A Year of Marvellous Ways (12 page)

21

I
t was the first of December when Drake finally
emerged from the boathouse. Berries were bright and red and hard. Winter had arrived.

Marvellous had woken him early and had handed him his slop bucket and a bucket of ash and had pointed to a flattened path up through the trees towards the outhouse and manure pit beyond.

His eyes squinted as they adjusted to the bright morning light. Calls from curlews and oystercatchers echoed around the creek and the air smelt fecund and the creek was not the fearful creek of his night-time imagination, but one of forlorn beauty, of something ancient and serene.

Up through the trees he saw the gentle rise of smoke, then the gypsy caravan for the first time. It was covered by wartime camouflage netting, and the fake leaves stood out unnaturally against the bare branches that surrounded it. Up close, the canvas was faded and patched, and once there had been writing on the side, but nothing of sense remained. A meat safe was secured to a pole at the side, and a small patch of land had been cleared behind, where vegetables now grew. A washing line joined tree to tree, and from old fruit crates a wooden shed had been built, doorless now, and packed with earthenware flagons – some with stoppers others open – fishing rods too and crab pots, tools, all sorts of tools, a tin bath and jerry cans of fuel. Secured to the side of the shed was a large metal-framed canvas kite smelling strongly of the sea.

He put down his buckets next to a battered lamp and climbed the caravan steps. A braid of damp seaweed hung from a telescope that was roped tightly to the outside slats. He pushed the door gently and encountered the strangest world he had ever seen. The room was still and warm, just the muffled sound of fire crackling in the stove, the occasional creak from the wooden wheels long embedded in decades of mud ’n’ mulch. The air was clear and smelt of pine, and something else he couldn’t put a word to, something feminine, something intoxicating. He went over to the bed and sat down. The wall opposite had been covered in shells: a mosaic of periwinkles and limpets mainly, hundreds of shells meticulously arranged in patterns of sea swirls and waves. And at the back, on the ledge below the window, in the dust and dark, a small bookcase housing a single book: a compact lockable ledger, hand-scrawled down the spine:
The Marvellous Book of Truths
. Drake pulled out the book and ran his forefinger down the words. He looked for a key but couldn’t find one. He put pressure on the lock but the lock wouldn’t budge. He put it back into the dusty chink for another day.

He crouched down to the Marconi wireless that sat on the floor next to the bed, the volume knob rubbed smooth from use. And there along the sides of the walls bags of dried leaves and herbs, and scales too, with brass weights the size of pennies. A pestle and mortar on a shelf up high. Cartons of Craven ‘A’ cigarettes and Lucky Strikes: the usual war bartering.

He lay down on the bed, glanced over the hand-written notes pinned to the quilted ceiling above, some new some old, but private instructions from her to her. He read:

Egg Friday      Man outside is Drake

Drake=Sad     Watch Drake

Born 1858

Money in cupboard     Blow out candle

He knew this world. Had seen this world of fractured thought before, when he was a boy. An old man used to come into the pub – a regular he was – and one winter’s day he came in with bits of paper that his wife had stuck to his gabardine coat, and from a distance Drake thought the paper looked like snow, and on the paper was the man’s name and address, what he liked to drink, and where his money could be found. It was in case he was having a
bad day
because that’s what they called it in those days, a
bad
day. Nobody ever robbed Stanley Morris and someone always got him home, usually with a song on his lips. That was a good world, thought Drake. A gone world.

He unpinned the scrap of paper that said,
Drake=Sad
. He looked at it for a moment before putting it into his trouser pocket. He smoothed the bed cover and left the caravan as still and untouched as when he had entered.

He picked up his buckets and marched up to the manure pit where an icy crust had formed. The cold froze the smell and it was just waste, just dirt, and even a startled rat didn’t disturb his calm. He undid his trousers and entered the outhouse. Pulled his pants down and shat like a bull. He wasn’t a new man. He just felt a bit kinder.

22

A
t the start of the Second World War, Marvellous
had made a rare journey over to the Great Port.

Whilst sitting on a bench feeding a pigeon, she had overheard a woman talking about a film she had seen the day before. The film had been shot in colour, the woman had said, and Marvellous listened carefully because she was curious, because she had never seen a film in colour before, in fact couldn’t remember the last time she had seen a film at all. From the title, she thought the film was probably about sailing. Something she would thoroughly enjoy.

Instead of heading back home straight away, Marvellous joined the queue for the pictures and soon found herself sitting in a row with courting couples, and as the lights dimmed, she looked about as heads dipped to kiss.

She had never seen so much colour, never in her life had such colour exploded across her landscape, not even in sleep. Red and orange flames burst across the screen with the black silhouette of marching armies, and she thought, maybe, this was Britain to come. And Marvellous thought Vivien Leigh looked like Robin Hood in her curtain dress, it was war there too, it was Make Do and Mend.

But it was the image of those orange lips and those red lips that had stayed with Marvellous over the years, and she had often wondered how she would have looked with lips like that.

She had been the last to leave the cinema. They had asked her three times to go as she sat staring at the large empty screen. She only moved when the air-raid siren screamed and she saw the panic race across the usherette’s young face.

It felt like a thud walking out into a blacked-out world. The sirens wailed and people ran to shelters, but Marvellous didn’t go to a shelter, she carried on down to the harbour and her boat, oblivious to the shouts of the wardens and the noise of bombers overhead. And as she left the falling bombs for the dark quiet creek, she thought again about those orange lips and those red lips and thought that had she had lips like that, then maybe she might have been kissed more.

She stood in the doorway of the boathouse and unfurled the poster.

Gone With the Wind
? said Drake, raising his head from the washing bowl.

I knew I had it somewhere. An American gave it to me. I thought you could put it here on the wall by the table.

Thank you, said Drake, and he dried his hands and took the poster from her.

Might brighten things up for you a bit in here, said Marvellous. It’s a young person’s picture, I think.

I think you’re right, said Drake, and he carried the washing bowl and emptied the contents on the briar rose outside.

I wondered how I would look if I coloured my lips, too, she said.

What?

Like her? she said, pointing to the poster.

Like Vivien Leigh? he said.

Is that the actress?

I think so.

Yes, like her then.

What colour were you thinking of?

Red. Or orange.

I think red.

Yes, I think so too.

I think you’d look nice, said Drake, and he missed her smile as he went over to the hearth where a pair of newly washed socks had been left to dry.

You have post, said Marvellous, following behind him.

Drake picked up the letter from the mantelpiece and handed it to her. It’s not for me, Marvellous. See? I was asked to deliver it. To this man here, he said.

Why?

Because I promised someone, he said, and he put on his socks.

And she studied the envelope, brought it close to her eyes. She said the name out loud, Dr
Arnold
, and she felt a whiplash of memory, something sharp and brief, and held on to the table for balance. And then the feeling disappeared just as suddenly, as if the pages to the book had been ripped out and the jagged edge at the margin hinted of something that remained.

Are you all right? asked Drake.

Yes, she said quietly. Yes, OK.

Here, he said, and he led her over to the bed. You look tired, he said.

It’s been all the waiting, she said.

I’m sure it has.

When are you going?

What?

The letter, she said, pointing. When are you going to deliver it?

Oh. Not today, Marvellous, he said. I won’t be going anywhere today. Or tomorrow. Or the next day, I don’t think.

And she nodded and said, Good, and like an echo said, Good, again. And a faint blush of colour pushed its way back into her cheeks. She didn’t want him to go anywhere; she was getting used to him.

23

T
he afternoon stretched out vacantly before him
. Marvellous had taken the crabber round to the Other Saint’s Village, as she liked to call it, to deliver winter herbs and rosehip syrup to those who still refused to see a doctor.

The cloud had shifted, replaced by an unbroken blue sky, and the shrill call of gulls and geese echoed around the empty creek. The tide was out but on the turn and the wet sand was surprisingly firm underfoot. Between the dark limp popweed, coils of lugworm patterned the riverbed, and discarded seashells too – cockles, mussels, winkles – evidence of their evening feasts. A flock of carrion crows landed over by the church and pecked at stranded sand eels in the thick blur of stinking weed.

Alone, Drake guided his thoughts back to the night he arrived. His memory was still vague, and for years it would be, the only fixed point was the strange sign that rose from the hedgerow commanding him to Stop Here. But it was what old Marvellous had said to him that night that stayed with him. That she had been
waiting
for him. How could she have known he was coming? He hadn’t even known that himself.

The lowering sun shifted as he marched up through the meadow, and it took him no time at all to reach the road beyond, the road once grandly called the High Road, back in the day of God and Bread and Wealth and Men. He was a thorough scout, but an hour of walking and searching along the stretch of road by the derelict bakehouse revealed nothing. No sign. Nothing. And he noticed for that whole hour no motor cars or carts or vans passed the boarded-up cottages. No traffic at all. The hamlet was eerily deserted. It was so quiet he could hear the mercury drop in that still air of yesteryear.

He sat down on the milestone and lit a cigarette. He played with his lighter, he looked at his hand. His shakes were lessening, he was sure of it. He watched the aerial dance of swooping starlings pattern the now familiar approach of dusk. Watched as they twisted and dived in the rich eternal blue, and for that brief moment, lost in their joy, he didn’t care about the sign or what old Marvellous Ways did or didn’t know. He felt transfixed by something other, and the golden light shifted across his face as it edged west, and as it did, it momentarily blinded him and he dropped the lighter to the ground. He bent down to pick it up, and as he reached for it, that’s when he saw it. Through his legs and upside down it was, but still he saw it. He began to laugh. And as he marched over the fields back down to the river, he left behind a granite milestone glistening in the late afternoon sun. A granite milestone, simply carved with the words:

ST opHere