Laura. It’s good news. The part in The Silent Daughter is yours if you want it. I enclose script. 23 words in all – I’ve told them, no last minute changes. It’s those 23 words. Well done – we’re all proud of you. The schedule has you over in Leeds the week beginning 12 August. Car will pick you up in Ely. Talk soon. Love. R.
Dryden kissed her on the neck, but he knew she’d detected the hesitation.
‘I’m happy,’ she said. ‘You should be too.’ The words were indistinct, but audible nonetheless. The part was in a play for Granada TV in which Laura would play a woman recovering from an horrific car crash. The audition had taken place in Cambridge earlier that year, her first journey away from Ely since the accident. It would be her only work in seven years. She saw it as a triumph, the beginning of a new career. Dryden felt the role was demeaning, a very public statement that this was now the limit of their ambitions.
‘Let’s celebrate,’ he said, trying too hard. ‘I’m proud of you too.’ He went below, put two bottles of champagne in the icebox and texted Humph to pick up a Chinese takeaway. Then he put chairs out on the bank and built a fire, breaking up the wooden crates they had their food delivered in, direct from the farm up the lane where Dryden paid the mooring fee.
Humph, who had been sleeping in a lay-by when the summons came, arrived at high speed in the cab, the dog sitting up with excitement in the passenger seat. The cabbie parked up, the two doors open, and switched the radio to a local channel which specialized in 70s and 80s music at that hour, knowing it was Laura’s favourite.
They ate by the light of the fire as the sun set, watching Boudicca run along the riverbank after the lurid green balls Humph fired – from a sitting position – using the tennis machine Dryden had given him one Christmas. It had been a truly unselfish present. The reporter harboured a deep-seated fear of dogs, which could stun his nervous system in the shape of a snarling Alsatian. But the greyhound’s good nature had disarmed him, and familiarity had softened his fears. It was a small consolation, but a consolation nonetheless, to know that he now had a pathological fear of every dog in the world except one. They ate, Humph producing a small bone for the greyhound. Finished, they burned most of the takeaway packaging on the fire.
‘Wait,’ said Dryden before Humph could contrive an early exit. He went below to the forward cabin where he had stored his records from nearly twenty years in journalism. All reporters are told to keep their notebooks in case of legal action, a piece of advice widely honoured in the breach. A barely legible scribble is unlikely to be of great use a decade after it was first written, so Dryden usually dumped them after a year. The cabin was a chaotic archive of cuttings, pictures he’d printed up from his more illustrious stories, books, a few microtapes from celebr ity or political interviews, and a case of video-taped TV programmes he’d amassed at the News when he’d been the stand-in critic. The walls boasted two framed awards for reporting – one in his specialist area of crime, another for feature writing when he was starting out in newspapers after university. And there was a picture from his first evening newspaper of a young reporter accepting an award. The intervening years had taken their toll but there was no mistaking the shock of black hair cut short, the narrow gangly frame and the handsome but immobile face.
Outside he could still hear the Capri’s sound system and the murmur of Humph’s voice – no doubt re-enacting for Laura her husband’s comic appearance in combat uniform. He heard laughter and was thrilled to hear his wife’s once familiar giggle.
He sat in his captain’s chair and tried to remember where he had last seen the tape he was looking for. There were two ideas wrapped up in the concept of ‘filing system’ and both were strangers to Dryden’s innate sense of informality. He’d always told himself that if he couldn’t remember something there was probably a good reason, and that every forgotten fact made way for a memorable one. There was absolutely no chance he still had his notebooks from July 1990 when he’d covered the evacuation of Jude’s Ferry. He doubted he even had the cutting from the resulting feature he’d written on the village’s last day. But over the years he was sure he’d bundled together stuff which had appeared in the media on the village – keeping a watching brief in case the story reignited.
He knelt down and shifted a pile of books, revealing a little avalanche of paper which had slewed across the deck. He pushed a hand in amongst the notebooks and foxed cuttings. It took a minute of sustained gleaning before his fingers closed on the tape cassette.
‘The Village that Died for Us,’ he read. The front showed a telephoto shot of St Swithun’s seen across the mere from the east, the beet factory chimney in the background.
Humph was pouring Laura wine when Dryden reappeared with the tape and a portable cassette player. He waited for the commentary to begin before adjusting the volume so they could all hear. The evening was quiet now except for the flutter of marine engines on the main river as an armada of pleasure boats slid past heading south for moorings and a pub dinner.
The tape was a history in voices recorded in the summer of 1990 by the local history unit at Cambridge University and released commercially a year after the evacuation. The title was taken from a quote from the then minister of defence who had defended the decision to evacuate the village as vital to national security and the proper training of a modern army. Dryden had bought the tape on a whim and then stashed it, unheard, with other memorabilia.
‘This was 1990, in the run-up to the evacuation,’ he said, adding more wood to the fire. The sky was still blue despite a misty sunset, but studded now with emerging stars. A vast flock of birds rose from the reserve at Wicken, beyond the river, and wheeled over them, caught against the backdrop of the moon.
The sound of wind filled the air, buffeting a microphone, and then came the church bells.
‘My name is Fred Lake, and I guess I may be the last vicar of St Swithun’s here at Jude’s Ferry.’
‘I met this guy,’ said Dryden. ‘He was OK. First parish I think, and a bit lost, but he tried to hold it together.’
The sound of bells swelled, then faded, to be replaced by the crunch of footsteps on gravel. Reverend Lake walked round his church accompanied by the sound of swifts flying from the eaves, then came the sound of a key turning in an ancient, oiled, lock.
‘We’ve got loads to do before the final service on St Swithun’s Day,’ he said, the words echoing slightly in the stone interior, and Dryden noted the voice was unstuffy, laced with the remnants of a South African accent. He imagined the wide skies of the High Veldt and wondered if Lake had felt at home on Whittlesea Mere.
‘The MoD tells us the church is not a target and isn’t in danger. But they can’t make any promises. The graveyard, the vicarage, who knows? We all make mistakes, it’s part of being human, so I’m expecting the worst. Everything we can move we will move, to St Anthony’s at Whittlesea, our sister church. They’ve been great about it, so who knows, we may be back in a year and all this will just be behind us like a bad dream.’
A sigh. ‘And perhaps we shouldn’t be too concerned with material loss. I’ve been telling everyone who’ll listen the story of St Swithun…’
Another door creaked and steps echoed, climbing the tower of the church. A gust of wind hit the microphone as they emerged at the top, a seagull screeching overhead.
‘It’ll be my last sermon – but they know it well. My wife says I bang on about it, but it’s relevant, even now, and these days if you want to get something across to people, past the distractions of the TV, and video games, and the rest, well you’ve got to bang on. So – St Swithun, the great bishop of Winchester, said he wanted to be buried out of doors so that, he said, the “sweet rain of heaven” could fall on his grave. There was a deeper message, a political message really…’ Dryden noted how strong the accent had suddenly become, the guttural nasal vowels distinct in the word ‘political’.