Desire Line, page 22
Anyway I got going on her story not by interrogating the dead but the living. When I threatened Tomiko, ‘I want to find out about her. We’ll leave it till tomorrow, if you like,’ he flinched. Then counter-attacked, ‘Work well.’ Nice closing line. I had every intention of working well. Better than well. So watch out. After I’d drunk tea and eaten vacuum-packed oatcakes bought on the ferry, I stowed away the surplus clothes then searched for Eurwen’s letter – Dear Dad on TV it says Mum’s in Rhyl – and I called Tomiko again and got him. He hadn’t budged. I read the whole thing aloud. He pretended his attention was down on the paper but the ink stick between his fingers didn’t twitch. I said, ‘Did Sara know about me?’
Something rare happened— he shook his head.
‘Never?’
‘No.’
‘When you— hang on! Josh smacked you. I mean you come from Eurwen with this letter and he hits you? Just because of who you are?’
‘Eurwen is very young.’ He still won’t look to camera. ‘More young than—’ He needs to explain it to the floor. ‘And fathers different. Then.’
Jay’s radio had started broadcasting ‘Fears are growing for Oxford writer Sara Meredith and today an appeal goes out for her daughter Eurwen to—’ Of course Rhyl’s Romeo and Juliet had been with Jay and Neil Rix all along but the sudden fuss sends Tomiko straight to Josh. The instant Eurwen’s letter is understood, the carrier is attacked by yes, a pretty different sort of father. I’m surprised he was let off lightly with a head injury that gets stitched by a police surgeon. Hence the scar and no complaint ever made. Tomiko checked here to give me a grin that was like all his grins, not self-mocking, not bleak or cynical but as seen – satisfied. Apparently he had an unusually thick skull, he bragged. I don’t know if he meant for a Japanese or for anybody but it was probably the God of Luck’s only part in the entire episode. And that included them making me. ‘He look for Sara then, baby not mattering. Not much. Everybody look. Eurwen is on TV asking. The professor and wife there. Important people. Everybody.’
‘Got that. But—’
‘So work!’ For the second time this Sunday morning, Tomiko explodes into a shoal of carp and swims off.
It was good advice because my non-working self is trash. I took an afternoon recce of a town where nothing is being fixed or moved or set aside to be saved. I wasn’t the only ICON DELETED round here. Someone had dumped an unsorted mass of broken ceramics, shredded plastic, sodden lath-and-plaster and household waste straight off the seawall. A huge pile – a small truckload – which in half an hour the tide will be distributing up and down the beach. Seething I call Borough before I move on as far as Blue Bridge— and it produces my first ever conversation with William Jones. He’s a disabled, Welsh old man I’ve never spoken to before but I know him by sight. It’s a small place. He said ‘Bore da’, which I could manage to return with a chi, my Welsh and Japanese running about neck and neck. After testing out my origin – Butterton Road area, Rhyl gets me a long stare— he gave his name and pointed to the boat he’d salvaged. ‘It’s ‘bout twice as knackered as I am,’ he says, rasping a square stubbly chin with fingers that are all callus. The boat, maybe five metres long and high sided, is tipped awkwardly in the mud below us and plastered with gunge. Like it’s been shot and threshed around. It’s not a patch on The Cariad, also down there but broken-backed and destined to be written off for insurance. But William Jones’ treasure was simply and superbly constructed once, even I could tell that. ‘Clinker-built of teak,’ he agrees. ‘In Portugal,’ he says, ‘for certain, though how it’s here is— well, guess if you like.’ He shrugs. The bridge shut, William Jones can lean on the metalwork without cars whizzing past behind him and shifts his weight from crooked aching leg to aching leg. I keep my back turned also because upriver Avonside is in sight, the houses with gaping sockets and open mouths, waiting for the bulldozers. Fast, ragged cirrus is throwing shadows across the estuary and you keep wanting to look up for the big carrion birds passing over. Down with us is virtually still and we talk, we follow the tenders out to the windfarm by eye and it ends with him making a pitch for the wood he needs— for free. ‘Just offcuts! Nothing to you is it? I’ve seen you round, some sort of manager, eh? You’ve got the access to things—’
He sucks in wind-burned cheeks that remind me of Josh’s. All these old men, they’re like a committee overseeing me and for some reason I allow it. Even Glenn Hughes however old he is, a good example— if Omar, polite and a better employee had turned up on Wave Day he’d never have got in, let alone moved in. This William Jones is clever and only spoke for what he’ll get out of me but I promise his couple of lengths if they’re there to be found because his failing legs in thigh boots are grimy to the knees, drying as we stand. He’s only just struggled up from the harbourside, from a project that’s hopeless unless I help. I mean, teak? And he’s already tried, he laughs. ‘But there’s bugger-all pickings left. And I’m the best bloody picker there is.’
Suddenly a wild idea – he’s Sara’s finder! ‘There were bones washed up.’
He’s about to tap his screen and write me off but shakes his head, stares into the river channel, serious again, ‘Heard they found some poor woman from years back. She was lovely too. Pity.’
I understand why I’ll provide him with teak even if I have to buy it myself. ‘I wouldn’t want to fall in there.’
‘Na, she’ll have gone in the sea! Otherwise tide’ll bring you straight back to Foryd.’
‘Drowned in the sea? Not the river or lake—?’
‘I didn’t say drowned, did I?’ The sentimental impulse had been brief. He actually winked, making me wonder if he was revisiting old gossip and scandal or just enjoying the new going the rounds. ‘All I’m saying is whatever or whoever killed her, she ended up in the sea. Anywhere from here to Splash Point would do it. Old gear catches her, she goes to the bottom— then it’ll take an Act of God to get you loose.’
That night I laid out Sara’s stuff on my swept floor, feeling and probably looking like Tomiko in the kneeling position. But Japanese work best at low level. Fleur’s letter answered the obvious query, Why is a valuable manuscript included? It wasn’t. The genuine working version of A First, decorated with Sara’s second and third thoughts was safe in St Clement’s library still, in some atmospherically controlled storage, Geoffrey’s bequest more valuable now its author was properly dead. I’m not skilled with documents so hadn’t recognised this as an excellent copy— sent as therapy by Fleur (and made by her because who else would’ve had access granted to the original, so quickly and easily?) Renovating Thomasina was meant to be a safe haven for Sara’s mind. And this was an original in the sense Sara’d attempted to play along as the pen marks proved. Fleur hadn’t bothered with the book’s frontispiece and title. The Austen quote was dropped in favour of straight into Geoffrey.
Chapter One
‘Economic fact cuts through a hill of homilies. In the latter half of the eighteenth century the average male servant was paid £6-5s per annum while the average female received £2-15s.’
Geoffrey Severing, The Money Masters, OUP, 1981
A relaxed old building of local golden stone under a tile roof, the Merman’s Tail Inn on the main square of Heystrete Newton once stood about 30 miles out of Bristol along the London road. At the time we are interested in, its licensee is one Jacob Swift and his wife is Maria and they are enlivened by a small girl child who laughs and chatters throughout a warren of parlours, public rooms, cellars and corridors. Although the structure itself was demolished at the end of the following century, in its history lie events which today would make a preservation order much more probable. For example a young Charles Dickens was a visitor; he stayed a solitary, incident-packed night in February and used some of those recollections for The Uncommercial Traveller,changing only the establishment’s name:
‘Before the waitress had shut the door, I had forgotten how many stage-coaches she said used to change horses in the town every day. But it was of little moment; any high number would do as well as another. It had been a great stage-coaching town in the great stage-coaching times, and the ruthless railways had killed and buried it.
The sign of the house was the Dolphin’s Head. Why only head, I don’t know; for the Dolphin’s effigy at full length, and upside down— as a Dolphin is always bound to be when artistically treated, though I suppose he is sometimes right side upward in his natural condition— graced the sign-board. The sign-board chafed its rusty hooks outside the bow-window of my room, and was a shabby work. No visitor could have denied that the Dolphin was dying by inches…’
With no great stretch of the imagination a peeling but entire merman held by a rusty hook can be conjured up, literally grating upon a sensitive guest’s nature. Yet prior to the Great Western’s schemes (abetted by a young Isambard Kingdom Brunel), the Merman’s Tail had been an example of that most vibrant of enterprises, the English wayside inn, comprising bar, beer garden, restaurant, boarding house, livery stables and several other services less favoured by the local magistrate. And this particular one was the birthplace in 1759 of the child who would come to be known as the Peerless Lady Quarrie.
From other travellers’ reports we can be sure a complete merman was the sign under which the Swift’s infant daughter played. And it is possible to piece together other visual elements of little Thomasina’s early years from William Hogarth’s (1697-1764) famous illustration ‘Country Inn Yard’. (Plate 1). Passengers are being loaded aboard a waiting coach: young bucks already perch on its roof, a matron is assisted by an unceremonious male hand applied to the buttocks, while in both foreground and background a mass of yet more figures compete for our attention. As in much of Hogarth, there is a suggested assault upon the senses with noise, scents, stenches and movement.
At the other extreme of artistic achievement, and a few years further on, we have ‘Outside a Country Alehouse’ by hack painter George Morland (1763-1804). Here is a chocolate-box scene. The local Master of Foxhounds is being served a much-needed tot of liquor after the finish of ‘a good run’; the lounging and exhausted pack around his horse’s hooves suggest general contentment. The innkeeper’s wife stands in attendance with eyes downcast but, presciently, it is the minute cherub of her little daughter that gazes up, wide-eyed. The glamour of an aristocrat has entered her child’s universe and the low ceilinged inn at her back, the grimy interior suggested through leaded lights that obstruct more light than they admit, will not contain her for—
Across the top Sara has scrawled, where is Dickens’ sleepwalking waitress story? Whole point dolt – a new one on me but I got it. She was heckling herself. A few other single words – such as unproven, rephrase and Starkey? – also some symbols that didn’t appear on any keyboard I’d ever seen (three parallel lines very close together, a circle with two dots in like a button drawing) littered the following pages. Arrows mainly said to me she was thinking of more inserts. I couldn’t approve. And Sara seemed to see my point. After Chapter 1 the manuscript was clean. But the backs of A First took over from the filled organiser I’d dipped into already which meant while Thomasina’s life progressed in good order on one side, Sara’s lurched forward in chaos on the other. Only a few entries were dated and these had gaps and additions while whole other sections had been crossed out beyond deciphering, not just rejected— eradicated. The overscoring was so deep it slashed through in places to the Peerless Girl. And was a mess. Beyond deciphering by anybody who didn’t work for an antiquities department— for a second I tried to dredge up any contact I might have on the Ashmolean’s staff before I had to stand and walk around shamed by my own stupidity. Dolt! That boat had sailed. Named Josh. He will have been painstaking. After an initial read through, a second, a third, however many it took, his policeman’s brain will have made a decision that either:
the journal contained nothing to explain her disappearance, just showed them both in a bad, really bad, light or,
it totally explained it and showed them both in a bad, etc, etc.
And since then he’d had years alone, side-by-side with an empty Windsor chair while he went through it methodically, (again and again, Sara’s other book) my money was on 2.
I’m no Josh. That sinister woman Sara nearly ran down on the first day snaffles my attention, urging me off on a search for Kim. Tighe. I make a mental note to question Glenn re: Clear Skies Café. Then flick backwards— so how do they recognise each other, hooking up by the railings? Sara knows nobody in the whole of Rhyl apart from her husband. And Eurwen, of course. So—? Back some more to the genie and Sara’s three questions— then Meg I warm to as if just introduced, good uncomplicated Meg hasn’t changed, a friend to Eurwen when needed, the woman who might bounce if dropped. She was and she did.
The Upton parties didn’t need describing. They were happening late enough for me to be dragged along more often than I want to remember, the hot drink always in frozen fingers, smarting eyes desperate to shut. And suddenly there’s Kim, again— but she’s a small mouli compared to one other person I bump into now and recognise. Muscling in at the end of an unsuccessful night documented by Sara, a night of spliffs, juggling, lovers, stars and Mama Rotti’s ominous lyrics, that’s Tomiko there just across from the fire. He’s watching a desperate but good woman. And he can’t be. Because they never met.
Chapter 21
When he said ‘a good woman, your grandmother’ he implied as a Japanese would because she was your grandmother. It meant what it meant, I thought. Your ancestors are not for criticising. They’re for respect. Like I’d ever give you an argument, otosan.
The Severings seemed to agree. A gesture to Sara’s loss had to be made every year and I was part of it. Fleur and Geoffrey would arrive by train from Oxford and we’d meet them on the platform out of First Class like visiting VIPs, Geoffrey straight as a tree, giving off status like cologne. It was left to Fleur to recognise us and get the first smile in even though she was burdened with The Offering. Our mission was simple— to go straight down to the beach and lay it on the sea. Sara’s favourite flowers were violets but who could get violets in November in Rhyl or anywhere? We laid white chrysanthemums – not in a wreath – which you could get locally but Geoffrey and Fleur brought with them as though anything Rhylish was tainted. The bunch of flowers, made up by the same North Oxford florist responsible for Sara’s wedding bouquet, had usually suffered in transit. Then, once launched, it was in the habit of refusing to follow the absent spirit out to sea— if she’d gone that way. My great-grandfather chipped in words to the effect that Sara, beloved daughter, beloved mother, was remembered and desperatelymissed, the pretence being she was held tightly still by this small family of a septuagenarian, his ageing wife, a sulky girl and the boy in her arms with a Japanese father lurking on the edge of things. Who were supervised by a tall policeman, not in uniform though not a member of the cast either. How did Josh bear it? And as the professor aged, the event became increasingly unsafe, top-heavy with his venomous feelings.
I got older and was expected to participate. At eight years and still living with Josh and my mother in Avonside, there was what must’ve been the worst occasion for the adults. To begin with Rhyl sky’s cloudless but the wind comes from the north, a true Arctic Circle blow. Fleur is important by her absence through a knee injury, I think, Tomiko is already in Japan— and Eurwen has a cold. Even whiter than usual, her sore nostrils are a match with the unruly hair. Her prominent lower lip’s cracked and she gnaws at the damage making me want to beg her to stop, leave the poor lip alone, please. She’s wearing a scarf of turquoise silk edged with tassels over an ankle-length coat of such intense puce it makes me feel sick. I connect it with the lip and think of bruises, of the way a bruise can hurt especially in the cold. I think cold – flesh – stone – bone. Freezing stone striking cold bone. Now I’m sure I’ll disgrace myself and be sick. I grit my teeth and anyone that actually sees me says things like Look! the child’s shivering, needs muffling up, shouldn’t have been brought out on a day like this, is going to cry. Which is true. A quick flashback prior to our expedition— Eurwen and Josh engaged in a rolling boil of an argument during which my mother has stated several times she won’t go. Not that she’s too ill to go. My mother never admits to illness and never uses it as an alibi. So she won’t go. Also thatit was stupid, the whole horrible thingjust stupid— and did nobody any good. She and Josh aren’t capable of speaking to each other now. I notice they keep either myself or Geoffrey between them. But Gramps Geoffrey can just about acknowledge his son-in-law to ask a question. Not otherwise. Even then he gives the impression he’d rather look it up.
I’m a conscript in a ritual performed by three people who can only communicate through me. ‘Put the flowers in, Yori,’ my mother says. ‘You’re big enough. You do it.’
‘You don’t want to, do you?’ Josh demands.
