Peninsular

I didn’t upset Mam. Continued to live with her, just as she continued to live with her story of the paintings by her great-grandfather, the ‘moonlight man’, Edwin Tate. Who left the dockside tenements to live in a Jacobean Manor overlooking the bay, just like the one on the books. Whose paintings reach six-figures. Whose pictures were on our table-mats and postcards and second-hand books, but not on our walls.

Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Unpublished Books

PART 1

PAINT

1974

All I am is five minutes late – but Mam stands at the gate, arms crossed, not smiling, not even pretending like she does sometimes.

‘Past teatime … been on the table ages … cold now.’ She leans in, hisses as she whisks me inside. ‘Where have you been?’ She reaches down to yank my arm. I open my mouth.

‘I …’

The toggles on my mustard cardi become tight as she pulls me round to face her. The door moves from my grasp.

‘I know where you were. I saw you. Well? Did you have a nice time? Even though I’ve told you not to?’

I must look blank while I decide to deny or go with.

‘… So?’ Mam glares. ‘So when will you go to Red Hall again?’

I say, ‘I’ll never go again. I promise,’ and I mean it. I never want to upset Mam again. Not like this. I will never give her reason to screech and bead her eyes. I will be a good girl.

I straighten my back at the table and eat my omelette. It’s still my favourite, even cold. Yes, I must remember to say thank you for making my best tea. Yes, that will make her happy.

I would like to be friends with Natalie from school and her brother, Isaac – who has a microscope – but I love my funny Mam so I’ll be no trouble. I’ll be good.

She quietly collects my plate. I daren’t disrupt this calm. I like things even – horizons, table edges, smooth structural beams. I love the spirit level’s bubble in its luminous yellow liquid when it remains within its lines. My strategy is to keep things smooth.

She returns with a cup of tea and two biscuits on the saucer.

‘You can bring it upstairs if you like,’ she says, and touches my shoulder.

‘Thank you, Mam.’

I sit myself into the window nook and look out over the saltmarsh. Sheep follow each other in merging lines. I like Mam’s lamb and gravy. I will tell her. Will always tell her.

Before bed I read some Jane Eyre, because I’m ten and aiming high. Mam liked the house on the cover. I do too. It is an old, dark house with orange windows. It looks like the insides are on fire until I remember how, in those days, each room had a grate. One day I’ll live in a house like that – or a ‘manor’ or a ‘hall’. I know plenty of words from reading, not so many from speaking. My hall will glow warmly, unlike our cottage that backs onto the bay, with its peeling frames and windows foggy with salt.

I brush my teeth and look myself in the eye.

I will be good.

I am good.

I scrunch the quilt around me and think of all the poor people sleeping in Barrow’s alleys and doorways. ‘Ex-foundry men,’ Mam said. I feel sorry for them but I can’t help thinking back a few hours, jumping in the leaf pile and swinging on massive ironwork gates. How it felt good!

Mam switches the bedside light off and kisses me, whispers ‘Goodnight.’

I will be a good girl.

Then I’ll leave.

2016

So.

I took exams, found a new home, made a new family, forgot that day; the last time she showed herself like that to me.

I made sure she was as happy as she could be on Sunderness Point, in a cottage too close to her loss. Right next door. But there’s no easy escape when there’s no money. And anyway she’d have missed the sea and sunsets – and the kelpy air and the mild, but long, misty winters.

And the quiet.

I missed that too when I left.

We probably could have got on with our lives had it not been for the fact that they did reside on the walls of our neighbours, at Red Hall. Mam didn’t like that one bit. Became obsessed. But I never saw them and wouldn’t even try, because I believed being good was the way to go. Only the hall’s high walls and orbed gates were solid in my memory, and even they dissipated over the years like a Morecambe Bay fog.

I had planned to return. One day. See if it was all true. Show myself that I had made the right choice all those years ago.

Somehow, it just kept being put-off. Until Mam wasn’t there anymore.

The Ness

Olivia scrabbles on the bedside table for the phone. Calls after nine are rarely good news and those at midnight, never. The cheery ringtone triggers a hypertensive gush in her ears, accompanied by an image of Mam perched at the telephone table, receiver in both hands, scrutinising the pull-out slate where, in heavy pencil, ‘OLIVIA’ stands out from faded hieroglyphics – numbers of dead aunts, defunct hospitals and shuttered bookshops. Mam wouldn’t erase them, nor the ‘Hugh’ that was visible when pulled right out. Olivia had always been Hugh’s little shadow, before the meaning changed and he slipped beyond the reach of landlines.

It won’t be him, and it’s definitely not her.

Anyway, who uses landlines when they have her mobile number?

‘It’s Isaac … Isaac Price … Sunderness?’

Yes, she knows Isaac. The way he looks: dark hair, meaningful eyebrows. Where he lives: Red Hall, the only other dwelling on the peninsula.

He must imagine he’s talking to that strange Olivia at the cottage who was friendly one minute and never again; who was quiet on the school bus and wouldn’t even take his old textbooks from him. Olivia’s well aware how she comes across. It’s taken thirty years to understand.

Yes, she knows who he is, at least the bit where his family, being the only neighbours, are the only enemies too. Mam forbade any connection with them and it was never romance – not actual. Well, maybe just a tad on her side, for four-weeks-three-days, when she was fourteen and loved him from an impossible three year distance. He had half the sixth-form after him, and the use of his little beach cove. Great for bonfires and illicit smoking.

Their exchanges on the school bus were limited to photography exhibitions or the next Bio Soc meeting. Later, on occasional visits to elderly parents their cars passed on the single-track lane, with a polite smile and wave when one backed up. Three years ago he’d lowered the window to say sorry for her loss. Yes, that was the last time she saw him. Phone updates from Andrea, her village friend who checked in on the cottage, persuaded her there was no need to return. The cottage was still fine. So she didn’t.

This however …

‘We’ve had some weather,’ he says.

Olivia knows he’s not talking pollen counts or wind-chill. This is Sunderness understatement. And for once she hadn’t checked the forecast on Friday because she was looking forward to a night in with a film and a couple of gin-and-slimlines for company, relaxed and comfy on the sofa. The red bill on the mat had taken the shine off that scenario as she felt the last fingerhold dragging from her grasp. Demands. Legal threats. No time to reminisce about waves.

‘How far?’

‘Couple of inches … you might be alright.’

‘Some weather’ is when a high tide hitches a ride with a strong onshore wind or heavy rain, or both. She imagines the water nibbling saltmarsh edges like they’re chocolate cake, before rising up mud and shingle, then over stones and grass, until it leaves a fine line of detritus on the yard’s floodgate.

‘I didn’t break in so I’m not sure … but I reset the gate … it was loose.’

Concern becomes guilt that her first thoughts are not soaked carpets or the wet settee but the cardboard box kicked behind the kitchen door. She imagines it bulging with sodden contents. Why hadn’t she looked through it properly like she’d promised?

‘There’s a diary in there, if you’ve time on your hands?’ Mam hinted. ‘Be worth checking.’ Then, sterner, ‘Don’t throw it without checking.’

The box contained old books and cuttings and postcards. Mam’s collection of her great-grandfather’s paintings. Curated in the hope that clues would rise from the dog-eared images about the one ‘still out there’ waiting to be found; the hitherto unattributed painting that only Mam could identify as genuine Tate, and thereby regain some vestige of the family fortune.

Mam was devoted to patterns in tone and subject, chronology and location; was alert to possible gaps – the missing panel of a triptych, the absent commission, the seasonal study with no winter. She took notes on Fake or Fortune like it was homework and had even bought a couple of charity shop pictures she’d suspected as Tates. Anyone other than Olivia would have considered her mad, but her daughter knew the years of close-reading, the meticulous note-taking, the research. It was the closest she got to owning one because they didn’t even have a sketch.

The box could, of course, hold nothing more than nostalgia for the countless weekend trips to secondhand bookshops of northern England. Mam had developed a strong sense of the artist, recognising patterns and unique strokes in his work. She’d privately recognised an unattributed image in the local pub as a Tate: an unsigned snowscape with none of the usual autumn leaves or warm-lit halls to flag it as his. North West Tonight proved her right when the Mason’ s Arms sold it to modernise their restaurant. She’d seen a similar composition at the edge of one of his sketch books at the Mercer Gallery in Harrogate and had stored the image away. It turned out to be work from his final years when he’d moved away from his signature halls and bustling streets, moonlit docks with cobbles like liquorice sweets. They were rarities, as were his earliest works.

Olivia had resorted to reading some of the box’s books during sad summers on the headland, when her few friends were away and she thought she’d dissolve into Sunderness silt. Especially so after Hugh left. Novels reliably connected her with life beyond the Point and to past times; Victorian novels for which Tate’s mysterious and melancholy images were ideal. Reading of others’ daily hardships made her life feel not so bad. She became dependant on them: a chain reader.

Isaac is talking about a landslip on the lane.

‘I’ll get there tomorrow.’

This is it then.

No more kicking this can down the road. She will just sell up. She can eek out a couple of months on her final wage while she gets the place spruced up. No rent if she returns to the cottage. No heating bills either, with the wood burner. She could be out by November. Ready to move on.

‘ … and thanks again for letting me know.’

He really didn’t have to do this after the way she and Mam had treated them. Maybe some people are just nicer than she is? Or maybe he has good reason to see her get that cottage sorted and sold? God she’s as cynical as Mam! But she can’t help it. Where had years of staycations, baking bread and paying into the company pension got her? Thirty grand in debt. Parties and designer clothes would have been a more enjoyable way to reach that financial low-water mark. Too late now. The cottage will be worth something. It will get her out of this mess. And it will sever the link to her childhood and Mam’s obsession with Tates plastering Red Hall’s walls.

If they do.

Olivia wouldn’t know because she’s never been inside. Even when she had the chance she didn’t risk Mam’s wrath. She’d been resolutely good, but had recently wondered about Mam’s views. Stolen works. Pictures taken from their rightful owners. Mam liked a tale, didn’t she?

Maybe Olivia could find a way in, just to satisfy her curiosity, before leaving for good. See if anything explains the mutterings of disgust when a Price passed by. Yes, she can solve both problems. With some TLC the cottage should appeal to downsizers or artists or, more realistically, investment purchasers. And while she’s painting and cleaning she can get inside Red Hall.

She rinses the dregs of her midnight tea and returns to bed, thinking of the cottage’s front room with its rough armchairs and horrible tasselled lamp, and that rectangular space above the fireplace. The picture that disappeared one numbingly cold night around the time Hugh left.

***

The new sign welcomes visitors to the ‘Lake District Peninsulas’ which to locals is simply ‘Furness’. She winds down the window for a hit of estuarine air and turns off the carriageway into hedgy lanes that dip between drumlins and edge fields stubbled like a Norseman’s whiskers. A mix of cortisol and nostalgia percolates her system. Returning could mean calm, sea stones and ringed plover on the sands, or a sea-mist confining her to where talk turned as quick as a slammed door.

She coasts the lane shorewards, splashes potholes on the causeway and rises again to the long-silted Sunderness quay. Her foot hovers the brake, but no one’s approaching. For centuries people travelled the ‘oversands’ route, from Hest Bank to the Cartmel and Low Furness peninsulas then on to the Cumbrian coast and Irish Sea. Its landways were bordered with haw and holly and yew, before its mysterious descent and disappearence into water, whelks and quicksands. Every few years a horse skeleton, carriagewheel or cross-beam of a boat is exposed out there.

The call from Isaac is a shock, but overdue. She braces herself for the worst case scenario: a flooded cottage. Takes herself through the rest: rugs can be dried, furniture taken outside, dehumidifier hired and if those books are soaked their all-important covers and the clues they might contain, can simply be cut and pressed like Victorian flowers. All do-able. Two months will be enough to ready it for buyers searching for a darling little place with rattan hearts, anchors and a sage-green door.

As chips of gravel chink the undercarriage, she sees the line of seaweed and stranded flotsam, visualises wave-lapped flood gates. Suddenly an old yellow Citreon is upon her and she has to pull over. It bounces past. No anticipation of corners. Must be a visitor for Isaac.

She negotiates the tricky bump near the cottage and stops. Curlews burble and the engine clicks. Her grand return. She gets a mint from her bag, checks her phone and reflexively her hair in the mirror. Sandy roots are a clear band now against the black colourant. She covers it with a Buff, mentally noting ‘hair dye’ on her to-do list, although no one’s going to notice her hair all the way out here.

This place unnerves her; the family home edgy and expectant and not a little judgemental. She inhales deeply. She’ll do it for Joe, as she always does – and won’t worry him with all her stuff. She’s done alright so far. Frugal living got him through college and now he’s fledged and living his own story, she must get back to hers – to whittle down her debt and clear up her ‘lost legacy’ before she leaves.

And … out.

There’s a movement near the old lamp-post where Hugh would jump out at her but it’s just wind whipping the hawthorn. And she wasn’t really scared. It just prepared her for the unexpected. Although now she’s unsure where to place Hugh in her emotional library – missing, absent without leave, lost, worse? For four decades. Nothing prepares you for that.

She remembers the Silk Cut Lights she has on standby in the glove compartment, for difficult events. She recalls one visit before Mam moved out, when Olivia had arrived at the cottage but had then turned home before smoking any. Before even reaching the door. It was a cowardly act that for months was represented by the intact packet. She’d smoked them just to get rid of the reminder.

The window frames have peeled to naked wood, and plates of that dreadful beige pebbledash lie broken on the path.

But no roof slates are gone.

The high tide-mark of crab-casings and bits of bright plastic stretches down the lane and into the beck. The line on the floodgate is just a few inches high.

And the backyard is dry.

The overgrown rose catches her town jacket. Mam’s clusters of sea stones, glass bottles and old floats sit like a tired welcoming party. Acid-green and mustard lichens blob the walls.

Such clean air.

Pots sprout grass, and the spare key isn’t under the Hosta but she can’t remember who’d have it or why so it’s just as well she still has hers.

Here goes.

The kitchen air escapes the confines of its neglect. Stale. Sedimentary. No doubt full of spores. Just needs a good airing, she tells herself, relieved she’s not stepping into an inch of water. And the box? It’s behind the door. Damp but not sagging. She lifts it to the table before jolting the windows open and checking the front parlour and understairs, then lifting the tiny cellar’s trapdoor. No standing water. There was no need for panic after all. It was good of Isaac to call. She picks a pebble from the sill, sniffs it for a trace of the sea, but it’s dissipated.

Where have three years gone? She’d planned to return sooner but what happened in Sunderness stayed in Sunderness. Mam’s death had unmoored her. There’s no question. But before that. How had she let things go so long before taking responsibility? She hadn’t conceived of a world without Mam; a life without tales. True or not.

The lights and plugs work and the boiler miraculously clanks into life as she turns the hot tap. She sets herself five trips to unload the car before the kettle boils, but does it in four as the bags are light and it’s a very old kettle. Her brew, with this soft water, tastes smoky and refreshing. She feels the ciggie pack in her pocket. She takes it out and lights up.

Sheep are nibbling the saltmarsh and pink angora clouds promise a dramatic Morecambe Bay sunset. Red and peach and flat grey.

The house is dry … No work Monday … Remember to thank Isaac … buy paint … but see if Mam was right … get inside Red Hall.

Ellen

Statement by Mrs. Ellen Dawson on 15^th September 1890 at Roose Lane Constabulary.

This is what I know. He came to Barrow in 1876. He was twenty-one years old having recently left his mother and sisters in Betws-y-coed. He lived of late at Red Hall on Sunderness. With his wife Henrietta, and two children.

I met him when I was seventeen. He was my father’s friend and worked at Barrow Foundry where he became partners with Mr. Whitley. He was working on a prototype.

We my father discussed this work with him on his visits to our home at Knowsthorpe. He visited Knostrop Old Hall especially regularly during the summer of 1887, after which time I never saw him again.

My father is Edwin Tate, and an artist.

The Books

Imagine waiting until fifty to break the rules. Mam had had her strange ways, but Olivia was always fed and watered. Uncomfortable yes, but never truly unsafe. And in exchange, Olivia ensured Mam was steady, had everything she needed – which wasn’t that much different to what she wanted. And she’d been a good-enough long-distance daughter, checking her food and bills and appointments. Visiting enough, but never managing to get inside Red Hall, see what all the fuss was about. Even when opportunities arose, like Isaac’s leaving party on the beach when he’d shouted a general invite across the bus and she’d crept to the cove, watching from the sidelines as others enjoyed the best splash-jumps hidden from parental view. The hall had been open and she could have pretended to need the loo but she didn’t because she was focussed on exams and university and tasting the world away from Sunderness.

They’d been on nodding terms during secondary school. He was three years older than Olivia, and three years younger than Hugh. She’d caught them drinking in the barn once, and they’d invited her to sit and listen to The Clash, but she demurred. Olivia regretted her inhibitions especially when he’d offered Hugh’s ‘little sis’ his old biology books and automatically she churned out ‘Already got them thanks.’ Even though she hadn’t, and the ones she ended up buying at the school shop had I.Price inside. Four pounds she could have spent on lovely stationery. All she gained was awkwardness when he drove past. It became so bad that she looked both ways on leaving the house, checking if his car was there. All summer long.

The sixth-form coffee-making facilities of autumn term, and its privileged lab access, couldn’t come quickly enough. She’d covered the books with wallpaper, underlining phrases and annotating their margins to capacity. At Polytechnic, in the maelstrom of plant physiology, molecular processes and new sexual experiences, she forgot Isaac until their cars met on the single-track lane. Worldly enough to wave briefly and smile, she thought of Isaac as the life she’d left.

Until, Mam dropped the comment.

‘Oh, Isaac did that.’ Pointing to the kitchen light.

So casual. So incendiary.

Heralding a new era of worry weighting Olivia’s limbs as if she was lying in a draining bath.

‘Isaac here? In this house?’

‘The bulb was gone and I couldn’t see. You always tell me not to stand on chairs.’

Thirty years and this was her repayment. Olivia wanted to punch a wall. Yet again, she swallowed it down, hard. And as she listened to Mam wax lyrical about how Isaac had been looking in on her, safekeeping her parcels and doing odd jobs, she arranged her face to ‘considerate listener’ and tamped down decades of restraint, of being a shade cooler than came natural. She’d always felt that sole neighbours on a murky headland should have known each other better. In the scheme of things, but Mam’s prohibition trumped Olivia’s desires. That was the path she’d chosen. No good ever came of breaking the spell of Mam’s good weather.

‘Well, you’ve too far to come and help me with a new bulb. Haven’t you?’

The change felt irreversible, like the time the sycamore was felled leaving a void through which she could see the mainland: Morecambe’s lights, Caton’s windfarms, Ingleborough’s tabletop. No more nuthatches climbing its trunk, seeing crows carry twigs and branches into its nests or admiring how its tilt lessened the impact of onshore blasts. She hadn’t wanted such a constant reminder of the world beyond Sunderness; of how tethered she was to the cottage and the bus trips and the quiet holidays, and the muck-spread fields.

Now she has a chance to visit the Hall, say thanks properly. She’ll no doubt be invited in for a cup of tea which will be sipped in an oak-panelled room hung with masterpieces which she will admire and ask him straight out about them and see how much he knows. Then a log will crackle and collapse in the grate of the inglenook fireplace before which lurchers loll in the soporific heat and candlewax drips seductively on stone flags.

She’s sure it will be like that.

***

Hugh had called Mam a ‘fantasist’ during their final argument. Olivia lies back and gazes at swirling texture on the bedroom ceiling, wondering when he last visited. Nineteen-eighty-seven for sure; body through the door, feet on carpet, tea and awkwardness (no bed, no breakfast, thanks). Ninety-three is a ‘possible’; Olivia could have sworn it was him buying apples at Barrow market – same shoulders. Early noughties in Ulverston less likely; when the guy on the bus looked at her through the window of the wheezing door – Hugh’s almost-black eyes.

It’s nine o’clock and properly dark. Tidal aromas have entered chimneys, keyholes and windows. She’s either tired or relaxed. It’s relaxed because her shoulders are loose and she’s enjoying pondering the books she’s fanned out on the bed. She reaches to put her lip-balm into the bedside drawer and finds Mam’s soft crocheted cardigan rolled up. She’d worn it reading, or listening to the radio to help her get off to sleep. As Olivia breathes into it the warmth of her exhaled air releases a traces of Ariel, and fleeting memories of sponge cake on a rack, steam rising from boiling potatoes, Mr Sheen from the Friday tidy. Then lavender from a Sunday night bath. The bath salts in the nursing home had dried her skin out no end.

Olivia hugs the quilt to her and wonders why a street scene of Tyson Bridge was chosen for the cover of ‘Northern Spirits’. How it relates to a ghost story? She’d loved this book as a troubled teen. Many of the places in it were local and she’d walk them on her lonely evenings: railway workshops and derelict signal boxes, rope walks for filled-in docks. As she looks closer she sees, among the striding men, a young lady in a green coat looking straight at the artist. Standing while others walk. Stillness within motion. The person who chose this particular image had studied it enough to see the anomalous woman in the crowd, still and silent. She loves this painting and has sought it out once she knew it was in Barrow Gallery.

How may bookshops had Mam visited? How many evenings had Tate’s walled gardens and gaslit streets occupied her thoughts? Mam knew his work; his signatures and signs and the hidden cipher in all his work; a silhouette in the shadows, under walls, in doorways. Never centre stage but consistent. If you knew to look.

His work had been loved by publishing houses in the seventies. He was the go-to artist for the melancholy nostalgia needed for the covers of classics, ghost stories and sensation novels. So the box held black-spined Brontë’s, cracked du Mauriers and a dog-eared Wilkie Collins or two. Mam’s collection had started with table-mats of Whitby Harbour. She scoured second-hand bookstores, and was a regular in charity shops across the north west. She relished the getting ready – mac and rainhat, sandwiches, special biscuits. The 555 took her north to Keswick, the R59 east to Appleby, the trains south to Lancaster and Preston and sometimes on brave occasions, to Manchester. She’d return bolstered and relaxed and would sit reading in her chair by the window. After Olivia left she’d ventured further; Liverpool docks, Glasgow streets, Leeds parklands. In Scarborough, she’d found his ‘Castle-by-the-Sea’ and was stunned that one of her family had actually lived somewhere with mock crenellations, as a second home.

Olivia wakes to a thud as a book slides from quilt to floor. The night’s cold and, with no streetlights, dark as tar. She hasn’t experienced the house without Mam’s nightlight to illuminate the bumps on the landing, the tricky turn in the stair. As she switches the lamp there’s a bang downstairs and for a fraction of a second Mam is in the house again. Real. Checking the windows are properly shut. Here again. Until Olivia pulls her thoughts together.

Impossible. Ghosts don’t exist.

Although privately she wonders about the secrecy of wood; old beams and boards expanding and contracting, releasing from their lignified cells the microscopic breath of the past. She’s always happy in old buildings.

She edges downstairs in case she forgot to lock the door; the one you must actively set. She thinks of the missing key. Anyone could have taken that. Why was it left in such an obvious place as if Sunderness is immune to crime just because you have to drive across a causeway? She vows to call a locksmith if she can’t find it tomorrow. She won’t sleep if she doesn’t. There’s a soft regular sound coming from the kitchen and she is so tense now that if she doesn’t enter she will just seize up. Surely it’s just a mouse or bird or something equally harmless. When the noise becomes louder she peers in and sees it is the curtain flapping and she knows the window’s just slipped its latch – and yes, the door is locked. Adrenaline lingers in her blood like a caffeine shot and her muscles aren’t fooled now by Ovaltine. Her fresh sheets are creased, and the lavender glow from her evening bath useless now in the cold, dark house. She sits at the bedroom window a while, watching how the moonlight ripples the water forming a path straight to her, and wondering why Isaac’s light is still on.

She’s buzzing so she may as well take a look at the other contents of the box. There’s the leather journal Mam had mentioned, written by Ellen Dawson, Tate’s ‘interesting’ daughter, maker of the fern cyanotype in the back bedroom. She’d lived at the often painted Knostrop Hall, and on inheriting this cottage late in life, chose to leave it to the family’s ‘needful female descendants’. It had come to Mam’s mother, her niece.

Olivia rubs the oxblood leather of this tiny and densely packed book, deciphering a few words as she flicks through tight cursive. Some of the pages are written in overlapping diagonal lines, making so many ‘X’ shapes, just like the Brontes’.

Colette Lawlor is a biologist who lives on Morecambe Bay, UK. Since her MA at Lancaster University (2009) she has facilitated many community creative writing workshops and courses. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as electric acorn, Mslexia, The Hopper, The Oklahoma Review, Southlight, and been placed in competitions including writersinc., Aesthetica, The Westmorland Gazette, LoveinArt. Her novel was longlisted in the Mslexia Novel Competition 2022. Her interests are in landscape and its inhabitants – past, present, plant, animal, massive to microscopic.