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Chapter Five

      BUT AS THE earth warmed up and birds started singing, Alison, exhausted by her night’s bawling, fell asleep abruptly in her mother’s arms. Mum crept to the kitchen door and mouthed, “I’m going back to bed for a bit.”

      “Good idea. I’m going too,” Prill told Colin. “I feel as if I’ve been awake all night.” She was thinking, Dad’ll be phoning at ten o’clock and I’m going to ask him to come back. I can’t bear it here.

      Colin sat in the kitchen for a few minutes, looking out over the sea. He felt quite cold suddenly, but it was going to be another beautiful day. There wasn’t a cloud in sight and the stillness in the air promised another scorcher. He still had hunger pains so he made himself some toast and another mug of lemon tea. Then he found the sleeping bag that Dad had stuffed under the stairs, unrolled it over the damp mattress and fell soundly asleep.

      At eight o’clock they were all still sleeping, except Oliver. He got up at seven, dressed stealthily, and crept round the kitchen looking for something to eat. Jessie whined and nosed at his feet. He refilled her bowl with fresh water, holding it at arm’s length in case she bit him. He was frightened of dogs. Then he went outside, selected a spade, and started to dig his hole. His uncle David had told Colin on the phone that he was allowed to dig, provided he left the earth in a tidy pile.

      The other two didn’t get up again till half past ten and by then Colin was ravenous. He sat at the kitchen table eating cornflakes, toast, eggs and bacon. All the windows were wide open. They could hear Oliver scraping away at his hole and talking to Kevin O’Malley who’d walked down with the milk. Mixed with the smell of fields was the tang of the sea.

      “There’s not much wrong with you,” Prill said. “I don’t know how you can eat all that.”

      “I was hungry,” Colin said simply. “It woke me up in the night.”

      “Was that all that woke you?”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Well, you were in the kitchen at five o’clock.”

      “So were you.”

      They stared at each other, Prill with a look that said, “You first”. Colin pressed his lips together. Prill was nervous sometimes. When they were little he used to get into awful rows for jumping out at her and making spooky noises. She still slept with the landing light on.

      “What was the matter?” she asked him.

      He hesitated.

      “Come on, Colin!” her voice was strained, almost angry. It wasn’t like Prill. He was supposed to be the moody one.

      “Well, it sounds so stupid… It was weird. I woke up because I was too hot, and my bed felt terribly damp, and… there was a kind of, well, mould all over it.”

      “Mould?”

      “Yes, honestly, and it smelt peculiar too, horribly musty.”

      She stood up. “Show it to me.”

      “It’s no good, Prill, not now. Sit down, will you? I can’t. It wasn’t there when I woke up just now. Everything had, well, you know, gone back to normal. The sheets are a bit dirty, that’s all. I was probably dreaming.”

      She was silent. A wave of fear rose inside her then ebbed away, leaving her numb and cold. “That makes it worse,” she said.

      “What do you mean?”

      “The fact that it’s all so…ordinary this morning. It’s like that smell on the beach. It was there. But you just said I must have imagined it.”

      “You didn’t imagine it. I could smell it too, last night. I was nearly sick.” He paused. “What woke you up, the same thing?”

      “No… no. It was Alison, yelling her head off. Then, when I did get to sleep, I had a kind of nightmare. It was about Donal Morrissey but he’d, sort of, turned into a woman. She looked more like a skeleton. Ugh, it was horrible.”

      She wouldn’t say any more. Shaking her head violently, as if this would shatter the picture in her mind of the woman crawling over the field, she went to the wall-phone and started dialling.

      “What are you doing?”

      “Phoning Dad.”

      “Why?”

      “I want to talk to him.”

      “But he’ll ring us, before he starts painting. You know that’s the arrangement.”

      “Well, it’s gone eleven and he’s not phoned yet.” She put the receiver to her ear and listened.

      “Is it ringing at the exchange? They’ll take ages to answer.”

      “No,” she said flatly. “And it isn’t going to ring either. It’s completely dead. No wonder Dad can’t get through.”

      Oliver had marked out where he was going to dig with four sticks and tied string at each corner. He hadn’t got down very far because he kept finding things. His treasures were neatly arranged on a plastic tray he’d found in the kitchen. Prill sat outside miserably and fingered them. There were some pieces of china, a halfpence piece, and several bits of white tubing with holes through them.

      “What are these, Oliver?”

      “Bits of a clay pipe, I should think.”

      He went on digging, puffing in the heat; he was still wearing a long-sleeved sweater even though it was seventy degrees and getting hotter.

      “Why don’t you wash the soil off?”

      He leaned on his spade like a little old man and said witheringly, “You don’t wash things like this, Prill, they might disintegrate. That’s what the toothbrush is for. You have to brush the dirt off very gently.”

      Although Oliver was scraggy and small there was something very adult about him. Prill didn’t like the look in those large blue eyes of his. It said so plainly that he thought she was both ignorant and stupid.

      He was the only person who didn’t seem affected by the house. She and Colin had talked about that in the kitchen. Nothing had made Oliver wake up in the night sweating, there had been no mould or mustiness round him. And he certainly hadn’t complained about a smell; the only smell he didn’t like was Alison when she needed a fresh nappy. In fact, the baby seemed to upset him rather a lot, especially when she cried. Prill had seen him actually put his fingers in his ears when he thought nobody was looking.

      “Well, he’s used to being on his own at home,” Mum had said. “And he’s been ill, don’t forget. He was in bed for weeks, and Auntie Phyl kept him very quiet. Anyway, a din like that might get on your nerves too if all you’d ever been used to was a house full of old people.” But Prill still felt like thumping him.

      Colin and his mother had gone with Alison on a walk up to the O’Malleys’ farm. Jessie went with them, mad with delight at being released from the concrete mixer. Mrs O’Malley rang the exchange to tell them the bungalow phone wasn’t working. “It’s funny that,” she said. “All the phones go off together usually, when we have gales. But last night was calm enough. Still, they’ll come to it to be sure, eventually. You didn’t need it today, did you?”

      “No-o,” Mrs Blakeman said slowly. “Though my husband will have been trying to get through, and I had just wondered about getting a doctor to look at the baby. She’s been really miserable since we got here.”

      The farmer’s wife took Alison on her lap. The baby gurgled and grabbed at the strings of her apron. “She looks grand now, a real grand girl she is. Oh, that’s bold!” And she prised Alison’s fingers away from the

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