The The Woodcock

The Woodcock

Richard Smyth

Fairlight Books

First published by Fairlight Books 2021

Fairlight Books

Summertown Pavilion, 18–24 Middle Way, Oxford, OX2 7LG

Copyright © Richard Smyth 2021

The right of Richard Smyth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Richard Smyth in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, stored, distributed, transmitted, reproduced or otherwise made available in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

ISBN 978-1-912054-45-9

www.fairlightbooks.com

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd.

Designed by Emma Rogers

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

For Daniel

Few, very few, are at all aware of the many strange, beautiful, or wondrous objects that are to be found by searching on those shores that every season are crowded by idle pleasure-seekers. Most curious and interesting animals are dwelling within a few yards of your feet, whose lovely forms and hues, exquisitely contrived structures, and amusing instincts, could not fail to attract and charm your attention, if you were once cognizant of them.

—Philip Henry Gosse, A Naturalist’s Rambles (1853)

In her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned.

—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)

Contents

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

I

I was on the beach the first time I saw them. I had a crab struggling in my right hand and the jar in my left.

There was a rain, a dense rain of fine, cold particles. Turnstones poked around at the weed-strewn tideline. Visibility can’t have been good, the view of the grey North Sea fading into the mist within a hundred yards – and yet I saw them, the two of them. They were on the cliff edge. A big one and a little one; a big man, as I was later to learn, and a slender girl (she could be said to be short only in relation to him).

The crab, with that strange strength of crabs, managed somehow to pivot in my grip, and I was diverted by a fierce pinch in the webbing between my forefinger and thumb. When, having subdued the little swine, I looked back towards Priory Bluff, they were gone. But their image lingered: she had been standing still, quite still, at the cliff edge and he, the larger figure beside her, had been gesturing with a wildly waving arm across the bay, towards the sparse masts of the harbour.

It’s a wonder that I could see them at all, in that rain or mist, or whatever you want to call it. But in fact I can still see them.

I slipped the crab, safely jarred, into my satchel and turned, as the tide was turning, back towards the land. It was a Sunday, around lunchtime, and the townspeople, as they issued from the chapel at the harbour end, strolled in twos and threes, in good hats and sober suits, up the sea road towards their homes or Holroyd’s pub – or towards nowhere, just towards the end of the sea road, where it turned inland at the priory. At this point, having completed their promenade, they would turn on their heels and return the way they came.

As I laboured through the soft ankle-deep sand between the tideline and the road I tried to pick out Harriet and her mother in the crowd. I couldn’t see either of them – only a stream of indeterminate faces turned narrow-eyed towards the sea. Besides, my eye, or my mind’s eye at any rate, was still distracted: those figures on the cliff, in the rain—

And my hand hurt. A crab can easily draw blood when it wants to (and in this case I couldn’t blame it in the least for wanting to).

Someone’s hat blew off: it went pinwheeling along the sea road. I laughed to watch the young men haring after it, their own hats tumbling as they ran.

Harriet wasn’t there when I got home. On a Sunday she often went to her mother’s for lunch, an arrangement that suited all three of us. On the occasions when we took Sunday lunch together, Harriet was embarrassed by my absence, so fresh in the memory, from Mr Aldridge’s Sabbath sermon. Her mother found it a painful strain, indeed almost a physical strain, to keep from jibing at me with regard to the same subject; and I – well, I spent the meal wishing that I was in my workroom, pickling shore life.

I was in my study, applying a gummed label to the dead crab’s jar, when she returned.

‘Hello, darling.’

‘Hello, my sweetest,’ I called. I set the jar on the appropriate shelf and rinsed my hands in the cold-water basin. While I towelled, she came through hat in hand and, balancing her weight on the ball of one foot, reached up to kiss me.

‘Another crab?’

‘Portunus puber.’

‘That’s another crab in Latin.’

‘Indeed.’ I tapped the jar. ‘Velvet crab. It has a sort of a fur all over it. And if you aren’t quick, the fur – like the bloom on a delicate fruit – just vanishes when the crab is dead.’

She held my arm and eyed the jar, and the crab within, with unease.

‘Perhaps the poor thing oughtn’t be dead at all, Jon,’ she said.

‘This one had it coming, my dear one.’ I opened my right hand and showed her the pincer wound. She made a small noise of pity and dropped at once to her knees to press her lips to it. I was surprised to find that my wife had the capacity to arouse me even here, in this room that reeked of formalin, iodine and salt. With my left hand, while she knelt, I stroked her roughly pinned beech-blonde hair.

Then she stood.

‘Mr Aldridge spoke very well about forgiveness today,’ she said, making a moue.

With a gentle sigh: ‘I should hope he did. That’s his trade.’

‘Jon.’

‘Very well.’ I addressed the crab in its jar: ‘I forgive you, my little friend. You knew not what you did.’

Again: ‘Jon.’ But she laughed, and put a hand on the back of my neck. The other hand she put frankly between my legs, and I drew in a sharp whistle at the cold touch of the mist-sodden corduroy.

I kissed her despite the curious beady-eyed gaze of the crab in its jar. There are, I dare say, good wives and bad wives. Harriet was a good wife.

*

‘There were some people on the cliff earlier.’ I was lying on the unmade bed in my underthings. I held a cup of tea that was as yet too hot for me to drink.

Harriet glanced over from the corner, where she was folding or unfolding or refolding a pile of linen.

‘People?’

‘Yes. Two of them.’

‘That’s not like you, Jon. Taking notice of people. Were there no ragworms or sea slugs around to catch your attention?’

‘No sea slugs north of Mablethorpe, my dove,’ I told her, and tried the tea: still too hot.

‘Where were they?’

‘On the cliff. Priory Bluff. Standing in the rain and having a set-to.’

‘Not a very nice spot for a set-to.’ She swung a bedsheet expertly over a bare forearm.

‘No. But then maybe it wasn’t a set-to. Maybe he was just theatrical.’ I watched Harriet folding for a second and then I added: ‘Like Mr—’

‘Mr Aldridge is not theatrical,’ she snapped.

I think I was permitted only a certain quota of remarks at the expense of our long-bearded minister. Beyond this quota Harriet would not even smile. But he was theatrical, that preposterous Aldridge. His beard was of Trollope length and he wore a suit of plain wool, the smell of which was unholy regardless of the good-hearted piety of the minister within. He was much given – or at least had been much given on the two or three occasions on which I had seen him sermonise – to the use of extravagant hand gestures to emphasise such words as ‘wicked’, ‘devil’, ‘damnation’ and ‘error’.

I sipped my tea, scalded my tongue and sucked my teeth in exasperation.

‘There was a strange new woman at church,’ Harriet said thoughtfully.

‘Strange?’

‘American. But that wasn’t the strange thing.’

‘It was surely one of the strange things, in Gravely. An American, here? I’ve never heard of such a ridiculous idea in my life.’

‘No, she—’

‘You don’t mean an American wigeon? Sort of duck. We had one over here once. But that was in Middlesex, I think.’

‘Jon. We aren’t quite the rude fisherfolk your imagination likes to paint, and we’re perfectly able to accommodate a Daughter of the Revolution should we find one in our midst. As I said, that wasn’t the strange thing about her.’

‘Then go on.’

‘We just couldn’t find out what she was doing here.’

‘Breathing the healthful sea air. Enjoying the views. Hearing the good word from Saint Aldridge of Withy Passageway.’

Harriet dumped the linen into the linen casket with a tired sigh. I watched her walk quite bare-bottomed from the bedroom and heard her sink with another, softer and happier, sigh into the sofa cushions. I heard her take up a newspaper.

My tea was now drinkable. I drank it.

I was always regretful after I had been facetious with Harriet. I was never regretful after sex, as I gather we’re supposed to be, as a species; I never felt ashamed or anything about all that, and I don’t mean to say that I was shameless, either, because I wasn’t. I was very proud of my wife, of myself, and of what we together made as wife and husband. I can’t see any reason on earth why I shouldn’t have been.

But there was something shameful in the way in which I often spoke to Harriet. I was probably worse – I certainly was that day – after we’d made love; I don’t know why. But I do know that that sickly jocularity, that compulsive levity, left me feeling – well, as though I were the most dreadful beast. As though I’d deflowered a shop girl in some appalling novel.

It may have had something to do, after all, with Harriet and her damned church. It may simply be that the hairy minister Mr Aldridge brought out the bully in me.

Or perhaps – on that day, in any case – it was to do with those two figures, up on the cliff, by the priory, in the rain. One big, one small.

~

I was born here. I grew up here. A Gravely lass – whatever that means, and I suspect it doesn’t mean anything much. Dab hand with a filleting knife, know all the words to ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’. Would I have been very different if I’d been born in Bradford, like Jon?

Well, David McAllister was born in Bradford like Jon and he isn’t anything like Jon, so you can see how far that goes.

If I hadn’t been born here we would never have moved here. Or who knows, maybe we would. Maybe the rock pools would have called to Jon from afar, across the moors and wolds.

From here I can see the sea, just about. It’s a short, fat strip of grey lurking between two houses; our driveway wall hides the breakers and the beach. Black-headed gulls go up and down, up and down. There must be sprats on the tide.

It’s funny, sitting without any clothes on, looking at the sea. I like it. I like it in a way that hasn’t got anything to do with sex. I like the feeling of contact – even though the sea is far away and behind glass, I feel like I’m in it, even though at the same time I know I’m sitting in the altogether on our second-best settee.

Glad I’m not in it, though. Frigid.

It’s quite cold enough here in the cottage. I should put something on but I don’t feel like it. I suppose I’m perverse. I fold my arms and carry on watching the sea.

In the bedroom Jon slurps his tea. Everyone thinks he’s so cold and rational but he’s not rational enough to wait for his tea to cool before he drinks it. That tells you something. He clears his throat, and I hear enough of his voice in the sound to make something in my belly, right down deep, ripple like a fish. It’s a miracle how I love him, it really is. Literally a miracle.

I get up and go back in and start putting on my underthings. Jon watches me. I hear him take a breath and I know it’s going to be a crack about Reverend Aldridge. Jon thinks it’s fun to wind me up like a watch spring and see if he can make me snap – but the thing is, he’s never even got close to making me snap, not really, and if he ever thought he was getting close he’d cut it out sharpish. It’s just this or that about the reverend’s beard or the way he talks. Nothing real.

‘What will you do today?’ I ask him as I fasten my skirt.

‘Dissertate on crab kind until David’s train comes in,’ he says, and sets his teacup down on the bedside table. ‘You?’

‘Nothing that can match the doings of crab kind for drama and excitement,’ I say.

I have to call on Mother, and update the household accounts, and fetch in some additional groceries because David McAllister is coming to stay (though I suppose he’s the type who lives on nothing but cold cuts and absinthe).

Jon smiles. He has the sort of smile that always looks relieved.

I put out a saucer of fish trimmings for Josephus, kiss Jon goodbye, put on my shoes, collect my purse from the dresser and leave the house. The fret hasn’t cleared but at least it’s not raining. There are puddles in the driveway. It’s murder on shoe heels, this driveway.

Two things on my mind today – that is, apart from the bills to settle and the groceries to buy. Mother said at dinner yesterday that she wished my father could have lived to see me come home. I’ve been home quite some time – we’ve been in Gravely, Jon and I, for two years – and besides, Dad wasn’t here to see me leave, he’s been dead since I was fourteen. So what did she mean? I asked her straight out, what do you mean? – but she just made one of those faces. One of those ‘mother’ faces. I could’ve pinched her. So that’s one thing on my mind today.

The other is that girl at church.

Alice Reynolds, the doctor’s wife and to all intents and purposes empress of Gravely and district, took the girl by the elbow as we were leaving church and said: ‘Are you staying with us long, Miss—’

Which raised a few eyebrows, being on the pushy side, but that’s Alice all over. Not backward in coming forward – and besides, weren’t we all dying to know? Someone had to ask.

And this girl, she just smiled (she had a lovely smile, we all thought so), and said: ‘I honestly couldn’t say for sure how long we’ll be here – but you really do have a beautiful little town.’

I’ve been thinking about that all afternoon.

Not many people out on the main road. There are some fellers walking up to the horrible pub and I see Kath Connolly, who lives two doors up from Mother, pushing her pram on the opposite pavement, but I’ve not got time to natter.

Who was we, for one thing? No wedding ring, you see. Tap mine with my thumbnail. Best pewter money could buy, Jon jokes. He’s not far off the truth, of course. But it was the best his money could buy.

And then Gravely, a beautiful town. Well. It’s like when people used to say I was a beautiful little girl, and Dad’d grin, showing his missing teeth, and say, ‘You don’t know her.’ I’m not saying anything against Gravely – it’s my town, it’s mine, it’s me – and I suppose in a lot of ways it is beautiful. All I’m saying is that if you say it’s a ‘beautiful little town’, and you say it like that, then you don’t know it.

Jon’s like that with his birds and butterflies sometimes. I think he knows what their life is really like – because it’s not nice, life, for wild things, and I think he knows that, how could he not? But he finds it beautiful anyway. Can’t help himself.

II

Waiting at the railway station that afternoon, while Harriet remained at home, I was reminded of my own arrival in Gravely two years previously. I’d travelled alone – work had detained me in Bradford until the Thursday after our wedding, so Harriet had travelled up with her mother on the Monday morning, promising that in the intervening days she would dust the cottage and acquire us a pet cat.

I hadn’t been north of the Tees before. I had travelled only infrequently on the intercity railway. I knew when the gleaming tracks swept us along the bay’s very edge, and for a few moments (moments fixed for me thereafter in the clearest spirit) I was able to watch the skuas, the pirate birds of summer, harrying Arctic terns against the high cirrus, that I could live here. I could still be me here, I knew – though of course what we had come here to be was us.

Perhaps forty minutes prior to those moments on the sunlit southbound line, I had been hurried, almost smuggled, in and out of Newcastle, hastened with my cases along mile-long platforms by scrawny porters and their skew-wheeled trolleys. It had been as though they thought that, if they were quick enough and sufficiently furtive, I might not notice the great smoking city beneath which the station buildings cowered – as though Newcastle were a dirty family secret, like an abortion or a brain sickness, to which they would not readily admit.

On the train I craned my neck to watch it retreat. I watched until all that was left in view was the city’s smoke. It reminded me of home. Bradford stank, too.

‘Jon Lowell. You damn sea creature.’

McAllister stepped down from a train that I hadn’t noticed had arrived. He had a square-edged suitcase under his arm and carried a hat, an umbrella and a newspaper in his hands.

‘Can’t shake your damn hand,’ he apologised as he approached, gesturing with the items he carried.

‘That’s all right. You know how we sea creatures are.’

‘Yes. Clammy.’

‘But you could ease your burden, David, if you wore your hat on your head.’

‘Waste of energy putting on a hat at the seaside,’ he said, but put it on anyway. I took his case. Heavier than it looked. ‘Wind’ll only blow it off,’ he added gloomily. Then he shook my hand. A firm shake but firm only because it wanted to be, not because it had to be. Not a test or a challenge.

I suppose there was no need for David to test me because he knew already that he was better than me. But that wasn’t the reason why his handshake was the way it was.

If he’d known I was giving so much thought to a bloody handshake he’d have ribbed me fiercely. He might have changed since we were boys, but a fellow can change only so much.

We walked out of the station archway. To our right, to the east, was the sea, and to our left, west, was Station Parade, a narrow and clean-looking run of shops and guest houses that stretched for perhaps two hundred yards away from the coast and led to the narrow-spaced black railings enclosing Quebec Park.

‘Nice-looking town,’ said David politely, linking his arm with mine.

To me, looking westwards at Station Parade was like looking into a rock pool on a clear day. On the surface of the water you can see with astonishing detail the reflections of surrounding rocks, the clouds above, perhaps one’s own net or hand, or curious, benevolent, hollow-cheeked face. But of course the thing to do is to blink and refocus, to look beyond that. And beyond that you see a different and perhaps a better world.

At sunset the canal of sky above Station Parade would fill with sunlight as though someone had opened a lock gate. Perhaps tall, fluorescent clouds would tower above the park. Perhaps the sky would turn to the colours of a wheatear and the clouds would be thin and lateral and dark grey like blotted lines of ink.

When someone said something like ‘Nice-looking town’ it made me want to say ‘You are not looking at the right thing.’

But I was pleased that David liked the place, so instead I said: ‘Do you want to go straight to the cottage, or do you want to see a bit of the town?’

He looked at me in counterfeit surprise.

‘You mean this isn’t it?’

‘This is most of it. But there’s a bit more. There’s the beach, and the priory. And the pub, of course.’

‘I think I’d enjoy seeing those things, only with their order reversed. Will there be girls?’

‘You can’t bring girls back to the cottage.’

‘Good Lord, no. I wouldn’t want to take them anywhere. I just thought it would be nice if there were going to be girls there.’

‘It’s not really,’ I said, ‘that sort of place.’

But, as it turned out, there was a girl there.

*

Bradford’s technical school, late in 1923 or early in 1924. The pavement outside. A young man appeared hatless out of the slanting snow with his hair plastered across his brow. A girl with him: wool cap, dark stockings, T-strapped shoes. I would have walked by them but the young man touched my shoulder. Just a light touch, but enough to make me stop in spite of the weather.

‘You’re Lowell, aren’t you?’

I nodded, ducking my chin and blinking my eyes against the snow.

‘I’m McAllister. You have rooms nearby, don’t you? I’ve seen you.’

‘I, yes, sort of. Laburnum Road.’

‘Yes, that’s not far.’ He looked at the girl and gave an encouraging nod. ‘That’ll do. And’ – looking again to me – ‘how’s your landlady, Lowell?’

I hesitated. I must have gawped, because McAllister clarified: ‘I mean, is it a case of here be dragons, you know, or is she a liberal, broad-minded type?’

‘We really are very cold,’ put in the girl, smiling apologetically with a sort of half-curtsey.

‘I, she—’ I faltered, and swallowed, then, feeling my cheeks burn, said: ‘She’s my father, I’m sorry to say.’

I walked off into the snow. I expected at any moment to hear caws of derisive laughter behind me, but I didn’t hear anything.

The girl in the public bar of Holroyd’s could have been the elder sister of the girl on David McAllister’s arm that night. Like that girl, she had wide eyes, dark stockings and T-strapped shoes. That girl’s hair had been hidden beneath her wool cap but this girl’s hair, knotted in a chignon, was rust-red. Both had a mill-girl slenderness. This one was no mill girl, though the other might have been.

In the public bar of Holroyd’s the red-haired girl stood out like an anemone in an empty rock pool. Or, rather, not empty – there were men standing at the bar, others by the dartboard, one at a table in the corner with a folded racing paper, so not empty, but rather peopled apart from the anemone with beings as blank-eyed as blenny fish, as insular as limpets, as crusty and sharp-clawed as crabs.

David lifted his hat to the girl as soon as we entered.

‘Good evening, madam,’ he said.

‘Good evening,’ she quietly replied, barely lifting her eyes. She was reading a book, a cloth-bound book. Too slim to be a Bible, I was pleased to see. There was a glass of tonic water or something on the table.

David caught my eye when I turned away from the girl.

‘What’ll it be?’ he said, although the look he gave me said something else.

‘Pale ale,’ I answered. More quietly, I added: ‘Mr Holroyd doesn’t keep anything else.’

‘A pale ale will go down very well.’ He smiled and dug in his trouser pocket, as fat Clement Holroyd appeared behind the bar. ‘Evening, landlord. Two pale ales, if you would.’

Holroyd nodded and exhaled a phlegmy breath. Taking hold of a glass with one hand and the pump handle with the other, he looked first at David, then at me, and then, with a long, chinny leer, at the girl at the table, and said: ‘I would indeed.’

I smiled politely. I couldn’t see David’s face.

Through the bay window by which we took a table I could see little but the grassy lip of the cliff and, beyond that, the grey sea. The crooked vertebrae-like rocks of Adam’s Middens broke the sea’s surface in a perpendicular line that led a quarter-mile out into the bay. At the limit of my eyesight the lighthouse at Fossmouth showed a warm light.

David, of course, wasn’t looking out of the window.

‘American,’ he said, and sipped his beer. Over the rim of his beer glass his blue eyes were reverential.

‘Did you think?’ I murmured. ‘I thought Irish. We get quite a few of them. Hard to be sure, of course, just from—’

‘No, American.’

The beer was tepid and good. I wiped my moustache with finger and thumb and said: ‘Well, you could be on to something, now that I think of it. Harriet said there was an American girl in town. She was at church this morning.’

‘Not this one.’ David shook his head with a curious smile. He was still watching the girl. The girl was still reading her book. ‘This one,’ David said, ‘doesn’t go to church.’

I drank more of the good beer. I would have said ‘How the devil could you know that?’ or ‘What on earth makes you so sure?’, but I knew David, and I knew that, in asserting so confidently that the girl was an American or a non-conformist or whatever else, he wasn’t seeking to tell me anything about the world as he thought it was – he was simply telling himself stories.

David had written his first novel while he was still at the technical college. It was a rather swooning love story. I, of course, adored it; I was a lonely and sensitive adolescent, and lonely and sensitive adolescents are little better than lonely spinsters – or, I suppose, lonely anybodies – where cultural discernment is concerned. Tosh of that sort I positively lapped up.

I was friends (and rather proud to be friends) with David by then. I went with him to a photographer’s studio in Leeds, where he had the necessary publicity snaps taken.

‘Both of you?’

‘No, just me.’

‘Two shillings.’

‘It’s for a book I’ve written, you see.’

‘Still two shillings.’

The grimy fellow in the studio with his moth-eaten screens and pre-war kit knew his business, though. Those pictures: the McAllister jaw square, the mouth a firm line, the dark eyes humorous, the blond hair swept back and showing a fine grain like turned wood. The knot of the tie a fraction off-centre. When the pictures arrived at the publisher’s office the publisher must have heard in his ears the ringing – joyous as wedding-day church bells – of booksellers’ cash registers.

But that isn’t to say that David had no talent as a writer. And I do know that telling stories was a thing that David would have done whether he was a writer or not.

‘Should I go and speak to her?’ he asked me, smiling and leaning forwards over his beer glass. ‘Would that be all right, do you think? With the locals, or whatever. Think of the talk, Mr Lowell’s reputation in tatters, that sort of thing.’

I returned the