Spiderweb

  She laughed.

  ‘So he backs off. We’re stood there and he scarpers. Suppose he thought we were going to give it to him right then.’

  She laughed again. ‘You want bangers and mash for your tea?’

  All that was months ago. They hadn’t seen the man again but every time their mother drove past the farm shop she accelerated and you could tell she was all charged up. She’d take it out on whatever got in her way next – another car, or the girl at the check-out in the supermarket. Or them, if they weren’t careful.

  Chapter Nine

  One day Stella identified a social anthropologist’s paradise. Unfortunately, this scientific treasure was unreachable, sealed away in the nineteenth century. The place that descended from it was still very much there – Watchet, a small port on the north coast of Somerset, with attractive harbour, esplanade and facilities for visitors by way of pubs, cafés and a car-park. But the alluring social structure that had brought a professional gleam to her eye was lost, gone, extinguished – reduced to a handful of names and some faded photographs in the waterfront museum.

  Time was, this place had hatched a highly specialized occupation. The earning of hobble by hobblers. Hobbling, this trade must presumably be called. Back then, the several kinds of vessel plying the Bristol Channel – the ketches and smacks and sloops – could be worked by a crew of only two or three, but when it came to navigating the awkward entrance to Watchet harbour for loading and unloading, more hands were needed. Accordingly, over generations, Watchet had supplied the need. Hobble boats, crewed by Watchet families, sailed out from the harbour to meet incoming vessels, negotiate a price and then bring the vessel in.

  A sensible, pragmatic arrangement, convenient to all. Watchet earned a living; small craft were not obliged to carry a surplus crew. But by the mid-century the system had gone awry. It had run amok, betrayed by its own fatal internal flaw. The hobblers had succumbed to internecine warfare. The trade was now in the hands of just three families; the three rival boats were locked into self-destructive competition. In their efforts to be ahead of the game in learning when a vessel was approaching Watchet, members of the warring families roamed the cliffs, peering out to sea; they crept around the town at night to interrogate fishermen. They put to sea and skulked along the coast at Minehead or Porlock, hoping to intercept incoming craft – a precarious move which risked missing the quarry and returning to base to find her in the hands of the jubilant enemy. Things got physical. There was fighting in the narrow streets of Watchet.

  What happened next is remarkable. The landlord of the town’s principal inn, himself a master mariner, saw that not only was the situation ridiculous, but it lent itself to a fine and progressive solution. He summoned representatives of the three families and proposed the amalgamation of the three boats into a union of mutual benefit, to be known as the United Sailors’ Society. Rules, regulations, monthly meetings, the keeping of accounts. Equal distribution of funds to all members. Provision for sickness and pension payments, for widows’ benefits. Not to mention the interesting possibilities of co-operation in the fixing of a hobble fee unimpeded by the rate-cutting of rival service providers. The masters of the vessels working that coast must have shuddered when news of this entente cordiale reached their ears.

  At this point the story of the Watchet hobblers becomes a matter for labour and trade union historians and Stella lost interest. What I want is a word with these families, she thought. Some good in-depth interviews. Not to mention a careful examination of lineage structures. I want to know exactly what Wedlakes, Aliens and Pittaways thought of one another, and what happened if a young Wedlake lad fancied an Allen girl, and how the women coped with a situation of prohibited relationships. I want to know how the hobble war affected the extended community. I want to get dug into Watchet of the 1840s, with a notebook and a card index, and act as a pair of eyes and ears. First time I’ve ever thought there might be something to be said for time travel. What a scoop I’d have! The television people would be all over me. Prime-time documentary on BBC 2: ‘This remarkable account of drama and tension in an isolated and forgotten society by one of today’s most innovative anthropologists …’

  She came out of the museum and sat looking at the little harbour. Not a very serious harbour, these days. A few fishing boats. Otherwise just some distinctly unbusinesslike dinghies and motorboats and the promise of day trips to Lundy or Ilfracombe.

  Stella knew this place already. Not the museum, which seemed to be a relatively recent installation. But she had sat precisely here, looking at this view of boats beached in low-tide mud with the grey-brown sea beyond and the grey-blue sky above that. She had eaten fish and chips at the café on the esplanade. She had walked on the cliffs beyond the town.

  They had. The two of them. It was possible, all things considered, that she had been happier in this place than ever before or since. Here, she had cruised briefly in that stratosphere which is beyond normal emotion, beyond contentment or exhilaration, that condition which drenches all perception at the time but is only recognizable in retrospect.

  Happiness being notoriously irretrievable, she could do no more today than pay respectful tribute to that alter ego. She had wondered if it would be a treacherous experience, to revisit this place, but in the event the treachery seemed in a curious way to be her own response. She had been almost at once distracted by wandering into the museum and falling upon the provocative story of the hobblers. And now, watching bickering gulls and a dog rooting in a dustbin and a boy fishing from the pier – just as the two of them probably had done back then – there was no anguish, just a contemplation: vivid, enduring.

  ‘Anywhere so long as it’s rural and blindingly English,’ he had said, on a phone that crackled and whistled in a way that international calls no longer do. So she had booked in at a pub that did bed and breakfast in a village that was unfamiliar but which should do nicely, according to the road atlas. She had met him at Heathrow and they had driven straight there, to the double bed in a room looking out on to a steeply tipping hillside, where sheep grazed on ledges and stared in at them.

  The next day they visited Watchet. It was a cool grey autumn day; they both wore sweaters and jackets. In the weeks since she last saw him she had thought of him always in hot weather clothes, bare-armed, tanned. To see him otherwise both startled and stimulated her. It was as though he suddenly displayed some new facet of his personality. I don’t really know him at all, she thought. I am in love with him, but that is quite another matter.

  He was a foreign correspondent for one of the broadsheet newspapers. She had met him on a rock off the coast of Malta. A rock to which you swam from a cove known, on the whole, only to connoisseurs. She had been sitting on this rock and a man had pulled himself out of the water and come to sit beside her. He had said his name was Dan Mitchell. He talked. And she had stopped being irritated at his invasion of her rock because his talk was intriguing. It was not the expatriate conversation to which she had become accustomed. He was not interested in decent restaurants or sailing excursions. He talked about the place and its people. When, later, she played back what had been said between them, she saw that it had been a subtle process of negotiation which she had not recognized at the time. He had probed her for responses and picked up direction and inclination from what she had said. He had talked about the Maltese language, she had pointed out that the origin is Arabic and had given some instances. He moved on to village names and topography and thus, after half an hour, sitting there between the sea and the sun, he had nailed her for who she was and what she did, while she knew that he was based in Italy and was here to cover an international summit conference about to take place on the island. It was the sixties, when summit conferences were all the rage. She had ceased to wonder how he was aware of this bathing cove known only to connoisseurs, because she realized that he was the sort of person who at once, by some osmotic process, knows what ought to be known about an unfamiliar place. They had swum
back together to the cove and as they got into their cars he asked her where she was living. She told him. The next day he turned up in the village.

  The summit conference ended and he left the island. Ten days later he was back. Italy is no great distance from Malta; if a busy journalist decides to take a break, he may as well take it there as anywhere. And so it went, for the rest of that summer. She lived on two different planes: work in the village, and the times when he was there.

  In Watchet he said, ‘This place could rate as the opposite of Malta. Like the reverse of a coin. How about us? Are we the same?’

  She was fresh from the night before. That double bed. Him. The impassive sheep.

  ‘So it would seem.’ And she laughed – a jubilant, carefree laugh that took in the night and the past months and this moment and whatever there might be to come.

  ‘I am not a good proposition,’ he had told her. ‘You do realize that? It will always be like this.’

  Oh, yes, she knew he was not a good bet. He lived with his bags packed, at the beck and call of events. It would always be like this and she had no option but to go along with it, because we do not choose with whom we fall in love. I am sentenced to this, she thought. Not that I would wish it otherwise. He will vanish, and reappear. Or not, as the case may be. Arrangements will be made and then broken. I shall wonder, as I wonder now, if possibly he has another woman somewhere else.

  ‘But then you’re not exactly rooted yourself, are you? What’s the longest you’ve ever lived under one roof?’

  Stella pondered. A year, she decided. Definitely she had chalked up a year.

  ‘There you are, then.’

  She did not know what he meant by this. We are not suited? We are kindred spirits? They had been blown together, on a rock. In the societies she studied, sexual liaisons sprang from associations that were generations deep. She and Dan Mitchell had barely a common acquaintance. They shared nothing except the past months.

  He was a man charged with energy – restless, inquisitive. The energy seemed to focus in his eyes – brilliant, interrogative eyes that fixed on you as though you were the only person of any interest to him. Brown eyes in a sharp-featured face on which a smile seemed only just held back. A smile of wry amusement, of disbelief. A charismatic personality, she realized, having seen many such in many societies. And he came and went with the immediacy of an apparition. He was nowhere in sight, and then suddenly he was beside you. He was in the room, and then all at once he was not. Just as he had slid up from the sea on to that rock – sleek and smiling and unheralded by so much as a splash.

  He never accounted for himself. He never said where he had been or where he was going. Simply, he came and went.

  He did not talk about his past. From time to time something emerged – incidentally, it seemed, woven by accident into whatever he had been saying, so that only afterwards would Stella realize that she had learned something about him: he had been at a major public school which he held in contempt; he spoke Russian as well as French, German and Italian; he had a child, a boy of ten.

  Hardly a matter for wonder, she told herself. The man is forty. Naturally, he has been around. As have I. All the same, she found herself wondering. Not about the boy, but about the mother.

  Walking on the cliffs beyond Watchet, she asked him. Idly, as though it were neither here nor there.

  She was German, it seemed. Inge. She lived in Cologne, with Konrad, the boy. Dan visited. Sometimes he took Konrad on trips.

  ‘We’ve never been married,’ he said. He knew her thoughts, Stella saw, and felt exposed. He smiled. ‘Water under the bridge, except for Konrad.’

  They had eaten fish and chips in the café on the esplanade and then walked on the cliffs. They scrambled down the cliff path on to a beach and saw that the cliffs were seamed with pink alabaster. They held hands. They stood in the wind and kissed. Others steered clear of them. We look like what we are, Stella thought. Lovers. People are wary of lovers, for good reason. They recognize an abnormal state of mind, and stay away. They see a temporary madness. They see those who care for nothing but themselves, who are immune to the rest of the world.

  This will never do, she thought. That is what I know, even in the midst of it. And I don’t care. I know that it will all end in tears, more likely than not, and still I cannot care. It is enough to be here, now. To have had these weeks and months. To feel thus.

  The first time he came to the Maltese village she had had to ask him never to come there again. He parked his hired car in the square and made enquiries. By the time he reached the house where she lived and worked, he had a Pied Piper following of children and there were watching eyes on every doorstep and at every window.

  He was contrite. ‘I’m sorry. Can’t you put it about that I’m a colleague? Come to give a helping hand with …’ he cast an eye over her table … ‘lists.’ He picked up a sheet of paper and stared. ‘Lists of what?’

  ‘Makes or firework,’ said Stella.

  He sat down, uninvited. ‘Tell me.’

  So she told him. About the firework festas which dominate the lives of Maltese villages, about the warring band clubs and the allegiances to rival saints. Outside, the narrow street became unaccountably busy. Various neighbours dropped by to see if by any chance Stella needed eggs, sugar, a loaf of bread. Eventually she said, ‘I’m sorry, but really I’m afraid you’ll have to go. I’ll never live this down.’

  He was further contrite. ‘I do so much barging in the course of business, I forget to be sensitive.’ He rose and stood looking at her. ‘So what do I do to reach you? I can see there’s no phone here.’

  She knew then how it was going to be. When he had gone she could still feel his look upon her, like the touch of a hand on the skin. She was exhilarated. She was horrified. A field trip was sacred territory. She did not see how she could work and have a love affair at the same time. Thus it was that she came to live two lives, over that summer: the village life and that other life.

  In the village she became an expert on makes of firework. This was necessary in order to note the preparations for and rate of expenditure on the festas in honour of saints’ days around which the village year revolved. Several times a year the village exploded. It erupted in a shower of flares and sparks, clouds of acrid smoke and a few hours of deafening bangs. Thus did the rival band clubs honour their chosen saint and assert superiority not only over opposing saints but also over neighbouring villages, who might have cut corners on expense and thus banged to less effect. Within the village, allegiance to the two or three different band dubs split the place several ways. Male members of families decided on their allegiance in adolescence, and henceforth devoted themselves to their chosen patron. On their saint’s festa day they strutted the streets in the band and later toured the island in buses and battered cars, letting off firecrackers and shouting the superiority of both saint and village. A system which channelled male aggression and esprit de corps in much the same way as loyalty to football teams does in other societies. And of course it suited the church nicely, focusing funds and attention on both the institution and its physical expression, the great baroque presence in the central square.

  The village priest was Stella’s confidant and informant. Once convinced of her scholarly status and that she was nothing to do with the government (anthropologists are suspected of being disguised spies of authority, the world over), he was prepared to brief and help her. He guided her through the complex network of familial relationships. He told her who worked where and who subscribed to which saint. Many of the cards in the index boxes in Stella’s desk bore entries in his neat, seminarian hand. He acted as translator when necessary.

  The Maltese village had eerie affinities with that Nile Delta village on which she had cut her professional teeth. Once again, she lived in close proximity to a family. The rooms she rented opened on to the interior courtyard in which they kept the rabbits and chickens which supplemented the father’s earnings as a dockyard wo
rker in Valletta. Once again, she was drawn into the life of the neighbourhood and had to struggle to retain her detachment. And, once again, she was a woman.

  The priest could reconcile her role and her gender because she was not a Catholic and was thus outside his remit. She both did not count and had to be accounted for differently. A lifestyle that would not do at all for a local woman was acceptable because Stella became in his eyes a sort of honorary man, by virtue of her occupation. The village recognized her as a woman, with all that that implied. The wives, mothers, daughters and grandmothers found her accordingly more approachable, but were concerned about her lack of husband or children. The men were wary, both fearing to be compromised if they associated too closely with her and feeling that she couldn’t possibly appreciate male concerns in any case. The priest became an essential mediator.

  The incursion of Dan Mitchell threatened her precarious neutrality. If she was observed to be courted by a man, the village would be enthralled, but her status would be radically changed. The priest would take her less seriously. Everyone else would see her as all too interestingly flesh and blood in a way that would impede her working relationships.

  Dan perfectly understood. He was amused, conspiratorial. He enjoyed the furtive quality of their meetings, as though the village were some heavy Victorian father from whom she slipped away. They met in Valletta bars, in the restaurant in Mdina, at favourite assignation points on cliffs and by coves and beaches reached only along rough tracks. Sometimes she came to the hotel in which he stayed, and then drove back late in the hot starry night, creeping guiltily into the village, fearing that her comings and goings must be noted. She invented friends and outside commitments, avoiding the eye of the priest and the family with whom she lodged. My old school friend who is staying in Mdina. The tennis club.

  The island became a place of wonder. Previously, she had seen it as an overcrowded landscape of cluttered villages set amid scrubby fields. Prickly pears seemed the predominant vegetation, the architecture echoed blockhouses. Tourists and British expatriates whooped it up on the beaches and in the Valletta bars. Now, it became suffused with private perceptions, their shared discoveries. The cliffs from which you looked down on to a quilted sea. The narrow ancient streets of Mdina, with glimpses into private courtyard gardens. Dolphin door knockers. The harbour-front bar where you could eat grilled swordfish. The island’s deep extended past: the mad tenacity of the crusader knights, the dark impenetrable hints of prehistory. Stella saw the familiar faces of her village in a new light, recognizing their tenuous descent from these things.