“Hello.”
He looked up. A middle-aged woman, ginger hair, gym-addict lean in a splodgy vest top and khaki jeans. She seemed familiar somehow. “Hello,” he said.
She ignored the question in his voice. “Can we have a quick chat?”
“Well … ”
She was already sitting down, placing her glass on the beermat opposite his. “My name’s Eve Callaghan. We met briefly when I came to talk to Gil Hunt at the café up in the square.”
“Of course.” The reporter. He recalled her brusque manner, Gil’s wary response.
“I’m mounting a campaign – Gil might have told you - to raise awareness of the dangers of the sea. I’ve lived here a long time and I’ve seen too many accidents, too many deaths as a result of carelessness or stupidity out there, not to want to try to do something about it. It’s why I spoke to Gil in the first place.”
“Sure. I remember.”
“And I noticed that you run a surf school down in the bay.”
“That’s right.” She hadn’t noticed it at all, he thought. She had checked him out.
“Parents are one of my target audiences, as you might imagine, and I’d like to do a reassuring and informative piece on the kind of health and safety precautions you have to take in your business – the same sort of health and safety precautions they might take themselves.”
“Okay.” He knew every risk assessment measure he took could not be faulted, that the children he taught were probably safer under his guidance than anywhere else on the beach. And if it helped, and maybe gained him a little incidental attention, where was the harm? So he gave her a comprehensive run-down of everything he was required by law and commonsense to do and watched her pencil fly over her notebook while he spoke.
“This is really,” she said, “exemplary practice.”
“I should hope so. It has to be.”
She paused, drank from her glass. “And what about as a surfer yourself?” she asked him. “Do you feel you and your friends have any responsibility to warn against the dangers there?”
“Only in our capacity as casual instructors.”
“Which you do?”
“Naturally.”
She nodded, scribbled a few more shorthand hieroglyphics. “So that’s you – Henry Muller – and your friends are … ?”
He struggled to remember their real names. “Richard Parker and James Buzzard.”
“Radar and Buz, right?”
He was impressed. “You’re in Patrick’s a lot, I take it?”
“How else would I find anything out?” She smiled. “And what about Gil Hunt?”
Henry laughed. “Gil doesn’t surf.”
“Too cool?”
“Too uncoordinated.”
She laughed. “He’s just there at the right time?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say he makes a habit of pulling kids out of the sea but yeah, generally, he does have a talent for being in the right place at the right time.”
“Have you known him long?”
“Nine years. The guys and I were friends at uni. Gil we know through this place.”
“Where were you at university?”
“Exeter.”
“Gil too?”
“No. He was in London. Goldsmiths, I think. Why?”
“Oh, just background colour.” She flipped shut her notebook. “Thanks, for talking to me. Can I come back to you, if I have any follow-up questions?”
“Yes, no problem.”
She picked up her drink. “It must be nice, meeting up here every summer. Like some sort of extended student vacation.”
“Well it is, and I admit we’re all getting a little bit old for that. Time to start taking life seriously, I suppose.”
“Oh don’t do that. Life gets serious enough all by itself without any help from you.”
He nodded, thinking of Cecily. “I know. We come here to escape our real lives but for the people who live here, this is real life. It’s easy to forget that sometimes.”
She looked at him with interest. “Have you become friendly with the locals?”
“As if you were real people, you mean?”
She acknowledged his point. “Sometimes it does feel as if we’re just one big service industry. Backstage crew, you know.”
“Then that’s the advantage of longevity. Yes, we have friends who live and work here. Good friends.”
She was watching him. “All of you?”
“Of course,” Henry said. He finished his beer, put down his glass decisively. “And I’m afraid I’m going to be late for one of those friends if I don’t leave now.”
She nodded. “Thank you,” she said, “for your time. You’ve been a great help.”
“You’re welcome.” As he walked away, out of Patrick’s and up the sloping streets towards the square, he wondered was it an advantage that people often thought him stupider than he was. For she might have pretended curiosity about his Junior Watersports Club, she might have asked relevant and pointed questions about safety and moral obligations, but Eve Callaghan had not succeeded in disguising from him that what she was really interested in was Gil.
Alex and Jem returned from their customary Sunday morning walk along the beach. They had been buffeted all the way by the wind, their faces barely warmed by the February sunshine. Alex could feel his cheeks stinging, still taste the salt spray on his lips. “Hot chocolate?” he said, hanging up his coat in the hall, taking Jem’s from her, her red woollen scarf, her hat with its earflaps and bobble.
“Yay!” she cried, as if it were a rare treat and not an essential part of their ritual. He called up the stairs –
“Marianne? Hot chocolate?”
A murmured assent.
The kitchen was warm from the oven and full of the smell of the beef he’d placed inside it before they’d left. Jem had hopped onto her stool at the table and taken out her drawing pad and felt tipped pens. He was trying to encourage her to sketch in pencil, then use crayons or watercolours, but who was he to deny her the craze for felt tips and gel pens currently sweeping the classroom. He made a point of not denying her any of the habits and desires and preoccupations of a normal childhood. He placed their drinks on the table, called up again to Marianne, and fetched the chopping board so he could prepare the vegetables for lunch at the same time as admiring his daughter’s artwork. She was drawing people; not the distant, hazy figures which populated his landscapes but finely detailed faces and complicated clothing, perfectly shaped hands, eyes which regarded you solemnly from the paper. He had taught summer school and evening art classes to adults who paid him considerable sums of money and saw more real talent in his eight year old daughter than he had in many of them in years. It was possible, of course, that he was biased.
Marianne wafted in from the hall, folded herself silently onto the chair at the head of the table and wrapped her hands around her mug. She had been withdrawn for weeks but withdrawn was the least exhausting of her humours and he had learned simply to treat her calmly and with great care. Years ago he had felt he was pretending or being patronising and now it was only the daily currency of their communication. Of his communication with her. At best her response was a sliding glance, a murmur. To preserve his own sanity, to present a cheerful face to the rest of the world, he had had to grow over his hopes and dreams and deepest feelings a hide of horn.
Jem was drawing her mother. He saw it in the peeks she sneaked across the table, her frowning concentration recreating Marianne’s oval face and narrow blue eyes. Alex peeled potatoes and smiled. “Tell your mum about our walk,” he suggested.
“Oh, it was so windy!” Jem said obediently as she coloured. “There was this little dog – was it a Yorkshire terrier, Dad?”
“It was.”
“This little Yorkshire terrier on the beach and the wind was so strong it nearly blew over! Its little face was all scrunched up against the wind.”
“So was mine,” Alex said. Jem laughed.
Mar
ianne said nothing, but he knew that no attempt to include her was ever wasted; it made it so much easier to pick up the reins of normal life when she could.
“And there was this place,” Jem continued, “behind the rocks where you could stand and it was like someone had turned off the wind. Then you stepped back out again and whoosh! they’d turned it back on again. You should come with us, it’s really cool.”
“It is really cool.” Alex finished peeling and chopping potatoes and carried the saucepan of water into which he had put them to the cooker. Marianne slid away. Jem looked thoughtfully at her drawings.
“I’m going to do you now. You have to come here and sit still.”
He laughed. “Can’t you draw me from memory?”
“It’s not the same.”
“How will you draw yourself, then?”
“Oh I just make myself up.” She shifted on the stool. “Actually I have to go to the toilet first.”
He cleared away their empty hot chocolate mugs and the potato peelings, was wondering absently what else he needed to do before he had to sit still for twenty minutes being Jem’s model and, more pressingly, where had the vegetable knife gone, when he heard his daughter scream.
After the horrific scene in the bathroom and the hours at the hospital and the further hours it had taken to soothe Jem to sleep, he sat in the dark of the living room with a glass of Jack Daniels and the phone in his lap. But there was no one to call; no one he needed to tell, no one he could talk to. It was not the first time Marianne had been hospitalised. It was the first time Jem had found her with her wrists pulsing blood onto the floor tiles. His head ached with tears he had not, until now, been able to shed.
He couldn’t go on like this.
He didn’t have any choice.
Chapter Twenty-one
“Gil?” My voice sounds small and lonely in the dark of the petrol station, its volume dwarfed by the silence. I hear myself whimper. It’s been minutes. A few minutes. He filled the tank, went to the kiosk …
I turn towards it. There is no light there now. No figure hunched over a till. It’s just an empty booth. It looks as though it hasn’t been used in years. How is this possible? I wasn’t asleep. I’m sure I wasn’t asleep. Only minutes have passed. But now there is no Gil, and no attendant, and a car parked in the bushes that wasn’t there before.
I’m shivering. I sprint over to the kiosk, but it is locked and too dark inside for any-thing to be visible through the glass. Nothing stirs on the forecourt. The road, stretching out of and into the night, is lined by tall trees, their tops shifting slightly in the breeze. I’m as certain as I can be that no other car has passed while we’ve been here.
But clearly one other car has.
It still sits, its nose pushed into the shrubbery, and it too is silent. I clench my fists at my side and walk slowly towards it, covering the fifty yards between me and it as though in its boot is an unexploded bomb and that bomb is meant for me. Which, who knows, could be the case. Gil has vanished. Maybe a bomb has come for him too. Maybe he has left me, on this deserted country road in the middle of the night, taken off across the fields because he can’t bear another moment.
I wouldn’t blame him.
The smiley face grins at me through the dark.
I am within two feet of the car now and no one has leapt out to grab me. The window has not wound slowly down. The car has not gone up in flames. I reach out my hand to the door, half-expecting my touch to be the trigger which explodes the bomb. And maybe that would be for the best after all. But nothing happens. When I press the catch the door clicks open and I hold my breath.
It is empty.
On the passenger seat is a map, in the back a couple of plastic bottles and the remains of what smells like fast food. The keys hang in the ignition. The driver was expecting to return. I am torn between searching the pockets and glove box and running –
Where?
Where am I going to go?
I can’t drive. Our hire car is useless to me. I will have to haul my rucksack over my shoulder and walk to wherever is the nearest town, catch a bus, a train. By myself.
Where is he?
Heart thumping, I draw back from the driver’s seat and walk round to the rear of the car. I press the catch of the boot. It’s locked. I walk back, take the keys, go back to the boot.
Do I really want to know what’s in here?
Can I honestly just walk away?
I slide the key into the slot, make a quarter turn to the left. Nothing. I take the key out and press the catch. The lid is released an inch or so. I want to be sick.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
I shriek.
“Jesus,” Gil says, beside me.
I stare at him in disbelief. “Where were you?”
He looks wild. Wilder. “Went for a piss.”
“But it’s been – ”
“Minutes. It’s been a few minutes.” He takes my arm above my elbow and starts to lead me away. “Come on.”
My head’s spinning, I want to resist but don’t. “The car, Gil.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“It’s empty.”
He opens our passenger door, bundles me inside. Walks round. Gets in. I’m shaking again, with relief and residual terror and awful, unspeakable, suspicion. He sits, doing the staring grimly through the windscreen thing we’ve been doing a lot of lately. Then he cries out, with what sounds like frustration and rage and pain, thumps the steering wheel, sinks his head into his hands.
“Gil,” I whisper. He doesn’t move. I touch his shoulder.
“Shit,” he mutters. He sits up again. His eyes are glittering and he swallows hard. “Jesus fucking Christ.” He gives a long, shuddering sigh.
“You’re scaring me,” I tell him.
He nods. “You should be scared.” His voice is ragged.
After a long moment I say, “Shall we get some sleep?”
“No, we need to move on.” He starts the engine, jerks the gear stick into first. I look at his hands. It’s dark, so dark, inside the car, but I know that he was crying, and I look at his hands.
Chapter Twenty-two
They had reached the end of the lane, a circle of weed-strewn tarmac and a stile in a fence allowing access to this part of the cliff walk. Jem had stopped in front of a wooden gate, long ago painted red, which opened onto an undisciplined garden of trailing, spindly flowers and louring bushes. “We’re here,” she said. Gil nodded, her apprehension infectious. He was still digesting the knowledge that Alex Gregory was her father, and that he was dead. He despaired at himself for having accepted her silence about her family without question, for not having seen that she was stricken with grief. He was supposed to be good at this stuff, for Christ’s sake. But then she hadn’t wanted him to see. She had wanted, with him, to hide from the horror. He understood that, could imagine doing the same thing. But the thought of her trying to cling on to the pretence that everything was all right made his heart ache. He tightened his hand around hers and her fingers squeezed in response.
He rallied. Said approvingly, “So this is home.”
“It is.” Letting go of his hand, she pushed open the gate. He followed her along the path which led around the side of the house through an arch of overgrown purple buddleia to the back door. She took her keyring from her bag and unlocked it. She paused. “It’s a mess,” she warned him.
“That’s okay.” He touched her arm. She opened the door.
The kitchen into which he stepped was so overcrowded with furniture he couldn’t move more than a few feet in any direction without hitting something. The units and appliances looked as though belonged to the seventies; the dresser dominating the room might even be turn of the last century. Every available surface was cluttered, not so much in a scary obsessive-compulsive way but simply because there was just too much stuff for the amount of available space. He said, “It’s clean.”
She made a sound which in other circumstances might
have been a laugh. “Apparently it’s hereditary. He couldn’t throw all of her things away and now I can’t throw away any of his.”
“Her?”
“My mum. She died when I was twelve.”
Another bombshell, this one casually tossed. “Oh.” He assimilated the information, said with sympathy, “Right.” Opposite the dresser was a bay window seat and an old pine table, morning sun already creeping across its scars and stains. The walls were hung with little sketches he recognised as her father’s, on the dresser among the crockery and beside an old CD player stood a photograph of Alex with Jem as a child. True, the level of domestic chaos, even just in this room, was greater than he’d ever known but the trail of possessions told the story of a life. Two, maybe three lives. He said, “This is nice, you know? It feels like home.”
She shook her head. “The heart’s gone out of it. It’s just a damp old house filled with junk.”
“Hey.” He hugged her.
She half-smiled, in spite of herself. “Do you want to see the rest?”
The kitchen proved a decent indication of what was to come. Off the long and chilly hall a small square sitting-room contained a wall of bookcases, a wing chair and a green velvet chaise longue, a small sofa beneath the window. Newspapers and more books were stacked in corners, old paintings propped against walls. She said, “It’s partly because it’s such a little house. It’s hard to contain all those years of acquiring things you love, and things you don’t love but you can’t part with because they’re so steeped in memories.”
He squeezed her shoulder. “What do you want to do?”
“I know what I don’t want to do. I don’t want to live like this and turn into some sort of Miss Havisham. But my dad’s things, Gil. I’m never going to see him again. How can I throw out all his things?”
“You don’t have to throw out all his things. You just have to start making a series of decisions. Maybe think about what he would have wanted you to keep.”