The House at Mermaid's Cove(49)

“Would you like that, Ned?” Merle asked.

He gave a loud sniff and a violent nod.

When the others had gone, I heated up some water and gave Ned a bath in the metal tub that hung behind the door in the bathroom. I’d often washed patients at the mission hospital, but I’d never given anyone a proper bath. I was worried about the soap going in his eyes and making him cry again, but he was very good. He didn’t make a whimper—even when I poured water over his head to get the last of the sand out of his hair. His brown curls stuck to his skin like the slick fur of a seal, parting over his ears. When I went to rub him dry, I noticed a small hole at the top of his left ear, as if someone had stuck a needle through the skin.

“Louis hasn’t been hurting you, has he?” I asked.

His hand went to the place my fingers were examining. His face told me that he was unaware of anything being amiss there. “He did kick me,” he said. “Not on my head—on my leg.”

“Has he done anything else?”

He shook his head.

“Well, if he hurts you again you must tell Auntie Merle—or me.”

When he was dry, I sat him on my lap, swathed in the towel, and fed him fish-paste sandwiches. While he was eating, I told him a story that my mother used to read to me, about a giant whose legs were so long he could step across the Irish Sea without getting his feet wet. I would have kept him all evening if I could. But I’d promised to get him back to the house by seven o’clock.

Ned held my hand as we walked up the valley, through carpets of bluebells, with swifts and swallows darting through the air after insects. He wanted to know the names of all the birds that we heard, and the flowers that we saw. I picked a foxglove and showed him how to put the petals on the ends of his fingers. When we passed the church, I caught a glimpse of an owl perched in a branch of a yew tree. I pointed it out to him, and we stood watching as it flew across the churchyard, swooping low to perch on a Celtic cross that stuck out of the ground at a crazy angle.

“Will you be my mummy?” Ned whispered.

His words took my breath away. He was looking up at me, his big, dark eyes so vulnerable, so trusting.

“Oh, Ned,” I murmured. “I’d love to be your mummy. But you have a mummy already.”

He shook his head. “That’s what Auntie Merle says. I asked her to be my mummy, but she says she can’t because she’s my auntie.”

His eyes were glassy with tears. I crouched down beside him, my feet squashing last year’s dead leaves, the damp smell of them rising from the muddy ground. “Your mummy would be with you if she could,” I said. “She lives across the sea, and she has to stay there for a while, but one day you’ll see her. She’ll come and take you home.”

“When?” The look he gave me was heartbreaking.

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “Soon, I hope.”

“But I want a mummy now.”

I didn’t trust myself to speak. I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him to me. I felt his tears on my skin. “I could be a pretend mummy,” I murmured into his ear. “What about that?”

“A pretend mummy?” He moved his head away from the crook of my neck, his eyes searching my face.

“Like in a game,” I said. “Like when you put your gas mask on and pretend to be a monster.”

He nodded.

“We’ll pretend we’re birds, living in the woods.” I cocked my head toward the owl, who was still perched on the tombstone, preening its feathers. “I’ll be the mummy owl and you be the boy owl. We need to go hunting for mice for our supper. Where shall we look?”

“Over there!” He ran to a fallen tree whose trunk was covered in moss and got down on all fours, peering underneath it.

I watched him as he scrambled about catching imaginary mice. I knew that I was going to have to be very careful. It was so easy to love him. But I didn’t think I could bear that pain again—the agony of having, one day, to say goodbye to him.



The next day, when my work at the farm was over, I went to see Leo Badger. He was sitting in a chair, pipe in hand, chatting away to George Retallack. George got up when I came into the cottage and said he’d wait outside while I looked Leo over.

There was no real need for me to examine Leo, as he was getting regular visits from the district nurse, but he seemed keen to show me how his injuries were healing. He asked me to recount exactly what I’d done to his leg on the day of the accident. His eyes gleamed as I described fashioning a tourniquet out of George’s shirt to stop the bleeding.

“That’s twice I’ve nearly bled to death, then.” He looked as pleased as if he’d just netted the biggest catch of pilchards in history. “Did I show you where the shark bit me?”

He looked disappointed when I said that he had—but he cheered up when I produced the apple pie that Merle had made for him.

When I went outside George was sitting on the doorstep. I offered him a slice of the pie, which he politely refused, saying that Leo needed it all to build his strength up. We chatted for a while about the practicalities of getting Leo in and out of bed, and about how long it would be before he could go fishing again. As George talked, his eyes darted this way and that, as if he were constantly monitoring his environment even though he couldn’t see it. I wondered if he would be at the quayside again the next time we went to France, ready to untether the rope when Jack gave the signal. It dawned on me that there was great wisdom in picking a blind man for that job: if anyone tried to get information out of him, he wouldn’t be able to say who had been on the boat.