The smallest murmur, a bubble of sound released gently into the cool air, and he paused, his focus shifting from the recreation of rock pools to the Moses basket resting on the old apothecary’s chest six feet away from him. He waited. His daughter’s hand was thrust into the air, the transluscent tips of her fingers briefly visible over the rim of the basket before disappearing again. He smiled, poised to retrieve her, but she sighed and quieted and he returned to his painting. This morning when he’d woken Marianne had been asleep beside him, which after so disturbed a night had been a blessing. He had crept around her, scooped up the baby in her basket and borne her downstairs with him, changed her nappy when she woke and fed her from a bottle of expressed milk, all intervening doors closed to preserve her mother’s rest. Afterwards he popped Jemima, all wide-eyed and dribbling, into her sling and walked down into town with her bouncing happily against his chest. He ran errands, stopped to chat now and then, his daughter effortlessly enchanting his friends and neighbours, and finally arrived at the quayside property which he’d bought, along with the cottage, only weeks ago. Two mortgages and two unstable incomes. He was trying not to think about that too much, about where he would be if the current public thirst for his painting became sated, if Marianne – well, he was trying not to think about that too much either. He stared hard at the canvas he’d begun the previous day and, seeing that the baby was asleep again, carefully slid her from the sling into the basket. He picked up a palette, a brush. His work, always his life blood, had become too welcome and necessary a distraction from the troubles which gnawed in his head and his heart.
Hearing the click of the street door, he hastened through before any greeting call woke his daughter. His visitor was Eve, the red-headed teenage girl to whom Marianne had given piano lessons last year and who had since unaccountably become something of a fixture in their lives. He didn’t mind; her abrasive edges amused him and masked, Marianne insisted, a touching insecurity and anyway, sympathetic and cheerful friends for Marianne were to be encouraged.
Eve smiled as he appeared and he put a finger to his lips, gestured towards the workshop. She glanced in, tip-toed to the basket and stood watching for a moment. Alex smiled. He had spent hours of her short life watching his daughter sleep.
“She’s gorgeous,” she whispered, when she had tip-toed back to him.
“Thank you. I think so too, but then I am besotted with her.”
Eve grinned. “I came to tell you I’ve had some good news. I’ve got a job with the Express & Echo. Just, like, cub reporter stuff but still … ”
“That’s great. Eve, I’m so pleased for you. When do you start?”
“Next month. I wanted to tell Marianne.”
“I would leave it for while, she didn’t sleep much last night.”
“Of course, with the baby.”
He hesitated. Sometimes telling the truth seemed like a betrayal of his wife and really, who needed the absolute truth? “I’ll get her to give you a ring.”
“Thank you.” She beamed at him.
She had been gone for quarter of an hour at the most when the door opened again. Once more he put down his brush and went quickly into the gallery. This time his visitor was his wife. Though it was a half hour trek down here from the cottage, she looked as dazed as though she had just woken. He prepared himself for whatever was to come.
“Hello.” He went to her, kissed her unbrushed hair. “I thought you needed to sleep.”
“I woke up and you weren’t there.”
“Giving you some peace.” He smiled, inviting her to smile back. She regarded him with suspicion.
“I didn’t know where you were.”
He had noticed, when he kissed her, that she smelled faintly stale and sweaty, that her shirt was stained with breast milk. “I’ll get a phone put in here,” he told her. “Then if you need me you don’t have come all the way down.”
She nodded.
“Eve dropped by,” he said. “She has some good news.”
She began walking around the empty space, rubbing her arm compulsively. He watched her, knowing her distraction to be focused inward, her head full of bewilderment and fear. “Marianne? Shall I go and get you a drink? Some breakfast, maybe?”
She shook her head. The sound of post flapping through onto the wooden floor almost made him jump. He went to pick it up, sorted quickly through circulars and a couple of white window envelopes which couldn’t, surely, be bills already. He’d decided to have his business mail delivered here, in the effort to compartmentalise his life which he needed to make but had no confidence was going to work.
When he looked up again she was gone.
He turned towards the workshop, saw that Marianne had taken their daughter from her basket and was holding her in both outstretched hands as though she were a gift, or a sacrifice. “Look what I found!”
He was beside her in a second.
She said, “Where did you get her?”
His heart sank. He said gently, “Well, she’s ours.”
Marianne frowned, confused. “Ours?”
“She’s our daughter. She’s six weeks old. Jemima Rae Gregory.” With each detail he prayed there would be some flicker of recognition, but she continued only to gaze at the baby in awe. “She knows you,” he added. “Talk to her, she’ll respond to you.”
“But I thought … our baby … ”
“What?”
She shook her head. “I had … someone told me she … ” Her eyes filled with tears. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she.”
“Yes,” he said. “She is.”
Jemima had twisted her head at the sound of his voice and, finding his face, smiled. He smiled into her eyes, said with his usual humorous affection, “Hello Puddle.” He lifted her from her mother’s hands to hold her safely to him, where she drooled against his neck. Marianne was shivering. He took a breath. Another day in the gallery lost but what choice did he have. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll go home.”
Chapter Five
Gil strides back across the tarmac towards me, the wind whipping his hair across his face as it whips the stink of oil from the ferries across the dock. I’ve dropped my rucksack to the ground, pulled the cuffs of my hoodie over my fingers. He says, “We’re in luck. Sails at six forty-five, arrives Roscoff around one.”
“I always thought it sounded Russian, Roscoff.”
He looks at me askance. “I got us a cabin. You need to sleep. We can’t do this with no sleep.”
I don’t think I’ll ever sleep properly again, but I’m trying not to say anything unhelpful. I had dozed briefly in the car, woken on a scream which had us slewing across the empty road. He braked and I had to get out, stand shaking in the hedgerow, breathing in the dawn. We dumped the car later out of town. Gil wanted to leave it at the airport but the airport closed this month, there were no flights going anywhere anymore. It wouldn’t have fooled anyone.
“Anyway,” he adds, “there won’t be any CCTV in the cabins.”
Gradually little knots of other foot passengers have appeared along the quay; a line of cars is forming slowly between the barrier and the road. I turn my face to the grey churning of the Channel – no surfers here, no one paddling, no sun glittering off the water; it might be an entirely different element. I am shivering, for my life is an entirely different element now, divided irrevocably into before and after.
Gil scans the road behind us, traffic increasing as the minutes tick by. He looks intense when he’s deliberating over a menu; it’s only appropriate now. I wonder what he’s expecting, how it will be when it happens: blue light flashing, siren whooping, guns and loudhailers or an unmarked car drawing silently alongside us, a flick of ID, a word in our ear.
He looks back at me, sees my face, squeezes my shoulder. “Hey. It’s okay. It’s going to take a while, you know.”
I nod. “But you’re jumpy.”
“Cold, is what I am.” He rubs his hands together as proof, glances towards the ferry waiting
for us at the end of the quay. “You’d think they’d be letting us board by now.”
And they do. We head the small crowd, past the duty free and row after row of empty seats, the smell of bacon from the restaurant almost but not quite eradicating the smell of sea and oil. Gil finds our cabin and we swing inside.
It’s a tiny white capsule of bunkbed and en-suite, everything a little chipped, a little shabby, but clean nonetheless. He takes off his rucksack, runs his hand through his hair. “I’ll get us some food, something to drink. What would you like?”
“Anything.” Nothing, actually, but I’m still in helpful mode. Alone, I take off my shoes and hoodie, step into the en-suite and recoil from my reflection as I did hours ago on the train. I look ill. We both do. My make-up’s in my bag but there’s no point; I don’t care and besides, foundation and blusher will conceal nothing. I wash, dry myself with a towel from the rail, weary now. My bones ache. When I sink down onto the lower bunk the duvet is softer than I’d expected, inviting. I want to curl up beneath it and disappear.
Just as I’m wondering where he is, whether I should be panicking, tearing round the ship endlessly searching for him like a mad woman or someone in a nightmare, Gil returns. He crouches on the floor, unloads a bottle of water and a can of Red Bull, sandwiches in plastic triangles, blueberry muffins and coffee, says apologetically, “I couldn’t take out any hot food.”
“I couldn’t eat any hot food.”
He snaps the lid from a cardboard beaker of coffee, takes a sip. I unwrap a muffin and break a piece off. “When we get to Roscoff,” he says, “I’ll hire a car. We’ll go inland, minor roads, stay where we feel safe.”
“Hiring a car will leave a trail.”
He nods. “We won’t be able to keep it. We’ll go by train sometimes. Buses, whatever. And we’ll have to empty our accounts as soon as we can.”
I think about this. I’ve no idea how much money we have. How much we’ll need. “Is France big enough to get lost in? If you have no paperwork and you don’t speak French?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve never done this before.”
I put down the muffin. I cannot speak. My throat hurts and I reach for the water.
“Hey.” He comes over to me on his knees, folds my hand into his. It’s the first time he’s touched me, the kindest his voice has been, since we were at the house. “One day at a time, you know?”
I struggle not to unravel. “I know.”
“We just have to get our heads round it. We’re going to have to get used to a different kind of normal. And no looking back.” He holds my gaze, tucks a loose hank of my hair back behind my ear. “There’s no one left to miss us anyway.”
Chapter Six
The garden of the inn overlooking the bay had always been one of Jem’s favourite places. Due to its distance from the beach and the precipitous drop beyond the palm trees and flowerbeds, it was one of the few places in town between Easter and September free from the wailing and paraphernalia of small children; a grown-up sanctuary in the midst of bucket and spade mayhem. Jem, arriving early, had taken possession of a picnic bench at the far end of the lawn, allowing the most secluded spot, the prettiest section of palms and lavender blue hibiscus and the best view of the Atlantic Ocean. It was a bit of a stroll to the bar but she had bought a large glass of white wine which she promised herself would last her the length of her stay. She had also brought her sketchpad and a pencil. An idea for a new design had half come to her in a dream, and she was trying to clutch at the dissipating fragments of it now and fix them to paper.
“Thought I might find you here.”
Alex. She smiled up at him. “Hey.”
“Hey.” He sat on the end of the opposite bench, gestured towards her sketchpad. “Inspiration struck?”
“Something like that.”
He smiled, gazed out over the greenery and the sea shimmer beyond. “We used to come here a lot.”
“We did. I think I’m going to start resurrecting old traditions.”
“Not starting new ones?”
“There’s room,” Jem said, “for both.”
He reached for the copy of the local newspaper, which lay folded on the table between them. “May I?”
“I bought it for you.”
She glanced at him now and then while she sketched and he read, knowing of old which pages he would read first, and second, and last, the point at which he would fold the paper in half and take out a pencil to attempt the sudoku, that it would be accompanied by much frowning and rubbing-out, the occasional blast! and inevitable defeat. She wondered why he bothered when there was a perfectly good crossword on the same page and they were both much better with words than with numbers. But then that was the point after all; rising to small challenges was how her father thought you should live your life, not so much taking the road less travelled by as taking the road which encompassed potholes, a ford and a bit of hanging off a cliff edge. It was as well, she had always thought, that she had inherited his spirit and didn’t hanker for routine or security. Or perhaps it was just that he had taught her well.
“So,” he said after a while, clearly having reached a point in his sudoku when conversation became preferable, “what are these other traditions you’d like to resurrect?”
“Oh … ” She considered. “Fish and chips on a Friday night. Going to the beach on Sunday mornings to watch the sunrise. Listening to the radio in the evening instead of playing spider solitaire on my laptop.”
He laughed. “That is a choice you make, you know.”
“It isn’t a choice, it’s a compulsion.” She quit the pretence of trying to rescue the Gothic Surfer range of jewellery from the recesses of her sleep and put down her pencil. “Any more thoughts about your trip to Tintagel?”
“I have, in fact. Had a word with Archie Fellows, do you remember him?”
“No. You always ask me if I remember people you were on nodding terms with before I was born.”
“He was a good friend and you were in high school. Anyway, I’m going to doss down at his place for a few days. It’s just a mile or so up from Port Isaac, it’ll be very handy.”
“Doss down?” she cocked an eyebrow at him, reached for his abandoned newspaper and began to turn the pages. “What will it be, a mattress on the floor?”
“Very nice spare room, actually. If you don’t want me to go … ”
“No, no. You should go. I can just see the pair of you reliving your beer and paint stained bachelor days. I … oh my God.”
“What?” He looked over at the page at which she was staring.
“It’s that guy.” She turned the newspaper at ninety degrees between them. “This is the rescue I saw last week, do you remember?”
“I do.” He skim-read the report, laughed. “She doesn’t get any more original, does she, old Eve? ‘Saturnine good looks’ indeed.”
Jem looked at the photo of a man called Gil Hunt, read Eve Callaghan’s brief account of events and considerably less brief call for action, and returned to the photo. She felt oddly breathless. “Do you recognise him?”
“No. You’d think I would, if he’s an artist of sorts and he’s here every summer. But then a lot of young people are here every summer and you know me, I don’t get out much.” He glanced at her. “Why? Do you?”
“No. I mean, from that night, but … ” And yet, there was something. She looked hard at the photograph. Gil Hunt, she thought. So that’s who you are.
Party-time at Patrick’s. Whose party no one knew or cared, its music and energy spilling into the bar, fairy-lit waves of rhythm rolling over guests and customers alike. You didn’t have to be too picky if you held your private celebration at Patrick’s: as the dance floor divided what passed for a function room from the society of tourists and regulars it became impossible to keep them apart. Cecily had never known anyone to mind. She sat on a bar stool with one leg tucked beneath her, swirling her third drink of the evening and people watching. A young
man wearing a straw hat and floral shirt bopping in joyous unself-consciousness while a gaggle of barely clad girls wept with laughter. Radar and Buz cranking up their dumb surf dude double-act for the benefit of two wise-beyond-their-years teenagers but also for their own amusement, Radar in knock-off RayBans and Buz having gelled his sunbleached mop into some bizarre kind of quiff. A couple around her own age, sitting in wicker chairs at the edge of the dance floor, watching the kids, turning back now and then to each other. Gil at the other end of the bar paying rapt attention to an elegant blonde, listening, laughing, emanating his fun-yet-honourable vibe. And Henry, beside her. Buying her another drink.
“Jeez, Hen. I’m going to be wasted. I have to get up and fry stuff in the morning.”
“D’you care?”
“Hell no.”
He smiled, pushed her drink towards her. Her gaze returned to the crowd, reading body language, catching the smallest interactions, singling out the beautiful, the introverted, the careless. We all have our stories, she thought, lifting her glass to her mouth. Every one of us.
“Wanted to tell you something actually.” Henry’s words filtered into her thoughts and she turned slowly back to him.
“Yeah?”
“What we were saying the other day.”
Cecily didn’t blink. If he kept talking she’d cotton on.
“You remember?”
“Sure.” She kept her face straight while she dredged her memory. “Remind me.”
“About taking something seriously.”
“I do. Of course I do.” She put down her glass, rested her chin in her hand. “So tell me.”
He hesitated. “I have this cousin, in Australia. Brisbane. My aunt and uncle emigrated out there when we were kids. Anyway, he has his own watersports business, been going a few years now, doing pretty well. He’s asked me if I’d like to go out there, just for a holiday and … ” He stopped. “You can see where this is going, can’t you?”