by F. G. Cottam
He supposed that the small population and consequent lack of trade would put off the big retail franchises. But he thought there might have been a recognisable off-licence, given what thirsty folk fishermen were reputed to be. There wasn’t a bank or even a cash machine, at least not on the high street, there wasn’t. There were shops with bright frontages, glass gleaming as though freshly cleaned and awnings gaily striped. But they were all independents. He was reminded of Lillian’s jokey remark about the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker and wondered whether his wife hadn’t lived here in a former life. He was walking from the small car park to the rear of the pub with his overnight bag in his hand when he realised that he had not even seen the familiar red livery of a post or telephone box.
He took a moment to examine the Portland stone statue of Gregory Abraham, on its plinth outside the Leeward Tavern.
‘He didn’t really look like that,’ a voice from behind him said.
James turned. The man facing him was about six feet four and broad-shouldered and had the coarse, reddened complexion of a lot of exposure to the sun and the salt air. He looked about forty years old, older at first glance because his hair and beard were a grey becoming prematurely white. Between his arms, he held a basket of fresh loaves. James could smell their freshness and see the flour powdered on their crusts. The man bent and put the basket on the cobbles and dusted his palms and said, ‘You’ll be Mr Greer.’
‘And you’ll be related to the fellow on the plinth.’
‘Charlie Abraham.’ They shook hands. The landlord smiled. He had a broad smile and bright eyes, somewhere between grey and green, sea-coloured, thought James, who warmed to this fellow immediately.
They went inside. The Leeward was low-ceilinged and lamp-lit, dark after the sunshine outside, but more atmospheric, James thought, than gloomy. There was a lunch menu done in chalk on a blackboard on the wall behind the bar. There were horse brasses and odd bits of nauticalia mounted and shelved. There was music, but it was not the sea shanty he would have expected on his experience of the village so far. It was Fleetwood Mac. It was Stevie Nicks, warbling her histrionic way through ‘Sarah’.
The music was coming from an old cassette player on a shelf under the optics. Charlie Abraham went behind the bar and turned it down. ‘Always had a soft spot for Stevie,’ he said. ‘Can I offer you a drink, after your journey? The first one is on the house. There’s tea, there’s a pot of coffee fresh on, or since you must have been up since the crack of dawn, you’re most welcome to a glass of beer, if that’s your preference.’
James thought it astonishing. The landlord of the Leeward spoke in a dialect that sounded as if it might have travelled intact from the eighteenth century. He was no expert on idiom or semantics, but thought that this was exactly the way the man celebrated on the plinth outside would have sounded. He accepted a cup of coffee and Charlie Abraham poured one for each of them and they sat down at a table under the big curved window overlooking the bay on the far side of the pub from the bar.
‘Beautiful view,’ James said. The ocean glittered, boundless, under sunlight. The compliment was redundant.
‘It’s fair all right, Mr Greer.’
‘Please call me James.’
‘Then it’s Charlie to you.’
‘What did you mean, Charlie, when you said your ancestor didn’t resemble the likeness outside? Did the sculptor not know his business?’
‘Oh aye, he knew his business. His job was to render something formidable in stone. But prizefighters were agile, crafty men. No one built like the stone fellow outside could fight seventy rounds. He couldn’t go seven, carrying all that muscle. Old Greg had as much guile as strength. He was a wrestling champion, before he turned pugilist. He taught Lord Byron some of his ring craft.’
‘I’d heard they boxed an exhibition.’
‘More than that, old Greg coached him. They became friends and corresponded. Byron was always very concerned about his weight. I’ve got the letters his lordship sent along with a poem his lordship wrote in honour of the Brodmaw Battler.’
James absorbed what he’d just been told. ‘Where are these papers?’
‘They’re in my safe.’
‘Have you had them valued? Do you know what they are worth?’
Charlie smiled down at the table and blinked and then raised his head and looked at James squarely. ‘I know what they are worth to me,’ he said. ‘That’s the only value with which I concern myself. When the time comes, I will pass the papers on to Victoria, my eldest child. She can have the cache valued, should she wish to do so.’
But she won’t, the look on the landlord’s face said. To do so would never occur to her as it never has to me.
When he had put his bag in his room, James reflected on this. He was in a place where little ever changed. Tradition endured. Family was fixed and distant ancestry was viewed with an intimacy untouched by the remoteness of calendar years. It was a way of thinking that guaranteed identity and brought security. There was the solid comfort of continuity.
Charlie Abraham had not had the Byron correspondence valued because he would never have dreamed of selling it, regardless of the market price. He would not even have regarded it as his property to sell, James realised. He was only taking care of the cache for the next generation of Abrahams to treasure and take rightful pride in.
His bag on the bed, James unpacked what few items he had brought with him on the trip. It amounted really to a couple of T-shirts and a change of underwear. He was only going to be here for two full days. He felt very positive, very optimistic about his first impressions. He represented business, obviously, so it was in the man’s interest to be polite. But the pub landlord had seemed to him much more open and friendly than the Cornish, with their reputation for a surly sort of insularity, were often held to be.
He went back down and decided he would fuel his afternoon on an early lunch. Charlie told him that the kitchen opened at twelve. It was now almost ten. He would walk through Brodmaw and climb the hill and look at the standing stones on their plateau above the village.
‘So it’s a sightseeing trip you’re on,’ Charlie said.
‘No, it isn’t. Something recently happened to my son that made me think my family might be better living out of London.’
‘You will have heard the saying about the man who’s tired of London.’
‘I will have heard it, yes. I used to believe it, too. But I don’t any more.’
‘You’re on a property scouting expedition, then.’
‘I suppose I am. Are newcomers welcome here, Charlie?’
The landlord smiled his open smile. ‘We can always use fresh blood,’ he said.
James passed fewer people in the streets on the upward walk inland than he would have expected to. He did not see any children, assuming they were all at school. Not much chance of truants slipping through the net in a place like this. And he suspected that tolerance of loitering gangs of hooded youths would be extremely low. There was no litter. There was no graffiti. Everyone he passed gave him a nod of acknowledgement and some of them even smiled. He did not see so much as a cigarette butt besmirching the street gutters.
Brodmaw Bay was real enough. It was vivid and authentic in its sights and smells and sounds. It was not an idyllic illusion on a Hollywood back-lot. There was no twee, theme-park fraudulence to it. It was rooted and real. It was there in the clack of the cobbles under his feet and the sturdy whitewashed walls of terraced cottages. It was there in the viscous, rainbow glitter of the scales in sunlight on the hake and haddock on the fishmonger’s iced slab. It was there in the whistle of a window cleaner and the sour wince of sherbet from the confectioner’s open door and the pained gait on the pavement of an old man made arthritic, James supposed, by drenched winters chasing the shoals at sea. You could not have made it up or imagined it, but it was a dream nevertheless in its bright, provincial perfection. To him, it all seemed absolutely right.
It was a high
er, steeper climb than he’d thought to get to the plateau and the standing stones. His stamina and wind were pretty good. Swimming had become a habit in his school days when he competed at the sport. In adulthood, it had become a discipline. He swam about five miles a week, using the Olympic-size pool at Crystal Palace.
But the climb to the stone circle was uneven and arduous, up a narrow path once the village was behind him, beaten by generations of human feet. There were stretches of bare rock where winter rains had scoured the land. In other sections there were the surface roots of trees. Almost at the top he turned to look at the settlement laid out beneath him, breathing hard, thinking that this walk, as a daily constitutional, would make the whole family fitter in weeks.
Then he was there. The grass was short here, stunted by exposure to the wind, or grazed by sheep perhaps. The stones were rough columns of granite, each about eight feet high. They stood solid, still, enigmatic; as they had for around four thousand years. Perhaps longer, he thought, approaching and examining the nearest of them. He had recently read that Stonehenge was much older than the palaeontologists had originally thought. The theories had needed to be revised.
They would only ever be theories, James believed. After such a vast chasm of time, the secrets had perished along with the people and the faith that had inspired these austere and wondrous monuments.
He ran a hand across the rough surface of one of the stones. Rain and wind had pitted it where once a hand-held axe had made its facets smooth. How much would it weigh, he wondered, twenty tons? From where had these stones been quarried? How on earth had they been dragged to this solitary height?
He resumed his circular walk and smiled to himself. Futile as it was, you could not but wonder why the place had been accomplished. It was human nature to seek the answer to mysteries so physically strange and provocative in their stature and their enduring silence. The silence of the stone circle seemed deliberate and stoical, though you could not in all logic endow masonry with characteristics that were essentially human.
Was this a holy place? He shivered. There was a brisk breeze in the high exposure of the plateau. He looked out over the land at the water, at the distant frets of white foam topping the waves where the sea became remoter and less calm. Actually, he thought the stone circle just the opposite: it was an unholy place, he was suddenly sure. It had been a place of worship, but the gods honoured had been dark. It had been a place not just of ritual, but of sacrifice.
He smiled again. This time the effort was harder. He did not know what had brought these sinister insights into his mind. His knowledge of ancient history was scant and though he had touched the stones in passing them, he thought the idea of psychic sensitivity the stuff of charlatans.
He saw someone, then. It was not a figure summoned by psychic power, he did not think. It was not a scrawny Bronze Age man, carrying a spear and covered in woad. It was a little girl. She was dressed in the pleated pinafore and short jacket and straw hat of a school uniform. The uniform did not look like it had been restyled since Edwardian times. But the little girl was not an apparition. The detail was too human. She held her hat in place in the breeze with the flat of one hand and the breeze made the grey cloth of her skirt shiver against her shins.
She was watching him. She was on the other side of the circle from where he stood. She was too far away for him to see her eyes but he was sure she was watching him. There was no one else there to see. Her face was very pale. They all wore high-factor sun barrier these days, didn’t they? He waved, but she did not respond. She watched him for a moment longer and then turned and descended the hill out of sight.
He did not want to follow the girl. He had thought her too young to be on her own. It was probably perfectly safe here, but she was of a vulnerable age, no older, he had thought, than nine or ten at most. If he went back now, he might be seen and thought by others to be following her.
He had told Charlie Abraham of his intended destination, but you still had to be very careful and cautious these days about children who weren’t your own. She had not seemed in any distress, quite the opposite. He was the only stranger she was likely to encounter. He would give her ten minutes to get well clear before taking the path back to the bay.
He was hungry now. In fact, he was ravenous. He sat down, at a spot equidistant between two of the stones, not really wishing to sit any closer to either of them, breathing in the pure sea air, chewing a sweet grass stem and enjoying the view until he thought his caution over the schoolgirl need delay him in returning to the village and the pub no longer.
It was just before one by the time he got back and ordered his lunch. He was thirsty and ordered a pint of shandy at the bar. A man of about his own age stood to his right at the bar, sipping from a half of Guinness. He was dressed in a well-cut charcoal suit with a floral shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest and his blond hair was tousled and worn shoulder-length. A pair of sunglasses had been pushed up into his hair in a way James thought either a bit rock star or a bit girlish, depending on your prejudices. Glancing down he saw heeled boots that looked like they were made from snakeskin. When the man reached for his drink, his extended arm revealed a silver bangle. Rock star, James thought. Jack would probably be able to tell me who.
The man put down his glass and licked the white residue of stout from his top lip and swallowed. He turned and extended a hand. ‘Richard Penmarrick,’ he said.
‘James Greer.’
‘I know. Charlie told me.’
‘I thought you would be older.’
‘I wasn’t aware my fame had spread to London.’
‘I read the article you wrote, about tradition. The one where you spoke about the importance of maintaining customs.’
Penmarrick smiled slightly and glanced up at the ceiling and back. ‘You mean the article in which I climbed aboard my high horse and cantered off dressed as Oswald Mosley.’
James laughed.
‘Waving Excalibur as I went,’ Penmarrack said, ‘on a quest to find some morris men.’
‘I particularly liked the second paragraph,’ James said. ‘It was very elegiac. It seemed written from the heart.’
‘I suppose the description of the village was written from the heart. Most of it, though, was written from the spleen. Our less than esteemed Member of Parliament had just suggested that traditions with pagan origins should be banned. He said they were seditious and no different from terrorism. It was headline-seeking nonsense, but it provoked me into a reply. But it couldn’t have just been the article that brought you here. Charlie said you’re looking to buy a place.’
‘I saw some pictures of Brodmaw in a book written for children. I suppose I fell for its picture-book charms.’
Penmarrick’s eyes were brown and shrewd despite the self-deprecation of his humour. ‘Charm is largely a question of perspective. The village looks no less picturesque from the deck of a fishing boat returning to harbour with empty nets. But in those circumstances it probably seems entirely lacking, charm-wise.’
James paused before replying. Then he said, ‘My wife and I are pretty much self-sufficient, financially. If we did come to live here, we’d be bringing something and taking nothing away.’
‘Your children might be bored, here.’
‘Like most middle-class kids housed in central London, my children live under siege. They have active cyber-lives. But when they’re not using their computers, when they venture outside the front door, they have to be chaperoned. This place would be a playground for them by comparison.’
Penmarrick didn’t respond to this.
‘Are there vacant properties available?’
‘If you are as affluent as you suggest, there could be one or two that might be suitable.’
‘We live fairly modestly. Are newcomers welcome?’
Penmarrick smiled. ‘I’ll give you the same answer Charlie Abraham probably gave you. We always need fresh blood. And you must call me Richard, Mr Greer.’
‘I
will, only if you call me James.’
‘There’s a courier at the door, Mum.’
It was noon on Wednesday. James had been gone for only one full night. He had not called. He had said that mobile reception might be patchy in the far south-west. It was not a big deal. He was due back on the Friday. She was glad he was not there. She had not called a courier and she had not expected a delivery to her home. She knew someone who rode a Harley Davidson and wore motorcycle leathers and thought, incredulous at Robert’s nerve, that Jack’s mistake was in the circumstances perfectly understandable.
He held a bouquet of flowers between his leather biker gloves. It was a cover of sorts; publishers and television producers sometimes sent her flowers or bottles of champagne. It would do for Jack. But had James been at home, if James had opened the door, Lillian thought that her husband would have suspected something not right straight away. The bike was too extravagant and far too clean and Robert did not have the necessary air of scruffy nonchalance. He looked exotic and desperate and not at all like someone paid to deliver things.
‘You must be mad to come here.’ Her voice was a whisper, though Jack had retreated, indifferent, to his room.
‘What happened to your son?’
He had noticed the bruising. He was a writer and observant but you did not need to be. It was impossible to miss. ‘He was beaten up and robbed. Go away.’
Robert smiled. He made no effort to move. ‘James isn’t here, is he? Olivia is at school. It’s just you and Jack.’
She wished she had never shared the names of her family members with this man. His casual use of them seemed more than intrusive. It seemed somehow almost sacrilegious. She did not think that he was deliberately provoking her, but that was the effect when the names of her children came out of his mouth. ‘Go away.’