In those deadened days, Valentina kept to her bed, vague and listless. There was a knock at the door late one evening, but she wouldn’t come down. Dimity peeped out around the door in the end, because the man wouldn’t stop knocking. She didn’t recognize him. His face was dark, pitted, and lined, with ragged black stubble all over his cheeks. His eyes were watery and gray.
“What about you? You’ll do. I was told this was the place to come,” he said, in a hoarse, reedy voice, when Dimity told him Valentina wasn’t available for guests. She stared at him in shock, frozen.
“No, sir. Not tonight,” she said softly. But he gave the door a shove, caught her around the waist, and pushed against her with all his strength, pinning her with the door frame biting into her back. He dropped one hand down, ground it hard between her legs.
“Not tonight, she says? Filthy teasing harlot… Come on, the apple never falls far from the tree,” he rasped into her face, and Dimity cried out in fear and surprise. His breath reeked of fish and beer.
“Ma!” she shouted out in panic. “Ma!” And, against all odds, Valentina appeared on the stairs, her face clogged with sleep but such a fire of rage in her eyes that the man put Dimity down and was already backing away when she fell on him, raining blows and hurling curses that would shock a sailor. The stranger scurried away up the track, muttering furiously all the way.
Afterwards they lay down together, in Valentina’s bed. Dimity wasn’t usually allowed into her room, with its veiled lamps and pink candlewick bedspread, but that night they lay down and Valentina wrapped herself around her daughter, lying close like two spoons. She didn’t stroke her hair, or sing, or speak. But when she saw that Dimity’s hands were shaking, she clasped one in her own hand, tightly, and didn’t relax her grip even when she fell asleep. The skin of her palm was tough and smooth, like leather. Dimity stayed awake for hours, her heart still bumping from the shock of the man’s rough touch, and from the alien unfamiliarity of Valentina’s embrace. She welcomed it, though, enjoying the warmth that grew between their two bodies, the feeling of safety married so uneasily with the knowledge that it all might end at any second. Which it did, come morning. Valentina woke her abruptly, with a slap on the thigh. Get out of my bed, you useless lump. Go and make breakfast.
Then, on a glorious day in mid-April, spring blew in off the sea on a warm breeze as sweet as the taste of ripe strawberries. Such a blessed relief that Dimity laughed, out loud and all alone, standing on the cliff path on the way back from Lulworth with a bag full of sprats and a bottle of cider vinegar in which to cook them. The sea shimmered with life and the land looked up at it, like some great animal befuddled by the cold, slowly coming out of deep sleep. Dimity thought she could hear the sap rising, fizzing up into the trees and the grass like a massive inward breath, held, poised for the flourish of summer. Sap rose in the men of Blacknowle and its surrounding farms, too, and sent them to knock on the door of The Watch, so that suddenly the residents of that cottage were surrounded by abundance. But it wasn’t the food or the warmth that Dimity yearned for the most. Even the welcome touch of the sunshine couldn’t fill the space in the world that the Aubreys had left when they departed. Dimity longed for the summer because she longed for them to come back. She longed for their bright chatter and their affection, the way their love for each other spread out around them, and the way she had been allowed to step into that world, and be part of it. She longed to see them, so that she wouldn’t be invisible anymore.
CHAPTER FIVE
Dimity blinked, and hummed a little in her throat, and Zach roused himself from reverie. The silence had grown so long as she’d studied the picture that his attention had wandered, and he’d let himself notice the isolated grains of sand on the floor, glinting in a shaft of sunlight; the gentle sound of the sea coming down the chimney with a faint, tunneling echo to it; a huge, thin spider sitting as still as an etching between the beams above his head, surrounded by the tiny, speckled cloud of her young. In the old woman’s hand was a piece of paper, a color printout Zach had made, borrowing Pete Murray’s computer, of a large oil canvas of Mitzy standing amid mossy ruins, so highly textured by the dappled light that she seemed a part of the forest, a part of the land, like some mythical creature merging with the hues and foliage around her. There was a gargoyle above her head, distorted and ill-defined, but it seemed to have her face; an echo in stone of the same lovely girl standing beneath it. Dimity’s mouth moved again and this time words almost formed, so Zach cleared his throat.
“Dimity? Are you all right?”
“He did so many sketches, up at that chapel. That’s Saint Gabriel’s chapel, the haunted one. He couldn’t decide what was best, how I should stand. For three weeks we walked to and fro, to and fro. We trod the path up the hill deeper than it ever had been, I reckon. One day I got so tired, standing still for so long, and with my belly rumbling as I’d had no time for breakfast-he wanted the early morning light, he said-that my head started spinning and everything wobbled in my ears and the light went dark, and before I knew what was what I was on the ground and he was cradling my head, my Charles, like I was a precious thing…”
“You fainted?”
“Dead away. I reckon he was half annoyed at me for moving for a moment, till he realized I’d swooned!” She laughed a little, rocking back in her chair, clasping her hands together and raising them up. The paper flapped like a solitary wing. Zach smiled and fingered the notebook across his knees.
“That was in 1938, is that right? The year before he went off to the war.”
“Yes. That year… I think that was my happiest time…” Her words faded to a whisper, then to nothing. Her eyes shone for a moment, frozen and still. She dropped the printout of the painting and her fingers went to the ends of her long plait, stroking, rolling. “Charles was happy, too. I remember it. I begged him not to go, the year after that… I wanted us to always be that happy…”
“It must have been hard… with such a recent death in the family, and under such tragic circumstances. So much upheaval,” said Zach. For a moment, Dimity didn’t answer, and there was a pause, but instead of her gaze falling into the past, Zach saw rapid thoughts flying across her face. Her mouth fell open slightly, thin lips parting, and she held the tip of her tongue between her front teeth. Keeping it still until the right words were ready.
“It was a… terrible time. For Charles. For all of us. He was going to leave them, you see. Leave her to be with me. And then when it happened, he felt very guilty, you see.”
“But nobody blamed him for what happened, surely?”
“Yes, some did. Some did. Because he was an older man, and me still so young. Young in my body, perhaps, but I had an old soul. I always thought that-even when I was a child, I never felt like one. I think we only stay children if people let us, and nobody let me. There was talk, you see-about sin begetting sin. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. I heard Mrs. Lamb up at the pub say that to him one night, as he was walking past. As though by loving me, he was causing bad things to happen. Bringing punishment on himself. But he was never wed to Celeste, you know. He broke no vows to her, by loving me.”