The Travellers Read online

  The Travellers

  Ann Swinfen

  Shakenoak Press

  Copyright © Ann Swinfen 2013

  Kindle Edition

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1997 by Century

  First paperback edition published in 1997 by Arrow

  Ann Swinfen has asserted her moral right under the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified

  as the author of this work.

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than

  that in which it is published and without a similar condition

  being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  For my mother

  Phyllis Pettit

  with love

  Chapter 1

  The black leather-bound book was scuffed at the corners, and water-stained along the edges of the pages, some of which clung together, and had to be prised delicately apart. But the stains were old and brown. The book had lain for so long in the wooden trunk up under the eaves that it carried the scent now of dust and not of the waters of the great river which had, many years ago, nearly claimed it. As the old woman turned the pages a faint cloud of this dust rose from them, compounded of slowly disintegrating paper and the accumulating drift of the years.

  Diary, 1936

  Suppose, after all, we were to be called to account for our deeds in this world before some ultimate tribunal. The past made present, confronting us as it truly was – not as our flinching memories recall it – could prove appalling. But might there have been, even in our darkest acts, the seeds of redemption?

  What if we could turn aside, walk through the unnoticed door into a hidden garden, and find there the past, ready to be lived again? Willing to be reshaped, fashioned from chaos into harmony and order? If the hurtling train of life could pause at the station, the hands of the clock stop.

  If we could have another chance.

  The old woman turned the pages slowly, reading the bold black script at random.

  Diary, 1938

  A man who will compromise his principles to save his skin – or, to put it in diplomatic language, to ‘preserve peace for the nation’ – makes a pact with the devil, be he never so assured of his own virtue and good faith.

  I must find a way to send Eva and Sofia out of the country. The Nyílas party is gaining in strength day by day, and to please their masters in Germany they are already seeking out ‘undesirables’ by stealth. Eva’s part-gypsy descent is no secret; they will hear of it soon enough. But I must stay and fight this thing, this creeping leprosy which is rotting the country in all its limbs.

  If no man fights it, what is to become of us?

  The woman lowered the book to her lap and gazed out of the window to where the waves broke on the rocky headland. Her hands were trembling. She had waited half a century to open this trunk of papers.

  But one cannot go on running away for ever.

  * * *

  Kate Milburn paused on the terrace, with the breakfast tray in her hands. Below her to the south the sloping lawn fell away steeply, bordered at its far edge by ornamental cherry trees, bosomy with pink flowers. The house stood apart from the old fishing village which lay below it, encircling the bay. On the left the bay was guarded by the long harbour breakwater, which extended the natural protection of the headland where the castle stood. Beyond the castle the shore turned sharply left at the end of the river estuary, and here a neat terrace of Victorian houses, built during Dunmouth’s era of middle-class prosperity, faced the east breezes off the North Sea. The whole scene was spread out below her like a pictorial map, with a few toy fishing boats bobbing in the harbour, and the castle grounds a neat pocket handkerchief of green public park. By a trick of perspective, it looked as though she could toss a pebble on to the roof of the lifeboat station where it stood upriver from the harbour.

  ‘Breakfast outside?’ Tom stepped out of the French windows, pulling on his jacket. ‘This is amazing weather for the beginning of May. Is it always like this in Dunmouth?’

  Kate put the tray down with a clatter on the cast-iron table. She had found the table yesterday buried under a mound of rubbish in the shed and had spent the rest of the day scrubbing it clean.

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you. Wait till November – or February, when the nights are so long and the wind from the Arctic lashes this coast. It’s bad enough down in the village. Up here it will be like sailing a square-rigger round Cape Horn.’

  ‘In that case we’d better enjoy it while the weather is good.’

  He sat down and poured himself some coffee. As he cradled the cup between his hands he looked thoughtfully over the rim towards the village below. ‘It’s a pity we didn’t have the chance to move here sooner. The children are too old to enjoy it now. It would have been great when they were still at the bucket-and-spade age. I could have taken them sailing. Now they don’t seem to do anything but moan about leaving London.’ Tom had never taken the children sailing. To the beach only under protest.

  Kate avoided looking at him, and busied herself instead with spreading marmalade on her toast. She was unwilling to admit that she had not wanted to come back to Northumberland. Her shrinking reluctance was something she had always kept to herself, and she had never disabused him of the idea, built up during the twenty-three years of their marriage, that she was longing to return to this place far in the north-east, where her roots lay. When he had been promoted to general manager of Crossbow Computers for the northern half of the country, she had not wanted to take the edge off his triumph. The company office was located fifty miles inland at Banford, but he had declared that an hour’s drive morning and evening was no problem, if it meant they could live at Dunmouth. Her reluctance, like so much else, lay unspoken between them.

  Four months before they were due to move north he discovered that Craigfast House, the finest house in Dunmouth, was on the market. Built by an eighteenth-century merchant, it had beautiful proportions and a spectacular view over the estuary. For the last sixty years it had been shared by two sisters, and had declined with them into decrepitude.

  Tom had bought the house without Kate’s knowledge and announced the news with the air of giving her a present – an air both complacent and propitiating. Perhaps he felt some guilt that she had to give up her own job to move north, but his attitude implied that Craigfast House would more than compensate. The major repairs had been done before they moved in, but it was Tom’s idea that they should carry out the finer details of restoration themselves whenever he could spare the time. Kate, faced with a house she had had no part in choosing, tried to reconcile herself to its isolation. Half-furnished, the house stood like an uneasy presence in their lives – beautiful but somehow soulless.

  ‘I have to dash.’ He gulped down the last of his coffee and got up, the second half of his toast in his hand. ‘I’m sorry to have woken you up so early. I’ll ring you from Manchester tonight.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ She raised her face dutifully for his kiss, but he walked past her, his mind already absorbed by the day ahead. ‘I like getting up this early when the weather is so glorious. I just need something to spur me on. Around here in hot weather the best of the day is the early morning. By noon a sea mist often drifts in. They call it the haar.’

  ‘Sounds like a Viking word. I suppose this was one of the places the Vikings raided and then settled, wasn’t it? Let Stephen and Roz make their own breakfast. You’ve been waiting on them too much since we moved up here. Pretend you’re still a working mum.’

&
nbsp; He spoke absently. The children had always been Kate’s concern, and since they had reached their teens he had retreated even further from close contact with them.

  ‘I might take Toby for a walk on the beach,’ she said. ‘Have a good trip, and I’ll see you on Friday evening.’

  Long after the sound of his car had disappeared over the hill, Kate sat staring into the distance where the sea appeared to curve upwards to meet the sky, her hands locked together between her knees.

  * * *

  The plain wooden clock on the shelf in Magdolna Buvari’s cottage chimed seven. József had already left for the fields half an hour before, and she had been lingering lazily over the last of her breakfast, breathing in the dark burnt chocolate smell of the coffee, and letting the last golden taste of Imre’s honey linger on her tongue. It was going to be another blazing hot day, too hot to work. She gathered up the tablecloth by its corners and shook it outside on the beaten dirt where the chickens had scratched away the thin, dry grass. She folded the cloth carefully before laying it on the open shelf of the carved oak linen cupboard. The cloth was made of fine white cotton, embroidered in white with tiny stitches, edged and inset with hand-made lace. Her grandmother had made it when she was a girl, back during the last years of the first world war. It was to be part of her trousseau, prepared as an act of faith that her fiancé would come safely home again. So diligently had her grandmother laboured that now Magdolna could use the trousseau linen every day about the house.

  Her mother had scorned such things as fripperies; her grandmother had treasured them for special occasions. But Magdolna believed in the loveliness of ordinary life. If you could not make the little daily business of living as beautiful as lay in your power, what was the point of the grand gesture or the special occasion? Her ambitions were not as high as her mother’s had been, but then she had always suspected that her mother would have been difficult to live up to.

  She washed the dishes in a white enamel bowl, somewhat chipped around the rim, then carried the water carefully outside and poured it tenderly into the earthenware pots and around the flowers in the patch beside the door. The geraniums were leggy, but already well into bloom, and the hibiscus was in bud. If the weather continued as dry as it had been, she would need to water everything at least twice a day. She walked down the sloping bank to the edge of the river and knelt to refill her bowl. Even the great river, seeded here with a cluster of islands, was low for late spring. The grey mud was showing along the shore, as if it were already August.

  Magdolna watered her tomatoes and melons, and even brought a bowl of water for the apple tree. The water vanished into the hard greyish soil in a moment, leaving no trace of itself behind. Watering the apple tree was a futile gesture, she knew. In weather like this, if there was no blessing of rain to break the scorching days, the apples would be small and scabby when the time came to pick them.

  She let the chickens out of their wicker hut, which stood on stone legs to discourage rats.

  ‘Tyúk!’ she called. ‘Tyúk, tyúk!’ and shook out a basketful of scraps for them.

  They came sidling down the ramp with the dignity of plump matrons, one behind the other, the dominant hen leading. But when they reached the ground, they rushed about frantically, as if they had not seen food for a week, and the sun glinted on their bronze feathers. Magdolna smiled at them affectionately, and went to gather the eggs from the coop. There were five of them – good big fine-weather eggs. She placed them in a blue pottery bowl delicately painted with a leaping rim of fish, and put it in a cool corner of her whitewashed larder.

  Only the floor to brush, then she could devise no more household tasks. She enjoyed the rhythmic swish of the bristles over the limestone flags, and prolonged the soothing job as long as she could, watching the glittering river through the open door and daydreaming about what she might make today. But she could put off work no longer. Propping the broom again the wall, and closing the door to keep the hens out, she crossed the strip of grass beyond the vegetable garden and opened the door of the barn.

  * * *

  Toby galloped ahead of Kate towards the sea, starring the unmarked sand with his feathered paw prints. The beach was empty. At a quarter past six the sun was already fully up, glinting on the cockled waves where the river Dun met the North Sea – river current and tide jostling for supremacy. The sheen and sparkle of it dazzled her, robbing the scene of colour like a faded photograph, and when she closed her eyes the pattern of the waves danced red on the inside of her lids like memory. There was no one else about as early as this on a weekday morning. Behind her, back past the castle on the point, the harbour dozed briefly. The fishermen who had gone to sea the night before would be back soon, and there would be a brief flurry of activity before the quay and fish-sheds slumped back into idleness again.

  When they had moved up from London a month ago, Toby had been terrified of the sea. An urban dog, wise in traffic, unmoved by road-drills or the howling sirens of ambulances and police cars, he had been dismayed by this moving edge to the solid ground, its insidious way of changing shape and location, its worrying undertone of sounds. But within days his Springer spaniel blood had asserted itself. He had become addicted to the water on his morning walks with Kate, and now she was concerned at his fearlessness as he leapt and paddled amongst the shallows, or breasted the waves, swimming outwards.

  ‘Come here, Toby,’ she would cry, her voice whipped carelessly away by the sea wind. ‘Come back, you silly dog! There’s nothing out there but Norway, and that’s too far for you.’

  He would turn his head, and pause, and finally swim back, but tolerantly, as if humouring a fearful child. He leapt back now through the shallows, straddled his feet and shook his lowered head so that the sea water flew out from his ears in a rainbow arc of drops.

  On this abandoned beach you could become a child again, she thought, unseen from this end of Castle Terrace, whose prim Victorian fronts were set well back behind a railed, locked garden and a private road. In the centre of the row stood the house where she had spent her childhood. Beside the harbour and further back upriver around the curve of the bay, the old low-browed fishermen’s cottages huddled together on the very edge of the water. Nothing but a narrow road separated their front doors from the iron rings where a few battered old boats were still tied, dragged up the pebbled beach above high water mark. Around them the women hung their washing, strung above the open boats like flags – jeans and knickers and school shirts flapping insolently above the bundled nets.

  But here, around the corner where the tough pebbled beach gave way to silky sand, no one looked out from the early morning windows or peered between the trees of the Terrace garden. Kate pulled a long piece of seaweed, sturdy as a young tree, out of the flotsam at high-water mark, and walked backwards along the beach, trailing it across the damp sand, sweeping abstract patterns in her wake. Quarrelsome gulls were racketing about overhead, and half a dozen sandpipers ran anxiously up and down at the very edge of the water, darting through the scraps of foam. Toby blundered back towards the sea into the midst of them, and scattered them to right and left. Buoyed up by an odd air of expectancy, Kate danced a few steps into the waves’ edge. Her bare toes were laced with white foam, and the steel cold of the water sliced into her ankles.

  She had walked further than usual this morning, leaving the village behind her as she passed the end of Castle Terrace. The last house, exuberantly turreted by some enthusiastic nineteenth-century builder, finished off the row with a flourish. She hadn’t been on this far end of the beach. . . oh, for years. Never since she had been sent away to boarding-school at eleven. During the school holidays she had avoided this part of the shore. Then during her university days in London she had returned here less and less often to see her parents. And since her marriage it had become the practice for her parents to visit them in London rather than for Tom and Kate to make the long journey north with the children.

  Beyond the last house, above t
he beach, there were only sand dunes, tussocked with the vicious marram grass that cut like knives. Here and there a clump of thrift or sea campion clung valiantly in a cupped hollow between the dunes. Behind the dunes, but hidden by them, lay a narrow road, pot-holed and little used. The main road running north up the coast lay further inland, beyond the strip of land that had once held the railway line, closed down and dismantled in the sixties. The old British Rail property had gradually been colonised by birch trees and elders, laburnums and rowans, with an undergrowth of broom and a tangled carpet of wild flowers. Rabbits had moved in, followed by foxes. There were hedgehogs. Blackbirds, thrushes and blue tits mingled with the sea birds from the beach and cliffs. A strip three hundred yards wide and nearly two miles long lay between the sea and the inland houses standing on the rising ground along the main road. It was a secret place, hidden unless you knew it was there. Even from the old road beside the dunes it was concealed by a heavily overgrown embankment. There were ways through to the sheltered little valley, for those who knew where to pull aside the brambles.

  Kate turned again and looked ahead. The beach came to an abrupt end where a small rocky headland thrust out into deep water. Just this side of it, shifting sandbanks built up in the sea where the tide carried the sand in and dumped it in the lee of the headland, then in stormy weather scooped it away again. Level with the inner end of the headland, she knew, the old road swung inland in a curve for a short distance, away from the sea. The heavy sand dragged at her feet and she slowed to a stop. There was something about this place that disturbed her. She shivered suddenly, despite the warmth of the day, and shaded her eyes as she looked out towards the sandbanks. There were twenty or thirty seals out there, sunning themselves. Squinting into the low beams of the sun, she could see a big bull scratch himself with one flipper, then lumber to the edge of the water and flop clumsily in. She watched him reappear once or twice as he swam round the sandbank, then heave himself awkwardly back on to the sand where he had been lying before.