by F. G. Cottam
‘Is that what you call Brodmaw now?’
‘What?’
‘You just referred to it as “the bay”. It’s like people from Wight always calling it “the island”. It’s how you spot a native.’
‘I’m not a native. My dialect lacks the burr. There’s no hay in my hair or mackerel scales on my boots.’
‘You’re a fraudulent fisherman, James Anthony Greer. You’re a dishonest son of the soil.’
‘Guilty as charged,’ he said.
They were in the stone circle, on the plateau above the village, having yet to descend down the road and arrive properly. Wonderful how a dash of infidelity can rejuvenate a marriage, James thought. But the thought did not insist on lingering in his mind. What resentment he felt was inconsiderable compared to the almost overwhelming feeling of relief. In his long descent over recent months into despondency, he had been unaware of quite how close his marriage had come to disintegration. That would have been infinitely worse than what he was currently being obliged to endure.
He had texted Richard to tell the Penmarricks he was returning with Lillian to look at Topper’s Reach with a view to buying. Richard had responded almost immediately with an offer to put the two of them up for the duration of their stay at their palatial Tudor pile. James had been inclined to accept, so much had he taken to the bay’s pre-eminent couple on his first visit.
Then he had thought better of it and politely declined. It would be awkward if Lillian did not respond positively to the village and particularly to the property that Richard, through the Trust, represented. More than that, there was an element of second honeymoon about their westward trip that James did not want inhibited. A certain formality would be required of them as house guests.
Robert’s daughter, Megan, was a fan of Lillian’s. But there were things the Penmarricks did not know about her. The recent dalliance with Robert O’Brien was one of them. James was keen for the sake of his wife’s reputation and his own self-respect to keep it that way. Lillian was anything but a tramp. No man liked to be thought of as a cuckold. They would stay in the Byron Suite and their lost intimacy would be restored and their romance resurrected tenderly, to no one’s timetable but their own.
‘This is a fascinating place.’
‘Is it provoking memories?’
‘Not at all, it isn’t, no. I can put my hand on my heart and swear I’ve never been here before. I recognise the view of the bay from my illustrations. But I do not feel as though I have ever seen it before in life.’
‘You’re doing it now, Lily. You’re calling it the bay.’
‘Fate,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘One simply cannot escape it.’
He was glad that they had the plateau to themselves. He somehow felt that the little apparition in the purple school uniform would have seemed twice as sinister had they both seen her. Sinister was not what was required at all. It was his intention for his wife to see the bay in the best light possible. He had already decided that there would be no visit to the derelict church. He would not have stopped at the standing stones had Lillian not spotted the Neolithic monument from the road and insisted upon it.
Lillian nodded down towards the settlement at the edge of the sea. It was a clear day. There was a slight haze on the horizon, but the water was blue and placid and the buildings clustered in their semicircle on the shore bright and sharp with detail. ‘It could be 1940 down there,’ she said. ‘It could almost be 1840.’
‘They didn’t have cars in 1840.’
‘There are precious few cars. I take your point. A car would be pretty anachronistic in 1840. But this is the twenty-first century and I’ve only counted about ten.’
‘There are actually only seven cars in the bay,’ James said. ‘The other three vehicles are vans.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes. They belong to the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker.’
‘You’re very witty, Mr Greer. Is Topper’s Reach visible from here?’
‘Not in its best aspect. Let’s go down and sneak a look before we ask for the keys.’
They walked back to the car. They had come in the Jag. There was no point in false modesty when the price of Topper’s Reach had been openly stated and Megan Penmarrick knew exactly who Lillian Greer was and her astute parents pretty much what someone with Lillian Greer’s artistic output would likely be worth.
On the short walk, James mused on his own phrase, on the subject of the bay’s best light. One of its brightest features, to his mind, was an unlikely primary school teacher called Angela Heart. He wondered what his wife would make of her. He was really intrigued to know what Lily would think of Angela.
To him, for all her potent allure, Angela was a character who did not quite add up. She had gone from here and then come back, she had told him. She had implied the story was a complicated one. He assumed she had left because someone as exotic as she was belonged naturally in a more exotic habitat; he would have put his money on somewhere like Paris or Barcelona. He could not help but speculate on the reason for her return.
He thought the bay the perfect place to build a home for a family with growing children. It was a clean and beautiful environment. It was prosperous and crime was not just low but uncommon and it had a stable population with a strong sense of tradition and civic pride. It was the ideal location for married parents who were able to earn a living without being tied to a specific region by their employer.
It obviously suited the likes of the chandler Martin Sharp and the builder Ben Tamworth. He imagined the bay provided their identity as much as their livelihood. And he suspected that was equally true of the headmaster Philip Teal and others he had met more briefly like the poet Michael Carney, the boatbuilder Billy Jasper, the pharmacist Rachel Flood and Bella Worth, who edited the local rag. They were what were always described in the photo captions of free-sheets like Bella’s as pillars of the community.
Angela struck him as fundamentally different from them. She had admitted herself that her job was more employment than vocation. According to the Schools Inspectorate, she excelled in the role. But it wasn’t the suspicion of half-heartedness or mediocrity. It was that she was a comically poor fit for the spinster schoolmistress of popular stereotype. There was a sense in which, despite her being a native, her occupation and the bay itself were far too parochial not just for her femme fatale image but for her personality too.
He smiled to himself. He did not know for certain that Angela was a native of the bay. That was his assumption. Was he developing a taste for gossip? Surely that was an essential requirement in any resident of anywhere so small and isolated. He was really going to fit in.
‘What?’ Lillian asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
Isolated was not a bad word to describe Angela on the night of the singing, outside the pub, when she had made that enigmatic remark of hers about the storm having only just begun. She had been smoking, for which a kind of voluntary exile was always necessary nowadays. But he sensed her isolation had to do with more than just the answering of the craving for a cigarette.
They arrived at the Leeward just before six o’clock in the evening. Mark had appeared punctually as promised at noon on their Bermondsey doorstep. Saying goodbye to Jack had been relatively fuss-free. His father got the distinct impression that he was happy and perhaps even relieved to see his parents going off to do something together. The journey west had been somewhat beset by Friday traffic. They had dawdled at the stone plateau and then Lillian had been given her first look at Topper’s Reach. She had gasped and said a single word when the house came into view. The word was ‘Perfect.’
Charlie Abraham greeted James with a hearty slap on the back and Lillian with a handshake and a short bow. It was a fine early evening by now and when they were shown up to the Byron Suite, the twin south-facing windows were open to sunlight and salt air and a view of the glittering sea. Gulls cried in the sky. The room smelled of brine and the fresh bouquet of cut li
lies in a crystal vase placed on the night table. James did not generally like puns but thought this one a charming jest on the part of their thoughtful and welcoming landlord.
Lillian took a shower. She did this habitually after a journey of any length. It was simple good hygiene in dealing with the dirt that could accrue on the body and hair and clothing during air or train travel. James did not think the interior of the Jag would have soiled her very substantially during their drive. Still, she had her ways and they were, some of them, very endearing. Perhaps she just wanted to get rid of the leather smell of the seats.
She left open the bathroom door. He could smell the heady, familiar lime and basil scents of her soap and shampoo stirred and liberated by hot water and steam. He wondered, for perhaps the hundredth time, whether the sex Robert O’Brien had enjoyed with his wife had been unprotected. He suspected it had been. Passion and precaution did not go hand in glove.
Lillian emerged from the bathroom wrapped in towels. She had fastened one in a turban around her head and had tucked the second above her breasts. The flesh of her shoulders was smooth and pink with heat. A single damp strand of hair had escaped and snaked along her neck and coiled above her collarbone. The towel worn around her body was not as long as those they used at home. It revealed her legs to the thigh. O’Brien had been exorcised from Lillian’s emotions. There could be nothing of him left inside her, no adulterous residue. He had been thoroughly sluiced from her body and soul in the days before this expedition to the bay.
James was lying on the bed, reading an Adam Gleason sonnet from a volume of his poetry picked from a short row of books lined up on the bedside table. As Lillian passed him he reached for the towel concealing her nakedness, snagging it between finger and thumb and she smiled at him and allowed it to unravel, revealing her.
The stir of arousal was very strong in him. She seemed to him both familiar and new. He had not known everything about her. What she had recently done had shocked and surprised him. It was a long time since he had enjoyed or even contemplated sex with a stranger. But the attraction of that unknown adventure was still compelling. And making love to his wife now would to some extent be that, because she was really quite different from the person he had assumed she was. And there was something else, because they were naked to one another now as he could not remember them having been for years.
She smiled and raised both hands and her breasts rose and she released the towel wrapping her head and her hair fell unconfined around her face. The damp ends of it brushed his face as, climbing on to the bed, she stooped to kiss him.
‘Charlie Abraham will have heard us,’ Lillian said afterwards.
James linked his fingers with hers, on the bed beside her, where they lay on their backs together. ‘We’ll be the talk of the bay.’
‘If we’re not already,’ Lillian said.
She took a second shower. This one, he took with her. They were dressing when the landlord knocked softly on the door and said through it that someone was waiting downstairs to see them.
Richard Penmarrick leaned with his back against the bar. Both elbows rested on it, hands hung loose at the wrist. He was facing the view out of the picture window over the sea. The pose was pure gunslinger, but, with his long ripple of wavy hair and shirt open halfway down his torso and the various pendants and charms hung from their chains and strings of leather adorning his chest, he actually looked like someone who might have hung out with the Rolling Stones at their most imperious and debauched.
He could have been the pusher, James thought, the main man, the fallen aristocrat who supplied the drugs fuelling the band in their Exile on Main Street period. He had that louche, relaxed, devil-may-care quality about him. He had a reckless, insouciant sort of style. He would have impressed their Satanic Majesties. He would have fitted right in with them.
He pushed himself away from the bar with a thrust of his hips and nodded and smiled at James as someone not quite respectable might at an old friend who shared some compromising secrets. He looked at Lillian and almost pulled himself formally to attention. He bowed and reached for her hand and raised and kissed it. ‘Welcome home,’ he said.
O’Brien thought there were any number of ways it would be preferable to spend a late Friday afternoon than being observed through the steepled fingers of his therapist, while her sharp mind dissected his words and she formulated a strategy for overcoming his problems.
Dr Eleanor Deacon was beautiful. It was generally Robert’s habit to subsume inconvenient truths about himself in trying to impress beautiful women. However at two hundred pounds an hour, even by Harley Street standards, she was expensive. To lie just to impress her because she was so easy on the eye would be both futile and extravagant. There was also the fact that he was there because he needed to be. He was desperate and, in his desperation, prepared to be brutally honest about his predicament.
She had seen him at short notice as a favour. She had helped him out a couple of years earlier, when grief over the quite sudden death of his mother had resulted in a barren interval when nothing he wrote seemed to be any good. She had correctly deduced that the writing he was doing in this period was therapeutic, a way of dealing with the grief by distracting himself, rather than an authentic effort at structured creativity.
She had suggested to him he try to write something in tribute to his mother’s memory rather than as a means of diverting him from his loss. This tactic had eventually resulted in one of the novels of which he had been proudest. In gratitude he had taken Dr Eleanor’s daughter, a fan, to tea at Fortnum and Mason. Alice Deacon had been thirteen then and had brought along her collection of his books, each of which he had duly signed for her.
Dr Deacon had not owed him any sort of preferential treatment. If anything, he considered himself in her debt. But when he had called, she had taken the call personally and she had shifted things around in her appointments diary to see him at very short notice. She said that her daughter remembered fondly her formal tea with the distinguished author and, even at fifteen, still treasured the books he had signed for her.
Now she said, ‘Let’s talk about the cocaine. Are you quite certain that you regard it wholly as a recreational drug?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘No. There have been occasions when I have used it to kick-start my mind.’
‘You mean at the outset of a period of writing?’
‘Yes.’
‘I see. Have the incidences of use in those circumstances recently increased?’
‘Yes, they have. I’ll be honest with you, Dr—’
‘Eleanor, please, Robert.’
‘I’ll be honest with you, Eleanor. I am terrified of the page remaining blank. Every day it seems more difficult to begin. I’m not sleeping. I’m exhausted most of the time. I don’t have the energy for exercise.’
‘This apparition, the little girl you see: she wakes you?’
‘She wakes me, yes.’
‘How does she accomplish that?’
‘She sings to me.’
Dr Deacon rose from her chair and walked behind it to her desk. Robert had brought with him some of the draft illustrations Lillian had done for the series of books about his telekinetic heroine from County Clare. They were spread out on the polished wood, curling slightly in the June sunshine slanting through the big Georgian window of her consulting room.
‘She looks like this?’
‘No. She looks nothing like that. That’s the confusing thing.’
Robert had not always pictured his heroine in the way that Lillian had. He had always imagined her waif-like; but Lillian had given her an almost elfin quality, as though the capacity for potent and practical magic lay behind the drab reality of a young life in servitude. It was there in the translucent skin and the halo of blonde curls and the green sparkle of her eyes. It was Lillian’s talent of course to communicate such things visually; the mischief concealed by the apparently mundane, each child studying the images would assume a secret only they
had spotted.
‘If she does not look like this, what does she look like?’
‘Like a ghost.’
‘You need to be more specific.’
‘Why? Why do I need to be more specific about a hallucination triggered by cocaine psychosis? I need some help in getting off the coke, Eleanor. I need to believe I can carry on working without the inspiration provided by a line snorted before I even sit down to begin. It’s as much a part of my morning ritual now as brushing my teeth and brewing my coffee and I haven’t the strength or the courage or the self-belief to stop.’
Dr Deacon looked up from the pictures on her desk and walked back to her chair. She sat down and crossed her long legs and pulled the hem of her skirt to the knee. ‘Describe the little girl who wakes you with her singing,’ she said.
Robert did not really want to think about the little girl. One had to face one’s demons – it was the reason why he was in that august and imposing wood-panelled consulting room – but it was an unnerving ordeal to have to do so. It should not have been, really, in such eminent company and in the sober light of day. But somehow the sober light of day and the therapist’s cold professionalism made his night visitor even scarier to recall.
‘I called her a ghost. By that I mean that she is quite real and not at all human.’
‘Like a memory, you mean?’
‘No. I don’t mean that at all. There is nothing vague or diaphanous about her. She is not your stereotypical ghost. She is not vague and insubstantial. She is solid and detailed and occupies three-dimensional space. She is dead, though. She is emphatically dead.’
‘And yet she speaks, which corpses do not, in my experience.’
Robert smiled. ‘You can be as sarcastic as you like, Eleanor. I do not have that luxury. Seeing a child, one who died a long time ago, at the foot of your bed, having her communicate with you, is not an experience that provokes much mirth in me.’