Charlie by Lesley Pearse
There was an autumn chill in the air this morning – almost, but not quite, an early frost. He noted there were far more seagulls than usual, wheeling around screeching, and that suggested bad weather was on its way.
He liked the harbour best at this time of day, deserted but for the birds and the odd prowling cat. On warmer days he liked to sit and watch the sun come up, to marvel how the sea turned from black to dark green and slowly to blue. But today the sea was determined to stay a sullen grey-green, and he decided to take the MaryAnn out now to collect his lobster pots rather than wait until after breakfast.
The pots were disappointingly empty, and as he turned the boat around to go back to the harbour, he spotted a figure in the distance, walking up by the Marine Hotel. He idly wondered why anyone was about so early; except in high summer he never saw a soul on his morning excursions. He came to the conclusion it was one of the hotel staff returning from a night on the tiles. The thought made him smile. He could remember a time when he too could stay out all night and still do a day’s work after it.
Ivor had finished all his chores, washed his shirt and underwear, swept and mopped over the kitchen floor, and laid a fire for later. It was only the pips on the wireless that made him look at the clock. It was nine, and Charlie hadn’t turned up.
He wasn’t the least concerned as there was little for her to do now the only holidaymakers were a handful of pensioners; besides, it was raining now and that would deter any would-be customers.
Ten o’clock came, then half past, but there was still no sign of Charlie. He stood in the shack doorway looking out at the heavy rain, and wondered if she was still upset about the events of the previous day.
By eleven the rain was torrential, so dark Ivor couldn’t see well enough in the shack to do anything, and as Charlie still hadn’t turned up, he put his pipe in his pocket, locked up and walked over to the pub, Minnie padding silently behind him. Mrs Maggs the cleaner was just mopping down the bar floor as he stepped inside. ‘We’re not open yet,’ she bawled at him, as if he didn’t know the opening hours.
‘Just wanted to see Beryl for a minute,’ Ivor said. Maggs was a harridan of over sixty, she had only one brown tooth and the worst varicose veins Ivor had ever seen, yet she not only cleaned here, but in several private homes too. Beryl called her a treasure.
‘She’s doing some paperwork upstairs,’ Maggs shouted as if he was deaf. ‘You can go up, as long as you wipe your boots first.’
Beryl was sitting at her desk just inside her sitting room, with a desk lamp on. Her red hair was like a torch, contrasting vividly with an apple-green sweater. She looked round in surprise as Ivor came up the stairs with his dog.
‘What brings you round here?’ she asked. ‘Want to borrow some money or a bottle of rum?’ This was a long-standing joke between them. Once, many years ago, another regular drinker at the pub had suggested Ivor and Beryl were having an affair because Ivor always seemed to be the first in the bar in the evenings. Ivor had kept a straight face and said he always got in first to borrow a bottle of rum and some money.
‘Neither today,’ Ivor grinned. ‘Just wondered how Charlie was. Is she sick?’
‘You mean she isn’t with you?’ Beryl said in some surprise, and beckoned him into the room. ‘She’s not upstairs. I went up there earlier when it started to rain to check she hadn’t left her window open.’
‘Did she get a call or anything from her mother last night?’ Ivor asked, mystified as to why she hadn’t been round to tell him if something pressing had come up.
‘I don’t think so,’ Beryl frowned. ‘She went up to bed about ten. She seemed very down in the dumps.’
‘She had a bad day yesterday,’ Ivor said. ‘Did she tell you about it?’
‘Not a word.’ Beryl shook her head. ‘But then she’s been kind of quiet and brooding ever since that business with Guy. What with that, and the prospect of moving in with her mum, I thought she had a perfect right to be a bit dejected. I didn’t believe a word of her story about Guy. I reckon he dumped her.’
‘Me too,’ Ivor said ruefully. ‘I didn’t challenge her story at the time because I thought she was being very brave. Perhaps I should have.’ He then went on to tell Beryl what had happened with the lawyer. ‘I thought she’d come to terms with it all by the time she left me in the early evening. But maybe I was wrong.’
‘Where could she have gone?’ Beryl asked. ‘She must have left before nine because I got up around then.’
Ivor sensed this was something more than a teenager suddenly bunking off work. He sat down with Beryl and they discussed the business of her meeting with Wyatt the previous day.
‘If she was angry and felt cheated, perhaps she got the idea of going back to her old house,’ Beryl suggested. ‘I know I’d want to go and grab anything I could if I’d been treated so shabbily. Or could it be Guy? Could a letter have come from him in the post? If he apologized she may have gone off to meet him.’
‘I think she would’ve left a note if she’d heard from Guy,’ Ivor said. ‘And however angry she was about the bankruptcy, she wouldn’t dare break into the house to take anything, it would be a criminal offence.’
Suddenly Ivor remembered that figure he’d seen going towards the Marine Hotel. The person was so far away he had no idea if it could have been a girl. He told Beryl about it.
‘Around five-thirty, you say,’ she mused. ‘Oddly enough I woke up around that time today. I could have been disturbed by the sound of the front door closing behind her.’
They went up into Charlie’s room then to look around. Her bed was unmade, and her waterproof coat was still there, hanging on the back of the door.
‘It’s strange she didn’t make her bed, she always does,’ Beryl said, bending over and straightening it out. ‘She told me once she didn’t even know how to until she went to stay with that friend of hers. Apparently the mother laid into her about it, and said there was no housekeeper there to do it for her. She said she had to learn how to do it then, and never forgot again. I suppose she could have just gone out for a breath of fresh air, intending to come right back, then took shelter from the rain.’
‘She always laughed at me going out early in the morning,’ Ivor said. ‘So I can’t imagine her getting out of a warm bed for that. Besides, it didn’t start raining until nineish. If she did set out at five-thirty she’s been gone nearly six hours!’
Beryl made no reply. When Ivor looked at her he saw she was frowning.
‘What’s up? Have you thought of something?’
‘You don’t think she could be pregnant, do you?’ she blurted out.
They stared at each other for a moment, united in their anxiety for a girl they both cared deeply for. ‘Good God! I hope not,’ Ivor exclaimed.
‘She couldn’t really know yet, could she?’ Beryl said breathlessly. ‘I mean, it’s only a month, isn’t it? But what if she was worrying about it?’
‘If you weigh up everything she’s had to cope with since those men attacked her mother –’ Ivor broke off, afraid to finish saying what he’d thought. A clap of thunder, quickly followed by a flash of lightning, made him look towards the window. ‘And she’s out there in that. She hasn’t even taken her coat.’
‘You don’t think she might have planned to –’ Beryl stopped short, her expression one of horror. She clapped her hand over her mouth as she remembered where the road Ivor had seen her on led to. ‘The cliff path!’
‘I’ll go and look for her,’ Ivor said. He suddenly felt sick with fear, just the way he felt when the action stations signal came on the ship during the war. ‘Can I borrow your car?’
‘But you can’t drive!’ Beryl wrung her hands.
‘Yes I can, I just haven’t chosen to for years,’ he said. ‘You ring the police, Beryl. I’ll go straight along to Soar Mill Cove. If we aren’t too late already, by my reckoning that’s about where she would have got to by now.’
Ivor was right in his estimation, Charlie
She had no idea why she’d come this way, she’d just walked blindly, wrapped up in her misery, and found herself on the cliff path. As the rain got heavier, she thought she might reach shelter up ahead quicker than turning back, so she pressed on. But the path just went on and on, up and down, growing more slippery with each step. Her plimsolls were sodden, the stones dug right through the thin soles, and before long she was stumbling and crying with frustration. There were no houses, at least if there were any they were shrouded in mist. The only living creatures she saw were a few straggly, frightened-looking sheep.
Suddenly she saw she was back in her nightmare. She was right on the cliff edge looking down at the sea pounding on rocks below. Yet it didn’t seem like a dream, she could feel the rain going right through her clothes, she was icy cold, and the wind was buffeting her, almost as if it was trying to assist her over the edge. Had the nightmare been a prophecy? A way of showing how she could escape her misery?
She wanted oblivion, nothing had ever felt so right before. To step out into nothingness, leaving all her problems behind. No more waking each day to a sick fear inside, no one could humiliate her again. Someone else could look after her mother.
She took a step backwards, poised herself to take a running jump. But just as she had lifted one foot to go forward, a voice shrieked out inside her head, asking who would look after Sylvia.
‘I don’t care who does it,’ she shrieked back in answer. ‘As long as it doesn’t have to be me!’
The sound of her own voice above the rain, the sea and the seagulls was like an alarm clock going off, abruptly bringing her back to reality. She looked down at her feet in sodden, dirty plimsolls, saw they were less than six or seven inches from the cliff edge, and she felt again that absolute terror she’d woken with just a short while ago.
Yet as she shrank back from the edge to safety, anger supplanted terror. She wasn’t even free to end her own life, she was bound too tightly by morality and duty. Shackled to her damned mother so there would be no escape, ever.
In her anger she yelled out, cursing her father for starting all this, cursing Guy for giving her the dream of freedom, and damned herself to hell and back for not having the courage just to leap forward into space regardless of the consequences to her mother and those who cared about her.
She couldn’t even have the utter silence she needed. The rain was hammering down, the sea roared and boiled on the rocks below, seagulls squawked all around her, seemingly taunting her timidity.
Sobbing wildly, she went on, but the desperation which had driven her here was now focused only on getting back home, to be dry, warm and comforted by someone. Half blinded by tears, the path now just a slippery slick of mud, she wasn’t watching where she put her feet. As she went down a steep section of the path, she lost her footing and fell backwards, shooting over on to the grassy hill as though she was on a toboggan run.
Her arms and hands flailed out, trying to snatch at the long grass, but this was wet and slippery too and just slid through her fingers. She hit a large stone, but instead of breaking her fall she seemed to veer off to the right, down over more sodden grass and heather, and kept hurtling on downwards.
The last thing she saw was a large boulder looming up right in her path.
She came to to find herself lying at an acute angle, her head pointing down the hill and a terrible sharp pain in her back and shoulder. She thought she must have hit the boulder and been knocked out, for she was right beside it.
She didn’t dare attempt to move, assuming by the pain that her back must be broken. The rain was lashing down on her, the wind icy through her soaked sweater and jeans, then a loud clap of thunder quickly followed by a flash of lightning frightened her still further.
‘Help me!’ she called out, but the futility of such a weak cry in the wind and rain made her sob with hopelessness. It was only when she instinctively lifted her arm to look at her watch, some minutes later, that it occurred to her she wouldn’t be able to do even that if her back was broken. Surely she’d be paralysed?
That cheered her slightly, but she wasn’t wearing her watch, she’d left it on the bedside table, and she couldn’t even guess what time it was. She asked herself how long she might have to lie here before anyone found her. Hikers and bird-watchers used the path frequently in good weather, but not in rain like this. She might be here for hours.
Turning her head a little, she saw to her further consternation that if she continued to lie as she was now, pretty soon the heavy rain would sweep her further down the hill. With her right hand, which she knew was unhurt, she reached out for a hand-hold on the boulder and slowly, inch by inch because of the pain, she managed to pull herself up and round into a sitting position.
Just the fact she could sit was proof her spine was intact, yet the pain was so bad she wanted to lie down again. She lifted one leg tentatively, then the other, and decided they were only badly bruised. But her left arm and shoulder hurt so much it was clear they’d taken the brunt of the fall. She might physically be able to walk, if she could get herself into a standing position, but common sense told her it would be folly to attempt to climb up that slippery slope to the footpath. One more slip and who knows where she might end up.
There was nothing for it but to sit and wait for help to come. She would keep her ears open for footsteps, then yell if she heard anyone.
Sitting there in the rain soon became the worst kind of torture she could imagine. She was so cold she wasn’t even shivering any longer, and the pain was growing ever stronger. She couldn’t get even moderately comfortable against the boulder, and the prospect of a long wait grew ever more alarming.
If she could just see clearly she felt she’d be less scared; for all she knew there could be a house somewhere near. But the visibility was limited to around ten yards or so through the rain and mist.
Yet over and above her discomfort she kept asking herself why she’d come up here in the first place. She couldn’t really remember exactly what prompted it – surely just a nightmare wasn’t enough to make someone behave so irrationally? When she thought about it, the whole business, from dressing herself to finding herself here, was something of a blur. She’d often heard that phrase, ‘While the balance of his mind was disturbed’, and it was usually said after someone had committed suicide. Was that what had happened to her? Had she lost her mind for a while?
It occurred to her that for weeks now she’d been behaving as she imagined her father would under pressure, getting on with what had to be done, resigned to it all. Apart from the odd weep now and then she’d been quite tough. But today’s events proved she was every bit as capable of loopy acts as her mother. Strange though it was, that almost pleased her. She didn’t like to think she was entirely Jin, in the light of his behaviour. Anyway, she felt she was rational again now, it was ghastly to think that just a short while ago she’d been on the point of jumping from that cliff top, but maybe she had to go so far before she could see how things really were?
The bankruptcy had been finalized. She and her mother had a home again. Sitting here soaked to the skin, a storm raging around her, with no immediate rescue likely, looking after her mother and returning to school didn’t seem so very terrible, in fact it felt comforting. So maybe Guy had let her down badly, but could she really have moved to London just to be near him? The men from the Receiver’s office were a bunch of crooks, but she did have those treasures stashed away. If she went back to school and got her ‘A’ levels, maybe she could still go to university.
There was still a chance too that her dad might turn up, she mustn’t lose sight of that. She also wondered about her mother?
She looked up as another flash of lightning flashed across the dark sky. Ivor would be looking out at it from the shack, he’d be wondering where she was. She knew with utter certainty that before long he’d start a search for her. Even if everyone else had failed her, she knew he wouldn’t. All she had to do was wait.
In an effort to take her mind off the pain and cold, she tried reciting poetry aloud, forcing herself to remember things she’d learned when she was seven or eight. She tried singing, but nothing more came to her than ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’.
After a while she felt as if she was drifting off to sleep. It was an extraordinary sensation, because common sense told her sleep was impossible when she was so cold and wet. Besides, even if it was possible, she knew she mustn’t because she had to listen for people. Yet still she felt herself slipping away, and her whole being told her to lie down and let it happen.
Ivor drove Beryl’s Morris Minor to where the narrow lane ended above Soar Mill Cove. He leapt out, Minnie following him, and strung the coil of rope he’d brought with him diagonally across his shoulder and chest. Then, reaching back into the car, he took the rucksack he’d packed with a flask of hot tea, Charlie’s coat and a blanket, and slid that on to his back. Finally he grabbed his walking stick, jumped over the stile and set off at a fast jog down the footpath through fields towards the sea.
‘Find Charlie,’ he said to Minnie, but she just barked and wagged her tail as if she thought she was in for a good day out.
This part of the Devon coast land was the most deserted and unspoilt: wild and rugged, a place for only sheep and wildlife. Ivor had often walked it when he first came to Salcombe.