The Virgin in the Garden (30 page)

He told her. As near as he could remember, conscious that the story was, unlike parts of his life, something she would find sympathetic. She did. She was moved. She said so.

“That was what I call religion, too,” he said. “That man’d’ve known by intuition whether this Simmonds was a prophet or a crank, or a vision was a delusion, which is something I’ve no skill in, it comes natural to me to advise people not to mess in such. So I’m not much use wi’ Marcus. I can’t say more than keep an eye on him and by all means send him to me if it’ll do any good, in your view.”

“Thank you,” she said. Nothing was changed, but she had the impression that it was, just because Daniel’s energies were loose in the field of Marcus’s anguish.

“Look here – I’ve a day to myself – Wednesday next week – all day. I’ve kept it clear, I’m getting out of here. To be truthful I wanted to go away somewhere – think what to do about – what we’ve kept off. I thought I’d go for a long seaside walk. I’d like it if you’d come wi’ me. Not to argue, you understand, just to walk. We didn’t do badly, today.”

“No, we didn’t.”

“Then you’ll come.”

“I like the sea.”

“So you’ll come.”

She never said no, he reflected. It possibly followed that she never meant yes. She liked to please. She liked him. It was exasperating.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll come.”

They went to Filey because Daniel had spent childhood holidays there. Proposing this place, he explained that he usually didn’t go back to places, but then he usually didn’t have a private life, so had thought he might. It took them some time to get there: bus to Calverley, train from Calverley to Scarborough, another train from Scarborough to Filey. Most of this journey was sufficiently beset by engine-noise and wheel-rattle for them not to need to speak to each other. Daniel was without his uniform, in the fisherman’s sweater and a vast shapeless black duffel coat, hooded and toggled, that he had bought at an army surplus store. It made him look, the enormous man, something like a Brueghel peasant, Stephanie thought, as though he should have had a hod, or an axe, to complete him.

They were almost the only people to get out at the station, which was bright with sunshine and bitterly cold. Daniel had planned the day. They would walk down into the town and out along the sands to the Brigg. They could take a pork pie and a bottle of beer and eat out there. Stephanie, in sensible shoes, but without hat or gloves, shivered. Daniel took notice.

“Ay, there’ll be a wind up,” he said with satisfaction. “It’ll be blowing the sea up, I hope. You should have a hat. I’ll buy you one.”

She demurred.

“No. I’d like to give you something. I’d like you to be wrapped up well before we get going, so I don’t have to worry about getting you back.”

They walked into the town past pebble-dashed bungalows, and colour-washed holiday homes, winter-bleached and dormant. They found a dark brown Victorian drapers, with bosomy russet and oatmeal dresses tucked and tied like matronly scarecrows on chrome T shaped stands, behind felt basins and tulle drums, royal blue, petunia pink, greener than any apple.

Inside a beige woman in a beige knitted dress with a crocheted front
opened for them cracked shiny white boxes of gloves, wool, leather, “fabric”. Stephanie, looking for cheapness and warmth, chose pale blue fair-isle mitts, with pale stars or sunbursts spangled on them. Daniel then insisted on the matching beret, which had a large pale yellow bobble. She pulled it on obediently over brow and ears; the neat roll of yellow hair curved out at the back, shining on her coat collar. How
sweet
, Daniel thought with overwhelming sentiment, and made a discovery. Behind the cliché was something old and fierce and absolute, a primeval passion of taste, Biblical honey. Ezekiel had eaten up the rolls of writing and called them sweet. It was the same, Daniel thought ferociously, with this clean round face under the childlike wool, the shining hair, the gentle, doubtful gaze.

They came into Cargate Hill, which was steep and cobbled and had hand-rails, the land giving a last uncompromising lurch, out and down. Ahead was the grey water, heavy and dark, with narrow lakes of glossy light lying where sunlight struck through racing clouds. His father had always roared out, there it is, there it is, seeing it for the first time, had hurtled towards it roaring, with Daniel on his shoulders, who had at first cried out shrilly with him, and had later felt exposed to inhabitants and settled visitors who might guess he had only just come. Though why that had mattered, at times when he
had
only just come, he was now at a loss to know.

“There it is,” he said to Stephanie Potter, and took her arm.

You came out onto the beach through a huge stone arch under the promenade, a cavernous tunnel where the wind rushed and died. Sand piled in dry drifts, heaped against its walls, had its own irregular tide-line on the cobbles. He had plunged down daily through its cold shadow, kicking off rubber beach shoes, a fat boy wriggling fat toes in its cool, and then warmer siftings, coming out onto the sunny shores.

“You could ride ponies up here,” he said. “When I was little, you could come right up into’t town on your own horse, like, to your own door.” He had been a fat baby in a basket seat with leather pommels on a wobbling donkey. He had been a fat boy in long grey shorts with fat calves pinched by stirrup-leathers, half-worried, half-jubilant, as the thin piebald pony strained slowly up, its rough mane jiggling under his eyes. Some of the flesh on him now was the same flesh and some was gone forever. His dad had walked beside him, slapping his behind, saying straighten your back, son, look lively, don’t sag. The summer after the accident he had come up once or twice on his own: his mum didn’t walk up, and indeed only paid for him to go up, twice. He used to think if his dad would leave him to get on with it he could talk to the horseboys who hung onto his reins. But in the event he never did.

Stephanie wondered why this thought made him look so grim. They came under the arch.

“And the wind like a whetted knife. Me Dad always said that, every time we came through here. Invariably. I think it was the only line of poetry he knew.”

“It’s a very good line,” said Stephanie.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Daniel, who still appeared unaccountably gloomy.

When they did come out onto the sand, out of the tunnel, the sea-wind hit them like a wet canvas wall to walk into, a deafening, stinging buffeting on their faces.

“Oh,” said Stephanie, opening her mouth, swallowing cold salty air. She staggered and laughed. “Oh, Daniel.”

A steady noisy fluttering set up in the skirts of her coat. She beat ineffectively at them, put up a mittened hand to the starry beret.

“Come round this side of me,” said Daniel. “I’m a good solid windbreak.” He stood between her and the stream of air off the sea, under the harbour wall. Dry sand blew and snaked and eddied, rose in a crest and fell inanimate under the wall. The tide was running out; beyond them it had flung its limit-line of glittering black grit, ground dust of mussel shells, tossed strands of bladderwrack. The sands were printed with long dimpling ribs, mirror-images of the water; where the beach dipped, a ruffled sheen of it still winked and shone. Daniel laughed with idiotic pleasure.

“Six miles of sand,” he said, waving his thick arms out, embracing it. He buttoned his collar, pulled the black hood over his bristling hair. The wind swung round his head, and little heads of sand lashed furiously at his turn-ups. Here he could put out scarecrow arms and almost be blown, clumsily weightless, along with the weather. He crooked his arm, and offered it to her.

“We’ll walk to th’Brigg,” he said, showing where the line of rocks and boulders jutted into the sea. “You don’t mind the wind.”

It was not a question. Her lips and cheeks stung. Her eyes were filmed with cold air and tears. She put her head behind his shoulders and gave an ambiguous nod. They set off, close together, making an erratic, sinuous, tracking path, in wandering mazes, occasionally bumping each other, out of step, occasionally trotting, almost running, as the wind filled their clothes like sails and almost lifted them into flight. Once, separating her head from his shoulder she looked back at the still wide curve of the bay, onto which the receding sea was thrown in white looping skeins, off which the wind-dried surface sand was snatched and tossed. It was all a pother, and yet a smooth shape, a clear shape. When
she took her ear away from him it filled with a frozen roar. She put it back.

In this way, after a stretch of time, they came to the end of the seawall, where the slipway ran down to the beach, down which the fishing-cobles rolled on rubber wheels, up which pony carts trotted in the summer, bright with 1930s Minnie Mice and Donald Ducks. Beyond the slipway the beach was bounded by the unstable cliffs, whose grassy brows and red muddy walls declined steadily towards sand and water. Perched in this cliff, shored up on girders, was the Marine Café. Daniel indicated it with a sweep of his free arm.

“If it should be open,” he boomed, “we could get a cup of coffee and a bun, to fortify us for the next bit.”

There were one or two old men with dogs hugging the shelter of the wall and some lugworm diggers by the waterline. It did not seem likely the place would be open. Stephanie felt a strong desire for coffee, hot, wet, sweet. She swallowed. Daniel bounded ahead up the cliff steps, dipping crazily, wooden sills to vanished mud surfaces, and beckoned from the door. It was open. Life was good. She went composedly up, crimson-cheeked, and sat down in the sudden hot quiet with eardrums throbbing and roaring. It was a little time before they could speak. They ordered coffee and toasted buns. The smell of toasting was almost painfully warm and promising.

The Marine Café was a faintly boat-shaped construction, with metal-framed windows and little basket-work tables with tops of ice-green glass. The windows of the sun lounge were smeared and blurred by the salt spray; the emerald table-tops were smeared and blurred by indiscriminate wiping. Outside clouds raced across the sun, streamed in the bright sky. Inside the glass brightened and darkened, muted. It was like being in an aquarium, in some thicker element. When the coffee came, it was hot and not nasty. Daniel wanted to produce a compliment on her bright eyes and rosy cheeks, and dared not.

He said instead, “I used to come here with me dad and mum. They had cups of tea and I had ice-cream in a silver cup. Well, I suppose it wasn’t silver, but I called it that.”

“Family life,” he said. “Family life. It’s a funny idea. When we were here in this place – us three – we were supposed to be together, we’d come here for that. And not one o’ the three of us had any idea of what to say. Sometimes my dad’d clown about. He couldn’t abide to be still. No, he couldn’t abide to be still. He had to be doing something. Holidays drove him mad, I sometimes think. My mum sat in a deckchair and I wasn’t much use to him. Too fat and slow. I wouldn’t climb and run, I never learned to swim. He’d go out in all weathers, he’d plunge up and
down, and we’d watch from th’shore. Silly way of passing time, really. I reckon he heaved a sigh of relief when we could go home and he could get back to work and stop thinking up things to do, like, or to amuse me.”

“You can’t abide to be still, now.”

“No,” said Daniel, “I can’t. But that came later, that came after he died.”

“I didn’t know he was dead.”

Daniel looked irritated, as though she should have known that. He was struggling to tell her what, in view of the position she held in his thoughts, it was easier and pleasanter to assume she already knew.

“He died before I was eleven.”

“I’m sorry. What did he die of?”

“Iron ore trucks. Broke loose and crushed him.” He brooded, separate from her. He saw his father, huge, white, streaming with water inside the green-lit, sea-smelling, canvas-smelling beach-tent, towelling his shoulders and trunk, and the vigorous hair, like Daniel’s own. He thought of all that, cracked and smashed, and told Stephanie, “I didn’t grieve. I don’t remember grieving. I should’ve grieved more.”

She put a hand in his direction. He did not take it.

“I’m sure you did grieve, Daniel. Maybe it was too painful to remember, after.”

“He was a good man. A big, kind, ordinary good man. He was exacting. Always at you, at me, that is, to excel, to do things properly. I wasn’t grateful. I am now, though. I resented it then, I think. I don’t know. I loved him.”

How could he make her imagine that dead man? Why, indeed, should she? He wanted her to have his past. But that wasn’t possible.

As for Stephanie, she knew what he wanted, and yet was angry. It is a frequent irony that those to whom we feel we need to make an offering of our past feel threatened, or isolated, or diminished by that past. It was a further irony, in their case, that a small truculence rose in Stephanie as a result of this. The shadowy engine-driver was not there, after all. But she was. She was. Daniel should see what was there.

When they came out on the slipway it was colder. The clouds were piling up in vaporous, slaty banks, curdling and swaying behind the crumbling red cliffs. There was another huge half-moon of sand to cross to reach the Brigg. Daniel felt low: he dug his hands in his pockets and stood squarely, staring out. She tugged his sleeve.

“Come on then. It’s going to rain. It’s blowing enough of a wind to satisfy even you.”

He looked down at her, shrugged, and took a step. She said something he didn’t hear.

“What?” he roared into the wind.

She spoke again, and again he could not hear; the air took her words and mixed them with its own noise. He pulled her closer to him, and they set off across the last segment of sand.

They crossed a shelving ledge of the squeaking, raw-red mud, and then were on firm sand, which was crossed, from time to time, by rapid channels of blood-coloured water, running down, slicing their own neat shores, to the sea. Once they had to jump, where effluent bubbled and hurried, peaty-cream and frothy, from an iron pipe that rose from the mud, and for a little distance blood-red and creamy froth and silver light off sea water mingled and glittered and turned. Then as they moved out into the bay everything was a plane of dazzling sun off watery sand. There were no other footprints, only dark conical miniature volcanoes of wormcasts breaking the glitter. They advanced crabwise, through the whirling air, both seeing a turning combination of earth, air, water, light, through the stung rainbow of their own tears. Their ears ached and hammered: chorales thundered in Daniel’s head broken by his heavy breathing. Stephanie, lungs beating and distended, waited for her second wind, amazed that cold salt could so scald. It was hard to see how far they had come or had to go, the sand was so extensive and bright, so that they seemed to be struggling on without progressing, running on the spot. And then her second wind came, she breathed a comfortable breath, and the wind came at them in a flurry and they were practically blown on to the Brigg.