Distant Voices. Barbara Erskine
collect my purse, and take the bus into Minster. The old people’s home was near the bus station, set in a lovely garden.
Aunt Irene was sitting on the porch, gazing out at the rose beds when I arrived. She smiled at me when she saw me and gestured at the chair near her. Her poor hand was still paralysed but she looked much better than when Steve and I had last seen her.
I felt her looking at me closely as I sat there not knowing what to say. I didn’t want to tell her anything; I just wanted the comfort of being near her, I think because she was Steve’s aunt.
‘It’s good of you to come, my dear,’ she commented at last. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about you and Steve.’
I felt myself blushing and I looked at my hands. Me and Steve. It seemed strange that she could still refer to us together like that, as if nothing had happened.
I looked up and smiled wanly, and I was quite embarrassed to find her looking at me so shrewdly. I felt it was almost as if she knew exactly why I was there. I suppose it can’t have been difficult to guess that we had had a row.
‘You know, Linda, I often think of my life in that cottage when I was young. I’m so happy to think that you two live there now, to fill it with happiness and laughter. I never told Steve this, but when I was a girl,’ she paused and there was such a long silence I thought she had forgotten what she was talking about, the way old people do, but then she went on, ‘I was engaged once, you know. To such a nice boy.’ Her faded blue eyes twinkled at the memory. ‘We nearly got married, then I found out that he’d done something very bad – he’d stolen some money. I told him I couldn’t marry him. He went away to the war of course, in 1914, and he was killed in the first month.’ There was a long silence. I could see that even now, after so many years, it still hurt her to think about it. At last she went on, ‘If I’d stood by him, in spite of what he’d done, I often think perhaps he might not have been killed. I might have had children of my own …’ Her voice tailed away again, and I felt my eyes fill with tears.
She smiled suddenly. ‘You won’t wait too long, will you Linda, you and Steve? I would so like to see your babies before I die, my dear.’ Then she became suddenly brisk. ‘Why not go and find the housekeeper and ask her if you can stay and have lunch with me. I’d like that. Don’t look so sad, dear. Take no notice of an old woman’s ramblings. After all, you do have Steve; and I know you love each other so much, that nothing could come between you the way it did between Robert and me. Nothing, however bad, should come between lovers. They must forgive.’
I got up and dropped a kiss on her head. ‘I’ll go and see about lunch,’ I said, my voice catching in my throat.
Of course it was very hard to forgive and I could never forget, but somehow we managed to get through that summer, Steve and I. When Graham came for me that afternoon I told him I couldn’t go to London after all and he shrugged philosophically. ‘I’m sorry, honey; if you change your mind you know where to find me …’ I think he was secretly rather relieved. After all, he was happily married in Wisconsin.
And I didn’t change my mind. I loved Steve and I realised that whatever he had done I was prepared to give him another chance. I knew I had been lucky too. Graham understood and he had not taken advantage of me when I had, I now realised, been playing with fire. I might so easily have found myself in the same situation as Lauren.
And now, the leaves are blowing from the trees and I’ve lit a fire in the grate and the room is filled with the scent of burning apple logs. I’ve given up my job; somehow we’ll get by on the money we’ve saved already, and by the time spring comes I shall have a baby and if it’s a girl I shall call her Irene. Steve doesn’t know the real reason I chose the name, but of course he’s pleased, and he’s thrilled about the baby. And I love him so very much.
Although the sun was setting in a blaze of livid gold behind the distant hills Harriet Cummins had her back resolutely towards the sight. Instead she was peering doubtfully through the windscreen of her stationary car at the retreating ripples of water on the road in front of her.
‘Extraordinary,’ she murmured to her friend, Cathie Hamden, who was seated apprehensively beside her. ‘You wouldn’t expect that the last bit to be uncovered would be the nearest bit to us. The land must be lower than the sea or something.’
‘I still think we ought to wait, dear.’ Cathie was looking at the shining mudflats and the road which snaked across them. A flock of ducks was wading happily across the causeway, not pausing to discriminate between mud base and thin mud scum.
‘Rubbish. I’m going now.’ Harriet reached purposefully for the handbrake before she switched on the ignition. That way the car already had a little impetus before the engine spluttered into life. ‘I wonder,’ she went on, gently malicious, ‘if there’s enough petrol to see us across. Wouldn’t it be awful to be caught by the tide and have to climb into one of those baskets!’
Cathie let out a squeak of fear as Harriet knew she would. She smiled to herself, but even she cast a slightly apprehensive glance upwards as they passed the first post with its plaited straw refuge.
She noticed that Cathie was sitting upright, clutching the top of the dashboard – the way she usually sat, in fact, when Harriet urged their old car over forty, which she was constantly trying to do, even in the short High Street at home – and spitefully she jabbed the accelerator. ‘Silly old woman,’ she murmured scornfully to herself. She always thought of Cathie, with her fresh pink face and still-blonde hair as old, although at sixty-five Harriet’s companion was three years her junior.
The car coughed momentarily, a frequent occurrence from its bronchial engine, and Harriet clutched the wheel more firmly, ignoring the subdued groan on her left. The wheels were sending up a fine spray and in the strange slanted evening light it was sometimes hard to see where the road ran. The water flowed impartially before them disguising their route in a silver tissue of reflections.
They gained the upslanting firmness of the island with undisguised relief, stopping momentarily to gaze back over their shoulders at the winding road through the mudflats. Already the tide had ebbed away and in places the causeway was drying in the cool sea wind.
Harriet groped in the glove compartment, leaning without apology across her friend. ‘Where’s the address? I want to get to the guesthouse and have a bath.’ Maps and books were rummaged unceremoniously to the floor.
Cathie tightened her lips a fraction. ‘I think, dear, you’ll find that you put it in your bag,’ she murmured at last, half apologetic.
‘Rubbish. Why should I do that?’
Cathie smiled bitterly. ‘Because you said I’d be sure to lose it if you didn’t.’ She watched as Harriet turned to the back seat for the battered leather hold-all she was pleased to call a handbag. Sure enough the instructions were there.
‘Humph!’ That grudging snort was the nearest Harriet ever came to apology, the glitter in Cathie’s eyes the nearest to triumph.
The car shuddered forward again, and they began to thread their way through the network of lanes which led to the island’s only village.
The guesthouse was not hard to find. It stood out at the end of a row of whitewashed fisherman’s cottages, a modern bungalow with cream and red paint and ornamental scrollwork on the nameplate, Castleview, which hung on a gibbet by the front gate.
Harriet parked the car with its near-side wheels in the thick lushness of the hedge and sat back, squinting at the house.
‘Castleview indeed.’ She craned her neck to see if the claim were true. ‘I do hope it’s going to be all right. One can never tell, booking from so far away. Well, what are you waiting for?’
‘I can’t get out this side, dear.’ Cathie moved round slightly and