Authors: Lucie Whitehouse
There are serious fears for the safety of a Yarmouth resident after her sailing dinghy was found floating off the back of the Island near Freshwater Bay.
Lifeboats from Freshwater, Yarmouth and Lymington joined the coastguard helicopter in the search for Alice Frewin, 34, after she was reported missing by her husband. Mrs Frewin’s boat, a scow named
Vespertine,
was recovered by the Yarmouth crew on Thursday evening and towed to Yarmouth harbour.
Peter Frewin, the missing woman’s husband, had believed her to be visiting family on the mainland but raised the alarm when his wife’s sister claimed that there had been no arrangement between them to meet and he discovered her boat had been taken from its mooring in the Western Yar. The search continues but, with sea temperatures now low, hopes for Mrs Frewin’s safe recovery are fading.
Next to the story was a photograph. I leaned over the table to look at it more closely. The newsprint blurred the picture and she hadn’t been looking directly at the camera, but with a shock of recognition I realised I’d seen Alice Frewin before.
Three days earlier, my first full day on the Island, I’d gone walking in the afternoon, partly to distract myself, partly to start getting my bearings again. At the end of the passageway I’d turned right and walked the fifteen or so yards to where the street met the town square. There, too, little had changed. The grocery was still on the corner, its green-striped awning rippling in the breeze, and opposite it was the yacht chandlery whose stone step, I remembered, had a deep groove worn into it by centuries of feet. Then there was the Bugle pub, the white walls of the little branch of Lloyd’s bank, the café in the wooden hut at the start of the pier. The garden of the George hotel was screened by a thick hedge. Two people had been in evidence: a grey-haired woman pulling a canvas shopping trolley and a man on the bench by St James’s church on the other side of the Square, bending slowly to pet the Yorkshire terrier which snuffled round his feet. Apart from the look of the few cars parked at the kerb, there was nothing much to suggest that I hadn’t been teleported back to the 1950s.
I had taken the road that led off the Square by the grocery: the High Street. There were more tiny local shops: a jeweller, a florist, a place selling old-fashioned women’s clothing. Signs on the doors of a gift shop and a restaurant said they would be closed until spring. A faded poster outside the police sub-station proclaimed the importance of the Neighbourhood Watch.
The shops ran out as the street went on and then I was walking between two facing rows of houses, some cottages, some substantial properties, in a range of architectural styles. There was a huge Gothic mansion, its leaded windows obscured by the lush magnolias that dominated its garden, and a little further along, the four-storey North House, so fresh-painted and pristine it wouldn’t have looked out of place in Kensington. Smaller but equally beautiful houses came after it and I looked surreptitiously through their windows, seeing the ornaments on their sills – the vases and plates and photographs – and the ordered rooms beyond. Occasionally in the houses on my left, I could see all the way through to the Solent, past the easy chairs and kitchen tables positioned for the view. Only in one of the rooms was there a light on, the yellow glow of a lamp pushing back the creeping grey of the afternoon.
The High Street came out at a common that sloped steeply to a tarmac path along the water’s edge. I’d made my way down across the long autumn grass and followed it, letting my feet fall into a rhythm with the grey-green waves that slapped at the concrete sea wall. Their briny smell mingled with the scent of mud and wet grass. Across the Solent, the mainland was little more than a thick green stripe; above it, another bank of cloud was massing.
Along the length of the path there were benches and on the last one, furthest from the houses, a woman had been sitting. Her posture had caught my attention immediately. She was perched on the edge of the seat, the tension in her body palpable even at a distance, as if she was primed to spring up in an instant, fight or flight. She wore a khaki parka jacket, its hood rimmed with fake fur, and one of her hands pinched the material of it close to the base of her throat. The other held a cigarette that she brought to her mouth with darting movements. Her hair was long and blonde, and the wind blew it about her face.
Her anxiety mirrored mine so closely it was as if I was looking at myself, and I had been filled with a sudden desire to talk to her. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, approaching. My voice was thick; it had been almost a day since I’d spoken. ‘I’m sorry to ask but do you have a spare cigarette?’
She’d looked up sharply and I realised that she hadn’t been aware of me in the minutes that it had taken to walk along the front towards her. Her eyes were glistening, as if she had recently been crying and was on the verge of tears again, but a flicker of interest that died almost as soon as it sparked told me that she’d noticed the side of my face. I turned away a little to hide it. A moment passed and then she reached into the pocket of her coat. Marlboro Reds: too strong. I took one anyway and wordlessly she extended her lighter.
‘Thanks. Do you mind if I . . .?’
She waved her hand quickly over the bench, granting permission.
It had rained around lunchtime and the seat was covered with fat drops of water that the wind hadn’t yet dried. I cleared the worst of it with the arm of my jacket and sat down, careful not to trespass into her space. The wind buffeted me, too, and I tucked my hair behind my ears to stop it whipping round my face. There were only a handful of boats out but coming up the Solent, midway between us and the mainland, was a large yacht, its huge white sail fat with wind. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her watching it, too. Her legs were crossed now and her top foot bounced to a hectic secret rhythm.
‘That’s a beautiful boat,’ I said, tentative.
She’d glanced at me, surprised that I had spoken again, and brought her cigarette to her lips. She looked exhausted. Her eyes, though bright, were underscored with dark rings. Her hair had been recently highlighted – expensively, I thought – but it was dirty, the roots dark. ‘Yes,’ she said. Her foot kept bouncing. ‘Do you know about boats?’
‘Not really. I mean, no, not at all.’
She turned to watch it. It was moving quickly enough for its progress to be visible against the line of the mainland. Already the mouth of the Lymington River where I’d caught the ferry the previous day was far behind it.
‘Do you?’ I said.
‘I sail.’
‘I should learn.’
‘Learn,’ she had said, turning to face me again as she stood up to go. The look in her eyes had been suddenly fierce. ‘Learn to sail. Sometimes I think it was the only thing that kept me sane in this place.’
I looked at the photograph for a while and then I folded the paper away and went upstairs. There was a second, even smaller bedroom next to the one I had been sleeping in and it had the same view. I’d decided I would use it for work and I’d pushed the single bed back against the wall and moved the table in front of the window. Now I sat on the chair I’d brought up from the kitchen and looked out. Visibility was closing down. The first of the fog the women in the newsagent’s had been talking about was already swirling round the tops of the masts in the harbour, and on the other side of the estuary the line that separated the wood from the sky was furred. I thought of her out there, gone for at least thirty-six hours. I hadn’t understood the significance of fog earlier but now I did: if there was any chance at all she was still alive, fog would make it almost impossible to find her.
I brought my focus back inside the room. My notebooks were stacked on the corner of the table and next to them was the manuscript. I pulled it towards me and turned the pages until I found the place about halfway through at which I’d left off a week ago, in what felt like a different life. I needed to start working again now, to bury myself in the analgesic detail of it, force time to pass. I planted my elbows on the desk, hands either side of my head as if to hold my eyes in place over the text, but though I tried to engage with the words, they swarmed on the page like bacteria. I tried again. The book was a crime novel which had won a number of awards, and I’d wanted to make a good job of it: I’d spoken to the author and been touched by how pleased he was about the French edition for which I was translating it. I read the paragraph again, trying to get a sense of how it would work, but now my eyes kept wandering towards my laptop. In the end I lifted the lid and booted it up. My mobile was switched off so that I couldn’t hear the calls and texts but it meant that I was out of touch for anyone else who might be trying to contact me: Dad, Helen. I should check my email at least, I told myself.
I felt my heart accelerate as I opened Outlook. Twenty-three new messages, about half from him. I deleted them without opening any. On most, the subject line had been left blank, as usual, but the final one, timed only half an hour earlier, had a title.
At least let me talk to you
. I clicked on it and pressed delete again.
By three o’clock, the air in the house was stale, as if I had sucked every particle of goodness from it. I needed to go outside and breathe the air off the sea, regardless of the cold or the mist. I knew, too, where I wanted to go.
I drove without the radio on, listening to the sound of the engine. The inside of the car with the rattle of cassettes in the door compartment, the nest of newspapers and road maps and old paper coffee cups in the footwell of the passenger seat was comforting, a capsule of the familiar. ‘I’ve still got you, car, haven’t I?’ I said and then felt foolish. As I crossed the bridge, the mainland was shut off from view by the shifting mist. The sea was a milky green now and the sky pale grey, the point where they met indeterminable. The light was fading; there was perhaps an hour of it left.
I had to look for signs to Freshwater Bay; I’d never driven on the Island. I had been too young, and my memory of how the various towns and villages connected was hazy, a collage of images of tracks and lanes and summer hedgerows with no practical particulars. I came down a hill at the top of Norton and found myself on a long street of semi-detached houses behind unkempt patches of garden, some of their curtains already drawn against the evening that was fast encroaching.
When at last I found the bay I pulled into the public car park and left the car next to the only two others there. It was pay-and-display but I didn’t bother with a ticket: I didn’t have time. No one would check anyway: the bay was deserted, not a soul on the pavement. There was no one on the stony beach either, and the café was closed for the winter, stacks of chairs visible through its lace curtains. I wrapped my coat around me, feeling the cold reaching into my bones.
The track I was looking for was behind the Albion hotel. Earlier walkers had turned the ground under the stile to heavy mud but they were long gone now; I was alone on the down apart from a few grazing cows. I watched my feet as I began the climb. In my memories, this place danced with sunlight and its blue reflection off the sea; now it was done up in flat shades of brown and green and grey, the grass punctuated with scraggy thistles. My heart began to beat faster, the slope steeper than it seemed. The morning’s breeze had dropped and the silence was so deep that I could hear the sea murmuring against the bottom of the cliff away on my left.
When I reached the fence at the top of the first incline, I stopped a minute to catch my breath. The Albion was below me now, shrunken already. In spring the bay would be inundated with people baring flesh on the first days of weak sunshine, buying ice cream and buckets and spades, but for now it had settled into timelessness, the view of dun fields back towards the north face of the Island the same as it might have been fifty years earlier or two hundred.
My thighs ached as I started up the next slope but I didn’t stop again: I had to get to the top before the light went. Now the grass had become the soft, mossy sort that never seems to grow and its surface was flecked with the shale of the white chalk underneath, as if the cliff’s scalp was showing through. To my left the land sloped away and I corrected my direction again and again to stop myself veering nearer the edge, which hid itself behind banks and folds in the cliff-top.
After perhaps fifteen minutes, I reached the top and the stone cross set up in memory of Tennyson, who had lived at Freshwater. Even here, where wind stole the heat out of the warmest summer days, the air was still. I circuited the monument and then, without knowing I was going to do it, I turned and walked to the edge.
Even from a few feet away, it looked as if the grass was disappearing from sight to incline gently to the sea but four or five steps further uncovered the truth: a sheer drop of three hundred feet. The grass simply stopped, became air. I leaned out, made myself look. There was no beach below, just a few feet of rocky rubble and then the sea, lapping insistently away at the back of the Island. The nearness of it, the dizzying possibility, took my breath away. Here it was, available to anyone who walked up here, unmarked and unfenced, raw as a knife. It would be so easy. In my knees there was a sudden urge forward.
No.
I took a couple of quick steps back and sat down. The wet grass was cold through my jeans at once. My legs were shaking and a wave of nausea swept over me, bringing a rush of saliva into my mouth. The ground seemed to tilt under me. I looked at the view to try to steady myself. People said you could see France from here on a clear day. Could they see us, too?
Do you see this, Maman?
a voice cried out in my head.
Can you see me now?