn’t cross with you. Ben? Can you hear me?’

I saw Hester standing with her hands on her hips watching the woman. She was less impassive now, biting hard on her bottom lip. I said, ‘I saw them together earlier. The boy wanted to see inside one of the boats on the marshes – maybe Alex took him there?’ Hester took this in on a low breath, then said, ‘Right,’ and gripped my shoulder. She shook her hair back from her forehead. ‘Look, be quiet – she’s coming back.’ Then she called out: ‘Sweetheart?’ It was an endearment she used without discrimination, but now it had changed; it wasn’t mollifying but condescending, as if she could use it to put an opponent in her place. The woman had appeared again from between the rocks; her flash of anger had gone, and she was wringing her hands. ‘He isn’t there, he’s not there…’

‘Of course not’ – Hester put an arm across the woman’s shoulders – ‘of course not. We’d’ve seen him, wouldn’t we?’ Turning the woman to face her, she put a hand on either side of her face and said intently, ‘The man he was with is called Alex. Did you speak to him?’

The woman nodded eagerly – her mistrust of Hester had gone, dissolved by the stronger woman’s gaze, and she was looking at her again with a desperate pleading face: ‘Just a bit, an hour ago I think. Ben wanted someone to play football with and my head ached, and the man was nearby – he was young and he smiled at me… they were there, just over there’ – she flung out her arm – ‘I don’t understand, how could they get so far?’ Her voice ended on a drawn-out wail.

‘You mustn’t panic. You won’t find him by crying, now will you?’ Hester bent awkwardly and picked up a half-empty bottle of water. ‘Have some of this.’ The woman winced as she drank and I thought it would be warm and unpleasant by now. I began to feel agitated by what I knew – the boy had probably begged to be taken back to the boat to spy for faces at the windows, and Alex would have taken him, I was sure of it, not seeing anything to threaten the happy day. I stepped forward and put out my hand thinking I’d tell the woman, but the order of the house had established itself here too, and I deferred to Hester, and stepped back again. Hester waited for the other woman to stop sipping at the bottle, then said, ‘You were out on the marshes, earlier in the day?’ She nodded. ‘Do you think your son might have gone back there?’

‘Not alone. He’s only five years old – he would never get that far alone, he’d get lost, he would never go by himself…’ Then the realisation of what she’d said struck her – he wasn’t alone and lost, he’d been taken away from her – and she threw down the water bottle. It landed beside Clare, on her knees beside a mandala of cowries. She noticed for the first time the three of us standing there and came over, frowning, looking from me to Hester and back again. She came and stood close by me, smelling of salt. I said, ‘She’s lost her little boy,’ and she grimaced.

‘But we’ll find him, John. Won’t we?’ Then she said to the woman, more loudly, ‘We’ll find him for you,’ but the woman wasn’t listening. Without turning to speak to Hester she ran heavily over the sand and I watched her heels sinking into the fine powder. We three looked at each other and followed, Hester moving a little behind me, and Clare running lightly ahead. I remember watching the woman’s bare feet thudding on the concrete of the car park and wincing as if I could feel it too, but she went on running and calling her son’s name, although even if he’d been able to hear her it came out so high and frantic it was like the seagulls crying. Many of the cars were gone by then, as people had tired of being battered by the sun and had gone home to lie in the shade until evening made life bearable. I looked for the boy with his fishing lines but he was gone too, with his white marks like a threat on the tarmac, and the shed selling crabs and cockles had closed its shutters. I remember being surprised that Hester, carrying so much weight on her stomach and thighs, could run so far and so fast. I could hear her breath heaving in and out of her but it didn’t slow her pace, and she reached the edges of the marsh just after us.

By then the tide was coming in fast: fingers of water crept across the cracked mud, and though the woman called and called, and Hester’s breath behind me hissed on the back of my neck, I thought I could hear it trickling up from underneath. Then suddenly I couldn’t hear anything because the woman stopped in her tracks and put her hands up to her head and screamed, not a high woman’s noise but deep and rasping and terrible, and it silenced everything else. I’d never heard anything like it and hope never to again – it dried my tongue and my stomach fell through me. I’d stopped running when I heard it, and Hester ran into me and knocked the breath out of me: I bent double and when I straightened up the woman was silent, which was worse than the screaming, because everything else was silent too, and there was a long empty moment when the water stopped creeping towards us over the mud, and we tried to see what she’d seen. She stood pinned to the ground, her hands still raised to her head, and I thought stupidly that if the wind blew she’d fall where she stood like a toppled statue.

When we moved either side of her on the narrow path and saw what was coming, Hester gasped and I heard a groan that can’t have been from Clare, so I suppose it must have come from me. Coming slowly towards us and with his head bowed and loose so that it swayed a little as he walked was Alex, and he was carrying the child. The bright green T-shirt was muddy and dragged up over his chest. His body sagged between Alex’s arms, and one of his trainers was missing. Alex must have been able to see us on the path but he didn’t lift up his head or call out, only went on walking, and the boy’s dangling limbs swung as he walked.

I marvelled at how slowly and painfully the blood thudded against my ears, and then the woman drew her breath in a gulp and screamed her son’s name. She dashed forward, pushing Hester into the rough grass, and snatching the boy lowered him on to the path. By the time we reached her the child was trying to sit up, and seemed not frightened but dazed. Where the T-shirt was pulled up over his thin torso he had a long fresh graze, and before his mother wrapped him in the cardigan she’d been wearing I saw a few dark splinters in the skin. The woman had become very calm, no more distressed than if her child had caught a cold – she stroked his hair and murmured, ‘We’d better get you in the warm, hadn’t we,’ although the sun was still trying to scald the water on the marshes. There was a bruise on the child’s forehead so recent it was still swelling as I watched, and when I saw it I became aware that Alex was standing a few paces away, wringing his hands and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry’, over and over. His T-shirt, white when we’d left the house that morning, was covered in patches of mud that were like inkblots, making a pattern like the drab wings of a giant moth. He too was grazed, down the length of his right arm.

Clare stood behind me and touched my arm briefly and uncertainly every few moments, as if she wanted to ask me something but couldn’t think what it was. I felt we were all ranged against Alex, that battle lines had been scored in the mud on the path: I wanted to place myself exactly halfway between the mother and the man who’d taken her son away, but couldn’t move, and as I write it now I feel it was cowardice that made me just stand by. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he kept on saying, and I wanted to shout that he should either say nothing at all, or tell us what had happened – what use was ‘sorry’ if he’d done nothing wrong?

The boy was sitting up by then – the cut on his forehead hadn’t after all gone deeper than the skin, and there was colour in his cheeks. He looked around, seeming unsurprised, not registering Alex’s face as any different from all the others that leaned over him. He recognised me. ‘We heard that funny bird again,’ he said brightly, and then began to cry. It seemed to me such a simple sound, so straightforward and easily remedied in all the muddle I’d been living through, that it calmed my anxiety, but the effect on the crouching woman was terrible. She stood up, and left unsupported the child almost toppled backwards. Clare, with her unselfconscious helpfulness, knelt next to him and patted his back with the same rough uneven strokes she used on her cat. The woman stepped forward towards Alex, who put out his hands and spread them in a gesture of fear, I think, and also of apology. It would be easy to look at the wringing hands and call it guilt, but that wasn’t what I saw then, and I don’t see it now, in my memory or as I write it out. He said again, ‘I’m sorry!’, this time making the words firmer, as if it might forestall the woman who was still coming towards him.

When she reached him, she put out her hand either to strike him or grip his arm, then pulled it back as if the idea of touching him disgusted her, and hissing between clenched teeth she said, ‘What did you do? Did you hurt my son? What have you done?’ Alex tried to speak but it came too slowly, and while he still formed the words on a stammer I’d never heard before, the woman said again, with controlled malice: ‘Well? Talk, can’t you? What’s wrong with you – cat got your tongue, is it? Say something, tell me what you did!’ She was moving towards him still, a small step with every word, and Alex backed away imperceptibly, holding out his hands to ward off the words and not finding any of his own. His silence infuriated the woman and with angry tears she said: ‘What have you done? What have you done? What have you done?’

Hester, still standing close to Alex, moved forward a little, and I remember then being puzzled at her face, which briefly showed open hostility to a woman who had every cause for anger. If she was going to say something, to defend Alex, to placate her perhaps, we never heard it, because a thought occurred suddenly to the woman and she stopped, gasped and said, not shouting any more but falteringly, testing the thought: ‘Did you – did you touch him?’

Seeing the word now, written plainly and without the awful inflection she gave it, it’s impossible to think how we all saw at once how to touch could be worse than to hurt. But it hung in the air like a foul smell; Hester paused in her movement and I felt bile rising in my throat. Alex went white and his eyes widened, and the movement of his hands became frantic as if he felt the accusation against his face and wanted to bat it away.

Only Clare seemed not to have noticed: she and the boy had found something by the path and were parting the grasses to get a better look and I wondered if it was the toad who’d passed me earlier that day. I wanted Alex to shout ‘No!’, to shout it clearly and strongly to break through the hysteria I could see darkening the woman’s face, but he didn’t, only mumbled, ‘Sorry, I’m sorry, it isn’t in there, I can’t remember,’ beating his own forehead with a bunched fist, then sagging slightly against Hester’s shoulder. It must have looked like a confession, because the woman rushed at him and struck out, not with the comic flailing I see sometimes on my way home late from work, but with violent precision. She wore a ring with a cheap stone on her right hand and it flashed as her arm swung back; Alex flinched and put up his arm, but she was quick and the blow landed and I heard it loud as a knock on a door. He didn’t make any sound, and I remember being proud of him for that. The woman’s anger exhausted itself quickly, perhaps because when Alex raised his head again he was bleeding from a split lip. The woman ran to her son, who looked now like any child might who’d been playing in the mud somewhere and fallen. He and Clare had picked long broad blades of grass and were trying to blow them like reeds, but they were the wrong kind and made no sound. The woman bent and yanked the boy’s arm to make him stand, and he looked up, baffled at first, then remembered where he’d been, and that his head hurt, and started sniffling.

Standing there holding his hand, she turned to face us. By then I’d crossed the battle line and stood with Alex and Hester, feeling the force of her rage pulling me in with them. She said: ‘I’m calling the police. I’m going to go and get my phone and call the police – you took my son and hurt him, and everyone will know.’ The child stopped sniffling and rubbed his eyes and nose on his bare arm. Tears and snot made a path through the mud drying on his skin. ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ he said weakly, and I heard Alex make a small grateful noise, but the woman didn’t hear her son, or didn’t listen. She turned away from us and began walking back along the path, and I felt Hester move convulsively next to me and draw in her breath to call her back.

But a few paces away the woman stopped. It must have been only a second or two that she stood unsteady on the path, but I felt the moment stretch out in front of us, giving me time to wonder what had happened or might have happened, what would happen to them all now, what it meant for them and me. Then she spun round and said, in a voice she must’ve taken great efforts to make chilled and controlled: ‘I want your names. All of them. And your phone number.’ She said it again, only tried to make it sound professional as if she could intimidate us, but the words weren’t quite right and I almost smiled, because I was ashamed of everyone and frightened for them all: ‘I require your contact details immediately please, so this matter can be resolved.’ I think she must have seen my smile because her eyes narrowed and the chill left her voice and I saw the flush of anger or embarrassment creep back into her cheeks.

The woman had found a pen and a scrap of card in her bag, and thrust it at me with shaking hands. Thinking all the while how absurd this was, I wrote out my name in clear capitals, as if I were humouring an inquisitive child. I wanted to say, ‘You’re mistaken; you must be – I never knew anyone less capable of harming a child.’ But every time I took a breath to speak I remembered my own guilt in deceiving them all, and the old stammer came back, and I couldn’t make the words come. I passed the card to Hester, thinking that surely she would speak in his defence, but instead she paused and looked at me with what I think was gratitude, then wrote Alex’s name underneath. She made it complete – ALEXANDER – as if this could distance it from the boy she’d sent to bed the night before with a glass of water for the hot night. Then she wrote her own name, and underneath that her telephone number, folded the card, and walked towards the waiting woman, who held out her hand.

Hester put the card into her open palm and folded the other woman’s fingers over it, and I heard her say: ‘I am so sorry your child was hurt. And I am sorry your day is spoilt. But it was an accident, no-one touched him. You’re making a terrible mistake – and I understand, I do, the world these days is dangerous for children. But it is a mistake. Look at Alexander, look – can’t you see he’s hurt most of all, that this will take longer to heal than bruises? Call us, call the police, talk to the boy: we’re not afraid. We’ll talk to you, to anyone. But take him home. Talk to him: he’ll tell you.’

We watched and waited for an angry response but none came. Hester’s strength of will gives her words weight: there’s something in her face, although it’s ugly – or even perhaps because it’s ugly – that seems incompatible with deceit or half-truths. The other woman briefly touched her son’s forehead, then nodded at Hester, and walked away from us. Clare stood by her brother plaiting blades of grass. She’d realised by then what had happened, I think, and was leaning against him slightly, biting down on her lip in concentration or perhaps because she didn’t want to cry. Hester came back to us. She put out her hand and touched each of us lightly on the shoulder. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Time to go home.’

Not much was said or done that night. There were phone calls I only partly overheard, Hester saying little and Alex nothing at all. I was there when Hester told Eve and Walker what had happened, and saw Eve storm at Hester as if it had been her fault: ‘The woman’s an idiot. Who leaves a little child alone on a beach? She should be glad. She should be glad it was Alex who found him, who looked after him. She deserves to have him taken away. I hope she calls the police. I hope she does…’ Walker put his hand on the back of her neck with a possessive gesture I hated; she flung it off, and shut herself in the music room. She didn’t play the melodies I was hoping for but scales, painfully slow and even, and after a while it was like the noise of the crickets in the garden and we couldn’t hear it any more.

I found Elijah in the dining room, dozing in the high-backed chair with its wooden candlesticks, where I’d seen him the night I arrived. His grave quiet presence was a relief to me, and we played chess until Hester came in to draw the curtains against the moths drawn to the light. When I told him what had happened he listened without anger or surprise – either the thought of Alex doing harm was so absurd it deflected off him without sinking in, or he could accommodate the idea of wrongdoing more calmly than we, as being just another consequence of being human. When I finished the miserable tale he shook his head and picked up a white bishop. ‘I’m afraid I never was any good at chess. You’ve won again, haven’t you?’

Just before I came upstairs to bed I went into the kitchen. Hester was there, unpacking the plastic cups and plates we’d taken to the beach. Clare was there too, knocking the sand from her shoes on to the kitchen floor and being scolded for it; and I didn’t notice for a long time that Alex was sitting in one of the kitchen’s dark recesses with his legs crossed, inspecting his hands and looking up sometimes when he heard his name.

‘She called, of course,’ Hester told me. She pulled a foil-wrapped parcel from one of the bags. ‘That’s the fruitcake I made, and we never got to eat it,’ she said, turning it in her hands. It gave off a sickly scent of spice and honey. ‘Yes – she called, firstly to ask lots of questions. She took the boy to hospital – he’d been knocked out but not for long, though they’re keeping him in until tomorrow. Alex spoke to her. She wanted to know if Alex would tell her what the boy had told her. Whether it all added up.’

‘And it did,’ Clare told me.

‘Well, of course it did. The boy had lied to Alex. He told him his mother had gone to the marshes to look at the boats, and he was scared to go out and meet her on his own, and would Alex take him. There’s no-one on earth can lie as well as a child, because they believe themselves, so it comes out like the truth.’ She gave me another of her searching looks and I wondered what Elijah had told her. But she shrugged and said, ‘They went out to the marsh and she wasn’t there, of course. No-one was. And the boy ran off to look at some abandoned boat. He slipped and fell, and if Alex hadn’t been there he’d’ve lain out there on the mud while the tide came in.’

I asked her if the woman would carry out her threat to call the police, and she said, ‘I doubt it. What would she say? That she left her child alone and wasn’t there when he fell? That this man saved him and she thanked him with violence?’ She nodded at Alex. The wound on his lip was closing but the flesh was swollen and he darted out his tongue to moisten it. ‘I imagine she’s ashamed of herself. She should be.’

Hester took a sandy blanket out of the bag and shook it, then folded it against her breast, and as she did she sent one of her long bright looks over to the corner where Alex was sitting. I saw something then that I couldn’t believe – something so peculiar that I blinked my eyes to clear them and looked again to be certain of it. Alex had pulled his knees up under his chin, and was pressing himself against the kitchen wall as if he wanted to seep into the bricks and plaster. But Hester didn’t look angry that he’d been accused of something so unthinkable, or afraid the woman had seen something in him that had passed the rest of us by. I didn’t find in her face the confused pity I was feeling, or even the most straightforward things – tiredness and hunger and anxiety. What I found instead was a long slow look of satisfaction, like a woman who’d come to the end of a day’s work sooner than expected. Then she smiled, and it wasn’t the sudden unfeigned smile that comes when you least expect it, but a kind of smirk.

It shocked me more than anything else that day, and made everything I’d seen up to that moment shift and sharpen. I fumbled for a chair and knocked a knife to the floor. They all turned to stare at me, except Alex, who scratched over and over at the graze on the back of his hand. Hester turned very slowly away from him and said, ‘All right there, John?’ and smiled at me. It was the same warm, steady gaze that had greeted me when I arrived, in the same kindly ugly face, and everything shifted again and settled into its old patterns.

Soon after that I came upstairs, and set it all down. These words on the page are problems I can’t solve, but I’ll keep at it – and sooner or later I’ll work them all out…