Pets were an indulgence, Grace explained. They did not need a dog to round up sheep, since there were no sheep. They did not need a cat to catch mice; chemical poisons did the trick.
What about rats? one of them said. You must get rats, on a farm. Grace opened her mouth to deny it. After harvest or haymaking, surely? the guest asked, with the wise look of one who knows such things from years of walking across other people’s fields. She guessed he must have seen one: the next step would be to ask for a reduction in the bill. There was often a method behind the most artless of questions.
Ernest shook his head. For those you get in the rat man, he said. With his ferret. That’s his job. Have you seen any ferrets? There’s lots around here. You only see them at night. Beautiful things. Now that’s what I’d call a worthwhile pet.
She had been aware of the rat in the house for the last three days. Their appearance was a mystery at certain times of year, although she was sure there was a logical explanation. I can’t stand the rats, Ivy would say. Can’t kill them either. She missed her daughter with a sudden, sharp pain.
As they scraped back their chairs, thanking her for omelettes and toast and fruit compote, an extra figure loomed in the doorway. Ed did not deserve the sobriquet of village policeman, although he looked as though he could audition for the role because he was fat, wore an unseasonal uniform and played the part of a weary paterfamilias. He usually arrived to check licences or the occasional stolen car left abandoned in a field, and Grace regarded him as simply another lazy bureaucrat with an alien accent. He smiled at the paying guests like a time-worn uncle, wished them a nice day, and wasn’t it a good one.
It was, if she had time to notice. Bright and warm, but not too warm, just right for walking about in shirtsleeves. A good day, following rain, with more rain promised in the afternoon. Obliging weather for the hay.
‘Make it quick, Ed,’ she said, handing him a mug of coffee and banging about behind his back. ‘Because I’ve got a lot to do. Like go out for a walk with my husband. You can’t have come to check gun licences. You know we haven’t had a rifle here for years.’
Ed sat down heavily, with the right ponderous manner for a serious errand.
‘Not even an old one, I’ll bet. No, Mrs Wiseman. It’s about one of your B and B people. Do you recall a bloke who stayed here for a week, earlier on? Middle of May or thereabouts? Young man from London? He came on his own. They remember him in the pub.’
‘I remember them all, but none of them in particular. Why?’
‘Only it seems he went missing, back in London, or so they thought. Took a couple of weeks after he left here for anyone to notice. Then this body turned up, off the coast, six miles down from Wethering. Taken them all this time to put the two together.’
Grace was clearing the table. Ernest sat quietly.
‘What’s that got to do with us?’ she said.
‘Don’t rightly know, but it looks like his last night staying with you was the last time anyone saw him. There was a party at the pub.’
‘There’s always a party at the pub, if someone’s willing to buy the drinks,’ Grace said crossly.
‘He was in the pub most nights, they say.’
Her face cleared, she nodded and sat down.
‘Oh yes, that one. I do remember him. Jack something. Jack the lad … No, it was Joe. Having a holiday because he’d split up from a girl or something. Remember him, Ernest? He was the only one I’ve ever had who wanted a quiet, healthy week in the country for the express purpose of getting drunk every night. Poor soul. What happened?’
‘Don’t know. He drove back to London, for sure. Put his suitcase inside his house, and that’s all he did. They say in the pub that Ivy was in that last night.’
Grace nodded, trying to remember. ‘So? Yes. I’ve got it now. She was home that week, wasn’t she, Ernest? We were both in the pub that night. I’m allowed out sometimes, you know. They give me free drinks, for all the people I send there. We’re good for trade.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘He was a bit obnoxious, to be honest,’ Grace said. ‘My God, he was even flirting with me. I’d mothered him a bit. Now I remember. It was that little heat wave we had, like we sometimes do in May. I got him back here, he went to bed. He was packed and ready, wanted to go early in the morning, to miss the traffic. And he did. Not so much as a thank-you. I thought that was funny, since he’d really enjoyed himself. Made friends, he said.’
Ed got up. ‘Is that all? You’ve no idea why he might have come back to the coast?’
‘You want to ask them in the pub. They’d have known him best. We’ve no idea. He said he’d definitely book for next year. I don’t know, I just don’t know.’
They all bowed heads in silent sympathy.
‘Ah well,’ Ed said. ‘I was asked to ask. I’ll let you get out for your walk. Lucky for some. How are you keeping, Mr Wiseman?’ he shouted, as if Ernest was deaf, the way he did with anyone old.
‘Fine.’
It was not true.
It was an old habit, walking round the farm, or further afield. The courtship of Ernest and Grace had taken the form of walking, getting away from scrutinising eyes. What could not be done in a house could be done in a field or a copse. He could buy her a drink in a pub, once borrowed his dad’s car for a drive somewhere else. The permissive, expensive hedonism of the 1960s had simply not applied here, only the same old rituals. The first time he had ever seen her semi-naked was by the lake. Grace in a swimsuit had taken his breath away; Grace being the better swimmer had alarmed him. She had been born by the sea a few miles away; she loved the sea. He had offered her the lake of which he was so proud, as if he had created it for her pleasure, presented it to her as a substitute for the sea. I made this with Carl, he told her. Carl was with me.
Ivy swam here, every summer day, only after Grace taught her first in the sea. It was easier to learn in the buoyant salt water. Even after the enormous expanse of the sea, the lake seemed romantically large to a child, from a child’s height. In reality it was a hundred yards long at most, dwindling to the point where it became river, then stream, with a narrow breadth between the bank and the woods on the far side, where the swans nested. A swimmer could treat it as a pool and do laps. It was safe and sheltered, and semi-secret, because it was so far from a road, there was no official footpath, and people were lazy. Locals knew; kids with bikes knew, but it never featured on a map. It was supposed to have died. There was no toilet, no coffee shop, and no games to play except sitting and eating picnics. There were occasional campers, who asked at the house first. There was no easy access to the water, which was muddy near the edge, and the place had a reputation for contamination and danger. The Wiseman family did not own the water, although everyone assumed they did because it was Ernest who picked up the litter. But it was his. It was their starting point and their nemesis.
Grace had fallen in love with the idea of a pond on the doorstep far sooner than she had fallen in love with Ernest. Carl was always there, then and now.
The habit was to walk, and sit, anywhere, including here, to talk about what was important, or not. Sometimes the point was not to talk at all, and then whatever it was which was festing cured itself and could be dealt with later. Or never, because it had ceased to matter. The presence of the lake was indeed his gift to her. Grace had sat in the field above, paused at the curve in the track, sat on the bank, swum herself into exhaustion, and chewed the cud here, and in the process had submerged all her greatest resentments without actually burying them. The fact that it had turned against her, and that the place itself, as well as its reigning swans, had delivered up to her the corpse of her grandchild, was a temporary aberration, a defection and betrayal held deep, but usually forgiven. The impact of that event went far beyond. She wondered now, as they sat on the bank in high summer, if Ernest saw what she saw, or if she could see what he did through his dark glass, and how long ago it was since they had lost the knack of telling one another the truth, or at what point she had decided he could not stand it, any more than she could. Or quite when it was he had begun to fade. All she knew was that when they looked at the lake, he had memories longer than hers, different visions of happiness and horror. And that he had never once had an ounce of her cunning or her acumen, or her passion, for which she thanked what passed for God, and loved him more, because he was still beautiful and he could always surprise her. As long as he would do as he was told.
‘Why did you lie?’ he said to her, absently, as they lounged in the grass.
‘About what?’
‘About who brought who back from the pub. That poor, silly boy. What a pain in the neck he was.’
‘I didn’t lie. That’s what I remembered.’
‘You lie all the time, lovely. Thank you for dealing with the cow. You were singing in the kitchen. Can you do it again? You might bring them out.’
Grace hummed.
She stepped away from me, and she moved through the fair.
And fondly I watched her move here and move there,
And she made her way homeward with one star awake,
As the swan in the evening moves over the lake.
‘There they go,’ he said. ‘Not waiting for evening.’
The swans came into view on the wooded side of the lake, the cygnets, two months old, big enough to fend for themselves, preening each other. The bulky nest was hidden away. Ernest knew what went into the nest, every single ingredient; he followed its progress. Grace never had. The nest was built in March and April, favouring an isolated shoreline. Made of vegetation, rushes, short-stemmed grasses, hidden but clumsy. Defended aggressively. They moulted on nesting, to feather the heap, could not fly away for seven weeks after and could only defend their citadel from the water. The babies were downy brown, half adult weight, but without their dignified serenity.
‘Took them a while, didn’t it?’ he said. ‘I mean, they’re getting on, aren’t they? They can start nesting at three, and these buggers were that old when I got ’em. How long ago was that, Grace? Five years? I know they can go on doing it, and it takes ’em a while to settle, and they’ll maybe live until a swan song at twenty-one years, but isn’t it great? They’re eight years apiece, that mother and father, and aren’t they proud? I am. It changes the view.’
She knew what he was seeing. He was not talking about these swans; he was talking about the other swans which had swum here a decade ago. The May swans, with their babies, blasted over the lake. May blossom from the hawthorn scattering the surface. Greasy blood on the rippling water, like an oil slick, white feathers dancing in the draught of a breeze, the reverberation of rifle shots, echoing. The real death. He could see it now, and Grace knew he could see it. He could see it behind the relatively new swans; he could see the old carnage. Ernest remembered a succession of swans, some more than others, Nina and Hans most of all.
‘Oh Lord, how I hated him,’ Ernest said. ‘Old Carl and I, we got those swans, can’t remember how. That pair we had ten years ago, we called them Nina and Hans, after his own siblings. They were already old, six if they were a day. I’d given up hope of them ever doing it. They built nests for three years, but it was only going through the motions, poor sods. No cygnets until that year, and then, hey presto, there they were. The darlings, they did it. No wonder Hans was so stroppy. It was probably his last chance. No one should swim here in May. And then he shot them all, even the cygnets. I hated him then.’
‘So does our daughter.’
He did not seem to hear. She knew what he could see, and if she had not loved him for what he was, she would have hated him for the nature of his regret. Always Carl and the swans. It was as if he cared more about the death of the swans than the death of a child, as if the memory of the swans was superimposed on the image of that other, less interesting, less damaged, almost bloodless corpse.
‘He came back in the evening. He got the rifle and blasted them out of the water.’
‘I don’t hate him for killing the swans,’ Grace said. ‘That’s the one thing I could understand. I might have done it myself.’
‘And I don’t hate him any more, Carl the younger. Why should we? Nina and Hans came back. I want him to come back. And bring his son, like old Carl did.’
There were pockets of fluffy clouds moving across the blue sky, casting shadows on the water, turning it dull, then bright as they moved away. The swans were bright white one moment, dull white the next, with the orange beaks of the cob and his mate glowing as they appeared to confer. She could remember the other scene, the May assassination, when the feathers scattered over the water were confused with drifting blossom; saw the birds rearing out of the water, too late. There had been no swan song.
Grace could feel the old, familiar jealousy. The way she had felt when Carl the elder appeared with his baby son, when she was still childless, watching them embrace each other as brothers and loving friends, and watching Ernest fuss that child, because he was a boy.
‘It was a mistake, wasn’t it, not to tell Ivy at once. About how it had happened. To let her have dreams of Cassie being turned into a swan.’
‘I’m glad you remember that much,’ Grace said caustically.
‘I heard you with her. I suppose it helped to get her to sleep.’
May heat waves. A sudden spurt of August-like warmth which made them all want to peel off winter clothes. There could be snow in April, heat fever in May, but never for long. Hottest bank holiday on record since 1899. They always said that.
‘It wasn’t Carl’s fault,’ Ernest said. ‘I wish he’d come back.’
He always missed the point, Grace thought, curling her fist around a clump of grass. Of course it had been Carl’s fault. She remembered him coming into the house, clutching that bawling, abominable boy, as if he could not walk, throwing him towards his mother, who was having a well-earned rest at the kitchen table, sharing motherly moans over tea. All he had had to do was supervise them down by the lake. He couldn’t even do that. The boy got fractious, so he brought him back. OK to leave Cassie. Actually, it did seem OK to leave Cassie; they all thought so. She could swim like a fish; the lake was shallow; she could run home in her bare feet in three minutes. Only she didn’t. She hadn’t. Grace could never understand how Ernest did not hate Carl the younger for the casual, wilful destruction of his wife, Ernest’s daughter, which followed.
‘She must have been on her back, with her neck extended, for the cob to bite her like that,’ Ernest said. ‘And make that mark. She must have swum too close to the nest.’
As if she did not know. As if it hadn’t been gone over again and again.
The lake was calm and dark under the fitful cloud. It was hardly a lake, more a pond. It was difficult to imagine the water churning, the swan’s beak around that tiny neck, pulling her under, making her panic, drowning her noise. Such a noisy, determined, talkative thing.
‘He shouldn’t have left her,’ Grace said stubbornly.
‘I’m hungry,’ Ernest said. ‘Is there anything for lunch?’
He was like that now. A narrow concentration span, skittering away and taking refuge in the dreams she would love to fulfil for him. She put out her hand, took his and hauled him to his feet, feeling the weight of his bones. He still saw so much more than he ever shared. Sometimes she thought she scarcely knew him at all. The path back to the house seemed long. He would have to deal with the cow after lunch, even it meant there were more flies. Otherwise, he would not eat.
‘Ivy’s all right now,’ he announced.
Her belief in his insight faded again. He had heard her that once, ten years ago, telling Ivy that Cassie had merely turned into a swan. He had never heard Ivy screaming in the night, never gone to hunt for her in the meaner streets of London, never known what ailed her, or the only way it could be cured. Revenge. He did not understand the coldness of anger, only the brief heat.
‘I like that Rachel,’ he said. ‘Lovely girl. I don’t like Ivy going to live with her, though. It isn’t really fair on her, is it? You’re using her, both of you.’
Yes, he did understand. She should never underestimate him.
‘We must give her a better time when she comes back. Take her to the pub instead of talking her to death,’ Grace said. ‘No, on second thoughts, not the pub.’
He sighed, ignoring her again.
‘Just as well he sends back the letters, really. The boy will come when he’s ready. He’ll find his own way. Just as well we don’t know where young Carl lives any more. Just as well we don’t have any way of finding out, nor Ivy either. We don’t have the right, you know.’
‘No,’ Grace said, meekly. ‘We can’t find out where he is. Not without spending money we haven’t got.’
‘He said he would look after us,’ Ernest complained. ‘He promised.’
‘That was when he married Ivy.’
He lived on another planet. The computer was only for the cows and his records, and he did that with difficulty and resentment. Of course they could find out where a man whom she knew had become a judge worked, if not where he lived. If they knew how to access internet directories, libraries, had the courage. Of course there were ways, but she did not know them. Nor could she leave him for long enough to find out. Ivy neither. Ivy had given up, hadn’t she? That was what she told Ernest.
Rachel could. It would be easy for Rachel, belonging to the same world. Rachel could find him, flash a card, demand to see him, and they would let her in. Rachel had all the qualifications. Rachel could.
Yes, Rachel could. She knew Rachel would.
Ernest stumbled and took her arm, smiled his sweet smile at her, as if there was all the time in the world to get home, to deal with the cow and the future and the collapse of dreams. As if there was time, with his fading mind and Ivy needing to be made whole again. Wanting to be restored to her former self, and always wanting to please him, for not being a boy. There was precious little time.
‘Such a clever little thing,’ he said. Grace did not know if he was referring to one of the cygnets, to Cassie, to Ivy. He was probably referring to Carl’s son, Carl. The boy. He looked at her; she wished her misjudgements of him were not as frequent as the times when she guessed his thoughts exactly right.
‘I mean Ivy, sweetheart. I was hard on her, wasn’t I? Expected her to do so much. Clever isn’t the right word. She took everything to heart and learned it. She knew she had to practise and learn and memorise, and she did.’
‘Yes, she did. She does.’
She put the thought of the drowned guest firmly from her mind.
Rachel opened the personal file on her private organiser. Dear Diary … She wrote to herself most days, usually in the office. Do you know, there was never a more opportune time for a clandestine affair in a crowded place? Except for finding somewhere to lie down. In the middle of an open-plan office like this, where everyone is isolated with their own screen, the lovers can e-mail in code, or pick up the mobile and text, without noise. Never has so much been done and misunderstood without speech.
I went into her room this morning, after she’d gone to clean offices. I wish she wouldn’t. I didn’t linger, promise. I just wanted to see if there was anything she needed which she wouldn’t ask for, like a better bedside light, because she sometimes draws in there and looks at her books. Why was I so slow to realise she can scarcely read? How will she ever get a degree? She’s so generous, and so proud. She’s made it into a nest, pinned up a couple of drawings. I shouldn’t look. It’s her private space. I won’t do it again.
Grace phones at eleven-ish, most days. Here. Otherwise, in the middle of the afternoon. Her fallow times, and mine too, I suppose. We don’t discuss Ivy, we talk about me. Which I like. She’s very tactful. She doesn’t want Ivy to be a nuisance, as if Ivy was a child and still her responsibility. She didn’t ask me to find out where that bastard Schneider lives or works, but I have, it’s easy. He’s in the Law Directory. I’ve already phoned up from here, said who I was and how I’d got a personal delivery for his home address, can they give it, and bless them, they did. I’d have got him off the electoral roll, anyway. I can’t picture where he lives. What he’s got to hide … I KNOW what he’s got to hide. Cruelty and desertion. I just want to know a little bit more, then I’ll find him.
We’ve got Dad for supper tonight. Sound like we’re going to eat him, ha, ha. I’ve just got this awful feeling about it. Hers are so colourful, mine are so plain. Grace keeps telling me I’m beautiful: she makes me feel it. I can’t wait to go back and tell her I’ve found him. No, I won’t, I’ll go and meet him. The bastard. The cruel bastard. I’ll go to his office, chambers, whatever. Someone, some man, like that should be exposed. He’s a judge!
It must be easy to divorce a person who cannot read. I went to the divorce registry yesterday, looked it up. On the grounds of adultery, I ask you.
She was wearing new clothes today. Her head ached; she wanted the sea and the lake, and she wanted justice.
OK to tramp the streets, though Donald did want to be home. It was not a day to be catching sight of himself in shop windows, especially in Soho, unless what was on the other side of the window was food. One of his favourite areas. It had always had people like Blaker. Soho changed its spots, but not its disposition. Sex and food, food and sex. Having lost interest in both, he was less than charmed. Sometimes he wondered if everyone had done as he did, i.e. short-circuited the whole process of judging human nature and come straight to the conclusion that everyone was vile. The effort of proving otherwise was scarcely worth it.
He saw her flitting round the stalls in Berwick Street, and knew he had seen her before. Tall, slightly gaunt, handsome, buying in vegetables and garlic, arguing the price. A tart if ever there was one, but a tart who cooked.
Donald really did not want to know about daughters and sons and wives. He was looking for Blaker. This was his patch, as it always had been. Blaker was a gentle mugger, only hit them when necessary, i.e. when they noticed they were being robbed. A daylight man who only ever got them when they were shopping. Favoured the good handbags, carelessly worn with the mind of the owner concentrated on shopping, that was his favourite modus operandi. He watched them first here on the stalls, and then in the silk shops. Theatrical types and curtain-makers went in there, foodies stayed outside. On the outside stalls of Berwick Street they had metal bowls with exotic fruit and veg at one pound a time. There was ginger and mangoes, one stall avocados only, another purely for pink apples, and the shops on the far side of the caffs sold silks, satins, videos and cheap, flashy jewellery, where the stallholders could stand outside, play cards and swear.
This was as far as the tarts from the other side of the river got in the 1870s. Over Waterloo Bridge, away from the drovers and market men worth a shilling a time, up into Covent Garden where the prices were higher. The unlucky ones went back in despair, some of them preferring to drown themselves in the river rather than return empty-handed. They called Waterloo the bridge of sighs.
The woman buying vegetables was streetwise. Her bag was strapped across her body and tucked into a belt, leaving hands free. No one would part her from her money without a fight. She tested the vegetables, disturbed the display, and no one argued back. She was a sight for sore eyes, if you liked them Amazonian. Donald had come here looking for Blaker. It was still a better bet than handling all that stuff about missing wives and old grievances. He could clock up the hours, looking for Blaker in the confident hope he would not find him in a hurry.
The woman stepped away from the stall, all negotiation done. Cash was king here, credit cards a no-no. This stall faced one of the few caffs down this stretch, ranging from bistro snacks to burgers. She waved towards the window. Donald looked in the direction of the wave.
Fuck this for a game of monkeys. The man in the window, being waved at, looked like Blaker.
Such a small world, and way too soon. Couldn’t be right. He wanted this job to last.