Salt by Jeremy Page Page A

He listens to the gusts of wind hitting the glass, the sound of water overflowing the gutter. He feels the darkened room in all its technicolour glory beginning to spin with the effects of the wine.
    An hour later it’s completely quiet and he wakes to see his wife’s deep brown eyes looking carefully into his. She moves her silent preoccupied face closer, and kisses him gently on the lips, then slowly moves back into the darkness and she is gone. A few seconds later, he hears the door to the spare room closing.
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    That night he stands in the yard under the shattered bunting. He picks one of the used fireworks that has been trodden into the mud, smells the casing, then throws it in the shed. Bloody Kipper. The only light in the yard comes from the one he’s left on in the dining room. The bare bulb shines like a sun on the table, making a pocket of light in there so vivid and awake in all this darkness he thinks it must belong to a life not his own.

7
    A Rural Scene, in the Fens
    1968, the world in riot, and George Langore attends an auction in Wisbech. It’s a mean-spirited occasion drawn out on a car park slick with puddles and slanting rain. The men in groups, hands deep in pockets, with faces set to drive the bargain. In the middle the auctioneer whips up the lots against the crowd’s better judgement. George liked all this. He liked the way the men behaved in a herd, how they shifted this way and that, picking up miscellaneous farming utensils and trying to break them with their hands. On this day, whether he’d arrived late or whether the rawness of the spring wind had caused the men to huddle tighter than usual, George found himself on the group’s edge while the auctioneer tried to sell a boat. The men jeered the auctioneer, shook their heads to put him off, made false bids as the price fell and fell, told him to hurry up . . . ain’t gettin’ dryer . . . get you on to the egg sorter, the stack of fence posts, the hundred yard of chicken wire. No one bid. But the auctioneer was already soaked and he wanted a sale . . . c’on, Bill, we all got homes to go to. Fen accents, mingling with the singsong of the Norfolk dialect.
    Then, for some reason, perhaps a fleeting memory of the boats in his youth, maybe of the Hansa itself, George raises his hand and says shilling . The auctioneer and most of the group think this is a great laugh, but faced with no alternative the lot’s knocked down and the boat is his. And as the group shuffles off to the next lot, that’s when he sees his boat.
    That evening the Mary Magdalene stood proudly and just a little sadly in the centre of the yard while Lil’ and George tapped it and Gull sniffed it suspiciously.
    â€˜Sweet little rowboat, even got a hole, just like the Hansa ,’ he says, framing his face in the hole and laughing at her.
    â€˜We going to keep it in the yard?’
    â€˜No we ain’t! She’s up for fixing.’
    Oddly, they realize they want to share something. It’s the first time in years and the feeling is sudden for her. It makes her giddy. She’s scared she might blush, because after all these years she still doesn’t want to give anything away. She laughs nervously, with her hand to her mouth, and says you’re a one - a real one.
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    Now what? she says. The hole’s been repaired, the boards caulked and a new coat of paint applied, and the Mary Magdalene ’s there prow down on a mudchute on the bank of the Twenty Foot Drain. Get in, he says, already pushing it, and they both scramble in at the last moment as the boat plunges into the water with a great rush. Instantly its heaviness is gone. The boat comes up, turns and drifts, and they look at each other in wonder.
    Occasionally, when their little boat goes under the shadow of a bridge, Lil’ looks down at the water to see the sky’s reflection briefly vanish. She rests her hand on the picnic basket to show