The Misadventures of Margaret Finch, page 11
Walking the length of the mahogany counter, she stands in front of the young man, expecting that he will stop reading and offer her assistance. But he does not move, does not look up, does not stop the infernal tapping of his pencil. ‘Excuse me,’ she says softly, reluctant to create any sound that will cause her head to throb any more than it already does. But he continues to ignore her. She waits, then prompts him again. ‘Excuse me.’
With a sigh, he lays the pencil carefully in the gutter of his book, then folds it shut. He will damage the pages like that. He will loosen the binding, make the spine misshapen. Does he not know? Or is he just careless?
‘Can I help you with something?’ He is in no rush to hear her answer; seems deliberately slow in raising his eyes to find her. She notes his accent is northern but self-consciously well-spoken.
‘I need something for …’ how should she put this? ‘… digestion.’
‘A furred colon,’ he clarifies. ‘You’re the fifth person I’ve had in today. Does no one realise the importance of keeping their system toned? I don’t suppose you’ve ever considered a regular dose of syrup of figs?’
She looks down and shakes her head. ‘No, I—’
‘Milk of magnesium?’
‘No, you misunderstand …’
‘Ah,’ he says, reaching for a round tin on the counter and rattling its contents as if to tempt her. ‘I see what you are after – Bile Beans. Many young ladies swear by their side effects. Makes the weight drop right off.’
Margaret is tired. Tired of arguing with men who don’t listen. ‘I do not need a laxative,’ she says wearily, but her words are lost as the bell on the shop door rings out behind her, and three teenaged boys enter.
‘I’m sorry. You’ll have to speak up, miss.’ The man in the white coat leans forward and cups his ear with his hand. Does he expect her to announce her health complaint to the entire shop? He is still smiling, but not warmly, not encouragingly.
‘I have an upset stomach,’ she says.
The corners of his mouth turn downwards and he is quick to move away. ‘I see. A stomach bottle,’ he lifts something off the shelves behind him. ‘Should ease diarrhoeal symptoms.’ He says ‘symptoms’ as if the word itself is unpleasant, as if she might be experiencing them then and there. Margaret hears a giggle from the teenaged boys. He had to say it, didn’t he? Had to say it loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘Two teaspoonfuls in water, up to three times a day.’
The medicine is chalky in colour, and moves sluggishly as he tilts the bottle to read the instructions. She is about to complain that it is half empty, but spots another layer of clear liquid above the white and concludes that the ingredients have separated. Ringing it through the till, he wraps it in a brown paper bag and places it on the counter so that she can pick it up without any need for their hands to touch. She wants to assure him she has washed them, that there is more danger of her catching something from him than the other way around. But she takes the bottle and leaves the shop, avoiding the eyes of the teenagers who snigger as she passes.
Sickness swells inside her again. Bile rises to her throat and tears to her eyes. Clutching the brown paper bag, she navigates through the crowd and crosses the road. This is where she saw Davidson last night. This is where he asked those girls for a light, even though he had a lighter in his pocket. And now he knows she has been watching him. Oh God! The cramps that were in her stomach have moved up to her chest. So strong they knock the breath out of her; so strong that she stops and brings her hands to her neck. She takes the steps down to the lower walkway. People jostle and chide her, and she cannot fight the momentum of so many bodies carrying her forward.
The ground yields and she looks down to see sand beneath her feet, the space around her growing as people fan out in different directions to stake their claim to any plot of empty beach. She reaches out and grabs the tip of a vacant deckchair, anchoring herself as more people rush past. Managing to pull herself around to the front of the chair, she moves to sit, and for a split second feels as though she is falling – before she is caught by the fabric of the seat. She feels vulnerable in such a reclined position, unsure that she would be able to get up again in a hurry, not confident that she’d have the strength.
Unwrapping the paper around the neck of the medicine bottle, she unscrews the metal cap. The man in the chemist’s said to take it in water but she doesn’t have any and she can’t afford to wait, can’t risk having another bout of symptoms. She needs to take the cure, get better and get on with her day, so she takes a swig straight from the bottle instead, the contents bitter as they reach the back of her tongue. Her mouth feels dry, as though her gums are shrinking back from the taste, but she tips the bottle back a second time. Then another. Three doses a day. She may as well have them all now so she can get to work. But it is making no difference, bringing no relief. She unwraps the bottle further, tears the brown paper to check the directions for herself. The clear liquid is all but gone now, the bottom half of the bottle opaque with the heavier layer, a grubby white like the net curtains in Maude’s parlour. She should have mixed the contents before she took the doses. That’s what the label says: Kaolin and morphine: shake well before use. She does it now, watching what’s left of the transparent liquid turning cloudy then disappearing as if it were never there.
Another sip. It tastes chalky this time. And she’s retching. Fighting to swallow, her body rebelling against her once more. She needs to wash it down. Hiding the bottle in her handbag, she finds the hip flask she bought on James’s instructions. A shake of it tells her what she already knows: that it is still full; she has not taken it out since she bought it. She can hear the liquid lapping against the metal inside. The fumes hit her as soon as she takes off the cap but brandy is known to settle the stomach, to calm the nerves. Brandy will take the taste away. And it does, filling her mouth and throat with a heat that burns through the bitterness on her tongue, almost sweet in comparison to the residue of medicine. She drinks, then drinks again. After every sip a sense of relief, a quietening of the thoughts scrambling to get to the front of her mind; a feeling that there is more space inside her chest.
She draws air into her lungs, tasting the alcohol on every breath; sinks back against the fabric of the deckchair, confident now that it will hold her, keep her safe; allows the hand holding the hip flask to hang loosely by her side; closes her eyes against the sun which is high in the sky above her. She can feel the weight of its warmth, her eyelids burnished pink by its insistent touch. The jumble of sounds seem to quieten gradually. If she stays very still, she can hear the sunlight itself, a gentle pulse that hums across her skin. The sea too. A chanting beat, drawing out the pain that was in her head and racing it away on the backs of galloping waves. Kicking off her shoes, she moves her toes in time to music she can feel inside her body. And when she opens her eyes, she can see its rhythm too: a little girl tapping the bottom of an upturned bucket to reveal a sandcastle, a boy lolling side to side as he takes his turn on a donkey ride. She has a vague sense that she should be making notes about all of this, making lists, but she cannot work out where she would begin, how she would untangle one thing from another. Closing her eyes again, she angles her face towards the sky, and feels even the corners of her mouth being drawn towards the heat of the sun.
The crowd’s chatter is like birdsong, but there’s another sound now too. A hum that’s building into a roar, the very air vibrating with it. She can hear the light, hear it agitating atoms into music. And all at once the families further down the beach are dancing, leaping, twirling. Margaret sees a flock of birds swooping slowly down above them, floating on the breeze, turning this way and that; white feathers falling gracefully to earth, turned suddenly to black in silhouette against the sun. They are raining down upon the people now. Children jump to snatch them from the air, adults colliding as they look skywards and hold out their arms, none of them seeming to notice what Margaret can see: a winged shadow, racing across the beach towards them, cutting across the heads of fathers buried in the sand and grandmothers snoozing behind windbreaks. Margaret hears the roar again, looks up and sees what the shadow is chasing: an aeroplane low in the sky above it. So low that she can see the pilot, waving to the crowd below. He is shooing them out of the way. He is going to crash. She tries to stand up, to get out of its path, but she is stuck in her seat, her head swimming with the effort of trying to get a signal to her feet. Beneath the sound of the engine, she hears something else: a melody, the soaring of strings and the marching beat of brass. She hears it as clearly as if someone had turned on a gramophone.
She ducks as the plane passes over her head, squeezes her eyes shut tight. It is so close that she can hear the air buckle above her, can feel the stroke of its wing on her hair. She brings her hands up to her head and feels something resting there. A piece of paper. A single piece of paper. There are others on the ground around her, others still falling gently from the sky. Her eyes can’t focus on what they say, a chaos of lines and symbols that make no sense. A young man runs and picks up a sheet that lands a few yards away. Two little boys, knees crusted with sand, fight over another until it tears between their hands.
‘No good to you anyway!’ says the first, as he stomps away in tears. ‘You can’t even play.’
‘No, but I’m goin’ f’ort learn!’ The second boy bends down to retrieve the two halves then stops, shields his eyes and looks into the sky behind Margaret. ‘Well … bugger me!’
Margaret tries to turn her head but she is too low in the deckchair; she tries to stand but the best she can manage is pushing herself sideways onto her knees on the sand. And there she stays, gazing up at it.
Blackpool Tower rises out of the promenade, circled by the buzz of a giant insect. Behind it the air is thick with a trail of black specks, pulsing like a cloud of gnats. Margaret watches as it turns, wings beating as they dip left and right into the deep blue of the sky.
‘It’s coming back!’ one of the boys shouts. ‘It’s heading up the beach again.’ They run off towards it. Margaret, still sitting on the sand, studies the paper crumpled in her hand. Her eyes are struggling to focus but she sees it now. It is sheet music. She can make out the staves, like ladders, and the clusters of crotchets and quavers that cling to them; lyrics skipping below, words elongated, waiting with outstretched arms to catch a falling note. She can make no sense of it, feels disconnected as though she is far away, watching herself through smeared glass. The pads of her fingers feel swollen, the tip of her tongue numb. No, not numb: alive with a sensation that she cannot place. Something like pins and needles or the tingling burn of cold.
She looks down at the sheet again. At the top, she makes out a title: ‘Me and Jane in a Plane’. She can’t remember ever hearing it, though Mother’s insistence that she take piano lessons as a child should mean she can work out the melody. She tries to hum it to herself but the notes refuse to sit still on the lines, or stay in the gaps between. All around her, sunbathers are standing and dancing to a tune she cannot decipher, jumping to catch sheets of music that are falling from the sky again. The two boys run by with the prize of a copy each. Families are gathering up their picnic blankets and making their way towards the stairs up to the promenade; shells, cherished as treasures not two minutes before, lie discarded with the crusts of half-eaten sandwiches.
They are flocking to something. And she has a compulsion to follow them. There’s an energy in the air, and she feels it like a force acting upon her, the pull of gravity towards something bigger than herself.
16
James opens the front door and finds her gasping on the step, sheet music clutched to her chest. ‘Margaret. Are you …? You look …’
‘I brought you something for your collection,’ she says, stepping past him into the hallway.
‘You have?’
She thrusts several pages, now rather crumpled and damp, into his hands and watches his face as he flattens them out. He opens his mouth to speak but seems to change his mind and Margaret, impatient to tell him everything she has seen, continues into his office, taking a seat in the armchair in the corner before being invited. If he minds, he doesn’t say so: too busy leafing through the pages of music.
‘It fell out of the sky.’
‘The sky?’
‘Yes, look at the title.’
He studies the pages again and reads aloud. ‘Me and Jane in a—’
‘Plane, it’s the new one by Lawrence Wright. He played it for me himself just now.’
‘Lawrence Wright played it for—?’
‘Did you see the aeroplane go over?’ She is grinning now. Sitting forward in her chair.
‘Aeroplane?’
‘With Jack Hylton’s band.’
‘I’m sorry, you’ve lost me. Margaret, are you quite well?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘You don’t seem quite yourself. You’re so …’
‘Now you mention it, I have been feeling peculiar. Very thirsty.’
‘Stay there. Don’t move,’ he says, rushing out of the room. She likes this feeling of being looked after, and does as she is told, grateful to catch her breath. He returns with a cracked mug emblazoned with the Lyons Tea logo. ‘There you go. No clean glasses I’m afraid.’
‘Thank you.’ She takes a sip. Never has she needed a drink of water more than this one. Never has it tasted so good.
‘Now, Margaret,’ he says. ‘Start again from the beginning.’
‘Lawrence Wright hired a plane to fly Jack Hylton’s band over Blackpool.’ Margaret can see the disbelief on his face. This is going to be one of those stories. One of those he will tell over and over again in future. That he’ll forget he’s told people a dozen times already. And he is going to hear it from her first. Right now, it is her story to tell, hers alone, but she will give it as a gift to him. He is staring at her, waiting to unwrap every detail. ‘It was terrifying at first, racing across the beach towards us, but then I heard the music. The band was inside. All of them. Playing their instruments. And then sheets of music started falling. All the children were jumping. People singing. And then Lawrence Wright. Performing. I went to his song-plugging booth. On the prom.’
‘The prom! Indeed.’ He smiles, gratified that she has used the short form favoured by the locals.
‘I followed the crowd. There was a sing-along. To get people familiar with the tune.’ And she had joined in, her body jostled from side to side by the movement of so many people. She’d felt the touch of skin and realised that the young man beside her had taken her hand. A woman on the other side had put her arm through hers. And she had been taken by the vibration in the air, of so many people singing at the same pitch. She could feel the notes running through the length of her body, touching every nerve and making it ring out with the clarity of a tuning fork.
‘And then everyone bought the sheet music. The full song.’ She stops and corrects herself, looking down at the pattern on her dress. ‘Well, I’d estimate eighty or ninety per cent of them did. Families that is. Obviously members of the same household will have only needed one between them. Or will have bought additional copies as presents, I suppose …’ Now she has started talking she can’t seem to stop; she looks up to find him studying her with a curious expression. ‘… and if it’s a one-off … a limited print run … well, there won’t be many copies and I thought it was worth …’
‘Having in the collection,’ he says. ‘Thank you for thinking of me … of the project.’ He studies the pages and falls silent for a moment. ‘And how’s your report coming along?’
‘It’s nearly there.’
He looks up. ‘Marvellous! I knew I could rely on you!’
Shame grips her suddenly as she thinks of last night, of Davidson, of her behaviour: she could not even rely on herself. On her body. ‘Well … I am a little behind.’
‘Still working your way through all those sideshows?’ he says. ‘From what I hear there’s a new one opening every day. Perhaps we should draw a line under it now. Be like painting the Forth Bridge otherwise.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘As soon as you got to the end, you’d have to start again at the beginning.’
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose I would.’
James stands and walks to the piano. ‘And what about your rector?’ he says.
‘He’s not my rector.’
‘Any rumours? Any more scandal?’
‘No. Nothing like that.’ She concentrates on making her voice sound bright, uninterested; wants desperately to change the subject, to think of anything but last night. But she wants to make sense of it too.
‘I did hear one thing you might find amusing …’ she says, a little more loudly than she had intended.
‘Oh?’
‘Someone in the crowd. I heard them say the Church had paid private detectives to follow him. Seems a bit far-fetched.’
‘No, it’s true enough.’ He seems perfectly serious. ‘Two detectives were called to give evidence at his trial.’
So, Davidson was right. She thought it was paranoia but his assumption is validated now. That she was following him. Spying. Gathering evidence. And for a moment she has to remind herself that she wasn’t. Because she feels guilty. Complicit. As bad as the rest of them.
