Midsummer Night in the Workhouse Read online

  Can they really be so angry, wondered Elizabeth, just because it will spoil a view that hardly anyone sees? Surely they must have a better reason than that. The Vicar made a third in their group, and she turned to him. ‘Do you really think it could do any harm to the neighbourhood?’ she asked him.

  ‘I suppose nothing might happen for years, but there’s always a risk. We have a responsibility to criminals, of course, but it does seem to me that the tendency, nowadays, is to exaggerate the importance of people who have gone wrong – delinquent children and so on – at the expense of the ordinary citizen. After all, we have a responsibility towards him, too. I certainly don’t want a lot of convicts straying about the parish. There’s no knowing what kind of influence they might have.’

  ‘But I don’t think they are allowed . . .’ Elizabeth was beginning, when his eye was caught by someone else and he excused himself.

  ‘It’s not even as though it would provide work for any of the locals,’ she heard a moustached, red-faced man saying. ‘They ship in a whole colony of beastly Home Office employees – the worst sort of minor civil servant – who’ll have wretched little glaring red-brick bungalows built for them.’

  ‘I’m sure they don’t,’ she broke in, roused enough by now to intervene in anyone’s talk; then realised suddenly that she had no idea whether they did or didn’t, that while his protest was almost certainly ill-informed and emotional, so was hers. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘open prisons have got to be built somewhere.’

  ‘And why, may I ask?’ said the red-faced man. ‘You send a man to prison to punish him, not to give him a holiday in the country.’ His light blue eyes stared at her fiercely between sandy lashes and she knew that, even had they not been surrounded by the jostle and noise of the party, she could not have argued with him without becoming angry and rude.

  ‘Well, I think if there have got to be prisons at all, open ones are a good thing,’ she said weakly, and he answered, ‘But you don’t live here, do you?’

  Oh dear, she thought, I had better move away and find Richard.

  At breakfast the next day his mother said, ‘We’ll be starting for church at a quarter to eleven, Elizabeth. Will you be coming?’

  ‘I thought we wouldn’t, this Sunday,’ said Richard, before Elizabeth could decide how far hypocrisy would stretch that day. ‘I want to take Elizabeth over to the island and the tide will be wrong after lunch. Can we take a picnic? It will be high water in time for us to get back for dinner.’

  ‘Go quickly and tell Teresa that you won’t be here for lunch. I expect she can let you have some cold chicken.’ Richard’s mother, long accustomed to her family’s programmes being dictated by tide and weather, was not put out.

  They drove down to a creek some three miles away, where two sailing dinghies and a motor boat were moored. ‘I’d forgotten how beautiful it is,’ said Elizabeth when she was sitting in the bow of the motor boat, sniffing the smell of mudflats and seaweed. A corner of the scarf over her head was whipping her cheek and although the sensation irritated, so that her hand came up to check the blown silk, it brought back other boats, other creeks, other years so clearly that she left the gesture unfinished: that, and the tock-tock- tock of the motor, and the light popple of water under the bow as they came out of the creek onto the wide reach between the flats and the island. It was ten years since she had been in a boat, and the stretch of coast she had known best had been a little farther south, but it was all as familiar as a dream landscape. When she put her hand on the coiled anchor rope beside her, she found that her fingers had always known the exact degree of roughness and wetness they encountered. She was not sure that Richard, at the tiller, had heard her words, but when she looked back at him he smiled at her pleasure. This was more important to him than showing her his house or his friends. His passion for the place itself, both land and sea, was his rich private territory, the reason why, unlike Elizabeth, he had never felt any need to revolt against the life lived in it.

  The island was a bird sanctuary. In the nesting season a guardian stayed on it, camping in a small tarry hut, but otherwise it was uninhabited: a long low strip of dunes running parallel to the shore to which, at low tide, it appeared to be connected though the mud then exposed was too treacherous to be crossed on foot and the narrow channel of water which remained was deep. Halfway across to it they met the boat in which the garage-keeper’s son ferried visitors. He had been over while the tide was still high enough for him to tie up at the jetty, to fetch back the few who had crossed that morning.

  ‘Good,’ said Richard. ‘We’ll have it to ourselves, or almost. I doubt whether we’ll be able to get up to the jetty now. We’ll anchor a bit farther along and go ashore in the dinghy.’

  Clambering from the motor boat into the tiny rowing boat, balancing as she reached up to take the picnic basket and the bundles of towels, Elizabeth began to feel at one with herself for the first time that weekend.

  ‘Come back into the stern,’ said Richard, ‘then I can get her bow right up onto the beach and you needn’t get your feet wet.’ But she had already rolled up her jeans and tossed her sandals ashore, looking forward to the silky squeeze of underwater sand between her toes as she helped him pull up the little boat.

  ‘We’ll cut straight across to the other side,’ he said, and they began to trudge through the dunes.

  ‘I always hated this part of it when we came here as children,’ said Elizabeth. ‘One’s feet sinking so deep, and one’s fingers getting cut on the marram grass when one tried to pull oneself up the steep bits. Sand that never has sea over it looks so depressing – ragged old seagulls’ feathers sticking out of it, and picnic papers coming unburied.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever hated anything about this place,’ said Richard.

  ‘Then you won’t ever have enjoyed reaching the other side as much as I used to. It was so lovely – just when one felt one couldn’t lug the beastly vacuum bottle, or whatever one had been loaded with, another yard, coming over the top of a dune, and lo and behold it was the last one.’

  She did now what she had done in those days: stopped on the crest of the last dune, dropped her burden and stood gazing. There were no other visitors in sight. Immediately below the dunes was a strip more pebble than sand, the chief nesting ground of the terns in which their eggs would lie so perfectly camouflaged that only the guardian’s marking sticks betrayed the nests. In the spring the parent birds became miniature dive bombers, swooping with shrill screams at the heads of anyone who intruded, sheering off so nearly too late that Elizabeth remembered putting up her hands to protect her eyes. Beyond the pebbles the beach dipped, then became so flat, sloped so imperceptibly into the sea, that the fall of the tide uncovered yards of it for every few feet on the steeper, shoreward side of the island. Already a great stretch of firm, still-wet sand lay before them, unevenly traced with ripple marks, washed so clean that the occasional shell or strand of weed had the significance of a signature. Here and there shallow pools were draining slowly towards the ebbing waves along courses sometimes lightly channelled, sometimes no more than ribbons of sand more shiny than the rest. To imprint footmarks here was a delight, as though upon new snow.

  ‘Heaven!’ said Elizabeth. ‘Let’s dump the things and walk along to the point to see if there are any seals in today.’

  ‘Do you want to change into bathing things?’

  ‘No, I’ll burn.’ She remembered that days like this were deceptive, a light breeze cooling the skin so deliciously that the sun’s work only made itself felt at the end of the day.

  Space, loneliness, high clear sky, flowing air, the turn of a gull’s flight and its harsh, lamenting cry – ‘I can’t bear to walk,’ she exclaimed. ‘Race you to the sea!’ and she was running. To catch a bus, she thought, I must run sometimes for that, but how long is it since I just ran? She was astonished at how freely and easily she
could do it. When Richard caught her she was hardly out of breath.

  ‘How can you bear to live in a town?’ he asked, still holding her hand as they walked on in the wash of the waves.

  ‘When I’m somewhere like this I feel that I can’t, but on the other hand I know that I couldn’t live at home, because I tried it. I don’t love London a bit – I don’t think I ever shall – but I stopped being miserable when I got there.’

  ‘I could never live anywhere but here. Apart from belong- ing here, I don’t see what could be more beautiful.’

  ‘Oh Richard! Not even Italy or somewhere?’

  ‘Not to me.’

  ‘It’s odd that it’s beautiful at all. It’s a dreary coast when you think of it – flat, just lots of sand blown into heaps here and there, and lots of water that never looks very blue, not even today. I suppose it’s the light and the loneliness . . . but other places have those, and more besides. You’re very biased.’

  ‘Perhaps I am, but that’s how I feel.’ He had given her a startled look when she said, ‘It’s a dreary coast’, and now he stared away from her, out to sea.

  There were two seals on the barely uncovered sandbank off the tip of the island, but they humped into the water before Elizabeth and Richard were within fifty yards. For some time their inquisitive heads continued to reappear, then they vanished, their absence leaving the sea extra- ordinarily empty. Small waves curled slowly away along the beach, unfolding so reluctantly that their sound was a part of silence. They were cloudy, full of the tiny particles of life which make good herring grounds, uninviting to swimmers. Gentle though the sea was today, it was not surprising to remember that every few years someone was drowned off the island – even now a gull, bobbing with ducklike placidity a little way out, was being carried past them quite fast on the pull of a current. From where they stood they could see along the coast: a low shoreline, faintly misted even in high summer, its curves slight, the rise of the land minimal. It was a landscape which depended on the sky, and looking at it now, Elizabeth understood why she had never felt at ease among mountains.

  ‘All the sky,’ she said, ‘from end to end. How awful that in a town one never sees it except in glimpses.’

  ‘During the war I liked the desert because of that,’ said Richard. ‘It’s the only other place I’ve been in where you could see it all.’ Then he pointed. ‘See where the mud-flats end, that line of Scotch firs? That’s where they want to put that damned prison.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘what a pity. But I suppose in time it will blend in, and they could hardly have found a place where it would worry fewer people. Any prison is loathsome, but it’s such a comfort that they are following up the open-prison idea – just think of the other kind! Who was that man yesterday – the one with the moustache? He looked so furious when I said that they have to build these places somewhere, but they do have to, don’t they?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Richard. ‘I don’t know much about it and to tell the truth I don’t want to know. All I do know is that I shall stop them building one here if I possibly can.’

  She said nothing, standing with her shoulder touching his arm, shocked, yet knowing what he felt as he saw and heard and breathed his private territory. She wished the seals would come back to distract her from her cowardice in not answering him. When they turned to go back along the beach she slipped her arm through his, as though the unquestionable satisfaction of physical closeness could cancel the distance his attitude made. He stooped and kissed her, but lightly. There was a tranquillity between their bodies, and if she had let herself acknowledge it she would have known that it came from expectation, because there was plenty of time.

  They chose a wind-scooped hollow, its rim plumed with tall tufts of marram grass, spread their towels and settled down. Sitting or lying, they were sheltered from the breeze, and the sun’s weight made them languid. The beer had become warm and although they rinsed their mugs with it before filling them, a few grains of sand still clung.

  ‘Flies inland, sand on the shore: have you ever had a picnic with neither?’ asked Elizabeth, brushing at a lettuce leaf with fingers which deposited more grains than they removed.

  ‘On a boat, but then one’s mug is always knocked over.’

  ‘So eating out of doors is hell?’

  ‘Oh, absolute hell.’

  ‘Then why does one enjoy it so much?’

  ‘Because of what it meant when we were children. Children on a picnic feel like ponies let out to grass after wintering in the stable, so when they are grown up they still keep a bit of the same feeling.’

  ‘Conditioning.’

  ‘If you like to put it that way. I hate jargon.’

  ‘It’s funny. You still do all the things we did then, only more so, while I do all the things one wanted to do but couldn’t.’

  ‘But I don’t think I did want to do other things, except the usual nonsense like driving a railway engine or sailing single- handed across the Atlantic.’

  ‘I suppose that’s why you are still here.’

  ‘Where else should I be? I like the work – I’m a good farmer though I say it myself – and I like the things I do for fun, and the place will be mine, after all. Do you think I oughtn’t to have stayed here?’

  ‘No, of course not. It’s just that, to me, the whole thing seems to go with sticking to the same old patterns of thought and behaviour.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have become patterns if there wasn’t something in them.’

  He was sitting with his arms round his knees, looking down at her, smiling a little. Simultaneously she wanted to reach up and run her fingers through his untidy hair, and knew with irritation that he was thinking her too pretty to take her words seriously.

  ‘I really couldn’t accept them, you know,’ she said earnestly. ‘I really couldn’t go on voting in the accepted way and going to church in the accepted way and dismissing people in the accepted way because they spoke with a different accent or wore funny clothes, without ever questioning it. My ideas are much more different from yours than you think.’

  ‘But we get on very well, don’t we?’ he asked, looking distressed.

  ‘Yes, we get on.’ The arrogance of adding ‘but only because I have kept most of myself shut off from you’ was impossible, so instead she reached for the Sunday paper they had brought with them and said, ‘Let’s see what’s new.’

  The light dazzled on the page and the headlines seemed irrelevant. After a minute or two she spread the paper under her head, lay back and squinted through her lashes into the profound blue. If she turned her eyes to the left she could see Richard’s forearm: warm-looking brown skin, springy dark hairs. She shut her eyes, but could still feel his presence as sharply: his presence, and the very distinct absence of Maggie and his London aunt.

  One of her hands lay within a few inches of his ankle. I mustn’t let it move, she thought. I mustn’t let it creep nearer him. The conscious effort she made to hold it still caused it to hum with invitation, so that when Richard reached out to cover it he was obeying her impulse as much as his own. Only a turn of the wrist was needed now, and their hands would be palm to palm, the current would flow. Elizabeth lay there in a state of suspension, waiting for him to make the gesture.

  ‘Your eyelashes are bleached at the tips,’ he said in a voice which sounded muffled, leaning over her. ‘I’ve never noticed that before.’

  She opened her eyes wide and was looking into his, very near, his head shutting out the sky. But still his hand did not grip down on hers.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve been wondering for some time . . . I think you probably know it. . . . Do you think you could bear to come back to live here?’

  Oh God, she thought, why must he say it now? She touched his lips, saying, ‘Hush
Richard. Don’t let’s talk about it.’

  ‘But we must. I think I love you very much.’

  ‘You don’t,’ she said softly, staring into his eyes; then sat up and shook back her hair. ‘You don’t. You really mustn’t, because I couldn’t come back.’

  ‘How can you be so sure? You love it – I can see you do. And you could go on painting, I’d like you to do that.’

  ‘Richard, I’m terribly sorry, I wish I could – oh darling, you’ve never even seen my paintings,’ she said, half laughing at how absurd that must sound to him, but with her throat beginning to ache. He reached out to put his hand against her cheek and she held it there, leaning her face against it, shutting her eyes. His skin against hers, the empty dunes – the only natural, easy thing would be to lean forward and to rest her head against his shoulder, then let her body slide back onto the tangle of towels and Sunday paper while his came forward to lie against her. It was as though a weight of sleep were bowing her towards him.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘what does that matter? I don’t mind what your paintings are like,’ and his other hand closed on her shoulder. With a twist she jerked away from him, scrambling to her feet, the pain of breaking from his touch so sharp that she bit her lip.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t Richard, I can’t. I’d hate it and you’d hate me and I’d be a bitch to you. Oh why did you start this, the whole thing is mad.’ She turned, plunged down the dune and began to walk away from him along the beach, thinking, Christ! The whole afternoon before the damned tide is high enough for us to leave, where shall I go, what am I to do?

  He did not follow or call after her, but quite soon the absurdity of her flight made her stop. She stood listening to the breathing of the sea and to the lamenting gulls, feeling tears running down her cheeks. If not with Richard, with whom could she take her childhood as well as her freedom into bed, and how could she endure the long afternoon with nothing to disguise that loss? Well anyway, she thought, beginning to walk slowly back to where he was still standing, perhaps after this we can do it without lying. But she knew as she approached him that neither of them would find any peace or pleasure and that it was lucky that she was returning to London the next day by train, alone, because the drive together would be intolerable.