They were walking along the harbour front in their chosen fishing town when, without any warning, Vera asked Arnold about his past. Her interest in him was so unexpected and sudden he wondered if she had suffered some sort of mental collapse. She had asked him about his parents, and he told her they had both died when he was in his twenties.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
‘There’s no need to be. They were old when they had me, so I always knew they would die while I was still young.’
‘What did they do?’
‘My father was a bookseller. He had a shop in Highgate. My mother was a musician and music teacher.’
‘What did she play?’
‘The flute.’
A seagull landed on the harbour wall, just in front of them. It touched down with the same lack of gravity as a puppet on strings. They were startled by its size, its brilliant whiteness, and by the stern, frowning face. A breeze lifted some of its feathers. As though realizing it had landed too close to the human couple, it took off again almost immediately.
‘The only time I ever have any thoughts about life after death is when things like that happen.’
‘Things like what?’
‘That seagull. It was my mother.’
‘So you are a heathen after all.’
‘Any animal out of place, that strays into the exclusively human realm, I think it’s her. An owl trapped in a church nave, once. A dog who sat by the lamp post across the road and watched our house all night. That’s the nearest I get to seeing the dead.’
Vera, who had her arm through his, pulled herself close to him.
They were wandering towards the fish market, walking without any strong sense of purpose; no one did in the fishing town, apart from the fishermen sometimes. The fish market occupied one side of the harbour in a series of large open barn-like structures of black corrugated steel. The market itself had finished much earlier in the day, but the fishmongers were still there, behind their long, chilled displays of crushed ice.
‘When the first cosmonauts went into space, my mother said they saw angels out of their windows. She believed the Communist Party suppressed the reports.’
They were in the market now, walking the salty floors of cement, looking at the stacked plastic crates where unsold fish were beginning to rot. Men in gory aprons and galoshes were sweeping heads and tails into bins, others were hosing down the stainless-steel tables. Arnold and Vera wandered among the displays where, on long counters of snow, the whole or splayed bodies of fish were on show. There were crabs and lobsters, monstrous and red. Dogfish as doey-eyed as puppies.
‘Do you like fish?’ Arnold said, eyeing the displays with slight revulsion.
‘Do you mean to eat, or to look at?’
‘To think about.’
The question caused Vera to ponder deeply. She looked at the fish.
‘I don’t know about them. They seem to come from another world, when you see them like this.’
It was as though they were in a museum of the fish. People ambled around with no apparent intent to buy anything, and instead gawped at tanks of live eels, or watched the gutting of bream and bass. Arnold and Vera felt a greater freedom to talk than usual. With no prompting, Vera began talking about her family.
‘My father had a terrible argument with his own father – my grandfather. He had been an active member of the League of Militant Godless. Have you heard of them? They were a group dedicated to destroying religious faith in the Soviet Union. They tried to do this by confronting religious believers with irrefutable scientific truths. Of course I wasn’t even born when this was happening, but my mother told me stories that she heard from her own mother, about how they would conduct parades through her village, at Easter and Christmas, the holiest times, and they would carry effigies of Jesus or the Virgin Mary dressed in clown costumes, along with pagan images and Egyptian gods, to show that they were no better, that Mary was just Isis in another form. Or even worse, they dug up the bodies of local patron saints to show that they were decomposing, just like the bodies of ordinary mortals . . .’
Arnold was not listening very carefully to what Vera was saying, because he had just been knocked almost senseless by the thought that he had spotted someone he knew among the crowds in the fish market. He grabbed Vera and started steering her away. The person he had seen was not in the fish market itself, but on the quay outside, standing close to the edge and peering down into the waters; a black-clad figure, tall and thin with loose curly hair. Arnold had never seen Martin Guerre in anything other than a paper suit, but still he felt convinced the figure was him.
‘What’s wrong,’ said Vera, ‘why are you pushing me?’
‘I’ve seen someone I know.’
He felt Vera stiffen as he said the words.
‘Where?’
‘By the quayside. If he turns round, he’ll see us. Don’t look, in case he does.’
‘Do I know him?’
‘No.’
By now Arnold had steered Vera to the back of the market, deep within the structure, and far enough away from the figure that was still gazing into the water. The problem now was that they were trapped, if Martin Guerre should turn around and enter the market. There was no telling which direction he might head, once he had finished contemplating the water.
‘Who is it?’ said Vera, turning now so that she could see the figure.
‘Just a student.’
‘Are you sure it’s him? You can tell from behind?’
‘No, I’m not sure. But I’ve a strong feeling. Why is he standing there? Why doesn’t he go?’
‘The best thing would be to split up,’ said Vera. ‘If he hasn’t seen us together yet, and doesn’t know who I am, then I can walk away on my own and meet you at the hotel later.’
‘Yes, I hadn’t thought of that. What is he doing?’
The figure had taken his coat off and had just dropped it on the ground behind him. He then climbed onto one of the stone bollards that lined the quayside.
‘He’s going to jump in,’ said Arnold, suddenly panicked, moving forwards through the holiday crowd, ‘he’s going to kill himself . . .’
He was hurrying now, suddenly, against all his own expectations, acting quickly.
It wasn’t just what Polly had said about the latent death wish evident in the poems, for the last few weeks Arnold hadn’t been able to get the boy out of his mind, and had become convinced that he was, in one way or another, going to cause him great trouble. He was going to – Arnold didn’t know – do something stupid, reckless, ridiculous. And since reading and rereading The Paper Lovers, he felt more than ever that there was something brewing with Martin, that he was a danger to himself. He could be thought of as that kind of person. He was pure and innocent and straightforward. He was the sort of person who might die for a principle. And the way he was poised on the bollard. Preparing himself for death, he had stretched out his arms like wings, as though he was going to take flight in just the way the seagull had, without even having to think about it. Arnold was running now, terrified that he wouldn’t reach the boy in time.
Afterwards he wondered how he could have been so deeply in the grip of the boy’s poems, that he accosted a complete stranger, a thin, attenuated practiser of tai chi, who had no intention of throwing himself into the deep waters of the harbour, but was merely exercising his living body. It was Arnold’s intervention that had put him in danger, throwing him off balance and sending him plummeting over the side. Not before he had turned and shown Arnold a most un-Martin-like face. It would only have been suicide for a non-swimmer with weights in his pockets. The tai-chi practiser disappeared with a ripping, pluming splash but bobbed up to the surface within seconds, spitting sea water and shaking the salt from his eyes as he breast-stroked to the nearby ladder. And he had been so understanding. He was, in fact, a great advert for the tempering powers of tai chi, for he showed not the slightest ill will towards Arnold, but instead said he quite understood. He had understandably mistaken him for someone about to throw themselves to their death. Even as he stood there dripping, the man smiled, and shook hands with Arnold, patting him wetly on the shoulder.
The incident had drawn a small crowd, though to Arnold it seemed vast. From his previous position of anonymity within the town he was propelled to sudden celebrity. It felt as though the entire population was looking at him. He feared that Vera was too close, and they would be seen together as a couple. But she moved away quickly and was soon lost to his sight. They didn’t rendezvous at the hotel as planned, but went their separate ways to their separate homes.