Without Her Read online

  There’s a point before adolescence tips you over, fuddles your brain, and distracts your body; a point of balance, between childhood and the opening adult world. I think in little girls it is particularly clear—but we rush past it, all of us, in our eagerness to become who we will be next. Here. Perhaps it is here, the clue I have been waiting for; where the wild open sea stretches all the way east before us and we turn our backs to the land.

  There was the night of the maroons, sometime in July, when the sun still sets so late on the east coast that it is only really dark for a few hours. The emergency siren wailed across the town to bring everyone out of their houses. We woke, hearing it, and already Hannah’s parents were calling upstairs to fetch us down.

  “What? What’s happening?” We were bleary with sleep, but quickly excited.

  “It’s the maroons. Everybody’s going to help with the boat!”

  A ship was sinking out at sea, and the lifeboat was to be launched. People were running down the street, even leaving their house doors open so that yellow light spilled here and there on to the pavement. Down past the Moot Hall we ran and saw it emerging from its shed like a great whale slithering towards the water, the people of the town all heaving and shoving to push it down faster over the shingle, so that it could strike out into the waves. It was midnight, and a starless windy night: the sky still held its pallor, but black water slapping up against the stones and against the sides of the boat as it was launched, and the sound of it was grinding stones and a kind of groan and then a sudden rush, and the spray that hit the bow. We all wanted to have a hand in it, and people crowded up to help. Hannah and I in our pajamas with raincoats over them, and sneakers pushed on with the laces still untied. We’d all run out together in our nightclothes, and everyone else was strangely dressed too, in wellington boots and jackets over nightdresses, and hastily thrown-on rain gear. It began to rain, and the rain slanted down in the light from the boathouse, and we saw the stern light of the lifeboat as it left shore and struck out towards the horizon. In just a few minutes it was out of sight. No lights out at sea, but still over the land the remains of that long summer twilight, pale over the marshes, and the sounds of the maroons, that siren wail in our ears still, that ghost-sound that had woken the whole town.

  People stood on the shore, straining to see the boat’s passage, or a dark shape that could be a ship out there, but nothing was visible. There was nothing to do, but go home to the open houses to bed, or wait out on the seawall watching for a return. We stayed out, I remember, because it was too soon to leave, although some people did, wanting to get back to children and warm beds. We sat on the seawall, Hannah and I, and her parents smoked, and then her mother said, “Well, it will be a while. Perhaps we had better go back in.” But I could hear that nobody wanted to, so we stayed.

  Her father said, “Maybe I can be of some help. They may need a doctor. I’ll wait and see.” We waited with him, proud of ourselves as if elected to be of use too. There was the continual grind and suck of the sea on stones, and then a whisper, a ripple that told us the tide had turned. I don’t know how much time later—an hour, more—it was that the boat came back in, the men shouting into darkness, lights at the bow, and the foreign sailors were brought ashore, one of them dead, someone said, a young man. People were saying that it was a Norwegian ship, so the young man was Norwegian.

  “Hannah, Claudia, come on! Come back with me, now. There’s nothing more we can do.” Hannah’s mother called us away from the scene and walked ahead of us, her arms folded. Her father was down by the boat where the ambulance men were running down the shore with stretchers. Maybe he was examining the young man, or helping others out of the boat. I wanted to see for myself, and I think Hannah did too. We moved close to him, pushing through the crowd, and they let us, because we were with her father. The foreign sailors in their dark wet clothes stood apart from the crowd. They looked shocked, as they rubbed their arms and hunched into themselves. People reached to hand them blankets, flasks. Someone was saying that the ship had gone down. Nobody knew if there had been others left on board. The boy being lifted out of the boat and laid on a stretcher looked young, not much older than us, and he couldn’t have been in the sea for long, only he looked completely soaked through and very pale under the lights and his features were blunt, somehow, like those of the dead kitten I once saw our cat give birth to, quiet and left to one side, still wrapped in its caul while all the others had been torn open and licked to life; and then I saw that he had a cut on his head, and blood had come from it, so something must have hit him before or after he fell into the water. Hannah’s father was holding a wad of cotton to the cut, as if to keep the blood inside, and the ambulance men were lifting him and the last we saw of him was a small dark wet shape on the stretcher that was being lifted into the back of the ambulance like something being put carefully away on a shelf, and all the while I saw that his arm and hand dangled down, the way they never do when you are conscious, or even when you are asleep.

  I thought when someone was dead you could tell: the body was heavy, different; and there was that boy’s hand, dangling as if disconnected to anything alive. Hannah’s father turned on us when the stretcher was gone and looked almost angry. I’d never seen him look fierce like that. “I thought you two girls had been told to go back to the house. Go on now, and I’ll be back soon.”

  We had no excuse. We just wanted to see what was happening up close, because we wanted to be part of it all, I suppose, we wanted to know. We walked back towards the house, not talking, all along beside the seawall till we saw the light in the kitchen and Hannah’s mother waiting up to scold us. Only, she didn’t, but just said, “Go to bed now.” In our room facing the sea we dropped our outer clothes on the floor and got straight into our beds, because there was nothing more we could ask, or say. And that night and the days and evenings to follow, we stood alone together at the edge of the long shingle beach, away from the smallness of the town, deafened by the roar of the sea and its withdrawing grind over pebbles; the gulls scream over the shore and the marshes, their swarming and squawking around the fishermen’s huts. We never talked about the boy whose body we had seen taken away in the ambulance. In the local paper, it said that he was nineteen, from Oslo, and must have fallen, or jumped, overboard. All the other sailors apart from the five rescued by the lifeboat men, had gone down with the ship.

  We looked outward together at the endless gray movement of the waves, imagining other shipwrecks. Anything was possible. The wind, we were told, came straight here from Siberia, nothing in its way. Even in summer, you could feel its chill. The east coast of England, a bulge, an excrescence, where land used not to be, and a wildness to it still, a lift of the light and air as if solid objects might fly away. The old town lay buried beneath shingle. I discovered later that it was among the crumbling Saxon churches with their watchtowers, inland farther than you would think a great ship could enter, that the invading Vikings—the early Norwegians—had first made their way upriver, in from the North Sea.

  How many summers were there? How many times did I go with her and her parents to this place at the very edge of England? More than once, anyway. I remember coming back there, a little older, probably the following summer, and taking up our old habits, but somehow they were not quite the same. The wild freedom of the first time has stayed with me. The freedom, and the danger, the strangeness of that night of the maroons when we first saw someone dead.

  8.

  We knew each other through all those invisible years, when people think you are simply a blank slate, a page for your education to write upon. When you have been children together, you have a past that no others can share; it has to be a secret, in order for you to survive. Often, we suffered in silence. But I saw her, and she saw me, across the enormity of this silence, and there was something admitted between us that said, not now, but later; not this reality, but another; we will wait it out. We have glimpsed it, w
e were on that beach, we know it’s there.

  It was necessary, we decided when we were back at school, to run away. We talked about it, worked out how it could be done, made plans. Why had nobody ever tried, as far as we knew—or was there such disgrace, such punishment, that nobody ever heard again of girls who had tried it. Perhaps they had been expelled, and their names expunged from history. We didn’t know. And, where could we run to? I had an aunt in the New Forest, only about a hundred miles from our school. We could disguise ourselves, hitch lifts. I thought she might take us in.

  “I’ll tell McKinley my parents are coming down, and they’ve asked you out too,” Hannah muttered to me as we crossed the courtyard to go into the school building, our green cloaks pulled around our shoulders, our heads bent together. You could never tell when someone could overhear you: a prefect passing, apparently unaware, a couple of girls who would inform on you just to curry favor.

  “Right. This Saturday? Or is it too soon?”

  “This Saturday. Be ready.”

  We passed each other notes in a code we had worked out, based on substituting some letters for numbers, so that it looked as though we might be passing answers to an algebra problem. We were in the Big Prep Room, where girls sat in rows, doing their preparation work, waiting for the shrill bell to ring that signaled a rush out of the building and back to our houses for the cold meal of Spam, sardines, or Marmite on toast called supper. It was in the spring term of our second year.

  She told our housemistress, saying that it was hard for both her parents to get away together, so it was a last-minute decision, an opportunity not to be missed. Our names were written in the exit book. We dressed in our scratchy tweed suits, pretended to wait for the car to come up the drive. When we were sure that nobody was looking, we walked fast down the drive, not looking back. Our berets on our heads, our hands in gloves, our socks pulled up tight, we must have looked less like escapees than a prim pair of young ladies heading for church. We had hidden a bag behind a bush at the bottom of the drive with our nonuniform clothes in it, and enough food stolen from the larder the night before for a picnic en route. We picked up the bag and walked fast into town, to the railway station, where we bought single tickets with no comment from the ticket seller. We waited on the platform for the train, on which we would change our clothes and our hairstyles, and join the crowds of ordinary commuters on the train that would end up, three hours later, in London. We hardly dared speak to each other as we were doing all this, except in whispered asides, got the money, good, platform three, only a few minutes. The platform clock ticked on as slowly as ever the clock did in the Big Prep Room. We sat on a bench, trying to look inconspicuous. We handed over change at the newspaper stall to buy packets of crisps and chocolate, and film magazines to read on the train. No girls from our school were ever allowed to travel unaccompanied on a train. Just before the board went up, announcing the train, we saw feet in brown lace-up shoes, legs in brown lisle stockings, a tweed school skirt come in to view. We couldn’t hide, except behind the magazines we’d bought. We waited to hear the voice of a school prefect—the only girls allowed to come in to town, and even they had to come in pairs, so there must be two of them. Our hearts hammered, as we told each other afterwards, we expected every minute a voice to say “Prescott and Farrell? What are you doing here?” and for hands to seize us and drag us away. Amazingly, as we kept our heads bent and our copies of Picturegoer and Photoplay in front of our faces, we heard nothing, and the feet in the brown shoes moved away. The whistle of the train sounded. What were the prefects doing here, if not hunting us down? The train was stopping, very slowly, up against the platform. Doors were opening. We were nearly free.

  “Just what do you two think you are doing? Thought you were getting on that train, did you? Well, you’d better think again. Come with me, both of you.”

  It was Janet Richards, eighteen and captain of cricket as well as head girl, a tall beefy blonde who seemed to us far bigger than any adult woman we knew. She was like a Nazi in a film. She and her friend Penelope Wright marched us back to school and straight into our housemistress’s study. There was nothing we could say. The punishments were various: being shouted at for half an hour for wasting our time and our parents’ money, telling lies, being in fact lower than the low; they included being made to stand in the corridor with books on our heads before breakfast; having to run around the hockey field three times in the fog; not being allowed any dessert for three weeks; and most serious of all, being threatened with expulsion. Our parents would hear of it—and did. We were not allowed to speak at meals, nor to walk together to church on Sundays. No one was to talk to us. I can’t remember what else they thought up that came short of beating us; but the general sense of being outcasts was hard enough. Perhaps some girls admired us for trying; but trying to escape and failing never carries much glory. We suffered in imposed silence. And then Hannah wanted to try again. “We were too obvious, Claude, anybody could have seen us walking downtown when my parents were supposed to be picking us up, we were sitting ducks, maybe even the stationmaster called the school. Next time, we’ll go after dark.”

  I objected: I didn’t want to risk being expelled, mainly because my own parents would have been so horrified. More than that, I had been made simply afraid. Being told day after day that you are a wicked, ungrateful, lazy, lying failure has an effect. Or, it did on me: I felt weakened, as if I could stand very little more of the general opprobrium.

  Hannah felt it as a challenge. She was caught up in the idea of escape, at whatever cost. I see it now as her practicing the art of fugue.

  “But what if they catch you again? There’ll be huge trouble. You’ll probably get expelled.”

  “Come on, we can’t give up now.” She looked at me, her head on one side, pulled a face. “Oh well, if you can’t, you can’t. Really, Claude, you’re sure? Then you’ll have to cover for me, till I’m really and truly gone. Promise? You’ll just say you haven’t seen me?”

  “All right.” I wondered what I would do, if questioned; how I would act my part.

  “You could pretend we’ve fallen out with each other.”

  I thought, they would never believe me. “I’ll think of something. Don’t worry, you’ll get a head start.”

  She would go out at night, before the main door was closed, and she would change immediately into ordinary clothes, put on makeup and pretend to be one of the town girls going out on a date. I saw her off, with a whispered “Good luck,” wearing her school raincoat, heels—we were allowed to wear them on Saturdays—her hair inside her beret, a slash of lipstick across her mouth.

  “Call me Sharon,” she laughed. “And if you never see me again in this hole, look me up in Bournemouth. My dad’s cousin lives there. By the sea, Claude!” And she was gone, into the darkness of the drive, flanked by laurel bushes, out of sight.

  When they brought her back, she was shut up in solitary confinement in the Sanatorium for a week, and I couldn’t see her or find out what had happened. Her parents were called, and she was threatened with expulsion, but her father was a fairly well-known pediatrician who wrote letters to the Times and had given money to the Chapel Roof Fund, so she was given another chance. When I finally saw her, she was pale and looked exhausted. “Claude, thank God you’re here still. I suppose we’ll just have to wait it out, now. It’s impossible to get out of this place—worse than Colditz, if you ask me.”

  So I remember, as I go through my memories in Philip’s house, Hannah’s early addiction to the art of escape. I search for something that may possibly be of use, but may equally be of no importance at all. What about the time when Hannah decided she was going to learn Russian? It was the year we saw Dino de Laurentiis’s War and Peace.

  My own film passion had begun early, when I went to a children’s party and saw my first-ever cowboy film, sitting in the dark watching Hopalong Cassidy, who was William Boyd on a white hor
se. I sat on, wanting him to return, long after the film had ended with its fizz of exclamation points, stars, and numbers, and all the other children were in the kitchen eating ice cream. I thought—so this is what you can do? You can be a man on a white horse, rushing through canyons? You can be someone completely different, live another life? At school, we had a film once every term and you had to sit on an ordinary school chair and watch the starbursts and numbers flashing upon the wobbly screen and then flashes like lightning, and spots, and grainy gray nothing, and then, miraculous, a human face. Just as we were getting enthralled, the film tended to tear, or stop for no apparent reason, and the projector wound down, and we all groaned in chorus.

  When we were fourteen or so, her mother took us in the Christmas holidays to see War and Peace. That film, Technicolor, Cinemascope, glorious stars, aching music, the death in battle of the one you loved most (or wanted to be), the crowds, the ballrooms, Natasha in her gray scarf searching for Andrey in the ruins of Moscow, Pierre lost on the battlefield. Complete suspension of disbelief. If we could have had freeze-frame and replay in those days, we would have sat rapt, for hours, going back and back to those scenes, till we knew them by heart. I would have stayed with one scene until I knew its every detail. As it was, there was the one unrepeatable (until years later) experience: Hannah and her mother and I, in a London cinema—yes, we had come up for the day—drawn into Russia, or its Hollywood likeness, uncritical, heartbroken, moved to tears. There was an interval, in which we stumbled out into the cruel daylight of real life, Leicester Square glimpsed outside, the taxis and buses and passersby, none of which I wanted to let in to the rarefied place in which I now lived. We ate sandwiches, drank Coke that came in cold glass bottles with straws, went back in to the holy darkness, immersed ourselves again. Afterwards, Hannah and I were speechless. I never wanted to talk again—and we noticed here our common dislike for anyone who began talking about a film after it was ended; the only correct response was an awed silence. We followed her mother, got ourselves somehow back to King’s Cross, may have had tea somewhere—it was the matinee—but I don’t remember. I remember Hannah’s look across at me as we came out of the red plush of the cinema into dingy afternoon London, and what it said: we are different, we are Russian now, this has changed life forever.