After that, Jonathan and I spent every day together, swimming and walking through the heath to Little Sea Pond. Post came for him sometimes, with writing commissions, and when he agreed to them there would be telephone calls a week later asking where his articles were. We went out in the morning before the holidaymakers, or in the dusk when our only company was the bats. Occasionally we persuaded you to come with us for a swim or a picnic, and of course you always emerged in the evening for the food I’d cooked and the whiskey Jonathan provided in payment for his board and lodgings. While we tramped across the heath and around the Agglestone, it was Jonathan who explained that you’d grown up in the big house down the road with your ill and controlling father and beautiful Catholic mother. You’d watched the disaster of their marriage, escaping to London as soon as you were old enough, and vowing that you wouldn’t make their mistakes. It was Jonathan who told me the real version of the story you’d given in that first creative-writing class: that your father didn’t tell you your mother was ill, instead he sent a telegram when it was too late. “Your mother’s died. Funeral Friday,” or some such thing. And he’d made you see her body, so changed in death that you found it difficult to remember what she’d looked like alive. He told me your mother left you a small amount of money in a trust fund, but how, when your father died of lung disease, there were debts so large the house had to be sold. The Swimming Pavilion was rolled on logs through the lanes of Spanish Green, and I like to imagine the men levering it along with giant poles, and cart horses pulling it, until it rested in its current position overlooking the sea.
Once Jonathan went up to London and returned with people he’d picked up on his travels: hitchhikers with guitars and Dutch girls with dusty feet. Bums and hangers-on, you called them, but I knew you didn’t really mind. They camped in the grass, not bothering with tents, and I got used to seeing strangers in the kitchen spreading jam on dry Weetabix or sitting around the table like it was their home. I liked the house busy with people and music. There was an impromptu party that started in the pub, had a stop-off in the Swimming Pavilion, and ended at dawn around a campfire in the dunes. And there were one or two girls who I could have made friends with but after a couple of days they were gone. Even while these people slept in your garden, used your bathroom, and cooked in your kitchen you locked yourself away in your writing room. Sometimes you came out for the drinking and the food, and occasionally you came out to spend the night with me in the four-poster bed.
Then, at the beginning of September, when the fog rolled in from the sea once more, I realised I was pregnant.
Yours,
Ingrid
[Placed in Small Dreams of a Scorpion, by Spike Milligan, 1972.]
Chapter 17
When Flora got up she was surprised to see her father dressed and sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee and a plate smeared with egg in front of him. Two rashers of bacon lay on the edge, untouched. His left eye looked grotesque in the morning light, puffed and purple like a rotten aubergine. Another bruise spread out under his bottom lip and over his chin, which was stubbled with grey hairs. His left arm still rested in its sling. She was even more surprised to see Richard sitting in the chair opposite.
“Morning,” Flora said, bending to kiss her father on the top of his head. Gil patted her cheek absent-mindedly. As she sat, Nan put a plate in front of her—a fried egg flipped once but with the yolk still soft, two slices of crisp bacon, and a piece of toast, each with their personal space intact. She tried to catch Richard’s eye so she could frown at him, but he was concentrating on Gil.
“Take this, for example,” her father was saying. Gil tilted his chair to stretch for a slim volume from the top of a stack of books beside the cooker.
“Careful, Dad.” Nan stopped squirting kitchen cleaner over the cleared surfaces and passed the book to him.
Gil moved it backwards and forwards, squinting to try to focus. “God knows what I did with my glasses. I couldn’t find them in the bookshop either.” His hand stopped. “By the way,” he said to Nan, “did that book ever turn up, the one I was holding when I . . .” he paused “. . . fell?”
“No one mentioned it,” Nan said. “I don’t remember seeing it in the hospital.”
“Perhaps you could call them for me?”
“About a lost book? Surely it’s not that important?”
“Maybe Viv has it,” Flora said, in a way that made Nan glance at her. Flora raised her eyebrows, smiled, and gave her sister a private nod.
“I’ll give the hospital a ring,” Nan said.
Gil adjusted the book in front of his face again. “Rood-Lofts and Their Remnants in Our Churches Including Dorset by E. Z. Harris,” he read.
Richard patted the papers on the table, moving books. A pair of glasses with black frames appeared from under the side of a plate. He picked them up, opened the arms, and Gil bent forwards so Richard could slip the glasses over the old man’s ears. The action was like a familiar habit, as if they had known each other for years. With her knife, Flora worked at freeing her egg yolk from its white without breaking it or having it touch the bacon. Gil let the book fall open at a page marked by a scrap of newspaper. Flora ate a piece of egg white with an edge of toast.
“This writing was done by a woman,” Gil said, waving the pages.
“How do you know?” Richard said, peering at it upside down.
“Purple ink, for a start.”
“Spending their pensions on brandy and summer gloves?” Richard said.
“Setting a good example for the children.” Gil and Richard laughed together. “It’s women who underline and write words in the margins,” Gil continued. “Men doodle and scribble obscenities.” Gil handed the book over to Richard, who examined the writing, turning it sideways to decipher it. Now he had an attentive audience, Gil leaned backwards for another book.
Nan topped up everyone’s coffee.
“Thanks,” Richard said, and Flora saw that her sister was wearing an apron that had belonged to their mother and she had put on lipstick.
“Oh, yes, thanks,” Flora said to Nan. Gil picked up his cup and drank, still looking at the book.
“I can’t read it,” Richard said. “What’s this word?” He squinted.
“Now this is wonderful,” Gil said. He pressed the book against his chest so he could open it one-handed, and Flora saw the cover: Queer Fish by E. G. Boulenger.