Salt (15 page)

We drifted into one of the banks of reed beds and I sat there for a while snapping the dry stalks. No one did anything. We were there a long time. No one passed. Then my mother unclipped the hand-paddle and pushed us out into the channel. She paddled us a hundred feet or so, then turned into a tiny drainage channel, not much wider than the boat. She punted us up this channel till the boat got stuck between the banks and then we just sat there as the night grew round us.

‘Can we go back?' Elsie said quietly.

‘Soon. We'll go back.'

Elsie took that calmly, an adult sensibility beginning to emerge in her. A share of responsibility between them now, for me.

‘And tomorrow,' my mother said, deliberately brightly, ‘we'll go in the yard and scrub those dirty pigs clean with baking soda and then paint them whatever colours we want. We can put lipstick on them and dress them up as clowns and Pip can paint a Union Jack on the fat one.'

‘Right,' Elsie said. And then she began to cry again, and she said through her sobs, ‘We're not going home, are we?'

‘No.'

My mother kissed us both and I realized that there, in that tiny, ludicrously painted rowing boat in the middle of the night in Bedlam Fen, at the end of a pointless drainage channel which had run out into nothing, with no space to even turn round, I was at home, utterly at home, with my mother and Elsie. Nothing else mattered. The farm, my father, everything up to that point, seemed so far away. Here, in Bedlam Fen, with the icy wink of the stars above us in the blue-black night and my mother in nervous collapse, this was where we all belonged.

‘I wish you were
my
mum,' Elsie said bravely in the dark.

 

I don't think any of us slept that night. But even though it was uncomfortable none of us complained. I remember how my mother wrapped all the blankets round us and then bound us in a length of rope that Elsie and I could hold at either end to keep our three bodies together. How she tied plastic bags over our shoes to keep our feet warm.

At around three in the morning Elsie said she was hungry and my mother gave us some Scotch eggs and crisps, and a plastic mug of chocolate from a flask. Some time later, I found the torch near my feet and wrote in my book:
Mum, the stars are turning round
. She read the message in the glare of torchlight, then she said turn that off, best we save the battery. We all stared up at the sky and the stars had indeed changed. Over the course of the night Orion had turned on his side ready to sink into the Fens again. Pip, she said, I've got you a present. And she gave me a small seashell like the ones hermit crabs live in. It's from Blakeney Point, she said. Listen to it and you'll always be near the sea, the North Sea, wherever you are.

 

Just before dawn in Bedlam Fen the first draught of air from the storm clouds reached us in our ditch, followed by plump, uncertain drops of rain. Then it began to pour down in heavy sheets. We could do nothing but get drenched while the earth spat mud around us and the fen steamed and boiled. Elsie climbed out and I ran after her, both of us slipping in the mud and she started laughing and running along the bank, our clothes skin tight and heavy with the water. I remember her hair and how flat it was and the slope of her thin shoulders and how big and wide her mouth looked.

‘Auntie May!' she shouted, ‘Auntie May, you're soaked!'

‘Like a fish!' my mother said.

 

She sat in the boat, still and grey in the rain. She'd heard the engine of the launch that had just decelerated past the mouth of our drainage ditch. Elsie looked up and fell silent as she saw the men in dark green oilskins picking their way over the fen to where she was standing.

My father arrived first, swiftly ushering the others to grab the painter and drag the boat from the ditch. He took his own hat off and put it on my head and it felt warm and secure and ridiculous. One of the other men gave Elsie his coat and she obediently put it round her shoulders, her hair plastered against her head and the man's trench coat splayed on the mud around her as if someone had partially deflated her. My mother seemed on the edge of all this, but one of the men had given her some sort of large fishing umbrella and so she sat under that, motionless, emotionless, while the
Mary Magdalene
was hauled out backwards.

 

The boat my father led us to was a proper motorboat with bright windows and the glass all steamed up, like someone was having a bath inside. We walked over the slippery black mud of the fen towards these windows, the only light we could see in the entire misty landscape. Inside, a kettle boiled away in a small galley, and a radio played quietly in the corner. An alien world. Elsie and I were given towels and mugs of hot black tea as the men started the engine and the banks of the drainage channel once more began to slip by. Through the windows the fen looked suddenly dark and forbidding. On the roof of the cabin and down the front windows and as far as we could see the river water was pitted with the lead shot of rain.

The
Mary Magdalene
was dragged behind the boat on a thirty-foot length of towrope, pulling so fast the water curved against its prow in a beautiful glassy wave. And there was my mother, still silent, still gripping the man's umbrella in her tiny patch of brightly coloured summer sky in a world gone completely bleak, the simple wedding band on her finger like the last ray of sunlight.

My father handed over the wheel and came into the cabin. He sat down on one of the bunks and looked at his hands for a long time.

10

Euximoor Drove, Cotton's Corner, Popham's Eau, Three Holes. Rain and mist driving across the landscape in blowing fogs, tearing through stands of poplar and gusting round farm-houses, pumping stations, labourers' cottages. Plau Field, Low Fen. Buildings without inhabitants in a land without people, somewhere lower than the sea itself, and us, somewhere on that negligible line between earth and sky.

Elsie had stuck to a description of pulling the boat out at the old sluice, how the stars had come out, how the storm had drenched us and of the heavy feel of the man's oilskin jacket she'd worn. My father listened with a patience born out of weariness, biting a hangnail, fiddling with his ear, waiting for her energy to wane. Wondering what he'd do then. Soon, Elsie did stop talking, and my father stared out the front window while he picked with his fingernails at a cork ball tied to a keyring. He never quite knew what to say to her.

Uncomfortable with the unfolding of a serious family drama, the other men had chosen to sit it out by the wheel. I recognized them from the fondue party. The one who'd told my mother about taking the armchairs to London had lost his energy for talk, as if that had been his yearly quota and he'd used it up. Both men zipped their parkas so tight only a small aperture of fake fur remained of their faces, as they passed a hip flask back and forth.

By the time my father had built a small pile of cork shavings on the counter we reached Three Holes. The rope pulling the
Mary Magdalene
went slack and the little rowing boat nudged into our stern with a gentle bump. No one reacted to it and it didn't wake Elsie, who had crashed into sleep in the space of minutes. She didn't wake when my father carried her out of the cabin, passing my mother, who didn't look up once from beneath her umbrella, Elsie's red hair hanging over the green shoulder of his oilskin, her mouth like a collapsed O as he picked his way up the bank. The two men stayed in the wheelhouse, deep in their coats. Surely Elsie couldn't just sleep her way out of all this? But she was limp in his arms. And a strange moment there on top of the bank: my father kissed Elsie, once, tenderly, on the cheek, and almost as soon as he did it he wiped it away with his finger. The glass cabin door swung gently to and fro. I decided to follow my father and Elsie but one of the men moved instinctively to the hatchway. Looking up at his big coat and a shadowed eye peering out from his fur-lined hood, I pulled the door closed and went back to my seat. I looked at the cork shavings and swept them off the table.

Half an hour earlier we'd passed the abandoned tractor engine where I had chased eels. I thought of the waterlogged flip-flop with its huddled crew of pebbles clinging on for dear life, and the sight of the one representing my father falling off the back of the boat. Falling off and never being caught. And I imagined him sitting in the front room of the Holbeachs' cottage. Ethel Holbeach, plump and waxy in her morning dressing gown, fussing with Elsie's wet clothes. Elsie, sullen and miserable, being made to stand on cold tiles. Mr Holbeach, as grey as the fens, considering some verse from Proverbs in his head because he had no words of his own.

A similar scene two hours later. From behind tightly shut doors I heard the vented fury of my father, his voice tight with the effort of restraining himself. His sense of betrayal. His whole damned situation stuck in this dreary farmhouse on the edge of the Fens with a madwoman for a wife. Occasionally, my mother sneezed, but otherwise she said nothing, and at lunchtime she went to bed and stayed there all day, knowing the weight of silence would be handed over to my father, and in it he'd hopefully find some guilt for the things he'd said and the things he'd done.

 

That night I dreamed of the oilskin creatures picking their way across Bedlam Fen. Oily creatures with no faces, the rain dripping off them. Their feet sinking into the marsh. And as they advanced - with each footfall - I heard the house creak. Eerily the dreamland fen sank into my room's shadows, and I realized I was more awake than asleep. The creaking continued. Slow, uncertain footsteps pacing the corridor. Opening the door, I saw my mother standing right outside, her head angled to one side as if she'd been brushing her hair. I touched the hem of her nightie and she pushed me away and then held her hand in front of her. Silencing some imaginary noise. The storm had left a terrible silence in its wake. Her eyes were open but she didn't see me. I just stood there, looking up at the marbled pattern of the moonlight shining through the wet window on to her face.

She moved away, her nightie bone-white in the corridor. Her door shut with a click, and I glimpsed something move at the end of the corridor, and realized my father was standing there, dark and brooding in the shadows. He gestured briskly at me, pointing me back to bed, and then with impatient steps I heard him coming down the corridor to make sure my door was closed as I climbed back beneath the blankets.

 

From then on I spent most days at the Stow Bardolph Estate, where I'd watch how my father priced a cow by the feel of its spine, or how the angle of a sheep's neck became a mark in a ledger. The marks built up into impressive accounts. How disease, vermin, seasons and gate prices bowed the beauty of his tables. How livestock, fowl and game - the whole array of animal nature - tabulated in columns on the one hand, fox, mole, badger and rodent on the other. Figures in red and black over several books, corralled into one irreducible number. Profit.

 

Only in the bull-pen did I see the dreamer he'd once been. The man who'd known animals before he'd known himself. I was allowed to sit on a high ledge where I could look down at him as he stroked and examined the bull. It was the Red Poll, about a ton in weight, and a deep tan in colour. My father had no veterinary training, but it was clear he was trusted more than anyone to treat the animal. He and the bull had an understanding, and I sat on my ledge in awe. Often he'd unchain it from the hook and lead it round, the bull taking a stumbling solid walk, only a few steps till its flank pressed against the bricks. It was an old brick shed rising up to blackened roof timbers, with two high windows - and in the mornings shafts of sunlight would fall into the otherwise dark pit. It was a very calm place. The bull breathed heavily while being led, its breath mixing with my father's pipe into a heady evocative cloud. The bull had a wild pink eye hidden in the curls of its head, and it would glance once at me on my ledge and then look at me no more as it passed between the sunbeams. My father spoke to it all the time, close by its ear. A lulling sound full of that's it . . . fine . . . come on now . . . easy, until the animal seemed to be at one with his leader's somnambulant whispers. Sometimes the Red Poll would swing its square head to one side and my father would be flung back on his heels, but he never raised his voice. The animal trusted him, a tamed giant, bending its spirit to walk in staggered circles through the straw as if wisdom were being passed from man to beast. This was the man who as a boy had killed a calf and cut out its tongue - an act that earned him the right to speak with bulls.

Then my father would disappear somewhere, and I'd wait in the kitchen making models out of dough. I made all the farm animals, and watched them grow deformed in the heat of the oven, and at the end of the day I filled my father's silent car with the sweet smell of bread.

My mother would take these loaves humorously, but when I closed her hands round them, I often noticed a tremble in her fingers which had not been there before. Her eyes, always sad, seemed to have grown duller. The food was still on the table for evening meals, but she didn't speak to my father any more, and when she spoke to me it was with a cracked, quiet voice. It was a silence that eventually drove my father to eat in his study, taking the food quickly from the table and washing his plate alone at the sink later. No mention that we ate the same thing on several nights running, or that it had lost its taste.

 

No one really knew what she did during the days. The garden became overgrown and eggs stayed in the coop. Only a kitten, Pepper - found as a stray on the estate - lifted her at times from the depression, as it ceaselessly chased bits of wool, ambushed my mother from behind chair legs and pounced on her hand to bite or scratch a finger, her hands becoming covered with tiny scars.