The Shifting Fog

  I blinked, focusing. ‘I think my daughter has already fixed up the bill.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the young girl, her voice soft and Irish. ‘Yes she has. Fixed up when she ordered.’ But still she didn’t move.

  ‘Is there something else then?’ I said.

  She swallowed. ‘It’s just that Sue in the kitchen says that you’re the grandmother of . . . that is, she says that your grandson is . . . is Marcus McCourt, and I’m really, truly his biggest fan. I just love Inspector Adams. I’ve read every single one.’

  Marcus. The little moth of sorrow fluttered in my chest, the way it always does when someone speaks his name. I smiled at her. ‘That’s very nice to hear. My grandson would be pleased.’

  ‘I was ever so sorry to read about his wife.’

  I nodded.

  She hesitated, and I braced for the questions I knew were coming, that always came: was he still writing the next Inspector Adams? Would it be published soon? I was surprised when decency, or timidity, beat out curiosity. ‘Well . . . it was nice meeting you,’ she said. ‘I’d better get back to work or Sue’ll go berserk.’ She made to leave then turned back. ‘You will tell him, won’t you? Tell him how much the books mean to me, to all his fans?’

  I gave her my word, though I don’t know when I will be able to make good on it. Like most of his generation he is globetrotting. Unlike his peers, it is not adventure he craves, but distraction. He has disappeared inside a cloud of his own grief and I cannot guess his whereabouts. The last I heard was months ago. A postcard of the Statue of Liberty, postmarked California, dated last year. The message simply: Happy Birthday, M.

  No, it is not so simple as grief. It is guilt that chases him. Misplaced guilt over Rebecca’s death. He blames himself, believes that if he hadn’t left her things might have gone differently. I worry for him. I understand well the peculiar guilt of tragedy’s survivors.

  Through the window, I could see Ruth across the street; she’d got caught talking with the minister and his wife and hadn’t yet reached the pharmacy. With great effort, I eased myself to the edge of my seat, hooked my handbag over my arm and clutched my cane. Legs trembling, I stood. I had an errand to run.

  The haberdasher, Mr Butler, has a tiny shopfront on the main street; little more than a hint of striped awning sandwiched between the bakery and a shop selling candles and incense. But beyond the red timber door, with its shiny brass knocker and silver bell, a trove of diverse items belies the modest entrance. Men’s hats and ties, school bags and leather luggage, saucepans and hockey sticks all jostle for space in the deep, narrow store.

  Mr Butler is a short man of about forty-five, with a vanishing hairline and, I noticed, a vanishing waistline. I remember his father, and his father before him, though I don’t ever say so.

  The young, I have learned, are embarrassed by tales of long ago. This morning he smiled over his glasses and told me how well I was looking. When I was younger, still in my eighties, vanity would have had me believe him. Now I recognise such comments as kindly expressions of surprise I’m still alive.

  I thanked him anyway—the comment was well-meant—and asked whether he had a tape-recorder.

  ‘To listen to music?’ said Mr Butler.

  ‘I wish to speak into it,’ I said. ‘Record my words.’

  He hesitated, likely wondering what I could possibly be meaning to tell the tape-recorder, then pulled a small black object from his display. ‘This one ought to do you. It’s called a walkman, all the kids are using them these days.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said hopefully. ‘That looks the thing.’

  He must have sensed my inexperience, for he launched into explanation. ‘It’s easy. You press this one, then talk into here.’

  He leaned forward and indicated a patch of gauze metal on the side of the machine. I could almost taste the camphor on his suit. ‘That there’s the microphone.’

  Ruth was still not back from the pharmacy when I reached Maggie’s. Rather than risk more of the waitress’s questions, I pulled my coat around me and wilted onto the bus seat outside. The exertion had left me breathless.

  A cold breeze brought with it a cluster of forgotten items: a confectionary wrapper, some dried leaves, a brown and green duck’s feather. They danced along the reaches of the street, resting then twirling in step with each gust. At one point, the feather reeled on ahead, embraced by a partner more vigorous than the last, which lifted it and sent it pirouetting up over the shop rooves and out of sight.

  I thought of Marcus, dancing across the globe in the grip of some unruly tune from which he can’t escape. It doesn’t take much these days to bring Marcus to mind. In recent nights he has been a constant trespasser on my thoughts. Pressed, like an exhausted summer flower, between images of Hannah and Emmeline and Riverton: my grandson. Out of time and out of place. One moment a small boy with dewy skin and wide eyes, the next a grown man, hollowed by love and its loss.

  I want to see his face again. Touch it. His lovely, familiar face, etched as all faces are by the efficient hands of history. Coloured with ancestors and a past he knows little about.

  He will return one day, of that I’ve little doubt, for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children. But whether tomorrow or years from now, I cannot guess. And I haven’t time to wait. I find myself in time’s cold waiting room, shivering as ancient ghosts and echoing voices recede.

  That is why I’ve decided to make him a tape. Maybe more than one. I am going to tell him a secret, an old secret, long kept.

  Initially I thought to write but, having found a ream of yellowed notepaper and a black biro, my fingers failed me. Willing but useless collaborators, capable only of transmuting my thoughts into illegible silver scrawl.

  It was Sylvia who made me think of a tape-recorder. She came across my note paper during one of her occasional cleaning sprees, timed to avoid the demands of an unfavoured patient.

  ‘Been drawing, have you?’ She’d said, holding the note paper aloft, turning it sideways and inclining her head. ‘Very modern. Quite nice. What’s it supposed to be?’

  ‘A letter,’ I said.

  It was then she told me about Bertie Sinclair’s method of recording and receiving letters to play on his cassette machine. ‘And I don’t mind saying he’s been much easier since. Less demanding. If he starts complaining about his lumbago I only have to plug him in, set him off listening to one of his tapes, and he’s happy as a lark.’

  I sat on the bus seat, turning the parcel over in my hands, thrilling at the possibilities. I would start as soon as I got home.

  Ruth waved at me from across the street, smiled a grim smile and started across the pedestrian strip, tucking a pharmacy package into her handbag. ‘Mum,’ she scolded as she drew near. ‘What are you doing out here in the cold?’ She looked quickly from side to side. ‘People will think I made you wait out here.’ She scooped me up and led me back along the street to her car, my soft-soled shoes silent beside her tapping court heels.

  On the drive back to Heathview I watched out the window as street upon street of grey-stone cottages slipped past. In one of them, midway along, nestled quietly between two identical others, is the house in which I was born. I glanced at Ruth, but if she noticed she did not say. No reason she should, of course. We pass that way each Sunday.

  As we wove along the narrow road and village became countryside, I held my breath—just a little—the way I always do.

  Just beyond Bridge Road we turned a corner, and there it was. The entrance to Riverton. The lace-winged gates, as tall as lampposts, doorway to the whispering tunnel of ancient trees. The gates have been painted white, no longer the gleaming silver of yesteryear. There is a sign affixed now alongside the cast-iron curls that spell ‘Riverton’. It reads: Open to the public. March–October. 10 am–4 pm. Admission: adults £4, children £2. No pass outs.

  The tape-recording took a little practice. Sylvia, thankfully, was on hand to help. She held the machine bef
ore my mouth and I spoke, at her behest, the first thing that came to mind. ‘Hello . . . hello. This is Grace Bradley speaking . . . Testing. One. Two. Three.’

  Sylvia withdrew the walkman and grinned, ‘Very professional.’ She pressed a button and there came a whirring. ‘I’m just rewinding so we can hear it back.’

  There was a click as the tape returned to its start. She pressed ‘play’ and we both waited.

  It was the voice of age: faint, worn, almost invisible. A pale ribbon, frayed so that only brittle threads survive. Only the merest flecks of me, my real voice, the one I hear in my head and in my dreams.

  ‘Great,’ Sylvia said. ‘I’ll leave you to it. Sing out if you need me.’

  She made to leave and I was beset, suddenly, by a sense of nervous expectation.

  ‘Sylvia—’ She turned. ‘What is it, pet?’

  ‘What will I say?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ She laughed. ‘Pretend he’s sitting here with you. Just tell him what’s on your mind.’

  And that is what I did, Marcus. I imagined you on the end of my bed, stretched across my feet as you liked to lie when you were little, and I began to speak. I told you some of what I’ve been doing, about the film and Ursula. I treaded cautiously around your mother, saying only that she misses you. That she longs to see you.

  And I told you about the memories I’ve been having. Not all of them; I have a purpose and it isn’t to bore you with tales from my past. Rather I told you about the curious sensation that they are becoming more real to me than my life. The way I slip away without warning, am disappointed when I open my eyes to see that I am back in 1999; the way the fabric of time is changing, and I am beginning to feel at home in the past and a visitor to this strange and blanched experience we agree to call the present.

  A funny feeling, to sit, alone in one’s room, and talk to a small black box. At first I whispered, concerned that the others would hear. That my voice and its secrets would drift down the corridor to the morning room, like a ship’s horn floating forlornly into a foreign port. But when Matron popped in with my tablets her look of surprise set my mind at ease.

  She has gone now. The pills I have put on the windowsill beside me. I will take them later, but for now I need to be clear-headed.

  I am watching the sun set over the heath. I like to follow its path as it slips silently behind the far-off band of trees. Today I blink and miss its last farewell. When my eyes open the ultimate moment has passed and the shimmering crescent has disappeared, leaving the sky bereft: a clear, cold blue, lacerated by streaks of frosty white. The heath itself shivers in the sudden shadow, and in the distance a train sneaks through the valley fog, electric brakes moaning as it turns toward the village. I glance at my wall clock. It is the six o’clock train, filled with people returning from work in Chelmsford and Brentwood and even London.

  I see the station in my mind. Not as it is, perhaps, but as it was. The big round station clock suspended over the platform, its steadfast face and diligent hands a stern reminder that time and the trains wait for no man. It has probably been replaced now with a blank, blinking digital device. I wouldn’t know. It has been a long time since I visited the station.

  I see it as it was the morning we waved Alfred off to war. Strings of paper triangles, red and blue, flirting with the breeze, children racing up and down, weaving in and out, blowing tin whistles and waving Union Jacks. Young men—such young men—starched and eager in their new uniforms and clean boots. And, snaked along the track, the glistening train, anxious to be on its way. To spirit its unsuspecting passengers to a hell of mud and death.

  But enough of that. I jump too far ahead.

  ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe.

  We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’

  Lord Grey, British foreign secretary

  3 AUGUST 1914

  IN THE WEST

  Nineteen-fourteen slipped toward 1915, and with each passing day went any chance that the war would end by Christmas. A gunshot in a faraway land had sent tremors across the plains of Europe and the sleeping giant of centuries-old rancour had awoken. Major Hartford was recalled to service, dusted off along with other heroes of long-forgotten campaigns, while Lord Ashbury moved into his London flat and joined the Bloomsbury Home Guard. Mr Frederick, unfit for armed service on account of a bout of pneumonia in the winter of 1910, swapped motor cars for war planes and was issued a special government badge announcing his valuable contribution to a vital war industry. It was cold comfort, said Nancy, who knew about such things, it having always been a dream of Mr Frederick’s to serve with the military.

  History tells that as 1915 unravelled, the war’s true character began to emerge. But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors. For while in France young men battled fear undreamt of, at Riverton 1915 passed much as 1914 had before it. We were aware, of course, that the Western Front had reached a stalemate—Mr Hamilton kept us well fed with his zealous recitations of the newspaper’s grisly fare—and certainly there were enough minor inconveniences to keep folks shaking their heads and tut-tutting the war, but these were tempered by the tremendous flurry of purpose the conflict gave those for whom daily life had become staid. Who welcomed the new arena in which to prove their value.

  Lady Violet joined and formed countless committees: from the locating of suitable billets for suitable Belgian refugees, to the organising of motor-car excursions for convalescing officers. All across Britain young women (and some of the younger boys too) did their bit for national defence, taking up knitting needles against a sea of troubles, producing a deluge of scarves and socks for the boys at the front. Fanny, unable to knit but anxious to impress Mr Frederick with her patriotism, threw herself into the coordination of such enterprises, organising for knitted goods to be boxed and mailed to France. Even Lady Clementine showed a rare community spirit, billeting one of Lady Violet’s sanctioned Belgians—an elderly lady with poor English but fine enough manners to mask the fact—whom Lady Clementine proceeded to probe for all the most ghastly details of invasion.

  As December approached, Lady Jemima, Fanny and the Hartford children were summoned to Riverton, where Lady Violet was determined to celebrate a traditional Christmas season. Fanny would have preferred to stay in London—far more exciting—but was unable to refuse the summons of a woman whose son she hoped to marry. (Never mind that the son himself was firmly stationed elsewhere and firmly set against her.) She had little choice but to steel herself to long winter weeks in country Essex. She managed to look bored as only the very young can and spent the time moving herself from room to room, striking pretty poses on the off-chance Mr Frederick should make an unscheduled return home.

  Jemima suffered by comparison, seemingly plumper and plainer than the year before. There was, however, one arena in which she outshone her counterpart: she was not only married, but married to a hero. When the Major’s letters arrived, carried solemnly by Mr Hamilton on a polished silver salver, Jemima was thrust centre stage. Receiving the letter with a gracious nod, she would pause a jot beneath respectfully lowered eyelids, sigh like endurance herself, then slit the envelope and seize its precious cargo. The letter would then be read in suitably solemn tones to a captivated (and captive) audience.

  Meanwhile, upstairs, for Hannah and Emmeline time was dragging. They had already been at Riverton a fortnight, and with ghastly weather forcing them indoors and no lessons to distract them (Miss Prince being engaged in war work), they were running out of things to do. They’d played every game they knew—cat’s cradle, jacks, goldminer (which, as far as I could figure, required one to scratch a spot on the other’s arm until blood or boredom won out)—they’d helped Mrs Townsend with the Christmas baking until they were ill from pilfered pastry dough, and they’d coerced Nanny Brown into unlocking the attic storeroom so they could climb amongst dusty, forgotten treasures. But it was The Game they longed to play. (I’d seen Hannah f
ossicking inside the Chinese box, re-reading old adventures when she thought no one was looking.) And for that they needed David, not due from Eton for another week.

  On an afternoon in late November, while I was up in the linen room preparing the best tablecloths for Christmas, Emmeline burst in. She stood for a moment, scanning, then marched to the warm closet. She pulled the door open and a ring of soft candlelight spilled onto the floor. ‘Ah-ha!’ she said triumphantly. ‘I knew you’d be here.’

  She held out her hands, uncurled her fingers to reveal two white sugar mice, sticky around the edges. ‘From Mrs Townsend.’

  A long arm appeared from the dim inside; retreated with a mouse.

  Emmeline licked her own gooey load. ‘I’m bored. What are you doing?’

  ‘Reading,’ came the response.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  Silence.

  Emmeline peered into the closet, wrinkled her nose. ‘War of the Worlds? Again?’

  There was no answer.

  Emmeline took another long, thoughtful lick of her sugar mouse, observed him from all angles, rubbed at a stray cotton thread that had adhered to his ear. ‘I know!’ she said suddenly.

  ‘We could go to Mars! When David gets here.’

  Silence.

  ‘There’ll be Martians, good ones and evil ones, and untold dangers.’

  Like all younger siblings, Emmeline had made it her life’s work to master the predilections of her sister and brother; she didn’t need to look to know she’d hit her mark.

  ‘We’ll put it to the council,’ came the voice.

  Emmeline squealed excitedly, clapped her sticky hands together and lifted a boot-clad foot to clamber into the closet.

  ‘And we can tell David it was my idea?’ she said.

  ‘Watch the candle.’

  ‘I can colour the map red instead of green, for a change.

  Is it true that trees are red on Mars?’

  ‘Of course they are; so is the water, and the soil, and the canals, and the craters.’