In the night she hears again the sound like distant artillery. Hears it at the edge of the audible but is sure this time it is not thunder. When she wakes in the early morning she lies a long time looking at the light on the wall. She cries again, though without any violence, the tears following the creases at the corners of her eyes and finding their way down to her throat.
Before getting into bed she made a rag for herself by tearing the back out of one of her T-shirts. She looks at it now, looks to see if she has bled onto the sheet below her, then gets up, dresses in jeans (the denim stiff with salt but wearable) and goes down the stairs. She’s very hungry and goes straight to the cupboard where, in Tupperware boxes and old biscuit tins, any uneaten food from the main meal is kept. She eats cold roast vegetables, a piece of flatbread, three of the little plantains, two tomatoes. She goes out to the girl looking after the chickens to ask if she has any eggs and the girl gives her two, which Maud breaks and swallows raw. She sees Jessica coming down from the walled garden. The girl greets her with just a moment of unease. She looks somehow younger today and perhaps feels it.
‘Where’s Theo?’ asks Maud.
‘He’s in the trailer.’
Maud goes to the trailer and knocks at the door until he opens it. He’s just wearing shorts.
‘Can you take me to the boat?’
He will not look at her, not directly.
‘I’m tired,’ he says.
‘O.K.,’ she says. She smiles at him but he is already turning away from her, closing the door.
She goes back to find Jessica and has her take the lock from the trap door. In the room below she tops up the fuel in the generator and takes an empty jerrycan down to the beach. She does not believe she will find the jangada hard to sail. She drags it into the surf, climbs in over the stern. The boat is steered with a rudder oar and there’s no more to the rigging than a mainsheet but for the first twenty minutes she thinks she’s made a mistake and has to reach back to skills learnt in her teens, the club days when she raced shallow-hulled Lasers and Fireballs on the Thames. Even so, the church is out of view before she starts to feel comfortable, to know where to put her weight, how to aim the sledge prow at the swell, how close to the wind she can go.
By the time she reaches Lodestar there’s almost no wind at all. She brushes alongside the yacht, ties on and climbs aboard. She fills the jerrycan with diesel—there’s still plenty in there—then goes below into the water. In the sliding-door cupboard in the heads she finds the tampons she took from the bathroom of the cottage, and pushing down her jeans (she’s up to her knees in water) she unwraps one and makes use of it then and there, a side-glimpse of herself in the mirror, her face darker than her hair, the white line of the shock cord around her neck.
Back in the saloon she looks for what else she can take. As before, she makes a pile on the top step of the companionway, then packs the smaller items into a pair of canvas buckets and puts the rest into a sail bag. She collects the boat’s title document, registration and insurance (all in a plastic file still above the waterline). The last thing she does is tear out an endpaper from the Book of Landfalls and with a pencil she finds floating between the benches and rubs dry until it functions, she writes a note that will serve as the final entry of the log she did not keep. My name is Maud Stamp, joint owner of the yacht Lodestar. I set sail from Falmouth on the English coast at the end of May 2009, was dismasted in the mid-Atlantic and driven south by a storm . . . It’s a short account, at the end of which she writes Tim’s phone number and the address of the Rathbone house. As an afterthought she also puts down Chris Totten’s name and the address of the yard. She hangs the page from one of the brass hooks holding the curtain wire at the window above the chart table and is about to step through the companionway when she sees, below the framed photograph of the boat, a piece of buoyant light in the water and she wades over to it and lifts it. It’s the bulb she picked out of the sea south of the Azores. General Electric, sixty watts, the glass skin undamaged, the filament unbroken. She turns it in her hands. She is almost afraid of it. She is also smiling at it, and for a moment she considers taking it with her—this object carrying its own improbable news—but she settles it onto the water again and climbs the companionway steps for the last time, drops in the washboards, and after tugging, hard, three, four times, drags shut the hatch on its runners.
The boy is waiting for her on the beach when she gets back.
He runs into the surf to take hold of the boat, take possession of it. ‘You must never take it!’ he shouts. ‘1550 nao te pertence!’ Something strangled in his voice. He’s close to tears.
‘You were tired,’ says Maud.
‘It’s not yours!’ he shouts. He grabs one of the canvas buckets and flings it onto the beach, scattering the contents. Maud walks around the front of the boat to where he is standing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
He stares at her, then looks down at his feet. ‘It’s not yours,’ he mumbles.
She lifts the other bucket from the boards, lifts the sail bag, puts them on the sand and crouches to collect the contents of the spilt bucket. Some of the children have been drawn to the sound of shouting, and outside the door of the church Jessica is looking on. No one comes any closer—then one of the children breaks ranks and runs down the beach towards Maud. It’s the boy with the bounce of ginger hair she found in the punishment box, the forno, at the back of the church. He flicks a nervous glance at Theo, then picks up one of the buckets and carries it behind Maud to the arches. Three other children carry the sail bag. It’s like the head of a giant they have just watched slain.
There is no film that night. At the evening meal Jessica tells them they must save the gas. Next week perhaps they will watch another; it will depend on how good they are, how obedient. Theo says nothing other than the grace at the start of the meal. As soon as the meal has finished he leaves the table. The atmosphere is exactly that of a household where the parents have reached some impasse.
Maud, carrying one of the wind-up lanterns, goes to her room half an hour after the children are in bed. She did not accompany Jessica on her rounds. She’s tired, drained, restless. Has she become unused to bleeding? So much blood last night she half imagined a miscarriage. She undresses, puts on Pa’s shirt that she now uses as a nightshirt and lies on top of the bed with Captain Slocum’s journal. Most of the pages are stuck together and when she unsticks them they feel, between finger and thumb, like old fake money. She props the lantern at the head of the bed and reads paragraphs at random, moths touching the edges of her face with the edges of their wings. After righting the dory for the fourth time, I finally succeeded by the utmost care in keeping her upright while I hauled myself into her and with one of the oars, which I had recovered, paddled to the shore, somewhat the worse for wear and pretty full of saltwater . . .
She settles the book on her chest, looks up at the ceiling where a house lizard is looking down at her. All there is, she thinks, is this, just this. This and nothing more.
The lantern, unwound, is growing dim, and she puts it on the floor, switches it off and has rolled beneath the thin blanket when she hears her door being quietly opened. She waits—it‘s too dark to see who’s there—but when they do not speak she sits up and asks—with no great kindness in her voice—who it is.
‘It’s me,’ says a small voice. A child’s voice, a girl’s.
‘You want to see me?’
‘Yes.’
Maud feels for the lantern, winds it, holds it up (as Captain Slocum might on a wilder night to see what rattled the dog-house door). It’s Leah.
‘Come in,’ says Maud.
The girl comes in and behind her come two black girls, the twins, who helped Maud to stand that first day. They gather at the end of the bed while Maud looks at them and they look at her.
‘Are you O.K.?’ asks Maud. Leah nods.
‘Did you have a bad dream?’
The girl shakes her head.
‘Are you hungry?’
‘No,’ says Leah. ‘No,’ chime the girls behind her. (Everybody knows the word ‘hungry’.)
Then Leah—perhaps prodded—comes around the end of the bed and stands directly in front of Maud, in front of her knees. Only now does Maud understand what they have come for. She opens her arms, the girl steps in and Maud holds her for some ten or fifteen seconds. After her comes one of the twins and in her turn, her sister. When it’s over, and without another word, the three of them file out and the last carefully shuts the door.
This, then, becomes the pattern of Maud’s nights. The tap on the door, the face of the boldest child leaning in. Three or four of them at a time, each one patiently waiting his or her turn to be held, then quietly leaving. She doesn’t tell Jessica about it but somehow she finds out. ‘So you’re a mother now,’ says Jessica, coming to sit next to Maud under the mango tree.
‘I was a mother before,’ says Maud.
‘But now you’re their mother.’
‘No,’ says Maud. ‘They have their own mothers somewhere.’
There’s a long silence between them. The girl rubs a piece of red earth between her fingers.
‘You,’ says Maud, ‘you’re like a mother to them.’
‘When Pa comes back,’ says the girl, kneeling up and grinning, ‘maybe you can marry him.’
‘Do you think he’s coming back?’ asks Maud, in whose head has appeared, in all its weird detail, a picture of the car in the forest clearing.
‘Sure,’ says the girl. ‘Why wouldn’t he come back?’
That night she hears it again, those guns firing at the edge of sound. It wakes her and she lies listening to it for a while, then gets up and goes to where her watch is on the table. When she opens the shutters there’s enough moonlight to see the dial, and though the time it shows is local to itself—she has seen no clocks at the Ark—she makes a mental note of it and goes back to bed.
In the morning she walks out with Leah and the goats. She asks her about the noise, thinks it unlikely the girl will know what she’s talking about, but she nods immediately, looks at Maud and says, ‘O trem.’
‘Trem . . . train?’
‘Yes. Train.’
‘Have you seen it?’
‘One time. With Pa. He likes to walk at night when it is cool.’
‘Is it a train that carries people?’
The girl points to the sky. ‘On top,’ she says.
‘People on top of the train?’
She nods.
‘And inside?’
She shakes her head.
‘It passed last night,’ says Maud. ‘When will it come again?’
‘Not tomorrow,’ says the girl, nudging one of the goats with her stick. ‘Not tomorrow tomorrow. Not the next tomorrow. The tomorrow after that.’
Maud holds up her hand, her fingers.
‘Four days?’
‘Four days,’ agrees the girl.
* * *
For two of those days she’s undecided. She’s keeping an open mind, or that’s what she tells herself. There are practical questions, of course, but she’s Maud Stamp, and the practical holds no terrors for her. So what else? The children? The children were on their own for months before she arrived. And she cannot be certain Pa will not return, though she no longer wants to see him, the magician, the old dancer, the man whose shirt she has been sleeping in. There’s food, water, shelter. Looked at from a certain point of view, their situation is enviable.
On the third day she puts on her trainers and walks up the path towards the hills. As she passes children—children working, children playing, children making work into a game and getting the work done—they stop to watch her and some run over to her and she spends a few moments talking to them before moving off. After fifteen minutes of walking the ground starts to rise. On either side of the path the land looks barren, though here and there some leathery succulent grows, or patches of silvery grass, or a cactus (one with a small white bird on its highest limb she mistook for a flower until the sound of her walking put it into flight).
Halfway up the hill she enters a belt of trees, their trunks no higher than her head but with large, intricate crowns of branches and tangling twigs where cicadas sing their tireless, mechanical song. Beyond the trees, she comes to the bare summit of the hill and climbs onto a cinnamon-coloured rock to look out over the country. No buildings, no herded animals, certainly no sun glinting off rails, just the low hills repeating themselves and rolling on towards the watery outline of bigger hills, mountains perhaps. She should have brought the Zeiss with her though she does not think she would see more than emptiness magnified.
She turns back, gets among the trees again by a different route, and there, at the base of a larger tree, one that rises above the others like a yellow fountain, she finds a wooden cross and a grave covered in patterns of fallen leaves. Carved into the wood of the cross, the lettering still sharp: Ginny Plautz August 2 1967–December 13 2007. A True follower of Signs. She had known it was up here somewhere, the grave, but she was not looking for it, and to come across it like this, by chance, feels important in a way she could not easily explain. She sits beside it. She’s tired and hot and the shade of the tree is welcome. And there is the sense of a meeting, overdue, with this woman whose presence has not quite ebbed away from the old buildings on the beach. Ginny Plautz, dead of a snake bite. Ginny Plautz, not healed by Jesus or Pa or anyone. No way of knowing what kind of woman she was, what kind of guardian to the children. Maud has not even seen a picture of her, has nothing to go on other than her clothes, her voice on a clip of film, and cannot quite remember what she said. ‘What shall we do in the dry?’ Or was it Pa who asked the question and Ginny who said something about blowing away? It would be good now to have her company, to sit here in the shade of the tree with her, talking in low voices, the sort of conversation Maud has had so rarely but now feels a sudden appetite for. Ginny Plautz might offer confidences about Pa (there would be many, surely). And Maud, when her turn came, would tell her things you cannot tell to children; tell her, for example, about that winter morning she drove through the rain to the Rathbones’ house, Mrs. Slad in the kitchen, Bella reading to Tim that book with the man and woman on the cover, dancing. And she would tell her about Tim’s father waiting for her in the kitchen and leading her through to the little drawing room. The fire, the drinks table, the way the whisky burned her lips. And she would tell her what he said and before Ginny Plautz (the dead woman is her friend now) could say that she did not think he was wrong, not entirely. Had she ever been interested in being a mother? In motherhood? Interested in the way the other mothers were or seemed to be? Was she not, in truth, perfectly content to let Tim be the one who fed Zoe, who bathed her, comforted her, knew which of her soft toys was her current favourite, knew which drawer her winter vests were in, knew when she was tired, when she had had enough? A bad mother, then. Or not a good one. And this perhaps should trouble her more than it does. A bad mother who worked long hours, who sailed, who liked to sail on her own, who liked to be on her own. The simple reason Tim was with Zoe that morning on the way to school was that he was with her most of the time, whereas she, her mother, was not. But about the rest of it, her being cold-blooded, unmoved, about that he knew nothing at all, and she would not let him knock her down a second ume.
She lays a hand on the grave’s wooden crosspiece, lets it rest there a moment, as you might on another’s shoulder. Then she gets to her feet, looks down through the twisting avenues of trees. If you have a talent for surviving—as poor Ginny Plautz did not, as Pa, too, may not have done—it does not seem wrong to use it. Is it wrong?
Anyway, she’ll use it.
In the room that night, after the children have visited, she goes through the things she brought from the boat, puts some of them—clothes, her phone, her passport, the boat’s documents—into the green backpack, then lies awake a long time wondering if Leah’s counting can be relied upon. In the morning she cuts up the sail bag and uses the cloth to make two parcels. Into one she puts the antibiotics, fifty American dollars (the other fifty is for herself), the last of the Fennidine with clear, careful instructions written on the side—how much and in what circumstances. Also, half a dozen tampons—nothing in the store rooms below to suggest Pa or Ma had thought that far ahead. In the other parcel she puts Captain Slocum’s book, the tattered charts, the binoculars, her Green River sheath knife and two of the hand flares—then changes her mind and puts one of the flares into Jessica’s parcel.
They watch another film that evening—The Empire Strikes Back—and though several yards of the film seem to be missing (at one point the soundtrack gives way to that of another film entirely—Mutiny on the Bounty?), the children cheer as if watching a football match and afterwards run on the beach, flinging themselves at each other, tumbling over each other in the sand.
It takes almost half an hour to round them all up but when the last of them has washed and the last boy, weary on his feet, has wandered back from the latrines, Maud goes up with Jessica to say goodnight, then says goodnight to the girl herself at the top of the stairs, a quick touching of hands in the dark, a dozen soft words. Ten minutes later, four children come in to be held—Jenna, Conner, Caleb and Faith. She holds them and they go. She checks the time, straps on her watch, lies on the bed, sleeps for an hour dreaming of a night sky thick with the migration of fabulous birds, the moon rippling on their wings as they pass. Then she gets up, changes into jeans, T-shirt and sweatshirt, though does not yet put on her trainers (what’s left of them). She has been tempted to cut her hair again, cut it short, but instead she uses a strip from the sail bag, pulls her hair into her fist and binds it.
The parcels are under the bed. There’s a T on one, a J on the other. She takes them downstairs, listens, then goes to the door of the church. The door does not open silently but she does not need to open it far. Once inside she turns on her torch and follows the beam the length of the nave to the room behind the altar. She imagines suddenly confronting the boy there but the room is empty.
On the bench the boxes are where she last saw them. She lifts them in turn. Two she can immediately feel are empty; the other is heavier, a weight that wakes in her hands. This one she sets on the floor and in its place puts the sail bag parcels, then grips her torch between her teeth, picks up the box and goes back to the church door where she stops, turns off the torch and slides it into one of the back pockets of her jeans. She has thought carefully about what she is going to do next. Her first instinct was to release the snakes but the thought of leaving behind a half-dozen pit vipers combined itself in her head with pictures of the children’s bare feet. Nor could she carry them with her. Nor could she leave them in the little room—it’s barely even a matter of conscience. Without Jessica the children might not survive. Without Jessica, Theo might simply follow the shade of Pa to wherever it is he thinks Pa has gone.
She carries the box down to the surf, walks out and sinks it in the water, holding it there until the weight of water running through the air holes is enough to anchor it to the sand. It only takes a minute, perhaps two.
In her room again, she sits a while, getting her breath. What’s done is done. She looks at her watch, puts on her trainers. She is starting to tie the laces of the second shoe when the door opens and a figure slips inside. It’s Leah. She’s dressed. They had no arrangement, or perhaps the girl thought they did. Either way, Maud is pleased to see her. She puts on the backpack. Everything now is touch and whisper. They go down the stairs and out through the back of the building, past the chicken house, past the walled garden and the latrine. Leah has her stick in one hand; her other hand has hold of Maud. She guides her away from the track towards the shallow grey dome of the water cistern and the palm trees. The half-moon throws thin shadows from solitary trees, or from cacti or black rocks. They do not use the torch, nor do they speak much. Maud has water with her, some mangoes and biscuits, a piece of flatbread. Leah has brought her camouflage canteen, the one she held to Maud’s lips the first time they met. The walking is not difficult. The ground is solid and true, though walking at night is never like walking in the day. The eyes change; the brain too, presumably. Some afternoon in her third year at Bristol, sitting in the library, Maud skimmed through a paper on it in a journal—Cell, perhaps, or BioEssays—and can remember things about cones and rods and photoreceptor proteins; can remember herself, too, sitting by the window with a view of afternoon clouds over office blocks and ancient churches, a young woman who sometimes disconcerted people though never tried to . . .
Leah stops. They don’t seem to be anywhere.
‘Here?’ asks Maud.
The girl points. It looks at first—the metal smudged with moonlight—like rivulets of water, little streams, but it’s the rails, a hundred yards away, running on a shallow bank between the open country and the rising ground beyond.
They sit in the dust and take a mouthful of water each, eat a biscuit. They wait; the moon glides; the train, of course, is not coming. It is impossible to even imagine a train. The girl rests her head against Maud’s shoulder, then slides down to her lap and sleeps. Maud looks at her watch again. She did not really have a plan for the train failing to come and she cannot stay out here all night with the child. Another hour, an hour at most, and they will have to go back. She will have to face the boy’s rage.
Then a new sound enters the world. The child opens her eyes and sits up. She leads Maud by the hand to the cover of a low, scrubby tree, a thing within a thin, twisted trunk as if its growing had been an agony. It’s not clear to Maud which direction the train is coming from but Leah knows and is staring down the track—south?—for several seconds before the light appears. Everything now depends on the speed of the train, on whether Leah’s memory of it (out here in the cool of the night with Pa) is a true memory, but from the way the light—a neat cone of yellow light—is creeping towards them it’s clear that it is, as the child promised her, a train you can outrun.
But the noise of it! Rumbling, jangling, screeching. It’s like an old world army on the march, a column of conquistadors with their siege towers and loot and tarnished armour. The light sweeps the dark before it, shows the land unreal, martian. They stay hidden by the trunk of the tree, watching, fascinated. Then Maud leans down to the girl and into her ear says, ‘You want to come with me?’ The girl shakes her head, says something in which Maud can only catch the word goats (in fact it sounds like ‘ghosts’). Maud nods. It’s too late for speaking now. She lifts the cord from around her neck, the hair clip, and puts it around the girl’s neck.
The engine is almost level with them, a soft wash of light behind the double windscreen, a ten-second view of the driver sitting as if stunned in a dream. After the lead engine a second, pouring fumes through high vents. Then the first of the wagons, some painted white, some a darker colour, some with words on the side—ALBRAS, HANJIN, FMC Chemicals—some swirled with graffiti. And on top of the wagons, huddled as if at the top of a high wall, the shadows of people, scores of them, dark blue against the paling blue of the sky . . .
How many wagons have passed? Forty? Fifty? The base of the wagons is at least four feet above the rails but all of them appear to have mounting steps and little ladders, a whole superstructure of handholds and footholds. A red glow, soft and somehow lovely, indicates the end of the train. Maud reaches round to touch Leah’s hair, the warmth of her. Then she squats with the pack on her back, and when the red light draws its colour across her face she rises up and starts to run.
In truth, the girl does not see her climb aboard, not the actual moment when she must have leapt and seized hold of something, but the train, which took so long to arrive, takes only a few minutes to disappear, and when the lights have gone so has the woman. She calls her name, two or three times, but nothing comes back. The track is empty and the world has settled into silence again.