Bohemia Village Voice

See Some Changes

Hen and Esther couldn’t go abroad. Pretty, cheap, old, accessible was the ticket, though seldom found together. But there was venerability on the kingdom’s ragged, fraying hem.
“I came here as a child,” said Esther, booking Swanshades B&B, but the woman could not have been more uninterested.
“See some changes,” she said, intoning the price (seven nights for six).
Hen was old, Esther older, her speech gathering speed and urgency as Hen’s silence grew. On the train, Esther remembered: buildings scattered along cliff and wind-clutched ridge, signs for Bovril, plastered cottages lurching irretrievably to the sea.
‘Unsanitary hovels the lot of them: I wouldn’t thank you for one’, her mother’d said, what, sixty years ago? Gun emplacements on the shingle. The draping cowls of smoke. ‘It’s been an age’ she thought, and the cab zipped away to the brand-new guesthouse, bolt-upright above the town.
They baulked at the morning traffic but the sun lit everything steadily and there was a pleasant sense of limitlessness, the houses far and still below.
“It hasn’t changed a bit,” said Esther.
The B&B stood on an A-road in a carpark, and descent to the scabby lanes by the Front was by aching dozens of broken concrete steps down a vertical escarpment. It was haring back and forth between pavements, or the endless stair. Mercifully, there was a greasy spoon/newsagent halfway.
There Hen bought cigs, Esther take-away tea, and they ambled along, passing the days comfortably, sipping and wheezing.
Here and there were gardens or small parks, unattached to any building, often with seats. Hen found a dark plot near the maritime museum and made for a bench. Someone had tied a bunch of chrysanthemums to it.
That museum stored debris: massive gear buckled by the sea or fall to earth, but unevocative barnacled scrap now, the tragic drama chilled.
So many artists! An intriguing spot. Hen brooded; purchased a watercolour in one of the hovels. Esther favoured the Town Hall annex, cosily got up like olden-days lodgings: samplers, range, infant in crib, and starched landlady serving muffins.
The last day, Hen declined the steps. Up here, front paths, mosaic adrift, led to terraces rendered Georgian by stucco and vestigial fanlights. Again the little gardens near nothing much – nice for a rest with a coffin-nail. Watch the view.
The sea’s textile quality: heavy, voluptuous satin stirred and swayed by a pulsing force; powerful, remote, and arbitrary. That blue. Then Hen was there. Had she been dozing? What was the time? Unsteadily, she rose.
“All right, dear,” Esther said.
The road again, Hen brisk and determined, despite the hip.
“Steady!” called Esther. Hen halted at a window. The twilight found a girl averted, motionless in a pale frock, and a man raising his hand, facing her.
“An artist’s model!” hissed Esther. Immediately the child turned, confident in the meeting. But Esther didn’t know her. A torn dress, stuck on in dark patches; a face filthy, and wet. Tears? Streaked dirt. A child weeping as she sat? Esther raised a shaking hand; rapped.
The artist was at the window. Soundlessly behind the glass he unfolded the shutters. Dirty, smoke-grimed; hands smeared vermilion. Exhausted. Esther felt ill, and afraid. She smelt burning. Hen’s face had collapsed rigidly around a cigarette. ‘Shattered’, thought Esther, ‘a wreck.’ Then it was dark.
“Can you find it again, dear?” asked Esther (Hen’s memory so much better than hers). But it was just warehouses downhill, with wasteland opposite a disused church.
On the platform, Esther thought she’d left something behind. ‘Possession’, she thought, wondering why, and heard Hen ask, astonishingly, ‘What by?’, but nothing else, and time to be gone.