The Undertow (10 page)

Despite herself, she glances at him. He stands almost directly under the streetlamp. His face is shadowed by his hat brim; her gaze drops down the length of his brown coat and lands on his boots. They stand out stark in the gaslight. They’re old; the soles are scuffed thin at the toes. And the trouser cuffs above them are worn through at the edge. She sees what he probably thinks people won’t notice—that he’s snipped off the fraying threads of the hems in an attempt to neaten them. Her heart flushes through with unexpected sympathy: whoever he is, he has his struggles, she thinks; he has problems of his own.

“Madam?” He steps closer. “May I trouble you a moment?”

No, she thinks, please don’t trouble me. I’ve had trouble enough to last a lifetime.

“I can’t help you,” she says.

She turns back to the door, peels off her gloves and slips the key into the lock. She wants to be indoors; she wants Billy home, the old man home, she wants cakes and tea and knitting and the evening to revert to its normal path, its ordinary harmony.

But he doesn’t move. “You are Mrs. William Hastings, aren’t you?”

The name seems somehow different when he says it, as though it stirs and shifts, coming alive again after all these years of ordinary use. She lets the key go, leaves it sitting in the lock, and turns to him again. He pushes his hat back. In the foggy light his face is all skin and bone.

“Do I know you?”

“I’m George Sully,” he says.

Her mouth is dry. She shakes her head.

“Ah, well, there we are then.” A quick grin. “He didn’t make this easy, did he?”

“What?” The word comes out thin as a fallen leaf. “Who didn’t?”

“William.”

In that moment, it is more than memory. She can feel William’s hands rest on her waist. His face press into her neck. His calloused fingertips snag on the palm of her hand. Her body is haunted by his touch. Her stays feel too tight. She can’t get her breath.

“I served with him,” he says. “On the
Goliath
.”

She reaches out to the doorjamb.

“Back in the year fourteen, fifteen. We were—” He moves closer to her. “Mrs. Hastings? Are you well?”

But the world contracts, goes tiny. She feels him lift the basket from her grip, takes her arm.

“Mrs. Hastings. I am sorry.”

She tries to shake her head, but everything spins and she just sinks. He puts his arm around her, turns the key. He lets them in.

She is in the parlour. Her head rests against the wing of the chair. He stands in the window, looking out, through the net curtains, the fog, the street beyond. She blinks, stirs herself. He turns at the sound. She goes to push herself up, but her head reels. He comes over to her, puts his hand over her hand, where it rests on the arm of the chair.

“Don’t get up.”

She looks up at him. He lifts his hand away from hers, moves back a step.

“You’ve had a shock.”

The room is cold, dim, lit only by the cool light from the streetlamp outside. Her basket, with its three cakes and newspaper and bag of muddy spuds, is set beside her seat. She sees his worn boots on the green rug of the parlour floor. His suitcase is tucked in beside the card
table, where they never play cards: the picture book lies on the green baize surface, with a red poppy, bought on Remembrance Day, laid on top if it.

He stands, looking at her, his hat still on. He smiles. It must be difficult for the men, she thinks, to just keep on going on, through the days and weeks and years, through the emptinesses, the absences, the threads left trailing off in mid-air. To know there are people looking at you, resenting you, angry that you’re alive, when the man they love is dead.

Her hat is pushed askew by the high back of the chair. She reaches up to take it off. She stabs the pin back into the felt, lets the hat drop onto her basket. She touches her hair.

“Do sit down, please,” she finally thinks to say.

He looks round a moment, then sits down in the other chair, facing her across the window.

“You were with him, then,” she asks, “on the
Goliath
?”

She is very conscious of the act of speaking, of forming the individual words.

He nods.

She leans forward and picks up the poppy. She rolls its wire stem between her fingertips, watches its paper head turn from side to side, a slow negative. They fade so quickly, real poppies, if you pick them. They can’t survive long indoors. They shed their petals, fall apart, dust the windowsill with fallen stamens, pollen.

“He said, William said, that if he didn’t make it through, I should find you. He gave me the address, so I could come and see you, and pass his message on.”

“There was a message?”

Sully clears his throat. “He talked about you a lot.”

The word comes out dry and dusty: “Oh?”

A pause; then, “He said that you were beautiful.”

Amelia blinks down at the poppy; it blurs and smears through the wet. “Oh.”

“I didn’t believe, him, of course.”

She looks up at him.

He smiles at her. “I thought it was just the kind of thing men say.”

She tries to smile back.

“He missed you,” he says. He seems to hesitate a moment, rubs at the side of his nose. “He was desperate to get back.”

He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket, and takes something out. He holds it out towards her, and for a moment she just looks at it, a blur of bright blue and yellow. A postcard.

“He wanted me to make sure you got this.”

She puts her hand over her mouth.

“Go on,” he says, reaching it closer to her. “It’s for you.”

She leans forward and takes the card. It is a precise, piercing, miraculous pain. Her eyes swim. She looks down at the picture, the yellow city, the blue-inked sea and sky. Across the top, in neat small print,
The Grand Harbour, Malta
.

“When did he—?”

“On the way to Gallipoli. So …”

So he never got the chance. She turns the card over. His sloping, careful copperplate.

Thank you for your letter
, she reads. She blinks away the swimming wet. The words fracture, fall apart—

longing

the child

I thought

you

you

Yours

She runs her thumb over the pencilled name.
William
. It smudges slightly.

“Can I fetch you something, Mrs. Hastings?”

She closes her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s been a shock for you.”

Her breath comes and goes, comes and goes.

“Mrs. Hastings?”

She shakes her head, presses tears away. “It’s all right. I’m all right. I’m sorry.”

“There’s no need for sorry, Mrs. Hastings.”

“Won’t you take your hat off, Mr. Sully?”

He lifts off his Homburg and reaches round to set it down on the card table. It lands with a soft thump on top of the picture book. She is starting to her feet, about to protest, but then she sees, with an inward twist, the exposed stub of his ear.

He sees her see, and grimaces.

“Oh,” she says. “You poor thing.”

• • •

When Billy bundles into the kitchen at teatime, his hands and face and knees are icy and he’s grubby from playing out in the street. He and Stanley Dunlop have a ropeswing slung from the lamppost on the corner, and they’ve been scuffing round and round on the cobbles, and swinging up into the air. It hurt the sore bits on his hands, so he tugged his sleeves right down and wrapped his arms around the rope instead, and he got the wool all stretched and snagged and little bits of rope-hemp stuck in the knitting, and he’s thinking he might just get away with it if he can stop her from noticing it today, because if you leave it long enough the sweater could go back to normal on its own account and he can brush the little bits out if he has to. The blood on his shirt is a different matter: he can’t do anything about that. But he is so hungry—hungry as a lion—and she promised him a special tea since it was his first day of work, and that outweighs the worry about the clothes.

He hurries over to the sink to wash his hands before she has the chance to get cross about that too. He’s half aware that there’s someone extra in the kitchen, sitting on the far side of the table with his back to the dresser; he assumes it must be one of the Clack boys popped in for a lend of something from his grandpa. But even in passing he did notice that there was cold ham, and buttered bread, and mustard set out on the table. He’s scrubbing his knuckles with the grey-green soap, eager for his meal, when he notices the way Ma’s talking, all of a fluster and chatter, not like her at all, and that Grandpa isn’t saying anything, has somehow taken a step back—sitting at the range and just looking at the flames, and not saying a word: so it’s not one of the Clack boys.

Billy turns round, hands dripping, to see who it is.

The One-Eared Man, the nasty-mouthed man from the morning. He smiles at Billy.

“Hello there, son.”

Billy looks from him to Ma. She’s looking at the One-Eared Man all smiling. Then she turns to look at Billy. Her expression is warm and bright.

“This is Mr. Sully,” she says. “He was a friend of your father’s.”

Billy folds ham onto bread, and bites into it. His jumper is tickling his bare belly, because his shirt is soaking in the scullery. She’s made very little fuss about it, considering. Hadn’t even given him the look when
he’d spun her a line—that he’d tripped on a paving slab and knocked his face on a lamppost. He can see it in his mind’s eye, a Stan Laurel trip and teeter and thump, and him sitting on the ground, face crumpling, scratching his head. She hadn’t even really seemed to listen. Just tugged him out of his jumper and shirt, dumped the shirt in the sink, and handed the jumper back to him.

Billy watches the One-Eared Man talking to his ma. He doesn’t seem to remember Billy from that morning. And Billy’s not going to bring it up—there are words that can’t be said in front of Ma; there are things that she is better off not knowing. But he knows. He knows what the One-Eared Man said to him. The kinds of things the One-Eared Man will say, in certain circumstances, if he thinks he can get away with it.

He eats his vanilla slice, and the One-Eared Man has a bakewell, and Grandpa has a macaroon, and Ma says that she isn’t hungry, and that is perhaps true, because she’s all flushed and funny, maybe going down with something. He hopes not, because nothing’s any good when Ma is ill.

The One-Eared Man has brought a postcard from his father. Billy’s ma lets him hold it. The handwriting is the same as the other cards, but then that’s how they teach you to do it at school: his own will be like that by the time he leaves. Grandpa holds the card a while, too. His eyes get shiny and he rubs at his nose like it’s itchy. His ma gets the picture book from the parlour, and takes the postcard off Grandpa, and fits it into place, the final postcard, this one softened and worn from being carried around for all these years.

“And still there’s so many spaces,” Ma says, turning the blank leaves till she reaches the end.

Then she stirs herself and has the One-Eared Man look through all the pictures with her, and he keeps telling stories,
Oh I remember, I remember
, but if you really listen they aren’t really about Billy’s father at all, they’re about the One-Eared Man.

After a long half hour of this, Billy has run out of patience.

“Why didn’t you die?” he asks.

His grandpa looks up, looks from Billy to his ma. His face is all grin apart from the mouth.

“Billy!” his ma exclaims.

“But why didn’t he?” Billy turns to his ma. “If Father died, then why didn’t he?”

“For goodness’ sake!” She turns to Sully. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s quite all right, Mrs. Hastings.”

“Amelia.”

“Amelia.”

Billy feels his cheeks go pink and hot.

The One-Eared Man fixes his gaze on Billy. “I was rescued. Picked up out of the water by the
Cornwallis
. It all happened so quick, son, there was no getting out if you were below.”

Billy folds his arms. “If my father was below, why weren’t you?”

“I was on light duties, recovering from wounds.” The One-Eared Man reaches up to touch the stump of his ear: “This, son. This saved my life.”

Grandpa sniffs, turns back to the fire. Billy’s ma lifts the teapot.

“Tea?” she asks, to deflect attention.

But Billy thinks, this is not fair: if the One-Eared Man was a stoker, then the One-Eared Man should have been down there, with Billy’s father, in the dark, stoking. The One-Eared Man should have died too, or they should both have lived. And if his father had survived, and was here, now, at home with them, Billy’s pretty sure this Sully fellow wouldn’t be.

Billy doesn’t like it, not one bit.

His ma brings him up to bed, and says what a day it’s been, him starting work and now this, and aren’t they lucky to have Mr. Sully here to see them? And even though she’s right there, she’s somehow far away too. She waits while he says his prayers. Billy clamps his hands beneath his chin.

He squints up at her, one eye open, one eye closed, and says, “When is he leaving?”

She’s looking off across the room, towards the curtained window. “What’s that, sugar?”

“He’s brought a suitcase.”

“Oh, he just came to tea. He’s not staying here.”

Billy nods. That’s all right then. Goes back to his prayer.

“Don’t you think it’s wonderful, though? A postcard from your father, after all this time?”

He drops his hands. Looks up at her. She is all pink and glowy. She is never pink and glowy. It must be wonderful, if it makes her feel like this.

“Yes, Mother.”

She drops a kiss on his forehead. “Now go to sleep.”

He stays awake though—listening to the voices through the floorboards. To his grandpa climbing the slow stairs, hours earlier than usual, and pausing at his door.