A Year of Marvelous Ways

Marvelous wakes to a frosty morning, disturbed by a dream urging her to open the boathouse, which she has kept locked for 25 years. Following her daily ritual, she swims naked in the cold creek. As she passes the boathouse, she resists the dream’s command. Later, while out in her crabbing boat, she reflects on the past, remembering how an influx of 2,000 starfish once heralded the return of her great love, Paper Jack, after 15 years of estrangement.

The narrative flashes back to 1900, when Jack, “worn down by life” (16), returned to Marvelous. He explained that he had been working in the copper mines of Moonta, Australia, and gave her a heavy gold fob watch as a token of his wealth. Jack confessed that Marvelous was the only woman he had ever truly loved but felt guilty because she was his brother Jimmy’s first love. He also told her that after another underground accident, he lost his nerve and would never go underground again. After they swam together, Marvelous invited Jack into the boathouse, where they made love. When Jack left before dawn, Marvelous promised to wait for him. She waited another 20 years before he arrived.

Marvelous is awakened by fireworks. Alone in her boat, she is struck by a fear of aging and losing her memories of Jack, her father, and her life. To combat this, she tells the story of a wrecked fishing boat, Deliverance, to the boat itself. As she finishes, she hears a sound like a heartbeat from within the hull. The dream’s command to “Open the boathouse” returns, and she finally decides to obey.

She finds the boathouse key from the bunch hanging outside her caravan and unlocks the boathouse for the first time in 25 years, met with the stench of decay. Inside, she finds one of the orange starfish that arrived with Jack still hanging on the wall and puts it in her pocket. She has a conversation with Jack’s voice, who says he is coming back. Newly resolved, Marvelous begins cleaning the boathouse to make it habitable again. That night, she dreams of two clear images: a linnet flying over the Thames with “a chest full of song,” and a young man staring at “a horizon that promised nothing” (24).

In October 1947, a young man named Francis Drake arrives in England by ferry, returning after a seven-year absence. He feels ill and disconnected from his home country. On the train to London, he nearly loses a letter he promised to deliver nearly three years prior. 

The letter triggers a flashback to Normandy in 1944, a week or so after the D-Day landings. His unit was contending with constant heavy mortar fire and German snipers, with morale dangerously low. During a lull in the fighting, Drake wandered to a field hospital at the edge of an orchard, where he met a fatally wounded soldier named Dougie Arnold whose arms were lost above the elbow. Drake gave the man a cigarette and listened as he talked about his home in Cornwall. Dougie asked Drake to retrieve a letter from his tunic pocket, addressed to his father, Dr. James Arnold, at Monk’s Rise, Chapel Street, Truro. Dougie made Drake promise to deliver the letter in person when the war was over and to tell his father “good things.”

Drake arrives in London and checks into a squalid lodging house in his old Farringdon neighborhood. In his room, he places the letter on the mantelpiece, overwhelmed with guilt for the delay in fulfilling his promise. 

Drake reflects on his postwar years in the south of France, where he tried to escape his trauma by working odd jobs and building sandcastles on the beach. However, when memories of the war resurfaced, he fled inland to work on farms, living an isolated, monastic life. His solitude broke one night when a farmer’s daughter came to him in a barn. This brief human contact made him acutely aware of his deep loneliness and the emotional emptiness inside him. This realization prompted his decision to finally return to England. 

Back in the present, Drake leaves the letter in his room and heads out into the London night with a bottle of gin.

Drake wanders through the bomb-scarred streets of his childhood. He passes the tenement where he lived with his mother until her death but doesn’t go inside. He recalls his fatherless upbringing and the feeling of being an outsider, watching other families through lit windows. His thoughts turn to his childhood friend and third cousin, Missy Hall, whom he last saw in the autumn of 1939. She was on her way to the Café de Paris and told him to find her there when he returned from the war.

Drawn by memory, Drake makes his way to the River Thames, a place his mother warned him against. His mother was abandoned by Drake’s father, a sailor whose name she gave only as Lucky. At night, she used to come to this shore and call out for him. She died when Drake was 11 of what he believes was a broken heart. Drunk on gin, Drake throws the empty bottle into the river and heads back to his room.

The next morning, Drake goes to Paddington Station to buy a ticket to Cornwall. While in the tearoom, he catches a glimpse of a woman who looks exactly like Missy. Dismissing it at first, he becomes convinced it was her and rushes out to search the crowded station. He follows a hunch to the underground, spots her on a platform, and boards a different carriage of the same train to watch her unseen.

As Drake watches Missy, he remembers meeting her when he was 11, after his mother died and he was living with his aunts. She was his 16-year-old third cousin, and they bonded over both being orphans. He recalls a sexually charged dare involving a coin that marked the beginning of his love for her, and how she left him one cold March morning, slipping a drawing of her hand under his door as a farewell. 

Back in the present, Drake follows Missy from Liverpool Street Station through East London. She stops before a damaged house and, sensing she is being followed, confronts him. When Drake steps out of the shadows and says her name, she recognizes him with shock.

Drake and Missy catch up in a pub, the joy of their reunion tempered by the awkwardness of the intervening years. He reveals he thought she died in the 1941 bombing of the Café de Paris, where she had told him to find her. Missy tells him about her life, explaining that she works in an office three days a week and sits as a life model for an elderly painter, whose art she finds transformative. During their conversation, Missy spots an old acquaintance, Jeanie, which makes her visibly tense. She quickly gathers her belongings to leave the pub.

At Missy’s small lodging, Drake observes her room, noting a silent linnet named Buddy in a cage. While Missy prepares food, she is lost in a painful memory concerning her old friend Jeanie. During the Blitz (the intense German bombing of British cities), she and Jeanie frequented the notorious basement of the Exchange, where they engaged in anonymous sex with strange men in the darkness. The memory fills her with deep shame. Now that Jeanie is a respectable wife and mother, their shared secret makes friendship impossible.

Drake watches as Missy searches his suitcase for matches. She finds an old tracing of her hand that she gave him years earlier. She also sees the letter addressed to Dr. Arnold in Cornwall. Drake explains his promise to the dying soldier, and Missy urges him to deliver it soon. Amongst Drake’s things, Missy discovers a collage of a man’s face made from magazine clippings. Drake explains it is a “lucky charm” made by a child that he takes everywhere with him. 

After they eat a supper of Spam in breadcrumbs with boiled potatoes and tinned peas, Missy asks him to dance. They sway together to music on the radio until they are interrupted by a knock from the suspicious landlady, Miss Cudgeon, whom Missy dismisses.

Late that night, fireworks wake Drake. He watches Missy sleep, feeling a powerful urge to protect her from the weariness he sees in her face. He suggests they go out for air, and she agrees. They climb to the roof with a bottle of brandy and watch the display. 

Missy recalls watching the Blitz from the same spot, describing its terrible beauty and the feeling of being intensely alive. She then detachedly recounts the night the Café de Paris was bombed. She was inside dancing when the bomb struck, and she describes the horrific aftermath. She helped the wounded, using champagne to clean their injuries, but confesses she has never cried about the event, which left her partially deaf. Drake tries to comfort her, but she resists, saying that everyone from that time has a story of trauma. They return to her room and make love.

The next morning, Missy wakes feeling a desperate need to be alone. While Drake sleeps, she opens her birdcage and coaxes her linnet, Buddy, to fly free out of the open window. When she creeps back to bed, Drake presses against her, but she pretends to be asleep. 

The mood between them is strained. Drake wants to spend the day together, but he senses Missy’s distance and packs his suitcase, saying he will head to Paddington for an early start to Cornwall. They walk to the River Thames. He asks Missy to come away with him and confesses his love. Missy rejects him and recalls her grandmother’s story that a beautiful mermaid once lived in the River Thames.

Hurt, Drake crouches by a moored barge. Missy then initiates a game, telling him to face a wall and sing an old hymn from their childhood while she moves away. As Drake sings, he realizes her footsteps have stopped, replaced by an unnerving silence. He turns around and sees Missy’s head submerge beneath the river’s surface. He screams as he reaches the water’s edge. Overhead, a linnet flies free with “a chest full of song” (79).

In Cornwall, Marvelous wakes with a start, gasping for breath. A powerful wind is rising, and she sees the door to the newly opened boathouse banging open and shut. Standing on the riverbank, she feels that something of great consequence is about to begin.