Читать книгу The Heart Beats in Secret - Katie Munnik - Страница 15

MATRON CLAIMED TO BE MOTHERLY, BUT SHE HADN’T a clue. My mum never put her foot down. She had no God-forbidding anything. She was much quieter than that.

Ahead of me, a gaggle of student nurses made their way down the corridor, looking pert and starched. From their chatter, I could tell they were due up in Maternity where they’d watch the ward nurses teach new mothers how to swaddle properly. Not Matron, though. No babies for her. I could imagine her eating them, with her cracked red lips, her pocked chin, and her eyes like lift buttons behind those thick plastic glasses. Standing behind the nursing desk, she watched every footfall on the ward, utterly unsparing. To get the attention of errant junior nurses, she snapped tongue depressors. She never drank tea. That afternoon, she’d spent her five o’clock sermon on me, filling my ears with her God-forbids. She said she was being maternal. I should be more respectful. I shouldn’t look up when receiving instruction, shouldn’t distract or interrupt, merely pay better attention and perform. My job was to trot along behind the doctors with my neat nurse’s basket, carrying the requisite tongue depressors, thermometers, scissors, and gauze. I was to be careful. Take notes. Agree. My questions were not needed. The litany ended, Matron attempted a smile.

‘I know I must sound like a proper old battleaxe,’ she said. ‘But do try to take it on board. Just a little nudge to the straight and narrow and you will be happily with us a long, long time.’

She patted my sentenced hand and released me down the corridor.

I walked slowly and thought about my mother. I pictured her out by the bay, tall in my father’s old trousers with the hems tucked into black wellies and her hands reaching up, picking sea buckthorn. Too early yet this year, of course. The berries would still be plumping back home and my mother focussed on raspberries in the garden, but when I conjured her, I saw her by the sea. I saw how the wind caught wisps from her bound hair and how small clouds scudded across the sky above her like impossible stepping stones set against the blue. She always took her time picking berries, making the day last as long as it might, and when I was little, I would be there at her feet, digging out caves in the sand dunes, hoping to find rabbits or buried treasure. Now in that bleached corridor, I remembered the berries’ sharp stickiness and their smell like sour wine. Mum mixed them with sugar and cooked them down to make a marmalade bright as oystercatchers’ bills. I missed her marmalade and all her jams – raspberry and bramble, blackcurrant from the manse garden, jellies from rosehips, haws and sloes from every hedgerow along the coast. At home, Mum kept them on a high cupboard shelf, closed away to keep their colour, and later in my Edinburgh flat, I set them along the window sill so they could cast their stained-glass colours on the cold floor. Here, I bought grape jelly at Steinberg’s and spread it on white bread.

Outside the hospital, the afternoon was hazy, and the road filled with fast cars and buses. When my hospital contract came for the agency, I thought the road name completely romantic. Côte-des-Neiges. The side of snows. It had been the name of a long-ago village, sitting halfway up the hillside, looking down on Montreal. It must have been where the winter snows piled thickest, I thought, finding it on a map. There was a cemetery, too, called Notre Dame des Neiges, which made my heart almost break with a cold kind of loneliness. Now, walking the road every day to the bus stop after my shift, it was the width that held my eye. So very Canadian. So much space for anyone that wanted it. If I could pick up Aberlady with my fingers, all her crow-stepped roofs and whitewashed houses, the little kirk and the ancient trees, if I could carry her here and lay her down in this wide-open road, how much room would she take up? How little. With my back to the hospital and the mountain behind, there was no horizon here and so much space.

But Aberlady was moon-far away, remote and removed. Or rather, I was. I was the one who had done the leaving, after all. Gave my notice in an insufficient letter to Dr Ballater, and shuffled off. Sold my car, bought a ticket and packed my trunk full of nursing textbooks and uniforms, too – though of course they were the wrong ones. Matron soon set me straight and ensured I had the correct hem-length.

A bus pulled up to the stop and I ran down towards it, waving to catch the driver’s attention. He waited and laughed when I stepped up into the bus.

‘Every day, I get a running nurse or two,’ he said. ‘All the pretty nurses. It’s a good route.’

I forced a half-smile and found a seat towards the back. The windows were open and, as the bus pulled away from the kerb, the air felt surprisingly cool. It was often crowded in the late afternoon, but that day there weren’t many folk on the bus. Summer holidays, perhaps. Everyone away at cottages, spending time by the lakes. Some of the nurses had been talking about cottage weekends, which sounded delightful. Canoes and campfires and hikes in the woods. Everything I might have imagined, but not yet found. Early days, I thought. There would be plenty of time.

When I’d told my parents about my Canadian job, Dad had asked if that meant I was turning down Dr Ballater.

‘Of course, she is, Stanley, and it’s no bad thing,’ Mum said. ‘He hasn’t tried anything with you, has he? Has he been pestering you?’

‘No, nothing like that. He’s been a gentleman. He’s just not … It’s not … It’s hard to explain.’

Dad cleared his throat. ‘You want an adventure,’ he said, softly.

‘I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.’

Mum didn’t return to the question after that, nor did she try to talk me out of anything. Instead, she helped me make lists of things I would need, even things I would like: novels, toffees, nylons, a pair of white sunglasses. We went into Edinburgh to go shopping and she didn’t ask me how I’d made my decision or what I was hoping to find. She bought me a book about North American wild flowers and, walking out of Woolworths, tucked her arm through mine and grinned. She even suggested we go to a café for a spot of lunch, somewhere young, she said, and modern. But I knew she’d also brought along sandwiches in her handbag and I said we should eat them in Princes Street Gardens. Walking past the gardener’s cottage, she told me about the air raid shelters erected there early in the war.

‘It’s strange to think about all that now,’ she said. ‘How dangerous everything felt and how every effort was made to make safe places for everyone.’ She squeezed my arm again, and we found a bench where we ate our lunch. I hoped that she wouldn’t speak again about Dr Ballater or ask any more questions. I didn’t want to defend him, but I couldn’t explain, either. I’d been shocked by the whole episode. Knocked for six. I decided then I wouldn’t tell anyone else about Dr Ballater. About George. I would give him that much. No more stories or questions or hypotheses. I would let him be. Like my mother, I’d keep mum.

She’d always been good at that. A cultivated quiet with no need to talk everything through. It really wasn’t necessary, was it? It was enough to be still together. Without words. Without shouting or slammed doors. All that unnecessary bluster.

I’d been good at bluster when I was twelve. Slammed the door and stepped into the rain. I only had my cardi on and that didn’t matter then. I didn’t even care. I just needed out. I’d hop on a bus and go somewhere, right? Only it was Sunday and I had no money, so no. Hitchhike, then? But I never had and, likely as not, I’d know the driver – or worse, he’d know Mum. Then it would be over. I’d be right back at that kitchen table and she still wouldn’t be saying anything. I could tell when something was up. I wasn’t stupid. And the way they were keeping the radio off and not letting me see the newspaper. It had to be about the Bomb. I knew it was. Ever since I’d read that article about Nevada and Las Vegas and Miss Atomic Bomb. And the mushroom clouds like opening umbrellas and the costumes they made girls wear in the clubs and the Dawn Bomb parties and Atomic cocktails and I got so angry and I couldn’t sleep. I tried to talk to my parents about it, but they wouldn’t listen. They didn’t want to hear. Maybe they were just as scared as me. Or more scared? They acted guilty, as if they were to blame. As if all this fear was something they made and silence was a way of keeping it down. That door-slammed afternoon, the radio had been on and Mum suddenly – fiercely – shut it off and looked at Dad with something like excitement, something like fear, and I asked if it was the Bomb or another war or what, but she wouldn’t talk. She bloody wouldn’t talk and I stormed out and slammed the door.

I crossed the road and then the bridge and headed out to the sands. The tide was far out so there would be a good walk, and I didn’t care how far I went. Wondered if I could live out there, even just for the night. Would that be possible? Not in this rain. It was easing off, but even a drizzle would make for a miserable night. It might be different if it were dry. I could stretch out under the sky and sleep on the sand. I’d see the stars, and the moon, if I was lucky, and then the larks would wake me up. They were rising now before me as I walked. Flying straight up out of the wet grass. Strange joy, as Dad would say. He always said that whenever there were larks. That’s when I heard him on the path behind me; his paced footsteps, his whistled tune.

‘Mind if I chum you to the shore?’

I didn’t say anything.

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘Silence is good. And this is a good place to be silent.’

But he kept whistling and quickened his pace to keep up with me. A hare leapt out and for a moment, it sat frozen on the path and I saw the yellow of its eye, the quick black circle taking in the world as it crouched with long ears, black-tipped, flattened, and then it erupted and ran. A lolloping stride escaping into the grass. In the quiet after it was gone, Dad picked up his tune, humming this time.

I didn’t mind. Really, I didn’t. It was fine that he was there. That he thought to follow me. It was fine.

Oh June, like the mountains I’m blue –

Like the pine, I am lonesome for you …

At least he wasn’t asking questions. Or being silent. I kept walking out towards the sands and he kept on with his tune. It was an old Laurel and Hardy number. Probably predated them, too, but it was their song as far as Dad was concerned. Sometimes he swapped Jane for June if he was singing when Mum was around.

… in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia

On the trail of the lonesome pine.

I hoped he just kept with the song and didn’t start with the slapstick to get a laugh. I wasn’t in a laughing mood. The wet sand was hard under my feet and the rain stopped as we walked towards the sea. Dad quickened his pace now and it felt like he was the one leading the way, which was just fine by me. I didn’t mind.

‘Thought we could go and take a look at the submarines. Think the rain has washed them away yet?’

They sat about a half-mile from the high tideline out by Jovey’s Neuk. Two wrecked subs that had been there as long as I could remember. Forever or something like it – though probably only since the war. There were fair-sized holes in both of them and the subs themselves weren’t that big. Mum warned me not to go out here – not all the way out on the sand at least. She’d rather I stayed closer in, maybe picked flowers round the Marl Loch. She’d rather I didn’t wander. But it was okay with Dad. He trusted me.

We walked across the sand together, our shoes wet through though there was only an inch of sea water on the sand. It was rippled and dimpled with puddles and the bay kept draining away. Further out, we saw the marks that seals make when they pull themselves back to the water. We almost missed the wrecks and had to veer left and in towards the shore, too. Their ribs stood out like something hungry.

‘Not big, were they?’ Dad said. ‘Hardly seems like there’d be space, but four men would crew each of these. Volunteers, I mean. You couldn’t make a man climb in.’

‘I’d hate it.’ My voice sounded rough from yelling and I wished it didn’t.

‘They probably did as well. But they did what needed doing. That’s what they would have told themselves. But it must have been hell. Cold and condensation. And all the way up to Norway. I couldn’t have done it. Not my field, of course, but there’s no way.’

I thought he was going to say hell again and I waited for it. Then he laughed, but not like it was funny. He laughed with a seal’s cough, I thought, or a mouth full of sand.

‘Did you know that the engine they used in these XT subs was the same engine they used for a London bus? Gardner Diesels. Bet you didn’t know that.’

‘No.’

‘Well, now you do. Look at that. You just got cleverer. I know, not funny. But that’s why I followed you out here. I used to come out here myself when a laugh wouldn’t work. Sometimes you need the space, don’t you?’ He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked up at the sky. ‘Listen, chum. It’s not about me, is it? This door-slamming tick of yours. About me and your mum? Because if it is, I want you to know that people jump to conclusions and talk rot when they don’t understand and maybe when they are scared, but we’re solid. We always have been. And your mum just needs quiet sometimes. Like you need space. I know you get angry and have questions and all, but she’s doing her bit and her best, too. She’s holding us together, you know.’

After this, he was quiet, and I was, too. We mooched out to the second submarine, squelching our feet in the mucky sand. I kicked the side and there sounded a dull thud. Above us, a skein of geese cut across the sky, and Dad raised his arms as if he was holding his gun, but he’d left it at home and they were flying too high anyway. I wondered what he’d do if the powers that be managed to get the bay pronounced a nature reserve. Less goose on the table, I’m sure. I teased him about that on the walk back and he pulled a grimace, then picked up his tune again.

And I can hear the tinkling waterfall

Far among the hills

Bluebirds sing each so merrily

To his mate in rapture trills

They seem to say ‘Your June is lonesome, too,

Longing fills her eyes

She is waiting for you patiently

Where the pine tree sighs.’

Before I left Scotland, Dad told me about the whales found a thousand miles from the sea. Not in Montreal itself, but even further inland near a place called Cornwall where the river was island-strewn and slow. I asked how they’d managed and he laughed.

‘Fossils, my dear. Ten thousand years old. They were found by men digging clay for bricks half a mile from the railway station and two hundred feet above sea level. White whales, I think. Proves the story of the long-drained sea, but then so does the clay. It’s quick clay, tricky stuff. Formed under the oceans and riddled with salt. With the tides gone, the clay dries out, the rains wash the salt away and it shifts. So cracks appear on buildings or suddenly, a whole hillside slips away. Sometimes, fossils emerge that way, too. Sometimes, they’re dug up intact.’

I wasn’t sure why he told me this. A token fact to ease my way into a new country. And a nod to what he knew, who he was. Clay and old stone, deep time and soil. It could have been that. But later, walking through Montreal looking up at the skyscrapers, a new understanding started to surface. Above me, the half-moons of hotel windows, the ribs of towers rising, and under my feet, things still hidden.

Was I the fossil-hunter then? Or the whale?