The Travellers Page 7

‘So they did survive, after all.’

  ‘Yes. But her mother, Papa’s wife, was dead by then. She asks him to write. Do you think Mama could have replied? There would have been so little time after this arrived.’

  ‘Probably not. Surely she would have said something to Grandmama, even if we were too young to understand.’ But István was not sure. The dangerous life she led had made his mother very secretive.

  ‘But what do you think we should do? There is an address. Do you think we should write?’

  ‘Madji, this letter is thirty-eight years old! Surely she won’t still be at the same address. Will she even be alive? She was much older than us – she was nearly twenty before the war.’

  Magdolna looked at him, serene now. He knew she had made up her mind.

  ‘She is our sister. Of course we must try.’

  The last chord of the csárdás fell upon the air, then the lamenting melody which brought the dancers back to reality.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘we will write. But let’s wait until I come for the summer holiday. Then we can think very carefully what we want to say.’

  Lying awake that night in the room he shared with András, István wondered how to compose such a letter. It would be best, he thought, not to reveal the relationship. He could say that the letter had come into their hands... He tossed restlessly. He was high above the floor in the ancient carved bedstead, lying upon a goose-feather bed with nothing over him but one of the lace-trimmed dowry sheets. The weather had grown ominously hot again after nightfall, and there were distant rumbles of thunder in the sky, though no rain. András was asleep on the wooden truckle bed which usually lived underneath the high bed when he had his bedroom to himself. His breathing was steady and contented. István had promised to spend Saturday morning fishing with him in a stream that ran down from the manor into the river, where there was a good chance of a catch.

  István wished Magdolna had not found the box. He wished she had not decided they must write this letter to their missing sister. The world was changed now. Hungary was changed. Let the past bury its dead – wasn’t that the saying? Nothing they could do now could alter the past, and the future would be better kept clean of its taint. Behind his carefully constructed barriers, his life was now secure and inviolable.

  But he wanted to read the diaries.

  * * *

  Linda had given Beccy a job in the bookshop. This had led to a row with Millicent, whose friend Helen’s daughter Maggie ran an exclusive ladies’ dress shop in Fisher Gate. Millicent, it was understood, had been to a great deal of trouble to persuade Maggie to take Beccy on for six days a week, at £1.75 an hour. Beccy had told her grandmother – rudely – that ‘exclusive’ meant that nobody wanted to buy any of the frumpy old frocks stocked there, and that Maggie could keep her sweatshop wages. She was going to work at the bookshop four and a half days a week (extra hours if she wanted them) for a legal wage (amount not revealed) doing something she would enjoy, in congenial company, where customers actually came in to buy.

  Millicent considered that all of this was Kate’s fault, and was barely speaking to either of them. Kate was worried that Linda might have felt obliged to give Beccy a job, and couldn’t afford the wages, though she secretly sympathised with Beccy, having been forced to share many trips to and from boarding-school with Maggie in their young days – an attempt to throw them together which had singularly failed. Stephen and Roz were jealous that Beccy would be earning real money before they had even broken up for the school holidays, and threatened to go back to London to stay with friends for the summer and work in McDonald’s.

  The launch of the bookshop had been a great success. Balloons and competitions brought in the children. A draw for a bottle of champagne was won by old Mr Fairclough, an avowed teetotaller, who insisted that it should be sent to the elderly people in Seaview Home. This had aroused the interest of the residents. The more mobile of them had made their way round the corner to the shop during the following days and raided the paperback detective fiction shelves. The local library had placed a large order, to test the shop’s speed and efficiency, and the article in the Herald had attracted attention over a wide area. A young schoolmaster from Charlborough High, who had just published his second historical novel, offered to come and do a reading at a wine and cheese evening.

  With all this going on, Kate’s walks with Toby had been much curtailed and she had not yet kept her promise to visit Sofia in her cottage, although they had met several times on the beach and always stopped to speak. Kate had even met Sofia one evening at the corner shop run by an Indian family, which stayed open until 10 p.m. She rushed in to buy dried dill for a fish pie she was making for dinner and found Sofia with a long shopping list, talking to Mr Shiraz about his family as they worked their way slowly through her purchases. Sofia insisted that Kate should be served first.

  ‘Come, my dear, you are in a rush – as always! I do my shopping once a month, and this I like to take time over. Mr Shiraz and I understand each other very well.’

  ‘I wondered why I hadn’t met you in the shops before.’

  ‘I do not like the act of shopping. It makes me very impatient. So I plan it like a general, and come when things are quiet and I can shop like a duchess, with all the attention for myself!’

  More than a week after the bookshop had opened, Tom had one of his particularly early starts, and Stephen and Roz were on study leave – which meant they would not get up till ten at the earliest. Kate made her way down to the village at seven o’clock with Toby trotting obediently to heel. She paused at Harbour Steps Books to admire the new window display, which she had helped to set up the previous afternoon, and then crossed over the street to the lifeboat station. Every time she had passed by this way, on foot or in the car, she had told herself that she must stop and read the memorial to the Dunmouth lifeboat, lost in 1978. She stood before it now, with the old fishermen’s cottages sleeping behind her. In front the harbour lay flat as glass except where a pair of swans with their three small grey-brown cygnets cruised imperiously, setting up five identical Vs of wash that spread out and lapped in minuscule waves on the pebbles below the old beached rowing boats.

  The plaque was made of bronze, and was screwed into one of the outside walls of the lifeboat station. It had been paid for by public subscription, raised in Dunmouth, Welbank and Charlborough, which had also provided a relief fund for the families of those lost.

  IN HONOURED MEMORY OF THE CREW

  OF THE ROYAL NATIONAL LIFEBOAT ‘ALICE’

  STATIONED AT DUNMOUTH

  WHICH FOUNDERED WITH THE LOSS OF ALL HANDS,

  IN A GALE IN THE DUN ESTUARY

  ON 23RD DECEMBER 1978,

  WHILE RESPONDING TO A CALL FROM THE

  DUTCH MERCHANT SHIP ‘CARA’ WHICH WAS

  ADRIFT IN THE NORTH SEA

  EDWARD STANNARD ROLAND HENNAGE

  JOHN LOCKLEY JOHN D. LOCKLEY

  JAMES WATSON GEORGE WILSON

  ROBERT DALE MATTHEW YOUNG

  George Wilson was Linda’s uncle. Roland Hennage was Mrs Hennage’s middle son. The younger John Lockley had been in her class at primary school – his dad had been a lifeboat man even then. Hardly a fisher family in Dunmouth had gone unmarked by the lifeboat tragedy, with the loss of husband or son, brother or cousin. The modern lifeboat was now moored just offshore. Too large to be kept in the old building, which held a smaller back-up boat, the Sara Belle had safety devices and modern technology which might have saved those men, had they been available sixteen years ago.

  ‘Looking at the memorial, are you?’

  A cracked voice behind her made her jump. She turned and saw a weatherbeaten old man, bent with arthritis, standing at the door of the cottage opposite, Barometer Cottage, which had a barometer mounted beside the front door in its own stone case. Above the barometer the date 1859 was inscribed, and it had served the local fishing community well until the advent of more sophisticated weather forecasting. The older men
swore by it still.

  The man rolled a brown-stained cigarette to the corner of his mouth and pointed towards the plaque. His hand trembled slightly.

  ‘Edward Stannard. That was my only son. Coxswain, he was, of the Alice. They awarded him a medal after he was gone, for conspicuous bravery. Wouldn’t bring him back, would it?’ He glowered at her, removed the cigarette and spat into the gutter.

  ‘Had to bring up his son myself, didn’t I? No medals nor plaques don’t put food on the table, do they?’

  Kate felt uncomfortable under this glowering eye. ‘I thought there was a relief fund, wasn’t there?’ she asked hesitantly.

  ‘Lot a good that was. Government should have done more. Instead of taking in all these wogs and foreigners and giving them food and houses at our expense. My nephew took over as coxswain. Stannards have always been coxswains in Dunmouth. Nearly lost two years later, he was. What do the government care?’

  He glared at her again, then stumped back into the cottage and slammed the door. Kate turned back to the plaque. Whatever the old man said, the courage of those men was undiminished, lost in a gale on the estuary answering a desperate cry for help. Drifting in the North Sea. How forlorn it sounded. She had never heard whether the crew of the Cara had been saved by someone else. Had they, too, all perished? The estuary looked as innocent as an ornamental lake this morning, yet she knew it had never yielded up the bodies of three of those who had died. Gently she ran her finger over the raised letters that spelled out Johnny Lockley’s name. He hadn’t been a very clever boy, but he had always been kind, and protective towards the smaller children. Somewhere out there he was still lost at sea.

  She pulled herself together, and marched Toby briskly along the harbour wall, past the Castle, the café and the water sports centre, and started up the long stretch of the sandy beach towards the headland.

  There was no sign of Sofia about this morning, and when she reached the end of the beach she hesitated. The line of trees Sofia had pointed out stood back a little from the base of the headland. The cottage must lie in the loop of land where the old road turned inland before swinging out towards the sea again and wandering on to its eventual junction with the main road more than a mile further along the coast. The ground in front of Kate was covered with rough grass, not so vicious as the marram grass of the dunes, but some other tough variety that could tolerate salt spray and sandy soil. The ground rose a little towards the trees, lifting itself away from the beach.

  At first Kate could see no signs of habitation, then Toby ran ahead and began to sniff around some bushes, disappearing from view round the side of them. Following, Kate found that beyond the windbreak of trees there was a stone wall about six feet high and roughly built. The cottage must lie behind this. Toby had now found a crude wooden gate and was sniffing eagerly at the gap below it. His tail was wagging enthusiastically, and from behind the gate the sound of another dog could be heard, making small yelps of welcome. Ákos must be there, recognising Toby’s scent.

  Kate hesitated. The gate and the wall had a forbidding appearance. Then she saw that to the right of the gate an old ship’s bell had been hung up, with a rope dangling down from it, and a wooden sign, neatly lettered, said ‘Please Ring.’ She pulled the rope and a sweet clear note rang out, surprisingly deep.

  She could hear footsteps now, on a path, then Sofia’s voice speaking to Ákos. There was the sound of bolts being drawn back, and the gate opened inwards.

  ‘Kate, my dear, I hoped it would be you. Come in.’

  Kate stepped forward, over the stone threshold of the gateway, with Toby rushing ahead of her. Then she stopped dead. Her eyes, accustomed to the grey stone houses of Dunmouth, to the sea and the sand, and the dull colours of the dunes, were momentarily confused by the sight. The garden inside was as vivid as an Indian embroidery. The sun, not long risen, seemed already to have soaked into earth and stones here. Huge bushes of lavender were interspersed with the white trumpets of nicotiana already in bloom, and a creamy yellow rose, densely flowered, clambered through a plum tree. Just inside the gate, Kate brushed against a clump of sweet cicely, and at once the scent of honey and aniseed rose around her. Scarlet poppies spilled over exuberantly on to the path, scattering their petals on her bare feet. Flowers, herbs, vegetables and fruits were crowded together, cascading over each other in a miraculous abundance.

  There were beehives, and the bees were busy about the honeysuckle and thyme, burrowed into the foxgloves and wandered drunkenly over the lavender. A goat was staked out on a lawn as green as glass. There were espaliered fruit trees against the walls, with young apples and pears just beginning to form. The air was rich with the scent of the flowers, but underneath it there ran the sharp aroma of the nearby sea. In the centre of this astonishing Eden stood a small grey stone cottage, but it too was smothered with climbing plants – more honeysuckle and ceanothus holding up its blue spikes and clematis montana so covered with blooms that no leaves could be seen.

  ‘Oh, Sofia, I cannot believe this! Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Sofia smiled awkwardly. ‘Welcome to my home,’ she said.

  Chapter 4

  The weather continued to veer from damp and chilly to an almost Mediterranean heat. Stephen and Roz suffered from it most, alternately shivering and sweating through their exams. Due to shortage of funds, the school could not afford to turn on the heating during the summer term.

  ‘In any case,’ the headmaster pointed out patiently to an irate PTA meeting early in June, ‘even if we switched on the system, by the time it warmed up we’d probably be in the midst of a heat wave again.’

  It was the hot days that were the worst, as Roz complained bitterly to her mother and Beccy. ‘At least when it’s cold you can put on an extra jersey. When it’s hot, the exam hall feels like the hottest tropical house at Kew.’

  The new secondary school at Charlborough had been built at the enthusiastic start of the seventies, before the oil crisis, and its design was a permanent nightmare. The main assembly hall, where the exams were held, had a wall of sheer glass, two storeys high and facing south. There were no windows which could be opened.

  As soon as his exams were over, Stephen refused stubbornly to go to school, although various activities had been organised to keep the leavers entertained.

  ‘I’ll go back for the leavers’ party, and maybe for a couple of other things, but you’re not going to catch me trailing round on worthy trips to the council offices in Charlborough or factories in Banford. I can do that for all the rest of my life. Right now I’m going to sleep.’

  And sleep he did, falling into bed at nine in the evening to the pounding rhythms of his pop CDs, which sent him to sleep – blessedly for the rest of the household – within half an hour. Beccy, if she was at home, would creep in and turn off his stereo system. Otherwise Kate, more nervous of waking him, would slip into the bedroom where he lay sprawled on top of his duvet in a pair of boxer shorts, looking like a drowned man. She was always afraid of pressing the wrong button on the stereo and increasing the decibels instead of extinguishing them, but nothing disturbed him. He would come down the next day about two in the afternoon and make himself a huge meal out of bowls of cereal, bacon and egg, and peanut butter sandwiches. Then he would fall asleep again in a deckchair on the lawn until it was time for dinner.

  Watching the way Stephen wandered about the house like a sleepwalker, Kate realised how much strain his A Levels had caused him. He had been sarcastic and offhand about them all year, but that had been a protective mechanism. Now he was abstracted, and seemed deaf when members of his family spoke to him. This maddened Roz, whose exams continued nearly two weeks after his and who resented his freedom.

  ‘At least you’ll soon have the music camp,’ said Kate consolingly, over tea in the garden. ‘With all your friends from Charlborough and Catherine from your old school.’

  ‘It’s only in grotty old Wales,’ said Roz resentfully. ‘Who wants to go to Wales? It rai
ns all the time.’

  ‘Might be a nice change,’ said Beccy, who was larding her arms with lotion after an injudicious sunbathing session on the beach during her lunch break from the bookshop.

  Roz looked at her crossly, then turned to her mother. ‘How come Stephen can go on a cycling tour of France, when I have to go to Wales, to a place that’s only a kind of school anyway?’

  ‘What?’ said Kate, startled. This was news to her.

  Roz looked pleased. ‘You mean you haven’t said he can go to France? He’s just having me on, then?’

  ‘Stephen?’

  Stephen said nothing.

  ‘Stephen,’ said Kate, ‘what is this about going to France?’

  He must have heard the slight sharpening of her tone, because he rolled over on the grass and opened his eyes.

  ‘Yeah, well, Mick and I thought we’d do a cheap holiday biking round France and maybe get some work picking grapes or something.’

  ‘They don’t pick grapes till nearly autumn,’ said Beccy witheringly.

  ‘Well, something,’ he returned equably. ‘We can get a lift down to Kent with Mick’s cousin, who has a four-wheeler that’ll hold our gear. Then it’s pretty cheap to cross by ferry with a bike, if you choose one of the unpopular sailing times. I’ve got a bit saved up. It won’t cost you and Dad a penny.’

  Kate looked at him gloomily. He was eighteen, which made him nominally an adult, though he didn’t look it, with his knobbly knees and his fair complexion. He still only shaved every three days, and he was incapable of switching on a washing machine or – it seemed – of making his bed. Was he really old enough to be let loose in a foreign country? And his friend Mick was no better. They would probably be mugged, or run out of money and demand to be rescued from the middle of the Rhône valley. But at his age he couldn’t exactly be forbidden to go.

  When at last the dinner was cleared that evening, and Kate and Tom had a few rare minutes alone together over a cup of coffee before he started work on the inevitable pile of papers, she put it to him.