The Main Cages Read online

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You fit your clothes.’

  ‘Same old clothes!’

  ‘It’s an expression. When someone’s spirit grew, we used to say it. Maybe they are in love. Are you in love, Mr Sweeney?’

  He chuckled, and shook his head.

  ‘Well, something then.’

  As they rounded the corner the cottage came into view. ‘Is Mr Abraham here?’

  ‘No. He went to Germany. He finished his big painting and he went to Germany.’

  Anna prepared a meal of cold ham and salad. They drank cider and sat at the slate-topped table outside the cottage, and the tide turned in the river and the tide-lines that had striped the ebb now tangled in the flood.

  Jack bit into an apple and leaned back against the wall. ‘I know only three things about you, Mrs Abraham. You are married to Maurice Abraham, you paint, and your father died in the Baltic Sea. Is there anything else?’

  CHAPTER 16

  Anna Abraham had been born Anna Petrovna Shishkin, in 1902, on a small estate to the south of St Petersburg. After her father drowned, her mother was forced to sell the house. She took Anna and her two sisters to live in the city, in a lightless tenement behind the Gostinny Dvor. Following the revolution they wound up in Berlin, then in Paris. In the summer of 1923, the first of several, Anna went south to stay with a painter cousin in Biarritz.

  She had spent a lifetime in overcrowded flats. Her companions had been women in threadbare furs, embittered by loss. In Biarritz she threw open a window on the world and saw it clearly for the first time. She stayed in a white house with a white balcony and at the bottom of the street she could see the sea. That first summer her cousin taught her to draw. He said she had ‘an instinctive sense of line’. He introduced her to a whole host of writers and painters – Americans, Spaniards, English and Italians. She had always thought it somehow shameful to be an émigré; but here each of them wore their exile like a badge, like an order of merit, and Russian was the highest order of all.

  Each May she returned to Biarritz. In 1926 she met the English painter Maurice Abraham and thought that God could not have made a more beautiful man. They were married that September. Anna often asked herself: What have I done to deserve such luck? She was living in a large house in Hampstead which looked over yellowing treetops to the towers and steeples of London. She had an attic room in which she painted – working through a succession of styles until she had something that was hers. At the same time Maurice’s own work began to attract more attention. He became, in a minor way, a fashionable painter. He was elected to the Royal Academy and began to travel more widely, and the more widely he travelled the better his work sold. He went to the Near East, North Africa, South America.

  Then Anna lost a baby. She had only known she was pregnant for two weeks and already the baby was gone. When it happened the next time, the doctor told her there would not be another. She felt a grief so deep that she could not find the words to express it. She had the sensation she was falling down a well. Maurice went to Germany to stay with his friend, the poet Max Stein.

  Over the next two years they drifted apart. Maurice spent weeks at a time in Germany, and each time he came back they found themselves more and more remote. Only in Polmayne, and in Ferryman’s Cottage, did they find an enthusiasm they could share.

  In the summer of 1935, Max Stein arrived in Polmayne and it became clear to Anna what she had long refused to consider. Max and Maurice were having an affair. Anna Abraham was not an angry woman but she told Max to leave her house at once. She herself left for London and suggested to Maurice that he find somewhere else to live. As much as the betrayal and the hurt, she was haunted by the thought that the only square of earth sacred to her had been sullied.

  That autumn, Maurice’s mother died and after the funeral he came to Hampstead and asked Anna for forgiveness. He embarked on a three-day monologue, reproaching himself for the years of travelling, his long absences in Germany and South America, for Max. He told Anna he could no longer abide Max’s hypocrisy, that Germany under Hitler was a terrible place and he was not going back. He told her he had never for a moment stopped loving her and she believed him. She believed him because she wanted to believe him. It was Christmas 1935, and in the New Year, when she received another letter from Jack Sweeney she wrote back ending their correspondence.

  In May 1936, Maurice received a commission from a new hotel in Polmayne and they went down together and all was well. The town was at its bustling best and Maurice rented a net loft big enough for his canvas and divided his working time between there and the cliffs around Pendhu Point. Then a letter arrived from Berlin and he became distracted. When he announced that after his painting was finished he would have to go to Germany, Anna told him calmly to leave at once. ‘And there’s no coming back.’

  For the first time in her life she found herself completely alone. She spent another week in the cottage. She waited for the sky to fall on her head but it did not. She swam and drew and walked and by the end of that week she realised that she had already endured the suffering and that nothing could ever hurt her so much again. She stayed on at Ferryman’s.

  However hard she tried in coming years, Anna Abraham was never able to remember the first time she saw Jack Sweeney. When he picked them up off the rocks during the storm in June 1935 he was already familiar, one of those sun-browned figures she had watched busying themselves around the quays. It took her some time to see that he too was an outsider. But that first summer she took little notice of him. She was amused by his letters and the details of his fishing, but nothing more. By the time she saw him again in the summer of 1936 she sensed that something had changed in him. He was assured and animated. He fitted his clothes.

  ‘You’re well enough to row up Ferryman’s, you’re well enough for Newlyn.’ Croyden had found Jack sitting in the courtyard at Bethesda, working at his knots.

  ‘I thought you weren’t coming.’

  ‘I changed my mind.’ Reports from Newlyn were good. ‘But if we have no luck,’ he warned Jack, ‘you’ll know why.’

  Jack told him to take the nets to the barking house. At low water he and Hammels spread them out on the rocks below the Antalya. Jack rowed aboard the Maria V and cleaned out the Kelvin. His leg was now almost fully recovered. The following day he brought the boat into the quays and they all scrubbed her down, scraped off the weed and re-tarred her keel. They took on another hand, Croyden’s brother Charlie. Two days later they were ready. They would leave at dawn, catch the tide round the Lizard and be in Newlyn by evening.

  Jack had seen Anna Abraham on most days. She dropped into the yard and when the Maria V was lying against the East Quay she paused to watch them on her way back to the cottage. On his last day in Polmayne she told Jack she would come to the harbour in the afternoon and say goodbye. At five there was still no sign of her. He took the Maria V back to the moorings. She had let him down again.

  ‘Stood up, is ’ee?’ Toper called from the Bench.

  How did he know? How did everyone know everything in this damned town? Jack glared at Toper and returned to Bethesda.

  She came at dusk. There was a quiet double-knock and he knew it was her. She had been sketching out at the lifeboat station and the time had gone and, well, she had no idea it was so late. She placed her pad on the table and looked around. She had never seen his room. It was entirely without softness – there were no curtains and no rugs; even the bed looked hard. There were piles of rope everywhere – off-cuts on the chair, hempen coils on the floor, piles of lanyard on the window sills. On the mantelpiece was a collection of shells and driftwood, a piece of old propeller and behind it a picture of a tropical bird.

  Anna took off her headscarf. On the table was the mat he had been working on and she ran her fingers over it. ‘What is it?’

  ‘A sinnet.’

  ‘Like a poem?’

  ‘That’s a sonnet. It’s for the mizzen boom – stop it chafing on the stays.’<
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  She shook her head, smiling. ‘You know this language is Icelandic to me!’

  Crossing to the window she half-bent to look out. The late sun shone on Pendhu Point. The waters of the bay were ruffled by a freshening southerly. Gulls dipped and glided above it.

  ‘Can you see the rocks?’

  ‘Not from here.’

  They stood in silence. He was leaning against the table, watching her.

  ‘Let me show you something!’ he said. He took a piece of line from the table and stepped up to her. ‘Now!’

  He tied one end to each of her wrists.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Wait, wait.’ He was grinning. He put his own hands together, as if praying. ‘Now, wrap that loop around my wrists – tight, so I can’t get them out. See?’

  She did so. They stood before each other. He was trapped.

  ‘Now what?’ she asked.

  ‘Watch.’ He worked his hands through the bight, twisted them and he was free.

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘You know what it’s called?’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘It’s the Russian escape knot.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it;’

  ‘Another?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Give me your ring.’

  She slipped her wedding ring from her finger and handed it to him. He threaded a loop of string through it, put each end over his thumbs and said: ‘Now – how do I free the ring without lifting the string from my thumb?’

  Anna looked at it. She leaned back, examined each end. ‘It’s impossible.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Without taking his eyes from hers, he tucked his little fingers inside the loop, pulled tight again and the ring fell away. He caught it.

  She shook her head: ‘It can’t …’

  He repeated the trick, more slowly. Again he caught the ring as it fell. ‘Look, you try.’

  He placed the string over her thumbs, then guided her fingers through it. Having pulled the string tight, she shouted: ‘Bravo!’ Then he leaned forward and kissed her. Neither of them heard the ring fall and roll across the boards.

  The day paled in the windows. Even close to midnight, it was still hardly dark. A bluish light fell across the bed and Jack looked down and saw her face against the pillow and it seemed he was seeing her for the first time. Later when he slept again she lay awake listening to his breathing. Down on the beach she could hear the hiss of the waves as they slid up the shingle and then the clink of pebbles as they drew back, and she thought: it sounds like something falling.

  They rose at four. She made him sit on the bed for a minute’s silence. She said: ‘Before a journey. It is a Russian custom, to make sure you come back safely.’

  It was still dark when she left him at the quay. Above Pritchard’s Beach she watched the Maria V head out towards Pendhu Point. She stood there until the boat’s lights merged into one. Below her the seas were breaking on the shingle, pulling back and breaking again and she thought again: it sounds like something falling.

  CHAPTER 17

  The day the Maria V left for Newlyn, a brand-new hotel opened in Polmayne. For ten months a team of builders had been working to convert a private house, but because they were not locals and because they lived on site, a certain mystery had grown up around the project. Now its doors were open. It was named the Golden Sands Hotel and its proprietors were a Mr and Mrs Edwin Bryant.

  Mr Bryant was a round-faced, balding man with a penchant for bowler hats. He also owned a good deal of property in Birmingham and Wolverhampton. During the dark years of the Depression he had acquired a number of very cheap warehouses, tenement blocks and old ironworks. By the end of 1931 he had added two bankrupt hotels to his portfolio. He was fond of saying things like: ‘When I hear talk of pulling in horns … tightening purse strings … battening hatches, I know it’s time to push the boat out!’ His own success was proof of all his adages.

  In July 1932, after thirty months of unrelenting work, Mrs Bryant had persuaded him to book in for a fortnight at Polmayne’s Antalya Hotel. They motored down. They were given a room with windows that framed the twin quays like a painting. They were both very happy those weeks. Mrs Bryant liked to sit on her balcony with her eyes closed, while the exploring fingers of the sun ran across her bare shoulders. Mr Bryant liked to walk through the town in his bowler hat. He liked to watch the comings and goings at the quays, trying to work out how the cogs of commerce spun in this sun-splashed seaside town. He liked to watch the young women sunning themselves on the quay wall, their dresses hitched up to the thigh. As the days passed, his passions rose and in the end he succumbed to them: he began to look at property.

  Wandering out of the village, he inspected the new villas and the Crates. So much new building! Beyond them was a block of pasture which looked down over the withy beds to the Glaze River. He paced around it, considered the view and dismissed it. He knew what people wanted. In the city they might like something modern, but on holiday they preferred the traditional style. ‘In business, look forward,’ he mused. ‘In leisure, look back!’

  On a wet afternoon, he strolled up the laurel-flanked drive of Dormullion House. He counted the upstairs windows. The columns of the terrace, he noted with some satisfaction, gave the façade a faintly Regency air. They were also badly in need of paint. That evening he wrote to Mrs Kliskey. He had the letter delivered by hand. The reply came back to the Antalya at noon the next day:

  Dear Mr Bryant,

  I don’t know who you are but the answer is no.

  No, no, no!

  Joan Kliskey

  Up towards the lifeboat station was a half-hidden Victorian house named Pendhu Lodge. The house had been built by an Azariah Dupont, amateur yachtsman, entomologist and founder and Chairman of Dupont Steam Irons in Sheffield. It was now owned by the current Chairman, his grandson Joshua Dupont.

  Mr Bryant peered through its gates and saw a group of people sitting on wicker chairs and rugs on the lawn. A young girl in a floppy straw hat was running around among them, chasing a terrier.

  Bryant received a courteous answer from Joshua Dupont:

  Although it is true that Pendhu is only fully occupied for a brief period of the year it is nevertheless a much-loved family house and greatly appreciated by all members of it – particularly the younger ones. I sincerely hope that Pendhu Lodge will be enjoyed by Duponts for generations to come …

  A year later, Mr Bryant read in the paper of the insolvency of Dupont Steam Irons. He wrote again, naming his price. A letter of acceptance came back from a firm of Sheffield solicitors.

  Against all the predictions of his architect, the hotel was completed on time. ‘You want a job doing well,’ Bryant told him, ‘you get your own men to do it.’

  5 August 1936 was a breezy, sunny day. Mr Bryant congratulated himself on choosing it for the hotel’s Grand Opening and Buffet Lunch. At 12.30 the first guests stepped into a hall laid with checkerboard parquet. Several aspidistras umbrellaed out over a stained-oak counter marked ‘Reception’. Above the fireplace hung a large, gilt-framed painting. It showed a great lick of a green wave breaking on the sands of Hemlock Cove; the Main Cages were dark shapes in the background. There was a patch of sky on one side where the bare canvas showed through; in the bottom right-hand corner the painting was signed ‘M.J. Abraham, 1936’.

  Upstairs, one of the bedrooms was on show. Mrs Bryant’s imaginative colour scheme was admired by all who saw it – except Mrs Franks, who called it ‘irredeemably vulgar’. The walls were painted sand-yellow, the counterpanes and lampshades were a woody yellow and beside the window was a custard-yellow, plumbed-in washbasin. The butter-coloured towels were embroidered with ‘GOLDEN SANDS’ in ochre thread. The window looked down over the lawns, between stands of fur-trunked Fortune palms to the hotel’s beach – which was neither golden nor sandy but covered in grey pebbles.

  One hundred and twenty guests attended the lunch. The Petrel owne
rs came. They stood in a group at the bar and Ralph Cameron with his George V beard sipped at a pink gin. ‘Might be time to change watering-holes.’

  ‘The Antalya’s become very gloomy,’ said the Dane Soren.

  ‘Rather!’ agreed Lawrence Rose.

  The Hoopers brought Captain and Mrs Henriksen. Mr and Mrs Connors arrived with Anna Abraham. Major Franks and Mrs Franks appeared on the terrace with their house guest of three weeks, a very distinguished-looking Indian man in a white suit and white panama hat. Mrs Franks introduced him to Parson Hooper as ‘the Master’.

  After lunch, the guests gathered on the lawn below. At half past two, Mr Bryant climbed up on a bench on the terrace and clapped his hands for silence. On one side of the bench was Mrs Bryant, on the other, three feet taller than her, was Lady Banville. The brigantine Lady Banville, bound for Liverpool with a cargo of copra and teak, had been wrecked on the Cages in 1862. Her figurehead was spotted rotting in a garden by Mr Bryant. He bought her for ten bob, had her restored, repainted and erected on the hotel terrace. Her eyes were now glossy blackcurrants, her lips re-rouged, and she displayed a spectacular décolletage – in which was stuck a blood-red rose.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ Bryant was without his hat. The wind flicked at the lapels of his dark suit. ‘I would like you to imagine, if you will, a town such as Polmayne one hundred years ago – before the railways. In those days it would take the best part of a week to get from here to London. The people here lived in ignorant isolation, depending for their livelihood on the meagre fruits of the sea. All that has changed. Like a beautiful debutante Polmayne stands on the threshold of a – er, “golden” age. Today she is coming out!

  ‘Business, I always believe, is a little like marriage’ – for effect, he glanced down at Mrs Bryant. ‘Both depend on the principle of mutual benefit. Likewise, here at the Golden Sands we are providing not only repose for our guests but employment and prosperity to a town which is sorely in need of it.’