The Warning Bell Page 19

  ‘I try,’ she said. ‘I do try.’

  I dumped my bags on the old brass-framed bed and started to unpack while Chantal lounged in a wicker chair under the window, her long legs over the arm. She and Kate had given me a breathless tour of the place. Three bedrooms with wooden floors and tall shuttered windows, and a grand old kitchen with a pine table and an iron stove. The plumbing looked as if it had been installed fifty years ago, and the whole place badly needed redecorating. The floors sagged, the plaster was peeling, and not all the angles were entirely square. I carried my clothes over to the chest of drawers and put them away. I opened the wardrobe to stow away the empty bag. The door handle came off in my hand.

  ‘It does that.’ She twisted a strand of her hair around her finger and looked the other way. ‘Serge’ll fix it. He’s really good at that sort of thing.’

  I tossed the handle onto the bed and started on my second bag, taking out parcels and papers and books and putting them on the bedside table. I unpacked the model ship I had bought in Portobello Road, checked to see that it was still intact, and set it beside the other things. The light winked on its green glass. I could feel her watching me.

  ‘It’s for Dominic,’ I said. ‘I’ll take it over to him in the morning.’

  ‘He’ll love it. He’s a sweet old man.’ But we both knew that neither of us was thinking about Dominic. Finally she said: ‘Iain, I know the place isn’t up to much. But it’s going to be, you’ll see. I’ve got Jean Bonnard coming in tomorrow to fix up the roof. Felix says he’s an OK builder if you keep an eye on him.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s going to be great.’

  ‘Even if we only use it as a holiday cottage every now and then. And this village is just so special. You feel that too, don’t you?’ She hesitated, losing a little of her confidence. ‘It’s not like it was expensive.’

  ‘I don’t care about expensive,’ I said. ‘But why did you do it?’

  ‘I was such a bitch before you left,’ she said. ‘I gave myself a good talking to afterwards. Beat myself up a bit.’

  I shook my head in wonder. ‘So you bought a house?’

  ‘Iain, I’m on your side,’ she said simply. ‘Always have been, always will be. I just forgot it for a minute, that’s all.’ Before I could speak she bounced up from her chair and came across the room and took my hand. ‘There’s something else. Come along.’

  We edged down the half-painted corridor, past the step ladders, and out of the front door. She pulled me along the veranda and down the steps. There was a small wooden cabin standing a few metres clear of the side of the house. She opened the door of the cabin and led me into a bare space, almost square, cluttered with broken furniture, boxes and old garden tools. The window in the far wall was cracked, but through the smeared glass I could see across the road to the sea.

  ‘I did some thinking while you were away.’ She dragged aside a beer crate and an old chair, found a scrap of rag among the litter and rubbed at the filthy glass. ‘If it hadn’t been for your dad, we’d never have come here...’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I thought …this cabin…’ she looked at me in mute appeal. ‘I thought maybe we could bring him back to the beginning again. Help him make his peace with St Cyriac, and with you.’

  I pictured the old man as he had been two days before, standing at the open front door of his cottage, gazing into the past while the petals whirled round him. ‘It’s a wonderful thought,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think he’d look at it that way.’

  ‘How would he look at it?’

  I hesitated. ‘I think he’d rather no one ever mentioned St Cyriac to him again.’

  Her face fell. ‘When I saw this place, it seemed so natural. I suppose that was stupid…’

  ‘It wasn’t stupid. I hoped the same thing for a while. I even asked him.’

  ‘You got somewhere with him, then?’

  ‘I found out some things.’

  She regarded me carefully. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  I told her. And as I did so I saw my father again, willing himself into the darkness where none of us could follow him, taking his ghosts with him.

  ‘Do you want to know what I think?’ she asked quietly, when I had finished. ‘I think perhaps it doesn’t matter so much what the old man decides to do. It just matters that you don’t give up on him. In here, I mean.’ She tapped her breast. ‘In here.’

  33

  Moonlight sliced through the shutters and zebra-striped the tangle of sheets on the brass framed bed. I guessed it was an hour or so before dawn. The window was slightly open and I could smell the tang of seaweed from the foreshore and hear the wavelets slapping against the stones. In the distance a trawler – perhaps Le Toque’s – was thudding out to sea. I settled back with Chantal’s head in the crook of my arm, and listened to her breathing as she grew calm again.

  ‘Does that mean you’re glad to be home?’ she whispered.

  When I didn’t answer she propped herself up on her elbow and looked at me questioningly.

  I said: ‘He burned the map.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘His old drawing of La Division. He burned it. I was too slow to stop him.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because there’s a connection between him and that house.’

  She searched my face. ‘Where are you going with this, Iain?’

  ‘He hasn’t given me the whole story.’

  ‘You can’t be sure of that,’ she said. ‘Maybe you already know all there is to know. He abandoned Hamelin, and he’s been haunted by that one act all his life.’

  ‘Haunted…’ I said.

  She hesitated. ‘Is there something else?’

  I looked at her in the greying light. ‘Do you want me to tell you a story I’ve never told anyone before?’

  She met my eyes uneasily. ‘I’m not sure that I do,’ she said.

  I was eight years old and walking along the beach at Torpoint. It was the first really hot day of the summer. I had known from the start that it was going to be a special day. Telephone calls of any kind were unusual in our home, especially on a Sunday. But this one had been very unusual indeed: it was from Chief Inspector Myers, my father’s boss – a terrifying man with glittering buttons. My parents had talked between themselves for a long while in an odd, urgent fashion after that phone call.

  I must have overheard some of this, because I knew my father would be Sergeant Madoc from now on, and wear stripes that were almost as impressive as Chief Inspector Myers’ silver buttons. I had worked all this out even before my mother had flung her arms around my father’s neck and kissed him, right there at the breakfast table. That was extraordinary enough, but it was even more extraordinary that he had laughed aloud and called her a silly maid.

  ‘Take him down to the seaside, George,’ my mother had said then. She looked happy and flustered. ‘It’s a shame to shut him up inside on a day like this.’

  ‘We should be off to church,’ he had said, but without much conviction.

  ‘Go on, buy the boy an ice-cream.’ She added daringly: ‘God won’t mind.’

  So we trudged along the shingle past the beach huts and the sunbathers behind their wind shelters until I could see the moored yachts of the marina, the ferries, and the creamy hotels on the seafront. To my right, beyond the distant grey line of the Plymouth Breakwater with its spike of a lighthouse, the blue Atlantic stretched out to a horizon lost in a summer haze.

  I was happy, because my hand was in my father’s hand. A man was backing a Land Rover and trailer down a ramp and across the narrow strip of beach until the back wheels were up to the axle in the sea. On the trailer was a tubby blue-and-white motorboat with a half-cabin. Three more fat little boats were riding in the water a few yards out. The Land Rover’s driver hauled on the brake and jumped out of his cab.

  ‘George Madoc!’ He was a big man with sun-whitened hair and a red face and he carried a sign attached to a sharpened stake. ‘Or is i
t Sergeant Madoc, now?’ When my father looked bashfully away the man grinned and stuck out his meaty hand. ‘Congratulations, I say. I heard a whisper. For once they promoted the right bloke.’ Still grinning, he took his signboard and rammed it into the sand and admired it. It read: Tom Blake: Motor Boats For Hire. The sight of his own advertisement seemed to give Tom an idea. ‘Take the lad for a spin around the bay. My treat, George; my way of saying well done. And here’s to a new start.’

  I felt my father’s grip tighten on my hand. ‘I don’t go out no more, Tom. You know that.’

  ‘A Madoc who don’t go to sea? That’s like a bird that don’t fly. Your people have been sailors since before Francis Bloody Drake, so don’t try that one on me.’

  Tom Blake knocked the ratchet of the trailer winch free and the wooden boat rattled down the ramp and splashed into the sea and sat there rocking prettily, blue hull on blue water.

  I sat on the bench in the half-cabin with coiled ropes and a steel anchor at my feet. The little space smelled of diesel and dead crabs. I had never been on a boat before and I could not decide what I thought about it. It was wildly exciting to sense the living water beneath me and to feel the breeze from the open sea. I hadn’t realised that it could be so windy out on the water and the spaces frightened me, the shining space opening up between us and the shore, and the dim space I could feel plunging away below.

  The sea had a strange and muscular rhythm out here. It took me some minutes to accept that waves running higher than the sides of the little boat would always, by some magic, pass harmlessly underneath. My father sat easily on the transom, holding the tiller against his knees, his head up, his eyes narrowed into the wind and sun, riding the motion of the boat like a horseman. He looked younger than I had ever seen him look, and more relaxed. He looked in command.

  The boat moved in a wide arc across the estuary, the inboard diesel thudding comfortably. Mount Edgcumbe rose green and sunlit to our right, Drake’s Island slid past on our left. I moved gingerly out of the cabin and leaned on the gunwale. Three times in quick succession the bow butted the water and sent up a little spray. I felt my stomach lurch.

  ‘No need to have fear of that,’ my father told me, ‘’tis just where the river kisses the sea. It will pass.’

  And, sure enough, very soon the water was smooth again, smoother than at any time since we had left the beach. We moved past a wooden tripod standing high out of the water. A red beacon shone from the top of it, weak in the sunshine. My father barely glanced at it as we passed, but it made me feel uneasy to see the tresses of dark weed moving just under the surface, coiling around those massive legs. I wondered how far down they went.

  Two large ships rode at anchor far out to sea. They had seemed impossibly distant at first, but gradually I could make out more and more detail – steel gantries, portholes, streaks of rust along the hulls. I did not look back to the shore. I did not want to see how distant the land had become. Perhaps my father had not intended to come this far, for I saw him look up and scan the horizon, squinting into the sun. He grunted and swung the tiller, taking the boat around quite sharply, so that it bucked against the broadside sea for a few moments before steadying again. The land seemed to have vanished, leaving us alone. Plymouth and the long green coast were lost in a grey mizzle. I began to be afraid.

  ‘Summer rains. We’ll likely get wet, but it won’t last.’ My father settled himself on the transom and opened the throttle slightly. ‘Still, we’d best get back.’

  The squall met us when we were still some hundreds of yards short of the tripod channel beacon, a curtain of rain and blustering wind sweeping out from the estuary. I was astonished at its force. In an instant the sunlight vanished and the surface of the sea turned to pewter. The boat was lashed by rain and everything more than a few yards distant was swallowed in a grey murk. It grew startlingly cold. I felt the water move beneath us, more restlessly now. I tried to remember the comforting phrase my father had used: this was where the river kissed the sea.

  The engine died.

  It did not splutter or cough. It simply stopped, between one thudding beat and the next one that didn’t come, and noise of it was instantly replaced by the silky run of the tide against the hull and the moan of the squall. My father leaned forward and tugged a couple of times at the starter rope with his free hand. The movement was awkward and he released the tiller and crouched over the engine to pull on the rope with both hands. Immediately we swung broadside on, and the sea began to slap noisily along the side, rocking the little craft. He cursed and went back to the tiller.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ I said.

  He glanced at me, hesitated, but then he stood up and without a word I slid onto his warm patch of bench.

  ‘Just hold it so. Keep her pointing round into the waves, not beam-on. She don’t rock so much then, see? I’ll have this fixed in a jiffy.’

  I took the tiller under my arm, bursting with pride and fear. I could feel the living sea through the wooden bar, making it quiver, and I was awed at its strength. I leaned on the bar and the boat’s prow moved from one side to the other.

  My father knelt and took off the engine cover and tugged on the starter rope twice more. When that didn’t work he found a spanner and deftly undid a nut and freed a tube and blew down it. The rain made his black hair slick and water ran down his neck.

  Up ahead, I could see a smudge of red light. Soon I could see the ghostly outline of the timber tripod. The structure swayed as we approached. I knew that it could not be, that it was the boat that was moving – quite fast on the inbound tide – but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were standing still and the marker had broken loose and was lurching towards us.

  My father sat up, grimacing at the taste of fuel from the pipe he had sucked. He caught himself doing it and grinned at me. He did not often smile, but when he did it felt like a blessing. He jerked his thumb at the tripod as if I might not have seen it. ‘See how the tide’s carrying us in? We’ll be back on the beach in ten minutes, motor or no motor.’

  I nodded. I felt tense and focused. He was rarely so talkative and I knew he was trying to reassure me. He bent over the engine and reconnected the fuel line and began to tighten the nut, first with greasy fingers and then with the spanner.

  The channel marker was only a few yards ahead of us now. I leaned on the tiller but this time the bow would not come round. I pushed harder. It did not move. It felt heavy and sluggish, as if invisible hands were clutching the rudder below. The slimy pillars rose above us, a dim cavern between them. I braced my feet against the gunwale and strained against the tiller bar.

  My father dropped the spanner and jerked his head up, and said, quite clearly: ‘No.’

  The tiller bar twisted out of my hands and the boat was inside the black triangle of timber, knocking against the posts, dragging against them as the sea rose and fell. Water gurgled around us and dripped on us and my father was shouting and the red light was flashing on and off above us, turning the sea lurid. The boat tilted and lurched and I let go the tiller and slid in terror into the shocking water and it closed over me.

  I was in daylight again and my father’s arms were around me, dragging me upwards, and I clutched the material of his coat, coughing and retching, the salt water stinging in my mouth and nose and roaring in my ears. The grey sea lifted me on its back and I caught a glimpse of the upturned boat swaying in a litter of flotsam and the tripod tower tilting away in the murk towards the open ocean. My father’s rough jacket was crammed against my face and the world beyond was cold and charged with dread.

  And I heard my father shouting, shouting and sobbing, freeing one fist to shake it and hurling his words at the indifferent sea.

  ‘You’ll not take him!’ he bellowed, over and over again, his voice cracking. ‘You’ll not take him from me!’

  Chantal nestled closer to me. ‘He wasn’t just shouting at the sea, was he?’

  ‘No. He wasn’t.’

  ‘He was sho
uting at someone,’ she said. ‘Calling to someone.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She hesitated. ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it wasn’t Hamelin. I think it was a woman, a girl. He could hear her sobbing. Wailing.’

  ‘So he did tell you that much, at least. He did talk about that.’

  ‘He didn’t need to,’ I said. ‘I heard her, too.’

  34

  I could hear scaffold poles ringing and clattering as workmen unloaded a truck, and Kate’s voice as she issued orders.

  By the time I got downstairs the kitchen was full of the aroma of coffee. Bonnard and his three workmen greeted me from the veranda and I returned the greeting. But I wasn’t watching them. I was watching Kate hand the mugs around. She was wearing khaki pants, a man’s blue denim shirt knotted around her waist, and open sandals. I noticed the way the men looked at her as they took their coffee.

  She came back to the door with the tray. ‘What are you staring at?’

  ‘Nothing. Thanks for keeping these guys sweet.’

  A brown paper bag full of croissants lay on the draining board.

  ‘I thought maybe you needed a lie-in.’ Kate gave me a schoolmarmish look. ‘You want to be careful, at your age.’

  I grinned, took a croissant and ate it wolfishly.

  ‘Dad!’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘They were for Serge! He’s coming over for breakfast.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ I licked my fingers. ‘I’ll have another one, then.’

  She was about to protest when we heard the motorbike in the driveway. I could see her quicken, and knew she was forcing herself not to run outside.

  I slapped crumbs off my fingers. ‘You like him, don’t you?’ I said.

  She clicked her tongue. ‘God, Dad.’

  ‘Am I embarrassing? It goes with the territory. For the record, I quite like him, too.’

  ‘Dad likes him!’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Well, that’s the kiss of death.’

  The engine cut out and the bike came trundling past the back door, squeaking on its springs. I caught a glimpse of Serge in a black helmet and old-fashioned goggles. His shirt was open and his forearms were taut and brown. Kate turned away from me and ran outside. I waited a decent interval before I sauntered after her.