Who she was, p.3
Who She Was, page 3
They both thought that the other one was a bit of a character.
People thought of our county as split in two – the authentic fishing folk like Will Farthing, keeping the old ways intact, and the fancy Dans like Anton, with their posh restaurants by some golden beach, all major credit cards accepted. But the two worlds totally relied on each other for their existence. That’s why Will had gone out today. Because there was Anton – and me – waiting for him to bring home the lobsters.
Will Farthing stood there grinning in the icehouse, still a strong man, and happy and proud that he had won his bet with the weather.
Bet Farthing stood by his side, staring thoughtfully at the lobsters on their bed of ice, visibly shaking as the relief came off her in waves.
The weather was still rubbish but we had a good night at the Lobster Pot.
The Porsche Cayenne family came in – the Winters, I remembered – and their children looked a little happier and their friends had made it down from London, both families arriving within minutes of each other, hugging and kissing and laughing out on the deck, and it was like a party.
And late in the evening, when the Winters and their friends were on coffee and dessert, Clementine came in alone and took a table inside.
‘You got your keys then?’ I said.
I didn’t know if she recognised me, and it made me off balance, unsure of myself. Then her eyes screwed up with something like ecstasy.
‘My keys! Yes! I love my keys! And I love my new home!’
I laughed. That’s the way people feel when they move down here for good. As if life is beginning again, as if they have another chance to get it all right.
At least that was the way it had felt to me.
I handed her a menu. She watched Lisa moving around inside the kitchen.
‘May I ask you a question?’ she said.
I waited. A burst of laughter came from the big table out on the deck. It was too windy and cold to be eating outside, but the Winters and their pals had kept their coats on and were making the bad weather part of the fun.
‘Your colleague,’ she said. ‘The one who spoke to me in the pub?’
‘Lisa,’ I said. ‘My friend.’
‘What happened to her husband?’
I looked across at Lisa. She gave me a grin and placed two coffees on the counter.
‘Service!’ she called. Our waiter, a long-haired local teen in double denim, Ryan, came over to get the coffees. Ryan was the son and grandson and great-grandson of fishermen, but he dreamed only of surfing, and he worked for me as a way of staving off the life at sea that he had been born for. Lisa had disappeared inside the kitchen.
‘Lisa lost her husband at sea,’ I told Clementine. ‘Everyone in these fishing families around here has lost someone out there. And I do mean every single one of them, because they’ve all been doing it for generations. But when they lose someone, they never really know exactly what happened. It’s like Lisa said – they go out on the falling tide, and they never come home. Jack – Lisa’s husband – had this sky-blue boat – Moon River – and then he went out one day and he didn’t come back.’
‘No body? No boat?’
I shook my head.
‘When Lisa was younger, she was down here with some friends from her uni, and she fell in love with a local lad, a fisherman – Jack – and then they were married, and she was pregnant with their son, and they were just getting their life started, and then Jack was gone.’
‘You weren’t born here either, were you?’ she said. ‘Why did you stay?’
I thought about it. I wanted to get it right.
‘It was my chance to try a different way of living, I guess.’ I remembered the life I had left behind ten years ago and shuddered. ‘I was a journalist, back in my old life.’
‘Anything I might have read?’
I shook my head. ‘I was on what they called the backbench. It’s more on the editing side. A backroom boy. But the industry was dying. That’s what happens in most jobs, I realise now. You think you have a job for life and then suddenly you discover you’re a milkman and nobody wants a bottle of full-fat gold top left on their doorstep anymore. And you’re lucky if you even have a milk round. My old trade just got harder and harder – lower budgets, more redundancies, more stress, always wondering if you were going to be next for the chop, always wondering how you would manage if – when – it came to the end. And my marriage broke up – my fault entirely. And I burned out. Quite badly, actually. A bit of a breakdown.’
I was talking far too much. Who cared about my old life? I took a breath.
‘So all this’ – I took in the Lobster Pot, the storm-blown spring night, the smell of grilled lobster coming from the kitchen and the bottles of white and rosé and champagne and beer stacked high behind the bar – ‘all this looked good.’
‘It is good,’ she said.
‘And how about you?’ I said. ‘What’s your story?’
‘My husband died,’ she said simply. ‘He died on a zebra crossing.’ She shook her head as if it was still not quite believable. As if it would never be believable. ‘A cop killed him. A drunk driver. A pissed, off-duty policeman, funnily enough. He slowed down but he didn’t stop, because he was looking at something on his phone, this drunken cop, and he just kept coming. And I saw that he wasn’t going to stop and I took one step back onto the pavement. And my husband – Alex – did not step back, and then Alex was under the drunk cop’s wheels, and then he was gone. Not immediately, but twelve hours later. In the hospital, in the night.’ A long pause. ‘And I got to the point where I knew that I just couldn’t be there anymore, on those same streets. I thought I could see the stains of his blood still on that zebra crossing. And I don’t know if that was my imagination or if it was real. But I needed to be away from there, as far away as possible. I need to be here at the end of England, the end of the country, the end of the line.’
All of this was told dry-eyed, her gaze level and her chin raised, with no sense of self-pity but on the edge of furious disbelief. As if all the tears had been shed, but the cold rage remained.
I said nothing. I could think of nothing to say. But I think it was at that moment that I realised I was falling in love with her.
‘Miss? Excuse me, miss?’
It was the man from the Porsche Cayenne. I remembered his full name on the reservation. Oliver Winter. He was somewhere in his forties, I saw now, although it was hard to tell exactly because he was so well preserved. I had not seen him smile before.
‘Will you join us?’ he asked Clementine.
I looked across at his table, at his glossy wife and their friends – more outsiders with money and teenage children who were not really children any more. The adults were all looking towards Clementine, their smiles as fixed as an ice skater at the end of her routine.
And I got it. Clementine was a stunning woman, and she was eating her dinner alone. I suddenly felt enormously protective towards her.
But she didn’t need my protection.
‘Will you join us?’ Winter repeated.
Clementine nodded, half-smiled, as if it was no big deal one way or the other, as if she was neither grateful nor offended by the invitation, and moved across to their crowded table. Winter poured her a glass of champagne as the introductions were made and they laughed as the bubbles rose too quickly and spilled on the bare wooden table to mix with the pink shells of the lobsters.
Even out of season, you could have these good nights.
‘She makes friends so quickly,’ Lisa said, handing me a Korev beer, the best Cornish lager, and we stared out at the night in silence. Lisa and I had been friends for too many years to feel the need to make conversation. I read the label on my bottle of Korev. The coast is our compass, it said. Born in Cornwall.
Across the river, Polmouth was black and silent, but the lights still glittered all across the small, steep fishing village of St Jude’s. Beyond the esplanade, there were some kids down on the beach passing around a spliff and kicking round a ball.
And then there was the sound of motorbikes.
Two of them, driving fast. The sound split the night as they came up the tight winding road out of the harbour, drowning the noise being made by the Winter party out on the deck. The two motorbikes rolled more slowly down the esplanade.
It was two cops.
That was an unusual sight around here.
We never really saw the police.
Their two motorbikes took the high winding road for all outbound traffic out of St Jude’s, speeding up as they passed the kids down on the beach. But the two motorbike cops did not even slow down to look at them. Whatever the police were looking for, it was not surfers smoking weed on the beach.
And drifting to me on the wild night air, as I drank from the cold bottle of Korev, I heard the sound of Clementine’s laughter.
BET FARTHING: It is strange who we love. When you stop and think, it makes no sense. My Will – when we were courting – he always told me, ‘I like your eyes.’ But they are ordinary eyes, really. There’s nothing special about them. Not even when I was young. But that is what he liked, or what he thought he liked, and why he wanted to take me to the Odeon in Truro. Because he liked my eyes! And I do think – is that all it takes to love someone? It’s got bugger all to do with how good someone’s heart is, or if they are kind, or if they are nice. Or how they treat you, even. What matters more is – the curve of their face. The shape of their body. Their perfectly ordinary eyes. The way they look and the way that makes you feel. I don’t know. It just seems to me that it’s not much to build your life on, is it?
5
I stood on the deck of the Lobster Pot watching a young seal sunbathing. He was out on the rocks where the estuary meets the open sea, stretching his great glossy bulk out on the black rocks as though they were a feather bed, sleek and fat and happy, digesting his breakfast as the waves swelled and broke beneath him. The sea was choppy, restless, moving through the darker shades of grey.
Down on the Platt the fishermen went about what they called their windy-day chores, mending nets and fixing pots and chopping bait, the jobs they did when it was too rough to go out on the open sea but quite not rough enough to sit in the Rabbit Hole nursing a pint of Korev and cursing the weather. One of them was painting the hull of his boat with a lazy, loving delicacy. They chatted as they worked and their laughter drifted up to me. I could see Will Farthing standing in the middle of them, the centre of attention by the look of the grin on his face, a constant splash of colour in his bright yellow oilskins and red beanie. I guessed they were talking about yesterday, teasing Will and each other because the old man had been the only one of them with the nerve to go out and fish. They had already turned it into a yarn, a story they would tell again and again down on the Platt and in the Rabbit Hole and on the days and nights out at sea.
From the deck of the Lobster Pot, I could look up at the storied cottages rising above the harbour and see Grandma Jo’s cream-and-blue cottage. A workman was taking metal grilles out of his white van. He had already installed one of them in the ground-floor windows.
Lisa came out on the deck and stood beside me. She followed my gaze up to the cream-and-blue cottage and then looked back at me. She raised her eyebrows at the new security measures, and said nothing. But I felt it too.
What’s she scared of?
We were not big on security grilles in St Jude’s.
Then something seemed to change in the air as the front door of the cottage opened and Clementine stepped out. She was wearing a red one-piece bathing suit, like a modest Olympian, her copper-coloured hair piled up high on top of her head, a beach towel draped around her broad shoulders.
My breath caught. With her hair piled up like that, she looked different. Uncovered, vulnerable. As if this was the real Clementine. There was something about the way her ears stuck out that nagged at my heart. I knew that when you had earned one of her smiles, you would see a pink flash of gum above her teeth. On such random accidents of birth, we give our hearts away.
The locksmith unloading the metal grilles looked up at her, grinning foolishly, and she gave him some unsmiling, murmured instructions. He nodded obediently and watched her as she began walking down to the Platt.
And we all watched her. All of us.
Will Farthing and the other fishermen, glancing up from their banter and windy-day chores to watch her progress down the winding streets that led to where they worked on the harbour.
And Charlie Farthing watched her from the deck of the Pleasure Dome as he loaded a scattering of early tourists, ravenous for the sight of seals and dolphins.
And Lisa and I watched her from the deck of the Lobster Pot.
Some of the party from last night’s big dinner at the restaurant were coming down the esplanade. Two of the Winters. The man – Oliver – and his teenage son. When they saw Clementine strolling onto the harbour, they stopped talking to each other, and they watched her too. Even the seal out on the rocks seemed to lift up his massive slug-like bulk and bat his enormous eyes at the sight of Clementine walking down to the harbour in her red one-piece swimsuit.
She walked down to the sea and it was like that old song, the girl walking to the beach at Ipanema, and the men all respectfully step aside to watch her pass but she does not even notice.
‘Bloody funny weather for a dip,’ Lisa grumbled, sipping her coffee.
And I saw that Lisa envied her. Clementine’s freedom, and the way we all stopped what we were doing to look at her, all of it. And suddenly it was important to me for Lisa to know the truth about our new neighbour.
‘She lost her husband,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Clementine lost her husband.’
I didn’t say – too. I didn’t say – just like you, Lisa.
But I wanted Lisa to see that every life has its tragedies that the world doesn’t guess at.
‘He got hit by a drunken off-duty policeman on a zebra crossing. That’s why she’s moved down here. To start again. To get away from it all.’
Lisa nodded. ‘She looks like she’s coping quite well.’
I felt a flare of irritation. ‘You don’t believe her?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know anything about the woman. I’m just saying, Tom. She’s not my idea of a widow. Look at her. I mean – she doesn’t wear a ring, does she?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘A widow wears her ring.’ She held up her third finger, left hand, and the thin band of gold glittered in the morning sunlight. ‘Where’s her ring, Tom?’
Clementine was nodding good morning to the fishermen, a special smile of recognition for Will Farthing, as she walked to the small pier at the edge of the Platt. Charlie’s boat idled nearby, the visitors gazing up at him, wondering why they were not on their way to see the dolphins and seals.
Clementine paused at the end of the pier, staring across at Polmouth, as if measuring the distance. She placed her towel on a bench, and turned to face the water. She rose on the balls of her feet, the muscles in her legs tightening, and then she stepped from the pier and dropped into the water below with a look of rapture on her face, like some sixteen-year-old boy on the first day of summer with Bad Apple Cider coursing through his bloodstream. She disappeared under the water, bobbed back up and took her bearings.
And then she began to swim to the other side.
Usually when someone jumped off the pier into the water, which happened all the time at the height of summer, they paddled around for a bit and then got out and did it again. But Clementine went into this steady but determined crawl, heading away from St Jude’s towards the shuttered village of Polmouth on the far side of the estuary.
Lisa shifted uneasily. ‘There’s a wicked current out there,’ she said, not taking her eyes from the figure in the choppy water.
‘I know.’
‘She could drown. Stop her, Tom.’
But nobody could stop her. And then the crazy emmets decided to join her.
Oliver and his son, Harry, were laughing as they jogged down to the Platt, saluting the fishermen who stared at them silently, and then stripping down to their underwear. Oliver, the dad, was in good shape for his age, as that kind of London money usually is. The boy was as skinny as a whippet.
They went in the water, Harry with a dive-bomb, and his dad seconds later with a clean expert dive. But when they swam after her, they could have been twins, their dark hair gleaming in the bright spring sunshine.
They went off at a furious pace, as if father and son were racing each other rather than following Clementine. Too fast. Then the boy suddenly stopped, treading water, calling for his dad. Something had gripped him. Cramp, possibly, or more likely fear, and the realisation of just how far it was to the other side. What it would take. They exchanged a few words. Then the boy turned back and his father ploughed on.
By now Clementine was nearer to Polmouth than St Jude’s.
Polmouth had a slipway, a boat ramp for access to and from the estuary, and this was where she was heading for. It was clear she was going to make it. Her stroke was measured and strong. When she rose from the water and waded ashore up the slipway, all the fishermen on the St Jude’s side applauded and cheered.
But Oliver Winter was slowing as he reached the halfway mark.
Then he suddenly stopped. You couldn’t see the expression on his face from this distance, but he was clearly in some distress, suddenly out of fuel, his head snapping back as if he was feeling the strength of the current, and looking around for help.
‘Bloody idiot,’ Lisa said. ‘I’m calling out the lifeboat.’
But Charlie Farthing’s engine rumbled into life and his boat took off, quickly reaching Oliver in a smooth clean curve, swooping around him to throw a lifebelt, and then idling as hands reached out to haul him from the water.
Charlie paused, clearly uncertain what to do next, looking from his wheelhouse across at Clementine on the far side. She sat on the slipway, her long legs stretched out in front of her, toes touching the water, her hair hanging in damp, dark-red clumps around her shoulders, all of Polmouth rising up behind her, all the windows of all those shuttered fishermen’s cottages staring down at her.
