The Mudflats of the Dead

CHAPTER 3

MENAGE A QUATRE

‘One for sadness,

Two for gladness,

Three a wedding,

Four a death.’

Anonymous

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The cottage comprised the sitting-room, now allotted to Palgrave, a kitchen and a small scullery downstairs, and two bedrooms at the top of a steep staircase. From his front window Palgrave could look out over the marshes. He moved a small table into the window and borrowed a chair of the right height from the kitchen and set out his notebook, a sketch-pad and his portable typewriter and continued to wait for the inspiration which still did not come.

At first there was little to disturb him. The Kirbys were as good as their word and, except for passing through his room to go out or to come in, both of which they did quietly and expeditiously, they did not speak to him unless he spoke first. For the first two days Camilla followed their example, although he guessed that she directed pleading glances at the back of his unresponsive head as he sat at his table in the window making notes and a sketch plan of the immediate neighbourhood.

By the third day, however, this good behaviour on her part broke down. She came downstairs before dawn and, while he was still asleep, she wriggled her way on to the studio couch beside him. He woke to find a naked nymph who clung to him with such determination that he had to use what seemed to him brutal force to break her stranglehold and deposit her on the floor, where she knelt sobbing with her head buried in the table-cover which was doing duty as a quilt and, so far as he could make out, threatening to blackmail him for seducing his girl pupils. She was clearly beside herself with frustration and disappointment.

Palgrave got up, put on trousers and a sweater over his pyjamas and went out into the chilly half light which preceded the sunrise. When he had walked off his irritation and had rehearsed in his mind what he would have to say to Camilla when they next met, he returned to the cottage with a half resolve to leave it immediately after breakfast and look for lodgings in the town which he knew was only a few miles away.

‘And a damn nuisance that is!’ he said severely to the girl, walking with her to the little bridge in the middle of the morning.

‘Oh, Colin, don’t go!’ she said, leaning on the sturdy handrail and gazing not at him but across the expanse of the marshes. ‘I didn’t mean any harm. It was only a joke. You needn’t be so stuffy. I don’t wonder you chose to be a schoolmaster! You’re just an old stuffed shirt. Are you going to tell Miranda and Adrian about me? I shan’t do it again, you know. I don’t like puritans and you’re not very attractive, anyway.’

Palgrave put a hand on her thin, childish shoulder and pulled her round to face him.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t want Miranda and Adrian mixed up in this, and I don’t want to go. What I do want is to settle to my book and get this place and my main characters down on paper, that’s all.’

‘Am I one of your main characters, Colin?’

Palgrave laughed.

‘Not if you don’t behave yourself,’ he said. ‘I’d like to put you in the book, but as an older, more sensible girl, I hope. I don’t mind swimming and walking and talking with you – in fact, all those things will help me to round out the character I want to build up – but beddery, and all that, is definitely out. You wouldn’t be a bad kid if you gave yourself half a chance, but giving me the rush of a lifetime is not going to do either of us any good. When I bed a woman she’s got to be just that – a woman – not a half-baked art student hardly out of her teens. You’re still wet behind the ears, my child. You save your antics until you’ve grown up a bit. Then perhaps one day somebody will fancy you enough to do the pursuing instead of you having to do it all. That will be the day!’

He was trying deliberately to make her angry. He did not succeed. She took his hand and said,

‘Yes, teacher. I’m sorry. I won’t be naughty again.’

As the end of the week approached he felt the beginnings of his old despair. The conditions were right, the weather was right, the doleful scenery was right. Another Wuthering Heights ought to be under contemplation, but no Muse approached him to murmur in his ear those vital sentences which would get him off the mark and start him on the opus. He had already settled upon Adrian, Miranda and Camilla as three possible main characters, but how to use them in a story, how to manipulate them, was more than he could determine.

What was worse, it soon became clear that, however sincere the welcome he had received from the married couple, they had had an ulterior motive for taking him into the cottage.

Finding himself alone with Miranda one afternoon when she had asked permission to paint in his room and the other two had gone on to the marshes, Camilla to make some impressionistic daubings, Adrian to roam the foreshore in search of more of those specimens, either of flora or fauna, which apparently he needed for his work, Palgrave pushed his notebook aside and said:

‘How do you come to team up with Camilla? If I may say so, she doesn’t seem quite your cup of tea.’

Instead of answering his question, Miranda said, in what seemed an inconsequent way:

‘My Adrian is a good man.’

‘Yes? Why shouldn’t he be?’

‘He is, I tell you. But that girl!’

‘I know. I’ve had some.’

‘Are you a good man, Colin?’

‘I hope so. Why?’

‘Camilla needs a husband.’

‘Very likely. Most girls do.’

‘She has a private income, not large, but permanent, you know. She would not be a financial burden on a man.’

‘That’s as may be, but, so far as I’m concerned, I’ve enough on my plate already without taking on a young nymphomaniac’

‘She would not be like that – not if she had a man of her own.’

‘Well, frankly, Miranda, I’m not in the market.’

‘Do you have a girlfriend?’

‘Once. Not any more. She married.’

‘Oh, I am sorry! I shouldn’t have asked.’

‘She thought I was too self-centred. It was while I was writing my first novel. I needed all my faculties.’

‘Well, of course, I understand your point of view. Art is a mistress. No wife can hope to compete with her. Of course you had to put your novel first.’

‘Yes, but the girl didn’t think so. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why I can’t get down to any more writing. There’s a blockage, and I think she is the cause of it. You see, it was I who broke the engagement.’

‘It would be nice if you had taken the same fancy to Camilla as she has taken to you.’

‘Well, I haven’t.’

Miranda sighed and squeezed out a dollop of green paint just as Adrian, bearing a jam-jar containing low forms of aquatic life, returned to the cottage.

‘Why are you painting in here?’ he asked.

‘Because Colin is lending me part of his front window. There is the view I want from here, but it’s too windy to sit outside today. I am not breaking our contract. I was not intending to interrupt his work. I did not say a word for more than an hour, and then he spoke first. Now I come to think of it, he asked me a question which I did not answer.’

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ said Palgrave. ‘It was an idle, impertinent question, anyway. Where did you leave Camilla?’

‘Oh, your question was about her, was it?’ said Adrian. ‘I carried some of her things for her and saw her settled down to her sketching, but I don’t think she did very much work. The last I saw of her she was talking to one of the summer visitors.’

‘A man, of course,’ commented Miranda.

‘Well, she would not trouble herself to talk to a woman, still less to stroll towards the village shops with one.’

‘I hope she won’t be a nuisance to the poor man.’

‘So long as she is not a nuisance to me, I’m afraid I don’t mind in the least who else she afflicts.’

‘Colin wanted to know why we had brought her with us. The fact is, Colin, that we often take one or more of the art school students away with us in the summer. We quite like young company and, as I teach part-time, I’m able to give them some hints about their work. Camilla begged us to let her join us this year, and at the time we saw no reason to refuse. I’m afraid, though, that we grasped at the idea of having you join us. It really was most unfair considering that you had come here to work on your novel. How is it coming along?’

‘It isn’t, so far. Inspiration is absolutely lacking.’

‘It will come,’ said Miranda comfortingly. ‘When it does, you won’t be able to get the words down fast enough.’

‘I don’t think that’s my style of writing. I weigh up and discard and alter. I’m very painstaking.’

‘So am I,’ said Adrian, ‘but when Miranda finds a subject she likes, she slaps it on to the canvas like a man slapping creosote on to a garden fence.’

‘You should never be skimping with oils,’ said Miranda, making a quick dab at her huband’s nose with a brush full of green paint. Adrian picked up her paint rag and wiped his face. Lifting up the jam-jar, he said:

‘I have had some success today, I think, but I wish I had some transport. Further along the coast there are freshwater marshes. The specimens would be different there.’

‘I must take you in my car,’ said Palgrave, without committing himself to a definite promise.

‘Would you? I’ll show you the kind of things I do.’ He took himself and his jam-jar upstairs and returned with a portfolio. From it he took some water-colour sketches and some pencil drawings. He named the subjects as he displayed them. ‘Yellow flag, water violet, marsh pea, marsh woundwort, marsh sow thistle, and this is one which not everybody knows, the rayed nodding bur-marigold. Of course not all of them came from these marshes.’

‘They are exquisite,’ said Palgrave sincerely. ‘Really lovely work.’ So indeed they were. Botanically correct in every finely finished detail, they were also delicate, beautiful, sensitive works of art.

‘Thank you,’ said Adrian simply. ‘By the way, if, when you are going down to bathe, you should come across a specimen of the peacock-worm – ’ he made a quick sketch on a blank sheet in his portfolio – ‘I wish you would let me know. It’s a lovely creature, but it feeds underwater. It’s a brownish-coloured tube – that’s the worm – and these tentacles I’ve sketched can be pink, red or violet-coloured. So says my book, but I’ve never seen an actual specimen. I’d like to see what kind of design I could make from it.’

‘I’m not terribly good at spotting marine animals except jellyfish and crabs, and those for the best of reasons,’ said Palgrave, ‘but I’ll do my best.’

‘Thank you. Oh, and if you should see this – ’ he made another rapid sketch – ‘I should be most awfully glad. It’s called the brittle star. They are five-armed, like an ordinary starfish, but they leave the most fantastic patterns on the sand. The photograph I was shown was taken in Pembrokeshire, so they may not inhabit the beaches here, but you may be luckier in spotting things than I am.’

‘I doubt that very much.’

‘I want my supper,’ said Miranda. ‘I think we won’t wait for Camilla. The food is salad and things, so she can have hers when she comes in.’

They sat on, after supper, and chatted until Palgrave suggested that his room was both larger and more comfortable than the kitchen. By ten o’clock Camilla still had not come in, so the couple went to bed. Palgrave sat at his window and tried to concentrate on a plot which would involve his three companions. The best he could do was to envisage Adrian falling in love with Camilla, but, even if he used this most unlikely opening, he could not see where it was going to lead him, or how it was going to bear the weight of the thousands of words and the score or so of chapters which would have to follow this less than auspicious beginning.

At a quarter past twelve, while he was still sitting there, but this time with the light on, Miranda came downstairs fully dressed, opened the front door without a word to Palgrave, and went out. Adrian, in his dressing-gown, came down five minutes later.

‘I tried to persuade her not to bother about Camilla,’ he said, seating himself on the studio couch, ‘but she says we are responsible for the girl. I don’t see that. Camilla opted to come here with us and she is of age, so why should we bother what she’s up to?’

‘I don’t see how Miranda is going to begin looking for her at this time of night,’ said Palgrave.

‘There’s a song and pop dance thing at the pub tonight. Miranda thinks she has gone to it.’

‘It would have been over long ago, surely?’

‘That’s what I said.’

Miranda came back and sat beside her husband. He looked at her and raised his eyebrows. She shook her head.

‘She has never stayed out like this before,’ she said. ‘I hope she hasn’t been out in somebody’s car and they’ve had an accident.’

‘If she picked up a lift in somebody’s car, she probably got what she’s been asking for,’ said Palgrave.

‘I know. But, Colin, sometimes they kill the girl afterwards.’

‘No such luck where Camilla is concerned,’ said Adrian, ‘so stop worrying. The bad pennies always turn up.’

‘Oh, Adrian, I don’t think she’s a bad penny, not really.’

‘A little defaced and debased, perhaps,’ said Palgrave. ‘And now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go to bed.’

‘Oh, Colin! Of course we’re sitting on it! Adrian, help him open it out and we’ll make it up for him.’

At three in the morning there was a heavy thunderstorm. In the middle of it Camilla came in. She was soaking wet. She put on Palgrave’s light and began to take off her dripping garments and drop them on the floor. Her entrance did what the thunder had failed to do. It woke Palgrave. He sat up, blinking in the light.

‘Hey!’ he said. ‘What do you think you’re up to? Get the hell out of here, and p.d.q., or I’ll give you what I wanted to give you the other night when you managed to climb in on me.’

‘Oh, Colin, I’m cold and so tired.’

‘Up you go. We’ll discuss your sad case with the others in the morning.’

‘Just a minute while you get me warm?’ She came towards the bed. Palgrave got out of it, walked over to his suitcase and took off the strap which held it together against a broken fastening.

‘Ready when you are,’ he said, giving the strap an experimental flick through the air, ‘and it won’t be quite the warming you have in mind.’ Camilla gave a coquettish little shriek just as Miranda came down the stairs.

‘What happened to you?’ she asked fiercely.

‘Nothing at all. Somebody gave me a lift into the town, we had dinner and then there was the usual engine trouble on the way back. It might have happened to anybody.’

‘Oh, go to bed,’ said Miranda. ‘Leave those wet clothes in the scullery. I’ll see to them in the morning. I’m glad you’re all right.’

‘I’m not. I hope she’s caught her death of cold,’ said Palgrave. ‘If she has, what a blessed relief that will be to one and all!’

He spent the next morning walking over the now spongy marshes. The creek was brimming and was wider than he had seen it before. The water was shadowed with grey which began to turn to silver and then to glints of gold as the sun rose. His wanderings took him as far as the pebble-ridge. It was clear that the holiday season was getting under way, for all the moorings in the creek had been taken up by the smaller yachts and he could see, when he scrambled to the top of the ridge, that several larger craft were anchored offshore, their dinghies either hoisted up on deck or riding behind them.

He came down from the ridge and found a track, muddy and waterlogged after the thunderstorn, which led to the church. Once past the church he decided to take to the road and walk to the village with the windmill which he had passed on his way to Saltacres. Miranda had made a painting of the windmill and he wanted to study the romantically situated little building for himself. As he had become rather too fond of saying since his first book had been published, all was grist which came to a novelist’s mill, and he was still hoping that something, somewhere, would bring him what he still thought of as inspiration.

The village, with a mile of marshes between it and the sea, was larger than, when he had passed through it in his car, he had supposed. He explored its ancient streets, found a good road which led down to the beach, looked at the outside of the church but did not go in, and made what inspection he could of the windmill, but discovered that it had been co-opted as part of a modern house. Time passed. He found a small pub near what had been the harbour and jotted down notes and sketches while he had a beer, and then he made his return journey to Saltacres.

He had brought a map with him and learnt from it that there was an alternative to going back by way of the road. It involved a far longer walk than his outward one, for it meant taking a broad causeway which led down to the shore, following another which ran almost parallel with the beach and then taking a long cast across the marshes on another causeway which would bring him out about a quarter of a mile east of Saltacres church.

Just before he reached this last causeway, which turned in a southward direction away from the beach, he saw two people paddling. They were laughing, pushing one another and kicking up the water. One he recognised immediately from the back view. It was Camilla, clad as usual in her jeans and shapeless sweater. The man who was with her was a stranger to Palgrave, but certainly not to the girl for, as Palgrave passed behind them, but twenty yards or so inland, he saw him swing Camilla up, toss her in the air, catch her again, kiss her and then, to an accompaniment of her squeals, dump her into the shallow water. She suddenly hooked the man’s legs from under him and had him floundering beside her. They both yelled with laughter.

To his own amazement and self-distrust, Palgrave found himself furious because of these antics. He quickened his pace and turned on to the homeward causeway, but fancied that their laughter pursued him.

When he reached the village he turned into the pub, as usual, for his midday snack and found the place taken over almost entirely by yachtsmen. He looked around for Adrian and Miranda, but they were not present. The bar was noisy and bonhomous, but there was nobody he knew. He managed to edge his way to the bar and put in his order, but ate his bread and cheese and drank his pint as quickly as he could. Then he went back to the cottage and sat down at his work table. He enlarged the notes he had made, typed them out, made a list of possible titles for his book, hoping that one of these titles would set the opus in motion, but gave up in despair and decided to go for a swim. The tide was still running out, so he searched the mudflats it was leaving behind and hoped that he might come upon the specimens of marine life which Adrian had sketched for him.

Tiring of this pursuit, he went back to the sand-dunes, took off his shirt and lay out in the sun. The warmth and the lassitude which followed his long walk of the morning soon sent him to sleep. He woke to find Camilla seated beside him, her arms clasped round her knees.

‘Hullo,’ she said. She sounded deflated and tired. No wonder, he thought. He sat up and gazed out to sea. ‘I’m sorry about last night,’ she went on. ‘Can’t we be friends?’

‘I don’t think you’re capable of it,’ he replied. ‘You can’t even keep your promises, can you?’ He did not tell her that he had seen her already that day. Again he was conscious of the fact that the emotion her antics had conjured up in him was not disgust but sheer sexual jealousy. ‘I’m a dog in a manger,’ he told himself angrily. ‘I don’t want the blasted girl, and yet I’m not willing that anybody else should have her.’

‘A penny for them,’ she said, putting her hand on his knee.

‘You’d be wasting your money,’ he said. On the following morning, but with a much later start to his walk, he explored the green countryside of the low hills behind the village. When he got back to the pub he found that, although it was less crowded than it had been at the previous midday, it was still virtually in possession of the yachtsmen. They were crowding the bar, so when he had secured his snack and his drink, he looked around to find somewhere to sit down. He found an alcove which was occupied only by Miranda.

‘May I?’ he asked, seating himself opposite her.

‘Oh, Colin, how nice!’ she said.

‘May I get you a drink?’

‘No, I have had what I wanted. I was just about to leave, but now I will stay and talk to you. It was good of you to lend Adrian and Camilla your car to go over to Stack Ferry. I did not want them to go together, but Adrian is so anxious to explore those freshwater marshes that I said nothing except that I was grateful to Camilla for taking him – he does not drive and the car was lent to Camilla—’

‘But it wasn’t!’

‘You did not lend it to her?’

‘Of course I didn’t! I don’t allow anybody else to drive my car. Suppose she has a crash and busts it up!’

‘That girl!’ exclaimed Miranda, for the second time in his hearing, but this time with greater emphasis. ‘She declared that you had promised she should borrow it because you were out walking and would not need it yourself today. Oh, Colin, I am so sorry! Adrian and I were doubtful, but she swore it was all arranged between you, so for Adrian the temptation to believe her was too strong. There is no transport that he can hire from here, you see.’

‘Well, I must hope for the best, I suppose.’ Palgrave tried to contain his anger, but could not. He escorted Miranda back to the cottage, put on his swim-trunks, and slung a towel around his shoulders. Still in a state of bitter anger, he took to the causeway, crossed the plank bridge where he had met Camilla for the first time and, walking and running, made his way down to the shore.

The soft warm muddy sand was pleasant to walk upon. Disregarding the dangers of swimming on an outgoing, treacherous tide, he ran into the rapidly shallowing water until he found the sand shelving beneath his feet.

When he got back to the cottage, exhausted and with legs which seemed to be made of jelly, he found that Miranda was still alone. She was seated by his window completing the picture she had begun from the same vantage point on the previous day. She did not look round as he entered, but when he collapsed on the studio couch and gave a great sigh of exhaustion she put down her brush and came over to him.

‘What have you been doing?’ she asked.

‘A damn silly thing, and nearly got myself drowned. The bloody tide carried me out, and when I thought it was time to get back to shore I found there was such a vicious undertow that I began to think I would never make it.’

‘You were angry about your car. People do foolish things when they are angry.’

‘Well, my first fine frenzy has washed itself away, that’s one thing. So long as Camilla hasn’t damaged the car I’ll forgive her. I shall give her a piece of my mind, of course.’

‘You do that. You must also put your feet up and I will make us both a cup of tea.’ She was so comforting and the tea was so welcome that he said, when he had drunk it and she had gone back to her painting:

‘I say, Miranda.’

‘Yes, Colin?’

‘No need to tell Adrian my car was taken without my permission. I mean, if he’s had a good day, no need to spoil it for him.’

That Adrian had had a good day there was no room for doubt. He was full of enthusiasm and gratitude. He had found a beautiful specimen of the sea-pea – ‘not the marsh-pea, Colin, but lathyrus japonicus, you know, not lathyrus palustris. I have painted one before, but not one so perfect.’ Then a fisherman had shown him a lovely marine creature which he had not seen before, the opossum shrimp. ‘Not a true shrimp, Colin. This one is not edible. It is only used for bait. It looks like a shrimp and is the most exciting Cambridge blue on top and white underneath. It swims in estuaries and is very active. It is in movement most of the time and does not stay on the bottom, as true shrimps do. I have made sketches and colour notes and now I shall work out my design.’

He was so happy and had enjoyed himself so much that, more than before, it seemed to Palgrave that it would be desecration to say anything about the unlawful use of the car. It did occur to him, however, to wonder what Camilla had been up to while Adrian had been pursuing his own interests.