Sheltering Rain

  "But you do. You know."

  Joy was briefly silent.

  "Yes," she said.

  "How?"

  "Because I don't feel properly comfortable around anyone else. Being with him . . . it's like being with you . . . except with the love thing added."

  She glanced at Stella, who was gazing at her attentively.

  "I suppose I feel like he's the male version of me. The better half. When I'm around him, I just want to live up to his version of me. I don't want to disappoint him."

  Joy could picture him now, smiling at her, his eyes wrinkled at the corners, his teeth just visible below his upper lip.

  "I never really cared what anyone thought of me until he came along," she said. "And now, I can't believe it's me he's chosen. Every morning I wake up and thank God that he did. Every night I go to bed praying that time will go that much faster so that I can be with him again. I think all the time about what he's doing, who he's talking to. Not in a jealous way, or anything. I just want to be closer to him, and if I can imagine what he's doing, then that helps."

  He would be asleep now, she thought. Or reading a book. Probably one of his bloodstock books, full of lines of horses stretching back generations, building his dreams on an equine family tree.

  "He's more than I ever asked for. More than I ever hoped for," she said, half dreamily. "I just can't imagine ever being with anyone else."

  There was a brief pause. Joy realized she had almost forgotten Stella was there.

  But Stella was raising herself from their seat near the lifeboats. She had stopped crying, and was pulling her shawl tightly around her against the cold.

  Joy pushed herself upright, and wiped the wet hair from her face.

  "Yes, well, you're lucky," Stella said, not looking Joy in the eye. "It's been easy for you."

  Joy began to stand, too, frowning slightly at her friend's tone.

  Stella walked toward the door, and then turned, so that her parting shot blew back at Joy, caught on the night spray. "Yes, much easier for you. No one else ever wanted to be with you, after all."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sabine sat on the floor, in the center of the threadbare Persian rug, staring at the picture of Stella in her evening dress. The muted shades of the tired room she occupied had temporarily receded, replaced by heaving, rain-lashed decks and the shimmering satin and sparkle of seven or so waterlogged sequined veils.

  "Did she go back to Dick in the end?" She gazed at the twinkling eyes, the knowing smile, trying unsuccessfully to imagine this girl desolate and abandoned on a wet ship. She looked too sure of herself somehow.

  Joy, who had been sorting through a box of old certificates, peered over Sabine's shoulder.

  "Stella? Yes, but not for long."

  Sabine turned to face her, waiting for an explanation. Joy put her box down on her knees, and thought for a minute. "He did adore her, but I think her feelings for Pieter Brandt rather shook her up, and after awhile, when no children came along, I think she felt she decided she would rather have a bit of excitement elsewhere."

  "So, what happened next?"

  Joy rubbed at her hands, to try and dislodge some of the dust. She was glad that she and Sabine were talking again, but it was a little wearing the way Sabine tended to pursue everything. She took a deep breath, as if bracing herself, as Stella had done all those years earlier, to deliver bad news.

  "She went through rather a lot of men in the end. Never quite settled with anyone."

  "A bit racy," said Sabine, gleefully. She had rather liked the sound of Stella.

  "I suppose you could say that. She certainly had a good time when she was younger. It was when she got older that she became a bit sad. Used to drink rather too much."

  Joy rubbed at her eye, which had become gritty. "Her last husband died of liver failure, and after she lost him I think it hit home that she didn't really have anyone. She was sixty-two by then, you see. Rather a hard age to be totally by oneself."

  Sabine tried to imagine the glowing, glamorous figure before her not just abandoned, but as a lonely old drinker.

  "Did she die?"

  "Yes. Only a few years ago. In ninety-two I think it was. We had kept in touch, but she moved to a little apartment on the Spanish coast, and we never really saw each other after that. I discovered she'd died only because her niece sent me a rather sweet letter." Joy paused, looking temporarily distracted. "Right. I think I should probably get rid of all these old rosettes. They look a bit moldy. What a pity."

  Sabine put the photographs back into the box in front of her, trying to imagine her own mother in the place of Stella Hanniford. She was less glamorous than Stella, but on present form she could easily plow her way through loads of men and end up alone in some Spanish apartment. Sabine had a sudden vision of herself, visiting her, while her mother reclined on a scruffy sofa, clutching a bottle of rioja, reminiscing drunkenly about those she had left behind. "Ahh, Geoff," she would say, her red hair hanging tattily around her shoulders, her lipstick smeared gaily across her mouth. "That was a good year. Geoff. Or was it George? I always get them mixed up."

  She brushed the image aside, not sure whether it made her want to laugh or cry, and then glanced surreptitiously at her grandmother, as she poured the old box of rosettes into a black plastic bag, trying instead to reconcile the stiff figure in green corduroy beside her with the perfect picture of young love that had recently taken root in her imagination. Over the past few days, Sabine found herself forced into viewing her grandparents in a new light. This crotchety, stilted old pair had once been a love story to rival anything on the telly. Her grandfather had been handsome. Her grandmother . . . well, she was handsome, too. But what had really struck Sabine was that long wait; all that time apart, and she had still known. All those other officers, and she had kept her faith.

  "No one would get engaged after one day these days," she said, half thinking aloud. "Not if they had to wait a whole year afterward, anyway."

  Joy, winding a piece of baling twine around the top of the bag, stopped and looked at her granddaughter.

  "No. No. I don't suppose many would."

  "Would you do it again? I mean, if you had to do it now?"

  Joy put the bag on the floor, and stood in the center of the room, thinking.

  "To your grandfather?"

  "I don't know. All right, yes. To Grandfather."

  Joy gazed out of the window, where the rain beat down in metallic shards. Above the window, a semicircular brown stain marked the place where the guttering had slipped from its place, allowing the water another means to seep enthusiastically into the house.

  "Yes," Joy said. "Of course." But she didn't sound convinced.

  "Did you ever get nervous? I mean, even before you saw him? After all that time on the ship?"

  "I told you, dear. I just felt glad to see him."

  Sabine wasn't satisfied.

  "But you must have felt something. In those last few moments before you saw him. When you were waiting for the boat to dock, and staring over the edge, trying to locate him. You must have felt a bit sick. I know I would."

  "It was a long time ago, Sabine. There were so many meetings. I really can't remember. Now, I must get this rubbish downstairs so that we don't miss the dustbin men when they come around." Suddenly brusque, Joy brushed the dust from her front, and moved toward the door. "Come on, put those away, and we'd better go down and start on lunch. Your grandfather will be hungry."

  Sabine, unfolding her limbs and standing, noted her grandmother's rather abrupt manner, but didn't really mind. The last couple of weeks, during which they had spent a couple of hours together most days going through the old photographs and mementos, Joy's starchy demeanor had visibly softened, especially when she would engage upon a long story of her and Edward's early days together. The memories would gradually loosen her abrupt sentences, stretching them into longer, free-flowing stories, infusing them with color, so that Sabine had found herself fascinated,
happy to listen as she was briefly allowed a glimpse of a new world of privilege and conformity and bad behavior.

  And sex. It was weird to have her grandmother refer to sex. Well, she never actually said sex as such, but she had left Sabine in little doubt what it was that had got Stella Hanniford and Georgina Lipscombe into such trouble. Sabine couldn't believe how much they were all doing it in the 1950s. It was hard enough imagining that her mother did it now. Sabine thought of her mother, and wondered, not for the first time, why it was that she couldn't have had a big, romantic love like her grandparents. A real love, she thought wistfully, a love that survived the slings and arrows of fate, that soared, like some kind of 1950s Romeo and Juliet, above the petty and the mundane. The kind of love that you read about in books, that inspired songs, that lifted you like a bird and yet stood solid, like a monolith: vast, all-encompassing, enduring.

  Joy, standing at the door, turned to face her.

  "Come on, Sabine. Do get a move on. Mrs. H is doing haddock and if we're late taking it upstairs it will be impossible for me to persuade your grandfather to eat it."

  So what with her grandmother's defrosting, and getting used to the damp, and actually quite enjoying all the riding (although she still couldn't bring herself to admit it), Sabine's longing for home had, if not disappeared, certainly subsided quite considerably. She didn't miss television as much, anyway. And she hardly ever thought of Dean Baxter. And Mrs. H and her husband had been married for thirty-two years on Sunday, and although that wasn't one of the important ones (it was granite or newsprint or something, rather than gold or diamond), Mrs. H said as far as she was concerned it was good enough to warrant some sort of celebration, and that she, Sabine, along with a good clutch of Mrs. H's family, was invited.

  Sabine had felt rather pleased about this; not just because it gave her an excuse to spend the evening out--while she and her grandmother were now friends, dinners at that long expanse of dining table were still something of an ordeal--but because it showed that she was not just becoming part of her own extended family, but part of Thom's and Annie's, too. Having only ever been an only child, and one of a periodic single parent, this was the first real family she had seen up close; a family that seemed endless and sprawling and yet intimate enough for everyone to know everyone else's business; a family where people walked in and out of one another's houses with the surety of possession, simply knowing where they fitted in. But what Sabine liked most was the noise: the endless talking over one another, interruptions, the explosions of laughter, the sharp cracks at one another's expense. Sabine's house had always been quiet. As far back as she could remember it had been necessarily silent, to enable her mother to work, so that it felt gloomy and permanently muffled, as if by a thick blanket. And when she, her mother, and Geoff had sat down to eat, there had been none of this noisy laughter, just Geoff asking her polite questions about her day, treating her somewhat self-consciously like a grown-up, and her mother staring into the distance as she ate, dreaming of who knew what. Probably Justin, thought Sabine, resentfully. For some reason she had started to feel really cross about Justin again.

  It was the first time she had been to Mrs. H's house, a bungalow situated on the outskirts of the village. It sat, squat, in the middle of a square plot, surrounded by patio paving and preceded by a series of neatly maintained flower beds. A satellite dish jutted questioningly from the side of it, like an ear trumpet, and there were pale, floral curtains in the windows and window boxes with glowing red and pink cyclamen on every sill.

  It sported synthetic stone cladding, which Sabine knew would have made Geoff blanche, and it had been built entirely by Mrs. H's husband, Michael, whom everyone called Mack. In fact the house itself was called Mackellen--which, when Sabine thought about it, was the furthest anyone had gone toward revealing Mrs. H's real name.

  "It's a long way from your folks' house, I'll tell you that," said Thom, who had walked Sabine there from the big house.

  "Looks less moldy, anyway," Sabine observed, and Thom laughed.

  Inside, she saw why Thom was right. As he opened the door, she was hit by the warm breath of central heating full on, and acres of pale, springy carpet underfoot. There were family pictures on the wall, framed photographs, and a couple of embroidered poems, but the dominant population was of ornaments, ornaments everywhere: little glass elephants, laughing, rubber-featured clowns, winsome shepherdesses with wandering flocks. All shining under the bright lights, all without a speck of dust, bright and cheerful and immaculate. Sabine stared at the battalions of little creatures, momentarily dazzled by their sheer numbers.

  "Come on in here, Sabine. Shut the door, Thom, you're letting in that damp air. My, but it's a cold one tonight."

  Beaming, Mrs. H came toward her to take her coat. Except she looked totally unlike the Mrs. H of everyday; that Mrs. H wore a housecoat of pastel nylon, her hair swept back, and a glowing pink complexion free of makeup. This Mrs. H was wearing a mauve jumper with two gold chains around her neck, one with a cross. Her hair, wavy and shiny, looked somehow bigger, and her face was brightened with makeup, so that she looked suddenly younger, rather sophisticated, and not a little intimidating. Sabine felt temporarily unbalanced and realized to her shame that she had never really considered the possibility that Mrs. H might have a life away from the big house, and her roles of cooking and cleaning. Even when she was at Annie's she was buzzing round, engaged in some domestic chore.

  "You--you look nice," she said, hesitantly.

  "Do I? Aren't you sweet," said Mrs. H, shepherding her through the hallway. "Annie bought me this jumper a couple of years ago and do you know I've hardly worn it. Keep saving it for a special occasion. She tells me off, of course. But it seems too good for everyday."

  "Is Annie coming?"

  "Annie's already here, love. C'mon, we'll go through. Thom, you make sure you leave those shoes at the door. I've seen enough of that Hoover for one day."

  Following Mrs. H, Sabine thought back to the previous day, when, riding past Annie's back garden, she had looked over the wall in the hope that she could see her and wave. Annie had often told her she should call by, so that she could take a look at her on a horse, and Sabine had to admit to being secretly proud of her renewed riding ability. She had begun jumping, practicing by herself, and was slowly plucking up the courage to attempt small hedges, encouraged by the seeming infallibility of the little horse.

  But as she pulled him gently to a halt, and glanced over into the kitchen window, she had caught sight not of a waving Annie, but of Patrick, Annie's husband, sitting at the table, his head buried deep in his hands, and his back slumped, as if under some unwieldy burden. Annie, half hidden by the reflections in the window, was standing across the table from him, simply staring into space.

  Sabine had halted the gray horse for a moment, waiting for them to move, but when, after some minutes, neither of them did, she had quickly ridden on, feeling suddenly anxious lest they should see her and think she had been prying. She had since wondered about telling Mrs. H, but couldn't work out how to start the conversation; besides, she had moved briskly, and they were already in the living room.

  Mrs. H's family sat around on immaculate, well-stuffed sofas, chatting in small groups and sipping at half-full drinks. To one side, a large, drop-leaf table stood laden with plates and cutlery, decorated with a glittering floral display, and flanked by chairs that sat seemingly within an impossible inch of one another. In the middle of the floor, on a pale blue and cream rug, two young boys played with an electronic racetrack, sending their downscaled vehicles whizzing noisily off the track and into the soft furnishings. The living room was even warmer than the hallway, making Sabine feel uncomfortably sweaty in her thick pullover. She had gotten so used to living in a cold house that she no longer went anywhere with any fewer than four layers, and she couldn't remember without looking quite how presentable the other three were.

  Sabine recognized hardly anyone, except for Patrick and Ann
ie, who, she realized with a start, she had never seen out of the confines of their own house. Patrick raised a glass to her in salute. He nudged Annie, who was gazing across the room, and she started slightly, before giving Sabine a broad smile, and motioning to her to come and sit down next to her. Sabine, trying to disengage her vision of them from before, hesitated, then walked over, half propelled by Mrs. H, who had to talk in unusually loud tones to be heard above the chatter and background music.

  "This is Sabine, everyone. Sabine, I won't even begin to go around the room with you because you'll never remember all the names. Now, I'm going to start serving in five minutes, so you all come through when you're ready. Thom, you make sure Sabine's got a drink."

  Annie was wearing one of her huge jumpers again. Sabine, who was already tugging at her collar, wondered why she didn't look nearly as uncomfortable as Sabine felt.

  "How y'doing, Sabine?" said Patrick. "I hear you've been doing well on that little gray horse."

  Sabine nodded, privately noting that he looked dreadful. He had dark shadows under his eyes, and at least two days' stubble on his chin. Despite being a big, coarse-looking man, more fitted to farming than writing, Patrick was always clean-shaven and immaculate. He usually smelled of fabric conditioner.

  "Will you go out with the hounds next week? See a bit of the Wexford countryside?"

  "Of course she will," said Thom, who had sat down on the floor with the boys. "I'll take her out myself. I'll pop her over a few solid jumps first, to see whether she'll go the distance, and we'll have a grand day out."

  Sabine, staring at him, didn't know whether to protest about the idea that she would go foxhunting, or inwardly glow at the thought that Thom was personally going to take her. She didn't want to go and kill foxes, she really didn't. She was a vegetarian, for God's sake. She had wept over roadkill. But the thought of spending a whole day with Thom . . . on their own . . .

  "Is your mam with you, Sabine?" It was a middle-aged woman, with short, aubergine-colored hair and a pair of heavily padded shoulders that wrestled for visual command over her momentous breasts. Sabine looked at her blankly.