AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVEL MAROON PUBLISHED IN 2010
People said you needed a sunny day for Summerdon, the sun perked it up a bit, but you couldn’t expect the sun to make a lasting impression on the town. It didn’t seem interested, and never stayed for long.
Here, a man who has watched all life, but to whom nothing has ever happened, sits at a second-floor window and gazes out at the Irish Sea. A woman, not far away, is lost in a world where fiction, dreams and reality have blurred into one, where time past and time present are so entangled as to obscure any future that might exist outside her ever-closed windows.
Here, two sisters share a deep secret that remains buried by the stifled resentment each feels for the other.
There are ghosts too: Seb, who hardly remembers himself; Georgie, for whom the dead have so long held a stronger sway than the living, and three children who play on the sands and among the tombs, speaking more wisely than their elders and who may never truly die.
But everything changes, and knowledge is power, and for some, redemption may yet be an unlooked-for possibility …
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EXTRACT
Seb knew the smell because it had been in his head for years.
As a boy, he kept rain-beetles in a toffee tin and made them a home of moss and earth. Whenever he prised open the lid, the woody, sweet odour breathed back at him. One by one the beetles died and were replaced, but their last resting place grew more luxuriously dank day by day.
What he could smell now, as he climbed the hill from the promenade towards Summerdon’s church, had something of that earth’s consistency, but there was nothing of the greenwood about it. This smell stuck at the back of his throat, something he would wake up with after a deep sleep; it couldn’t be washed away. He turned up the collar of his coat against the wind whipping up from the beach. The climb that took him to St Botolph’s was steep, high enough for the sea below to turn into less than a throbbing whisper.
Waiting at the edge of the sea had been a waste of time. He’d been there for much of the day, at the very place where the sand ran out under pebbles, hoping for a departure. Someone would be starting out over the water for a fresh adventure, charting a boat to foreign islands where fruits could be held in the hand still warm from the sun. It beat down in places like that, unmapped regions which you could only reach by vessels determined on long voyages, but along the whole line of the shore he could see nothing was doing. Perhaps the ships set off under cover of darkness, torches flaring from the deck and the sailors on board shouting until, miles from land, their voices turned into sounds that only oceans recognised.
Seb had been to St Botolph’s before, when he was six, one summer of a year he could not identify, but he couldn’t remember it being so high on a hill. It had been a practising church then, C of E, with lilies in a vase below the pulpit, news of missionary endeavours on the notice-board, and pleas for contributions to the flower-rota.
On a scorching August day, a woman that he remembered as an aunt took him into the coolness of the vaulted building. Her hand, emerging from a perfectly laundered linen suit, was the colour of pale cloth; everything about her, her heavily but whitely powdered face, beige stockings, the fall of hair and the fold of organza, subdued. She took the boy into the church because she was worried what would become of him, and the heat of the day had become unbearable to her.
Her nephew looked up at the monuments and plaques, memorials to the dead of Summerdon, to the Warboroughs, to the Tompkins, to the sisters Beatrice and Ursula Peake whom it had pleased God to take from this life into His everlasting care in the year of our Lord 1837, and to a little army of young soldiers sleeping in the arms of Jesus.
Seb had heard of worshipping, of what might be said and known in such a place. Secrets of the heart could for a moment be unburdened here, prayers sent up to heaven, marriages celebrated, the dead cleared away. But he could not guess at the thoughts of his aunt, could not define her face, or the worried expression it wore. He did not remember her name, although the cloth of her suit brushed like a ghost against him still, the feel of her grasp tangible, the tickle at his cheek when the floating material at her neck came down to touch it.
‘Wood, stone, marble, glass,’ she said, taking his hand in hers and passing their hands together over each as she spoke, over wood and stone and marble and glass.
‘Knowledge is power, Sebastian,’ she told him.
She dropped coins into a box, taking up a booklet and handing it to him.
He had never forgotten the visit. He couldn’t recall how they had come to be there, couldn’t say whether the light that now burned above the door of St Botolph’s day and night had been there then. Of Summerdon itself he had little recollection. As he turned his back on it, he thought it might have changed out of all recognition from the place he had come to on that summer’s day a lifetime ago.
He felt in his pocket for a key, but when he touched the door it opened without difficulty, and the beetle smell he had cooped up as a child in the little tins was already filling his head.
