The Undertow (2 page)

She straightens her hat, remembers the handsome Max, bowing to the stinking, roaring, shrieking crowd. “If it wasn’t for that spray—”

He grins, turns her lightly, side to side, at the waist.

“But just think: they can film anything,” he says, “and show it anywhere. It’s amazing. Anything. Japan. America. The whole world—”

“The whole world in a little room.”

He stills her, lets his hands fall from her. “I suppose so.”

She takes his arm, and they walk. William tucks her arm in tight to his side. He doesn’t speak. She wonders if she’s offended him, but can’t work out quite how. An omnibus passes by, the horses dragging along tiredly, lamps glowing, making her realise that the light is fading.

“Do you want to go somewhere else?” she asks.

He clicks his tongue, shakes his head.

And that’s true enough. There’s nowhere else to go. Too late for the park; music halls and pubs are vulgar. So, by rights, is the bioscope, though she’s let that pass for once. And it’s not like you can just go for a stroll along the riverbank; it’s not that kind of river in this part of town.

“He might be in bed by now,” she says.

“You never know.”

They are nearly at the corner of Plough Road; nearly home. They turn down the road, and it’s quiet now. For a moment they are alone, and a sparrow chitters along the length of a back wall, and you can hear the clattering of cabs and drays down the York Road behind them. William stops and pulls Amelia to him, holds her, making the edge of her corset dig into her flesh, so that when she undresses later there are red marks on her skin. She catches her breath, doesn’t protest: she wants him to be happy.

He dips his face into her neck, and almost lifts her off the ground, and says, “Oh my sweetheart, Oh my girl.”

She could have had anyone, her mother always said. Edwin Cheeseman, from the grocer’s. Lionel Travis, who’s doing so well at Price’s. Mr. Bateman, a senior clerk in the city, who’d been casting eyes at her ever since she was fifteen. A whole host of good, sound, solid men who’d’ve been only too happy to have her as their wife. So why on God’s good earth did it have to be him, William Hastings, a scruff from the wrong end of Battersea with little to recommend him but a job on the factory floor at Price’s and a bold manner, who clearly thinks he’s better than he is? And Amelia would dismiss her mother’s objections, dismiss the whole world and all the sound solid men in it with a toss of her head, and turn back to the window, to look out for him, so that she could see him from the moment he turned down Edna Street. Watch him walk all the way to her front door.

The old man’s clinking and clattering in the kitchen; William leads her instead into the cool dimness of the front parlour, propels her gently towards the seats by the window.

“Sit down.”

She sits. The summer sky is a deep blue strip above the houses opposite; little light reaches into the narrow street. She watches as William goes over to the cabinet and lifts a package from the top. He brings it over to her, puts it in her hands. It is neatly wrapped in the stationer’s striped paper, tied with creamy soft cotton tape. There is substance here, heft. She feels an unaccountable prickle of apprehension. She has to fight an urge to hand it straight back to him.

“Open it.”

He sits down on the arm of the chair. His arm presses against
her shoulder. She teases the knot undone, conscious of the brush of her sleeve against his thigh. The paper peels apart.

The book’s cover is a deep inky blue. A flowered plant twines up the left side, curling round the black embossed word
Album
. She runs her fingers over the skin-cool board, tracing the lines and shapes, the dents and ridges of its patterning. She doesn’t know what to make of it.

“It’s beautiful,” she says.

He shifts eagerly on the arm of her chair, leans in to lift the cover. Inside, the page is cut with little angled slips.

“It’s for postcards,” he says.

He touches the four cuts where you would slide in the corners of the cards. He lifts the page, turns it, shows her the spread of two pages, blank too, the whole book of it waiting to be filled.

“Wherever I go,” he says, “every country, every city; I’ll buy postcards, and send them to you. So that you can see the world, see everything I see.”

She runs her hands over the cool paper, feeling the snag of the corner cuts. She smiles up to him.

“Like a picture book,” she says. “Lovely. Yes.”

The sheets feel damp on her skin. She can see, in the narrow strip of evening sky, a single bright star. It is still not quite dark. The room is humid, hot. She can hear her father-in-law in the next room as he moves around, getting ready for bed. The chink of his collar studs on the washstand, the sucked-in breath as he undoes his belt. The walls are thin. Everything about the house is thin: the rooms, the corridors, the curtains and the floorboards and the brick and mortar and the lath and plaster. Everything is permeable: damp seeps in, and smoke oozes out of the chimney, and the fog slinks in from the street and leaves oily dirt on the windowsills. Whenever a door is opened or closed, a step climbed, a curtain drawn, whenever someone sits down, stands up, coughs, the shift is felt throughout the house, by everyone.

She lies still as she can, and breathes, “Hush, love, please.”

He grunts in reply, too occupied in himself, in making the springs jangle, making the bedframe creak and the bedhead tap the wall. His body slithers on hers in a film of sweat. She hears the old man step out of his trousers and the huff as he bends down to pick them up. She
can feel the neighbours in the rooms either side, can almost hear them breathe. She misses Edna Street, she often does. Things were more solid there.

William is done. He presses his face into her neck, and kisses her. It’s ticklish. After a moment, he pushes off her, and gets up and pulls on his shirt and goes to the window and lights up a cigarette, and pulls the sash up high. He sits on the windowsill, holding the cigarette outside, out of courtesy.

She tugs the sheet up to her shoulders and watches him, the soft creases of his shirt, the lean muscle of his naked legs. The way he leans down to the gap to blow the smoke out into the night. At moments like this, he seems so foreign to her, almost unknowable. Like a fox met on the turn of a lane—encountered for a moment, and then gone.

He looks round at her. Grins. She swallows down the fear, and smiles back.

THE POST COMES IN
as William is scrubbing up after the forenoon watch. He’s bone tired, his back burning, his palms raw, and what he really should do is eat something, slump into his hammock, read her letter, sleep. But he has shovelled coal and slept and eaten, turn and turn about, for days, and now there is a whole new island out there. A whole new country. He has dug his way here through mountains of coal.

As he climbs up from the mess, daylight dazzles him; he crosses the deck half blinded, stunned by sun and noise. Coal thunders into the hold, crates swing, ropes creak under the strain, gulls wheel and cry. He reaches the far rail and he leans there, and looks down and down the curving flank of the ship into the giddy depths, coloured flares swimming across his vision, and he breathes in the unfamiliar air, the smell of harbour water, coal, drains, bread and oranges, deal, the dusty smell of hemp. He sucks it in.

Below, fishes flicker in the glassy water. Strange fishes, new fishes, Maltese fishes now. There’d been sea snakes off Africa, slithering through the waves. Flying fish scudding across the surf. His eyes adjust, and he looks up, across the harbour, where fishing boats sway at their moorings. They look back at him with blue painted eyes. Behind them, the harbour wall sweeps round like a protecting arm, and buildings straggle up the hills from the quayside. Above it all, on the clifftop, stands a vast building, quiet and empty. It must be a cathedral, he thinks, or some kind of ancient temple, to have that scale, that prominence.

The colours are so clean, so simple here: just golden rock, just blue sea and sky.

He recalls the letter, dangling from his hand. He opens it. There’s something about her letters—the neat, closed handwriting, her careful
sentences—that’s just like her. He reads the words, and it’s like her voice is speaking them. It’s an uneasy feeling.

I was able to speak to Mr. Travis, and he assured me that you can have your old job back, at Price’s, when the war is over, and we have you home with us again. It is great news, that we can have that to look forward to—your return, and our security as a family
.

He closes his eyes, and the redness pulses and flares with colour. He tries to imagine her. Her pale curls, her grey dress, her buttoned collar, the alien swell of her body beneath her clothes. It is all so far away. In the damp and chill of Battersea the workers stream into Price’s in the dawn dark, stream out again at twilight. He tries to see himself amongst them, another dark figure in a dark coat in the dark winter evening, the way he used to be.

The baby is due in May.

“Drink, Billy-boy?”

Sully. He leans in beside William, elbows on the rail. Sully is an old hand, leading stoker, and a bad penny. It’s hard to say no to him.

William folds the letter briskly, slips it into his pocket. Notices Sully notice it. Sully grins, and it reminds William of something, but he can’t quite place it. It’s like his skin is somehow too tight for his bones.

“Seriously. Drink.”

“Postcard first,” William says.

“Everywhere we go, you’re off looking for postcards.”

“For the missus.”

“She must be quite something.”

William inclines his head. Once, when they were courting, he’d caught a glimpse of her coming down from the offices at Price’s; the swirl of her skirts, a flash of ankle, the neatness of her waist: before he’d even realised it was her, his chest had tightened with desire.

“Drink first though. You can buy a postcard after. It’s young Paveley’s birthday.”

“It’s always someone’s birthday.”

Sully shrugs. “You’ve got to take your chances when you can.”

Of course you do. Because who knows what’s going to happen next, or if you’ll ever get another chance at all? Sully nudges closer, conspiratorial. He smells of the boiler room. Coal dust. Sweat. Damp. A smell like old mattresses.

“We’re off to Spiteri’s,” Sully says. “You’ll come to Spiteri’s. You’ll like it there.”

William looks out across the harbour, where the little boats rock on
the little harbour waves. The blue painted eyes stare back at him. Above them stands the quiet temple. He’d rather go—just walk out through the streets. Climb up to the temple, its shadowed cloisters. See the city.

“What d’they do that for?” William nods towards the fishing boats.

“Eh?” Sully squints out along William’s sightline.

“Those boats. Why do they paint those eyes on them?”

“Oh,” Sully says. “That. It’s for good luck. Safe return. They think if they paint those eyes on their boats, they can outstare the evil eye.”

Valletta wrong-foots him. He feels queasy, liverish. It’s like nowhere else he’s been, or rather it’s like everywhere: it seems caught between Africa, Arabia, and Europe. It’s like stepping into an imagined city, into someone else’s dream.

There are five of them, climbing through the city streets. Sully, Paveley, Dwyer and Spooner. Him. The letter swings in his pocket as he walks, the corner of it pressing into his thigh with each step. It is cool and dim in the city: the buildings are high and the streets are narrow, cutting out the sun. The men pass by ornate carved stonework and under balconies and beneath a criss-cross of washing lines slung high above. They jump up onto doorsteps and skip along their length and leap off the other end; they run fingertips along the heavy wooden doors, over the cold metal stare of doorknockers. Everything is grand, but also somehow faintly shabby, like a girl in evening dress with bare and dirty feet. The men talk and laugh and shout, but the houses stand shuttered, silent, and as they make their way deeper into the city the silence begins to prickle into William’s skin, and makes him rub at the cropped hair on the back of his neck, and he falls quiet too.

Something lands hard on his shoulder, making him jump, and it’s only when he touches it and brings his hand away wet that he realises that it’s water fallen from the dripping linen high above.

He watches his step then, moves round the wet patches on the pavement. He becomes mesmerised by the progression of his boots over the flagstones, the way they keep taking him on and on, even though he’s not himself certain where he’s going, or that he wants to go there. Then, sudden and familiar, birdsong bubbles from a shuttered window. He looks up, looks round for the source of it.

“You hear that?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Is that a nightingale?”

“Think so,” Dwyer says.

“At this time of day?”

“They blind the birds, to make them sing all day.”

Sully tosses this information back over his shoulder as if it’s nothing. William rubs again at the back of his neck, trying to rub away a shudder. When he was a boy, back in Kent, there’d been nightingales in the fields behind the house. He’d lie awake at night, crammed in between his sleeping brothers, and listen to the birds sing.

They wheel round into a cross street and three women are coming down the far side. He feels it in himself, sees it instantly in the other men, the way they register the women’s presence. Go quieter, watchful. The women come towards them, wrapped in dark Maltese capes, the hoods arched high with ribs of whalebone, shadowing the face, concealing even the shape of the head. Passing the open door of a Roman church, William catches a glimpse of candlelight, hears the mutter of mass, catches the smell of incense smoke. Then the women turn silently and drop into the church, leaving behind a scent in the air, smoky and sharp, with a shade of roses. Their passing makes him acutely aware of himself. Of the hair bristling from his upper lip and the sweat gathering in his armpits. He pushes his hands into his pockets. The coal dust never quite washes from the skin.