“Good!” Garth slapped my back. “And no more diversions – we go straight there.”
Following the paved path as before and climbing a gentle rise, we started walking. We angled a little inland from the unseen cliffs where the green, rolling fields came to an abrupt end and fell down to the sea; and as we went I gave a little thought to the chain of incidents in which I’d found myself involved through the last hour or so.
Now, I’d be a liar if I said that nothing had struck me as strange in Easingham, for quite a bit had. Not least the dry rot: its apparent profusion and migration through the place, and old Garth’s peculiar knowledge and understanding of the stuff. His – affinity? – with it. “You said there was a story attached,” I reminded him. “To that horrible fungus, I mean.”
He looked at me sideways, and I sensed he was on the point of telling me something. But at that moment we crested the rise and the view just took my breath away. We could see for miles up and down the coast: to the slow, white breakers rolling in on some beach way to the north, and southwards to a distance-misted seaside town which might even be Whitby. And we paused to fill our lungs with good air blowing fresh off the sea.
“There,” said Garth. “And how’s this for freedom? Just me and old Ben and the gulls for miles and miles, and I’m not so sure but that this is the way I like it. Now wasn’t it worth it to come up here? All this open space and the great curve of the horizon . . .” Then the look of satisfaction slipped from his face to be replaced by a more serious expression. “There’s old Easingham’s graveyard – what’s left of it.”
He pointed down towards the cliffs, where a badly weathered stone wall formed part of a square whose sides would have been maybe fifty yards long in the old days. But in those days there’d also been a stubby promontory and a church. Now only one wall, running parallel with the path, stood complete – beyond which two thirds of the churchyard had been claimed by the sea. Its occupants, too, I supposed.
“See that half-timbered shack,” said Garth, pointing, “at this end of the graveyard? That’s what’s left of Johnson’s Mill. Johnson’s sawmill, that is. That shack used to be Old Man Johnson’s office. A long line of Johnsons ran a couple of farms that enclosed all the fields round here right down to the cliffs. Pasture, mostly, with lots of fine animals grazing right here. But as the fields got eaten away and the buildings themselves started to be threatened, that’s when half the Johnsons moved out and the rest bought a big house in the village. They gave up farming and started the mill, working timber for the local building trade . . .
“Folks round here said it was a sin, all that noise of sawing and planing, right next door to a churchyard. But . . . it was Old Man Johnson’s land after all. Well, the sawmill business kept going ‘til a time some seven years ago, when a really bad blow took a huge bite right out of the bay one night. The seaward wall of the graveyard went, and half of the timber yard, too, and that closed old Johnson down. He sold what machinery he had left, plus a few stacks of good oak that hadn’t suffered, and moved out lock, stock and barrel. Just as well, for the very next spring his big house and two others close to the edge of the cliffs got taken. The sea gets ‘em all in the end.
“Before then, though – at a time when just about everybody else was moving out of Easingham – Lily-Anne and me had moved in! As I told you, we got our bungalow for a song, and of course we picked ourselves a house standing well back from the brink. We were getting on a bit; another twenty years or so should see us out; after that the sea could do its worst. But . . . well, it didn’t quite work out that way.”
While he talked, Garth had led the way down across the open fields to the graveyard wall. The breeze was blustery here and fluttered his words back into my face: “So you see, within just a couple of years of our settling here, the village was derelict, and all that remained of people was us and a handful of Johnsons still working the mill. Then Lily-Anne came down with something and died, and I had her put down in the ground here in Easingham – so’s I’d be near her, you know?
“That’s where the coincidences start to come in, for she went only a couple of months after the shipwreck. Now I don’t suppose you’d remember that; it wasn’t much, just an old Portuguese freighter that foundered in a storm. Lifeboats took the crew off, and she’d already unloaded her cargo somewhere up the coast, so the incident didn’t create much of a to-do in the newspapers. But she’d carried a fair bit of hardwood ballast, that old ship, and balks of the stuff would keep drifting ashore: great long twelve-by-twelves of it. Of course, Old Man Johnson wasn’t one to miss out on a bit of good timber like that, not when it was being washed up right on his doorstep, so to speak . . .
“Anyway, when Lily-Anne died I made the proper arrangements, and I went down to see old Johnson who told me he’d make me a coffin out of this Haitian hardwood.”
“Haitian?” Maybe my voice showed something of my surprise.
“That’s right,” said Garth, more slowly. He looked at me wonderingly. “Anything wrong with that?”
I shrugged, shook my head. “Rather romantic, I thought,” I said. “Timber from a tropical isle.”
“I thought so, too,” he agreed. And after a while he continued: “Well, despite having been in the sea, the stuff could still be cut into fine, heavy panels, and it still French-polished to a beautiful finish. So that was that: Lily-Anne got a lovely coffin. Except –”
“Yes?” I prompted him.
He pursed his lips. “Except I got to thinking – later, you know – as to how maybe the rot came here in that wood. God knows it’s a damn funny variety of fungus after all. But then this Haiti – well, apparently it’s a damned funny place. They call it the Voodoo Island, you know?”
“Black magic?” I smiled. “I think we’ve advanced a bit beyond thinking such as that, Garth.”
“Maybe and maybe not,” he answered. “But voodoo or no voodoo, it’s still a funny place, that Haiti. Far away and exotic . . .”
By now we’d found a gap in the old stone wall and climbed over the tumbled stones into the graveyard proper. From where we stood, another twenty paces would take us right to the raw edge of the cliff where it sheered dead straight through the overgrown, badly neglected plots and headstones. “So here it is,” said Garth, pointing. “Lily-Anne’s grave, secure for now in what little is left of Easingham’s old graveyard.” His voice fell a little, grew ragged: “But you know, the fact is I wish I’d never put her down here in the first place. And I’d give anything that I hadn’t buried her in that coffin built of Old Man Johnson’s ballast wood.”
The plot was a neat oblong picked out in oval pebbles. It had been weeded round its border, and from its bottom edge to the foot of the simple headstone it was decked in flowers, some wild and others cut from Easingham’s deserted gardens. It was deep in flowers, and the ones underneath were withered and had been compressed by those on top. Obviously Garth came here more often than just “now and then”. It was the only plot in sight that had been paid any sort of attention, but in the circumstances that wasn’t surprising.
“You’re wondering why there are so many flowers, eh?” Garth sat down on a raised slab close by.
I shook my head, sat down beside him. “No, I know why. You must have thought the world of her.”
“You don’t know why,” he answered. ‘I did think the world of her, but that’s not why. It’s not the only reason, anyway. I’ll show you.”
He got down on his knees beside the grave, began laying aside the flowers. Right down to the marble chips he went, then scooped an amount of the polished gravel to one side. He made a small mound of it. Whatever I had expected to see in the small excavation, it wasn’t the cylindrical, fibrous surface – like the upper section of a lagged pipe – which came into view. I sucked in my breath sharply.