Cathbad and his children are doing yoga in the garden. Miranda, aged seven, spends most of her time trying to stand on her head. Michael, aged ten, takes it more seriously. He dislikes games at school but is actually well-coordinated with a good sense of balance. Maddie, Cathbad’s grown-up daughter, has unexpectedly joined them and she is like a poster for yogic prowess, standing on one leg in tree pose, her golden hair shining in the weak sun. The rescue hens, Darcy, Shirley and Motsi, watch her admiringly. The children chose the names although Cathbad still secretly thinks of the chicken sisters as Alecto, Tisiphone and Megaera, after the Eumenides, or Furies, the Greek goddesses of vengeance.
Cathbad has a pretty shrewd idea why Maddie has materialised this morning, but he says nothing until he has finished the session, raising his thumbs to his third eye and lowering them to his heart. Michael copies him. Miranda has wandered off to find Thing, who is excluded from yoga because he finds downward facing dog unbearably exciting. Maddie whispers a reverent ‘namaste’.
‘We’re going to start every day with yoga,’ Cathbad tells Maddie, as they walk back to the house. ‘I’m trying to make home-schooling a real adventure. We’ll tell a continuing story and illustrate it with things that we find on the beach or on our nature walks. The school have sent some work sheets but I don’t think we’ll bother with them. Michael and Miranda can learn science, history and geography from the world around them.’
‘I can help,’ says Maddie. ‘I’m good at telling stories.’
‘Have you come to stay then?’ says Cathbad, measuring coffee carefully into his Italian espresso machine. The children have already got out the flapjacks. Thing is hoovering up crumbs.
‘If that’s OK with you and Judy.’
‘You’ll have to ask Judy but I’m sure it will be. We’d love to have you.’ Cathbad feels an atavistic satisfaction at the thought of having all his children with him during lockdown. With the hens and the vegetable patch they’ll be almost self-sufficient. There’s no need for any of them to venture into the terrifying world of coronavirus. Except Judy, of course.
‘I think I’ll go mad if I stay at the flat with no outside space,’ says Maddie. ‘The lease is up next month and Jody’s going to move back home too.’ Maddie’s flatmate Jody is a nurse. Cathbad thinks that she’ll need all the creature comforts she can get in the weeks ahead.
‘I expect I’ll be furloughed,’ says Maddie. ‘But I can still do freelance work.’
‘What’s furloughed?’ says Cathbad. The word has a baleful agricultural sound, a cross between furrow and plough.
‘You keep your job, but on less pay,’ says Maddie. ‘I suppose it’s better than nothing. But it’ll leave me time to help with the home-schooling. We can start our own newspaper. TheCathbad Chronicle. TheNorfolk News.’
‘TheWeird Times,’ says Cathbad.
‘These are weird times, all right,’ says Maddie.
Nelson holds his meeting, in defiance of the new regulations. He does wear a mask though and is surprised how claustrophobic it makes him feel. You can breathe, he tells himself, it’s all in your mind. He remembers Ruth telling him about a panic attack she once had whilst swimming. ‘Suddenly I just forgot how to breathe.’ He realises now that he never asked what Ruth had been panicking about.
It’s a shock to see the team wearing masks too. Tony’s, like Nelson’s, is standard NHS issue but Tanya’s is a rather jaunty tartan affair. ‘Petra made it for me,’ she says. ‘Masks are going to be in short supply.’ Nelson has already had a memo about shortages of PPE. It makes him feel slightly guilty about planning to send masks to Ruth.
He tells the team that the investigation into the death of Avril Flowers is still a priority. ‘Just do as much on the phone as you can,’ says Nelson. ‘We’ll keep looking into the other suicides too. We can’t expect much back-up. Uniform might be required to help the emergency services.’ He doesn’t add that, according to Jo, one of the tasks that might fall to the police force is ‘burying the dead’.
‘What about civilian staff?’ asks Leah. ‘I’ve heard of people being furloughed.’
‘Some will be furloughed,’ says Nelson. ‘But you’re a key worker in my eyes.’
‘Who else would work the printer for you?’ says Leah.
Everyone laughs a lot at this, glad at the release of tension, but Nelson sees something else in his PA’s face, something that makes him feel a little worried. He identifies it later: relief.
Chapter 15
It’s still dark when Ruth wakes up. The green numbers on her alarm clock say 6.05 a.m. Ruth resolutely closes her eyes but she knows there’s something there, just on the edge of her consciousness, something waiting to pounce, zigzagging its way across her synapses. Ah, there it is. Pandemic. Lockdown. Virus. Death. Ruth sits bolt upright, reaching for the soothing tones of Radio 4. ‘Health Secretary Matt Hancock announces that a temporary hospital called NHS Nightingale will open in London to cope with the rising tide of coronavirus cases. . .’ Ruth switches off the radio. Her phone pings. ‘GOV.UK CORONAVIRUS ALERT,’ says the message, in stress-inducing capitals. ‘New rules are now in force. You must stay at home. . .’
Ruth tries to breathe mindfully, the way Cathbad taught her. In for four, out for eight. Don’t have a panic attack, she tells herself. You’re quite safe as long as you never leave the house. But Ruth must go to the shops today to buy Flint’s gourmet cat food. Strangely, the thought of doing something actually calms her. She gets up and puts on her dressing gown. She’ll go downstairs and have a cup of tea. Then she’ll start planning her day’s teaching. She’s getting to grips with the dreaded Zoom. At first, she treated it like a recorded lecture but now she’s able to be more interactive and is even able to send the students into breakout rooms. Preferably for ever.
Ruth treads carefully across the landing. She doesn’t want to wake Kate. She has a feeling that it’s going to be very hard to occupy Kate all day, especially when Ruth has her own work to do. The worksheets the school has sent seem very dull and, besides, Kate will dash through them in minutes. Thank goodness for the Saltmarsh, miles of blessedly empty marshland full of educational possibilities. They can collect grasses and shells. They can search for Neolithic flint flakes. When the weather gets better, they can paddle or even swim. Surely this nightmare will be over by the summer? But, even as Ruth dreams of shell and grass collages, she imagines Kate refusing to go outside and rolling her eyes at the thought of Neolithic flakes. She must ask Cathbad for some advice. She’s sure that he will have an imaginative curriculum worked out.
Flint is waiting for her in the kitchen, staring pointedly at his empty bowl. Ruth feeds him while she waits for the kettle to boil. Then she takes her tea into the sitting room. The sun is rising over the marshes, turning the distant sea to gold. The Saltmarsh is coming to life, like a photograph developing, the grasses turning from grey to brown to green, the birds ascending from the reedbeds to wheel across the rosy sky. Dawn. Ruth thinks of the picture she found in her parents’ house, ‘Dawn 1963’. Out on this very eastern edge of England, the sunrises are spectacular. Is that why Ruth’s mother took that photo, all those years ago? The shoebox is still by the front door, where Ruth left it when she came back from London. So much has happened in the weeks since then. Ruth clears a space on her desk, which is overflowing with files and books from her office, and rifles through the school photos and adult baptisms until she finds the picture of the cottage. Flint jumps lightly onto the table and starts sniffing the box. Maybe he can just smell Eltham mice, but Ruth takes his interest to be a sign that this is a mystery worth pursuing.
The picture shows all three cottages. To take it the photographer must have been standing on the other side of the road, in the rough grass that segues into the marshes. Was it taken at sunrise? It’s hard to tell because the colours have faded so much. There are no people present, just the three houses and a car. Ruth has no idea of the make. She could ask Nelson or Judy but she thinks they have enough on their plates on the moment. The houses are painted pink and there’s a hedge in front of them. A tree in the garden of the right-hand house seems to be in blossom, which means the picture was taken in spring. The tree’s not there now. The weekenders cut it down when they paved over the front garden.
Ruth moved into her house, 2 New Road, twenty-two years ago. She had been part of a dig that had discovered a Bronze Age henge buried in the nearby sands. The excavation turned out to have long-lasting and devastating consequences, one of which, for Ruth, was a passionate love of Norfolk. Ruth applied for a lecturing job at the University of North Norfolk and bought the cottage, which was then uninhabited. Who had owned it? She has the title deeds somewhere, but she remembers that the previous resident had been an elderly man who had died on the premises, probably in Ruth’s bedroom with its view of the ever-changing marshes. She tries not to think of this fact too often. The house was then passed to his children who had been anxious to sell it as quickly as possible. Ruth got the place very cheaply and had loved it from the first. Even though she had first co-habited with her then-boyfriend, Peter, the cottage had seemed always and only hers, although nowadays Kate and Flint would probably claim joint ownership.
‘What are you doing, Mum?’
Ruth jumps. Even Flint looks up guiltily. Kate is at the foot of the stairs in her Peppa Pig pyjamas, which are slightly too small for her. Her dark hair is standing up around her head. She looks very grumpy and very young.
‘Looking at this picture,’ says Ruth, showing Kate. She’s interested in her reaction.
