Judi James - Naked Angels

This time Cecil stopped the car. Not quickly, but just slowing down onto a verge as though stopping to point out some tern that dotted the sky overhead. The windows came down automatically and they both sat there a while, listening to the wind cutting through the dune grass. There was a rock nearby that was covered in creamy-white shells dropped by the gulls. Beyond the rock was a lonely-looking yellow sandbar that the tide was busy trying to cover up.

Evangeline’s nose caught the smell of fresh smoke and when she looked around Cecil was drawing on a weedy-looking roll-your-own.

‘Do you mind?’ he asked, and she shook her head, flattered by his manners. He had lowered the glass between them so that his voice didn’t sound so funny. It was nice, sitting there quietly. After a while Evangeline started to cry but he didn’t make a fuss, or try to stop her. He just let her cry until her eyes were empty of tears and then he took his own hankie down to the water and brought it back wet, so she could wash her face with it.

‘She might know, you know,’ he said, meaning Grandma Klippel. Evangeline shook her head.

‘If she knew she’d have said. She never lies, she told me so. She wouldn’t say anything unless she believed it. Why do people die?’

‘God knows.’ Cecil spat a fleck of tobacco. He was not a philosopher. Evangeline thought the answer was fair enough. She never asked the question that was really troubling her, though: why did they die without her? Why hadn’t she gone as well? Didn’t they want her with them? Thea, Darius, Lincoln and Patrick. All together. Without Evangeline. The thought came into her head that they had hated her. Why? Was it her school grades? Was it because she was so ugly? It just didn’t make sense unless you looked at it that way.

Maybe they did hate her, after all. She would never have considered doing anything without them.

‘Why don’t you take a run on the beach for a bit?’ Cecil asked. ‘Your grandmother’s not expecting you back yet. Get a bit of colour into your cheeks.’

She took Cecil’s advice, running wild till her legs ached, and the air did feel good. Then they drove back to the house.

‘We have whole baby chickens for supper, Evangeline, with herby gravy,’ her grandmother said. ‘Go and wash up, there’s a good girl.’ She was wearing a lilac-flowered dress and a matching duster coat, as though she’d been out. She never told lies. She would have said.

Nothing was spoken, then, and as Evangeline grew a little older the question ‘Why?’ hung constantly in her head, like a small bird on a perch in an empty cage, pecking away all the time. When she got a little wiser she asked Cecil how he knew and he said he’d just known, that was all, which seemed to her a stupid kind of an answer.

Then she thought about it properly and she started feeling better. If Cecil had ‘just known’ they were dead then maybe she knew that they just weren’t. Maybe you could sense these things and Cecil was wrong. She tried not to think about it too much. It had made her ill the first time and she didn’t want to be ill again.

It was as though a fog slowly settled around the whole affair and as time pushed an ever-widening space between herself and her parents she began to despair of ever finding out the truth.

And just as Evangeline grew older, so Grandma Klippel seemed to grow younger. She was not such an old lady, after all. When she had first come to the house Evangeline had thought her grandmother to be about ninety years old, but now she knew she was nearer fifty. Maybe Darius’s disappearance had made her younger because she spoke a lot about when he was a boy and acted half the time as though she were just a young mother again.

Shock over the deaths created some sort of malfunction between Evangeline and her grandmother. She needed the old lady’s sympathy and pity, but she knew she could never seek it because that would have meant giving away the secret that was so important to hide.

They lived in the same house, then, and her grandmother was kind, but that was all. Each of them was too empty inside to nurture any real affection. Grandma Klippel would not allow crying in public, though Evangeline heard her grief at night sometimes, when she was alone in her room. She wanted to please her grandmother. Most of all she wanted to please her parents, wherever they were. It was as though they were always there somewhere, watching and waiting; holding their breath until she did something they could be proud of at last. Darius and Thea: beautiful and talented. All of them, some place special, some place she couldn’t reach because she wasn’t special enough.

Evangeline felt like a ghost. She grew to realize that wishing she were with her family was the same as wishing she were dead too, but that was all she could think about. It was impossible not to imagine that they were having fun somewhere without her. Every bone in her body ached to join them.

When Cecil left to get married, another man took his place. The new man was older and Evangeline imagined out of boredom that he was in love with her grandmother. Unlike Cecil the new man knew nothing about her parents. He spoke little English and he went home at night. They would be all alone in that house then, with just the sea for company.

Evangeline thought about Darius as a small boy, playing happily in the surf. She even tried it herself a few times. The beach was OK in the summer. The sand would be warm on top, though it got colder and wetter the further your feet sunk. She liked the white driftwood and even took a few pieces home, which pleased Grandma Klippel for some reason. She remembered Cecil telling her he’d seen a whale swimming off the coast and that the next day it had been dead and washed up on the beach. Maybe that was how she’d find them one day – Darius, Thea and Lincoln, lying in a row on the sand, bleached and blistered by the sun and the salt in the water. She became afraid to go down onto the sand at all after that fancy.

For Evangeline’s eighth birthday Grandma Klippel had organized something extraordinary, though she refused to say what. Things stirred in the old house at last. Two rooms were decorated, which meant there was some life in the place as local handymen arrived along with radios, kettles and twenty cans of apricot-coloured paint. Even when the rooms were finished the smell of paint lingered for a couple of weeks.

On the morning of her birthday Evangeline went to school as usual, but when she got back there was someone waiting on the porch with her grandmother. The woman was small with wiry black hair, and dressed in clothes that reminded Evangeline of her mother.

Grandma Klippel was beaming.

‘Today is a special day, Evangeline,’ she said. ‘This is Miss Clayburg and she’s to be your tutor, stopping with us for the whole of the summer.’ She bent down closer, to be on Evangeline’s level. ‘You remember what a famous artist your father was, Evangeline?’ Her breath smelt of violets. ‘And your mother, of course. They had great talent, both of them. I told you. Never forget that.’

The small plane buzzed overhead, drowning out some of her words, but Grandma Klippel ignored the noise. It was almost as though the plane was eavesdropping. Evangeline looked upward. The sun had caught the plane’s wings. There was a white trail winding behind it, like a long smokey cloud.

‘I know Darius was not your father by blood but I believe somehow you may have inherited his talent. I have seen the green shoots in you already and I want to nurture those shoots. You are to learn to paint, Evangeline. Miss Clayburg is an art tutor from one of the greatest schools in New York. We can thank God she has been kind enough to come all this way out here and take you under her wing.’