Desire Line, page 12
I wish I could tell her, Driftalong while you can. Focus on the family coming towards you. That clumping boy and his mother, behind is the father, bobbing and twitching his way through the foot traffic like a fighter. A little girl shelters among them. Blonde and smiley, her stubby fingers are grasping for anything within reach, a display of apples, a revolving barber’s sign. She even gropes for the black fur of a giant dog. Their general shabbiness says they’re out of funds and luck. But they’re laughing. The father gives the son a playful push. The mother seems going to intervene but they settle it with a grin as the child begins a war dance, wants to be hoisted level with their faces. Choose them and share the pleasure, I encourage her. You haven’t got long.
Does she, doesn’t she? She puts a hand out and it’s to the nearest wall and to hold herself up. Then a small thing happens. One second she’s drag-footed, the next she stares into a shop window and heads inside. Back out again almost as quickly, it’s with a small wrapped package— so small it could fit into her shoulder bag and the transfer’s half-complete when she steps back against the shop doorway and shakes out a silk scarf by its corners. It balloons from her hands in the breeze, making a passer-by side-step as the material turns into a live thing, look, it’s trying to escape and soar up and away from the woman that grips the tassels. The scarf’s design of turquoise and peacock blue with silver edges will blaze out in this strong sun like stained glass. And I know who this is for because I know those colours and who’ll always choose them given the chance. So a welcome home gift, a connection with the missing even though Eurwen’s never touched it. Sara has picked by instinct. Easy for her and more like slipping into another self than remembering a fact. Outside time, mother and daughter are one and the blue-green silk goes slithering round the neck, drawing the girl to the grown version of herself who stands holding both ends. In a drowner’s grip. I decide to let her go for now— with the fiction running through her head of everything healed and Eurwen’s slotted back into a remake of their old life.
Sara’s Sundays are a work-day for me. I thread through West Rhyl’s loiterers and pass the abandoned fairground site, its furthest point— where my own head should be full of what to do with it, for it. Once it was a tourist town’s powerhouse—
—but Sara and Eurwen have unbalanced my mood. You’re wrong Kailash, I must have a heart or which organ is registering Pain of Regret now? In this place especially where past and present are like cut and paste. What’s gone? Brash flower beds and the Golden Horses carousel, helter-skelter, rowing boats, hot dogs, palm-readers, minature golf, ice-cream, Strike It Lucky! and Rhyl rock. And the Ferris Wheel brooding above the shabby roundabouts right up till the moment the last pound coin was extracted from the last punter. I know, thanks to a photograph of Eurwen, craning out from her cradle at its summit, not scared, in fact a picture of relish. As background that great symbol of human fortune, the Big Dipper, is about to descend. Listen carefully and you can make out how halfway down the metal carriage will morph into an old rickety Water Chute boat that caused Rhyl’s first ever funfair death, long before a certain famous murderer got a job on the Dodgems and made his play for the screaming girls—
Long before I’d meet Sara here.
When a sudden impact comes from the direction of the river and the bridge, I turn my back on the desolation and clamber up the embankment for a sight of the water or the traffic or anything but this. Over in what’s left of the harbour I think I can recognise a familiar character, a retired seaman called William Jones at work. He’s repairing, he tells me, a fishing dory. There’ll be the usual bits of metal, wood, ropes and sheeting about, mainly gash stuff waiting for someone to summon up the effort to shift it. But round William Jones it’s ship-shape (not that I can see from here but I’ve been up close) with everything to hand. If I had time I’d go over to watch. I’ve become a bit obsessed actually. A dory is an exotic craft to be holed and sunk in the estuary mud— then salvaged with enormous effort according to Jones. He made a good story of finding the half-buried craft thirty metres upstream. How he hosed the hull out at low tide and attached empty barrels he calls camels, working always against the clock to fix them way down and float it off. But worth it. When he finishes and fits this last piece, this strake, then the bow and stern will both rise well above the line of the gunwale in a characteristic shape that’s elegant and practical. I know all the nautical stuff thanks to William Jones who’s made impressive progress since I got him the off-cuts he needed. Still struggling with his workplace, though, the silt sucking at the waders every turn. I’d like the rest of the morning on that hull with him, do something productive instead of this self-pitying idleness. Irony’s only one of the concepts I never mastered – my education got going late, there are big gaps – but it might be operating now. Just when I’ve the tools assembled for Project Sara, personal weakness gets in the way and I could leave her be, easily jump ship. Switch horses. My hands are feeling the metal of the plane and spoke-shave, and the give of the grain to its blade as the teak I gave William Jones surrenders another red curl.
My face imagines the breath of wind that has bellied out a blue-green square of silk.
Chapter 11
October 3rd
Since she ran away, Sara found she noticed Eurwen more: how the hooded-eyed expression had become habitual, her default setting. How the lips… God! she could draw and colour the mouth, wider than her own, a pure shade of peach and slightly open when she is unaware of being observed. Ready to mock though or more likely, to contest… But this spiteful, perfunctory summing up is halted in its tracks. Sara ‘sees’ herself arrested in treachery, for that is what it is, and, thunder-struck, stalls halfway across the room in which she was making for… who knows, anyway? Of course this isn’t the sum total of her daughter. What of Eurwen’s instant return to humour after yet more of their ‘words’? No sulking! And the gift of time given with such a good heart to Gramps Geoffrey and Frau Fleur, Eurwen’s own inventions, new characters that she managed to coax out of an elderly couple and sustain through play. To personalities Sara treated as complete and fixed, Eurwen proffered the chance for surprising themselves and they had taken it up with gratitude.
And what of Eurwen’s preternatural feel for the sufferings of the voiceless and her passion to defend them? And its corollary, her absence of self-love?
Sara sinks down into a chair, palms pressed to her eyes, hiding, sobbing.
Lack of resolve was a physical burden as she moved around Josh’s house later the same day, nearly convinced that in the next room Eurwen was wrenching a comb through the unruly mane… pulling on the boots she seemed to want to live in, summer and winter. Always on the threshold of departure she could still be clutched at, not quite out of reach. Yet.
Everything Sara wrote down re: Eurwen would be in the present tense from now on. I know because I’ve got her personal effects however risky that might be (for me I mean). So for example I can read off, ‘October 3rd. Very late or early. Through the wall I strain to hear Josh turn in bed, to receive ‘the comfortable words’ of his proximity at least in a silent house. Even the little clock he has lent me in lieu of my watch barely ticks but still counts out my errors… for example a conviction at each waking up I need to weather just a day, one more day that will bring us close. Tomorrow we’ll hold each other: touch, smell, listen to, see… tomorrow. Whereas in fact time is not the problem, time is a construct and means nothing. The place is at fault. Eurwen is here in the minute that begins now, my minute that I’m wishing away. But elsewhere.’
October 4th
Those beetles were back, crawling across her chest and into the valley of the breasts, so lifelike you expected to see the silk twitch and a pair of black antennae emerge from between buttons, the shiny carapace pushing after them, a squeeze… But she’d had no drink for five days which was a working week for some. This morning, soon after Josh’s departure, a huge Red Cross-type parcel seemingly for the intellectually deprived was delivered. From dependable Fleur. She carried it into the living room and sat on the rug, tearing at the brown tape with her nails… and found books. A brace of paperbacks, Blackwell’s labels still attached, were Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and William Boyd’s Restless. She scanned their covers. Oxford novels… naturally… poor Fleur. The home connection should have made them welcome, so why did she fling both away and watch their flight across the room as if a scorpion lurked in the pages? And when they came to rest, did the grimace they’d provoked remain? She shook her head, knowing too well.
An entire layer of journals to remove next. October’s edition of The Historical Review was flaunting ‘Catholic Loyalism in Early Stuart England’: but where was the woman who cared? It and the rest went the way of modern fiction, leaving a single slim clothed-in-drab monograph. The Ladies’ Persistence. Irritably, she flicked through… hardly persistent… a paltry ninety pages. According to the flyleaf, ‘it catalogued for the first time the achievements of the Kensington Circle, four genteel Edwardian wives to powerful men intent on improving the lot of vulnerable young girls in London’s East End…’
Surely a mis-choice for the pursuer of her own runaway daughter… and from Fleur who was so precise in her classifications usually. But the author turned out to be Apolline Reith. Of course. And only a month launched (Garden Quad, 7pm St Clement’s College, Drinks and Savouries) by the same diligent toiler in the field they had shared. Sad surpassed, outsoared friend Polly… once. She let her eye cherry-pick the half-dozen scholarly puffs filling out the unadorned cover until it closed on, ‘Here is a quartet of interwoven women’s lives, undramatic yet well worth the recovery…’
But no Thomasina Swift amongst them. (How punishable is a smile Polly if you never see it?) No Thomasina Swift. In the protracted period of abstraction this caused her, she almost missed the picture postcard of a donkey, identifiable as Crook, standing foursquare in the Uptons’ yard; on his underside Eurwen’s handwritten line, more telling to Sara than twelve volumes of Gibbon, than the whole of Herodotus, ran, just lush… super time…soon see u! before it blurred.
Still Fleur had not finished with her. Thick A4 envelopes padded out the bottom of the box, justifying its weight. Attached was the inevitable letter.
Darling,
Just a few necessaries. I think of you every day and I hope this distraction can be useful. If not, then humour me and let me pretend.
Would it help if I came? You’ve only to say, darling. No, you’ve only to hint and I’ll be there. Geoffrey and I talk of little else. Your father is very concerned. I also but I believe that Josh will be doing all the necessary things. He’s a good man who loves his daughter very much. Try to keep that thought uppermost.
Eurwen is intelligent and mature beyond her age. When I think of you at fifteen! You were a fey little creature. But from the note she left she had a plan and somewhere she was making for. In many respects she’s quite an extraordinary girl, as were you but in a very different way.
I promise not to plague you with calls. Are you able to check emails? I know it would give Geoffrey peace of mind to let you have a sentence or two and be sure of getting one in return.
My intention was to gather and send your current working material for when or if you felt able, you understand? I can find nothing. You appear to have had a very recent and thorough clear-out. So I enclose a nice fresh photocopy of ‘A First’ taken from the draft you showed us. You will have a disk or whatever but I know how deeply you are wedded to the word on the page!
It’s such a familiar world and our dear Lady Quarrie the choicest of companions.
With my very best love
Fleur
Was she wedded to the word on the page? Fleur would not intend the rebuke, but…? Like an automaton she straightened her spine, pushed off from the floor and left the room. When she returned and resumed her position she was running the back of one hand, coarsely, across her mouth not caring if the glass held in it dripped a final drop. An open bottle of Stoli was placed down next with greater care.
The photocopy of A First divided between envelopes, being too much for a singleton, herPeerless Girl though the book made no such claim. The story was fable already, if only from Virginia Woolf’s catty, eighteen-hundred-word essay, ‘Who?’ which she made sure to acknowledge, here in Chapter 1: ‘…tiresomely exquisite, abnormally calculating girl. I suspect the taste she brought to Heystrete would have caused her lord to blush, the acquisitions made in her occupancy, ripe fodder for its lumber rooms. Yet the past is unserviceable in attempting to assess her life. She is the first potato pulled from the pease field; though no more savoury to a refined palate, the future is hers.’
Woolf was accurate in this if nothing else. Thomasina was certainly destined to be Sara’s future as sole subject, a book, a play and a film, as they used to say in a game played at Pryorsfield Christmases… all there, even the earliest synopsis, written at Geoffrey’s suggestion and delivered by him to Pythian Press’s old office in the Euston Road she had loved visiting.
Thomasina Swift was born at Heystrete Newton, 30 miles from Bristol in 1758, the daughter of an innkeeper. At fifteen, she became mistress of Louis Quarrie, heir to Heystrete Hall, a spoiled young man. Sent up to Oxford he continued the affair and, having boasted in drink about the accomplishments of his lady, bet John Cane and the Hon Spencer Goodridge fifty guineas each Thomasina could keep a term there, passing for a student.
At the start of Michaelmas, Louis Quarrie reappeared with his young cousin, Tom Swift. (He bore the cost of the adventure. His account book shows expenditure of 10s for a greatcoat, 4/9d for a plain cloth coat, also two waistcoats, a dozen muslin cravats plus stockings, breeches and shirts and a hat all bought for his ‘cozin’). The pair took rooms in Longwall Street. It was not a completely successful ploy. To Cane, who had left the University early, Louis describes having ‘thrash’d an insulent fellow in The High who calt my good cousin Tom Swift a molly’.
Tom attended lectures in classics, philosophy and divinity and came to the attention of Dr George Buller, (1719-1788). A classicist, he was Louis Quarrie’s tutor and despite humble origins, a much-feared character in the University. No one’s fool, yet Buller encouraged Tom Swift’s studies. The curmudgeonly don had fallen under Thomasina’s spell and the masquerade was sustained. Tom Swift kept ‘his’ term at Oxford and returned to The King’s Arms, at Heystrete with 100 guineas in ‘his’ pocket.
When Sir Philip Quarrie’s horse threw its rider at the Heystrete Newton crossroads, the twenty-two-year-old heir was suddenly Sir Louis, with an income of £8,000 and only a pious mother cluttering up his Hall. Thomasina and he married before the harvest was in and she became celebrated as a charmer and wit. Invitations to Heystrete were sought by statesmen, artists and philosophers for the next four decades. The poet Robert Southey had to be thrown bodily down the main stairs at Heystrete by Sir Louis for ‘versifying to my wife and therefor causing much anoyance’. Though her beauty dimmed, she remained, as William Lyle Bowles was moved to write in a fit of hot blood and bathos, ‘the wonder of her sex, our age, and this blessed County of Wilts,’ the peerless Thomasina.
An impressive thickness of paper, grown out of that couple of hastily written sheets, forced itself down onto her thighs. Each envelope had been enumerated and headings and pagination added. You could believe an actual revision was about to get underway! Yes? No? When I’m drinking I’m not working and when I’m working I’m not drinking, a pithy and presumably sober other writer once said. How long had the fool lasted after double usage of a word immeasurably potent? See! That ba-ba-ba-bum of the pulse resulted from merely thinking it… now Fleur’s shocked face flashed up. She would have recognised the scattered ashes from both bin and grate as the putative new edition, notes and letters and, who knew? The leads unfollowed, even where the references had been tracked and indexed. But no final draft: attenuated preparation, a type of scholarly foreplay, had proved that pithy sometime-drunk’s adage. She had not been working. Had not worked for years. How could she? How dare she?
Her glass was empty again. Reply to Fleur, she counselled herself. Or at least speak to Fleur before… you… before you get… She did neither. But when she answered her phone, ‘I’m up at the Clear,’ Kim said without preamble, ‘and don’t take forever!’ She complied.
Kim’s Lycra still bagged at the knees yet everything else about her had altered subtly. Movements were smoother and more controlled. The wide eyes shone despite pinpoint pupils. To Sara’s anodyne ‘How are you?’, Kim catalogued her regime with a sort of bravado, ending in the teatime Rhyl Hotshot: diazepam and codeine phosphate needing to be injected ‘to get down’. Why not a Coldshot?Sara wanted to ask but substituted, ‘I’m ignorant when it comes to drugs.’ It was what Kim would expect. ‘Hence so worried about Eurwen.’
Kim simpered over the top of her mug. ‘I was a bit of cow the other time. This kid of yours—’
‘Eurwen.’
‘I know. Well, I’ll tell you this for free.’ She leaned in closer. Her pointed little chin was sore-looking today as though she had been rubbing at the clustered whiteheads stuck like mites into the flesh. ‘I reckon she don’t want to be found.’
Sara had to lace fingers beneath the table so as not to slap her. ‘How can you know that?’
‘Som’dy would be seeing her. That lot at the stables, for one.’
