I can still smell his lingering shaving foam, feel the side of his face smooth against mine, and it’s making my brain completely malfunction. That’s the only explanation as I say, ‘I suppose it could be.’
‘Will you come?’
‘What, now?’ I glance down at my feet in the water. ‘I’m a bit wet.’
He laughs as he steps back and stands up straight, grunting as he stretches his back out, making me realise how tall he is and how short I feel next to him. And I wish I could just grab him and sort of hold him against me for a bit longer. ‘No, some other day. Maybe the weekend? When we’re both dry and we can set out a lot earlier than this. It looks like it might be a bit of a walk.’
A bit of a walk? To me, it looks like you’d need a set of those walking pole things, an oxygen tank on your back, a few base camps on the way up, and a couple of machetes to cut down whatever it is that’s grown over that sorry excuse for a path. If it even is a path. I think he’s hallucinating. To be honest, jumping out of a helicopter from the top looks like an easier way to access it. Sans parachute.
‘What do you say? We can take a picnic. I’ll even make sandwiches …’
I’m having an out-of-body experience. I must be because I can hear myself saying, ‘I’d love to, that sounds like fun,’ but I’m pretty sure that such words would never come out of my mouth.
‘Yes!’ He punches the air. ‘Thank you, I was a bit scared to go on my own.’
Oh, great. That’s comforting. What good does he think I’ll be to him up there? The hill between the main street and the cottages is too much of a climb for me and a village of ninety-year-olds do it every day.
He clears his throat. ‘By that, I mean I’m completely brave and macho and not at all scared that the ghost is going to get me.’
His adorableness makes everything inside of me melt. Honestly, another excuse to spend time with him is more than welcome, even if it is climbing a flipping mountain. And I am intrigued by Camilla’s story and would love to find out if there’s any truth to the romantic legend and see where the carousel came from. What’s left of it, anyway. I give the pile of stones on the cliff another doubtful glance and then look back at Nathan, who’s still smiling with that wide, unguarded grin and that lightness in his eyes makes everything else fade away. This means a lot to him. It’s worth it.
Even if we die on the way.
‘Wait, you’ll make sandwiches?’ I say, wondering if I should be concerned that that thought occurred immediately after thinking about certain death. ‘I thought your cookery skills ended at Pot Noodles.’
We start heading back the way we came, still walking in the surf but further up the beach now the tide is coming in, and he grins an unmistakeable ‘I know something you don’t know’ grin. ‘Ah, I have a secret weapon sandwich recipe that I think you’ll love.’
‘What is it?’
‘I can’t tell you that. Not until you’ve tried it anyway, hence the “secret” part of “secret weapon sandwich recipe”.’
‘Weapon as in it’s a good sandwich or weapon as in it’s liable to kill people?’
He laughs. ‘Oh, come on. Do you trust me?’
It’s the moment Princess Jasmine steps off the balcony onto Aladdin’s magic carpet.
But with sandwiches, not flying rugs, obviously.
He holds his hand out just like Aladdin does and I’m helpless to resist slipping mine into it.
‘Of course,’ I whisper as his fingers close around mine.
He smiles and doesn’t let go as our hands drop back to our sides and we paddle back along the beach.
Chapter 10
‘Got time for that cinnamon swirl and a cuppa?’ he asks when we get back to the carousel.
‘I’d love to.’ I force myself to tear my eyes away from his forearms as he leans on the security fence and pulls off one boot and then the other with a wet plop and holds them upside down to tip the water out. I sit on the wooden staging and remove my dripping ballet flats, which now have sand glued all over them. I bang them together to remove the loose clumps, poke my sodden footlet socks inside, and lay them on the wooden staging surrounding the carousel to dry out in the sun. I do the same with Nathan’s boots while he goes into the tent and pulls the sides back, revealing the pieces of carousel laid out in an order that probably makes sense to him.
Even in pieces, it’s an impressive sight. The top finial and strong centre pole is metres above our head, the top of the tent far above that, piles of long metal bars that support the animals, and the wooden horses themselves, still in rows in one corner of the tent.
I pad barefoot across the smooth staging that the completed carousel will sit on in all its glory one day. It looks like a phenomenal amount of work to get this age-battered thing running again, but Nathan doesn’t seem fazed in the slightest.
After we’ve had a cuppa from the flask and pulled apart a cinnamon swirl each, he gets back to work but I can’t tear myself away yet. I watch him in the middle of the carousel, doing something that looks complicated to the engine. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Just cleaning it before I flush it out and see if I can get it back working again. Nothing seems damaged and there’s no obvious reason for it not to be going, I think it’s more a case of how long it’s stood unused, although even this is not in as bad a condition as you’d expect for something over a hundred years old. A bit rusty but that can be sorted easily enough.’
I glance at what looks like a mangle of metal that he’s currently got his hands underneath. It’s never crossed my mind what’s inside a carousel before, and nothing about it looks easy to me.
I wander around the tent instead, letting my hands trail across a stack of decorative curved panels that would usually form a circle around the engine to hide it, battered wooden boards that once held paintings of striking landscapes but are now too damaged to make out what landscapes they might’ve been. Each panel is expertly carved into a curve at the top, with scrollwork and fancy ivy leaves surrounding the paintings. ‘Do you really think a guy without much money could’ve built all this from scratch by himself?’
Nathan looks up with a shrug. ‘Sure. It wouldn’t have been a quick job, but yeah, this is a labour of love, not expense. He must’ve been experienced in wood carving, and if he collected the wood and dried it himself, he could’ve made or bought the metal poles, and the engine was definitely scrap from something else. See here?’ He pulls a cloth from his pocket and rubs a patch of the complicated-looking metal contraption. It’s just a jumble of wheels, cylinders, and pulleys to me, and I’m impressed that anyone could understand how it works, let alone fix it. I step across to see what he’s looking at. ‘See the scratches showing the green underneath?’
I nod, peering at the red metal he’s pointing to.
‘Means it’s been painted. He wouldn’t have bothered if it was new.’
I can’t help smiling at him. ‘You’re very good at this.’
He ducks his head, and I move away again, running my hand down one of the once-gilded posts that support the carousel and touching the pile of wooden sweeps that he’s marked up for light installation.
I look out the open tent side towards the sea, sparkling in the sun as it gradually comes nearer, the empty sand free of everyone except a dog yapping at the waves as his owner throws a stick into the water for him to fetch. ‘He must’ve really loved her.’
‘Or had too much time on his hands.’
‘Aw, that’s not very romantic.’
‘I don’t believe in ghost stories and starry-eyed fairy tales handed down through generations. This is an amazing carousel – the craftsmanship is astounding even over a century later – but I don’t care why it was carved, I just want to know who by and when.’
‘But you want to visit the place it was found. You believe the villagers enough to think it’s worth going up there.’ I look towards the cliff even though the house isn’t visible from this high up the beach. ‘All the way up th
ere.’
‘That’s different. The age of the building may give us some clues about the exact age of the carousel. I think it’s worth having a look from a factual point of view. Not because we might run into a ghost.’
‘But we might.’ I flash my eyebrows at him and he grins.
‘That’s why I’m taking you for protection.’
‘I don’t know, I keep hearing about this secret weapon sandwich of yours. If you brandish that at any ghosts, they’ll probably run a mile. Well, float a mile. Ghosts don’t really run, do they?’
He laughs, the warm sound filling the tent, and I can’t help watching the way his shoulders shake, his black T-shirt clinging to muscle, the denim straps of the dungarees over them.
‘Do you want some help?’ I say without thinking.
‘I’m already dragging you up to the ruins at the weekend.’
I fear he doesn’t understand how literal that ‘dragging’ might be. Also, possibly carrying, lugging, hauling, phoning for an air ambulance, et cetera. ‘I meant now. With the carousel.’
‘Don’t you have work to do?’
I think about my overflowing inbox, which is undoubtedly getting fuller by the minute with journalists sending over articles to be checked. I should have gone back to the cottage an hour ago and made a start on the backlog from yesterday before creating even more of a backlog today, and that’s without part two of the article, which Zinnia wants by Monday, but I don’t want to leave Nathan yet. This carousel steeped in history, the beautiful beach I’m standing on, laughing with this gorgeous man … I feel more alive than I have in years. I don’t want to go back to the reality of work, even if it does come with a slightly better view than usual.
‘If anyone asks, I could call it research. Someone’s bound to want some carousel facts checking sometime, I’m doing pre-emptive research.’
‘I like your style, Ness.’ He grins again and then shakes his head. ‘You sure? This is long, boring, repetitive work. Most people don’t find this interesting.’
I nod. ‘I have no idea what I’m doing – you’ll have to give me something easy.’
‘You can make a start on cleaning up the horses, if you want?’ He gets up and goes to one of his toolbags, coming back with a packet of wet wipes. ‘I feel a bit sexist for giving a woman a cleaning job, but I need to get the engine and then the organ sorted before I can even think about the superficial stuff.’
I take the packet of wet wipes from his hand enthusiastically.
‘Just give them a surface wipe – I’ll get a brush on the deeper grooves later – and don’t worry about the amount of paint that peels, it’s all got to come off anyway.’
I go over to the first horse in one of the rows at the edge of the tent and crouch down beside it. It’s the lead horse that Nathan showed me yesterday. It’s an impressive thing with brown glass eyes and intricately carved trappings, ivy leaves curving around the edges of its saddle, with wooden rosettes pinning engraved ribbons along its side, and a pattern of more ivy leaves engraved in its mane.
One side is more impressive than the other, which is mostly plain.
‘That’s the romance side,’ Nathan explains. ‘In Europe, carousels turn clockwise, and in America they turn anti-clockwise. The side that faces away from the public is never as intricate – that’s how you can easily tell where a carousel originates from.’
‘The saddle’s really worn on this one.’
‘Maybe that’s the one the ghost has been riding for all eternity.’ He looks over at me with a raised eyebrow.
‘You laugh but I’m going to stand outside the cottage playing a recording of carousel music at midnight tonight – you won’t find it so funny then.’
He laughs. ‘Ah, but now I’ll know it’s you. I’ll come downstairs and, believe me, catching sight of me in the middle of the night will give you more of a fright than any ghost.’
I quite fancy catching sight of him in the middle of the night, actually. I bet he’s adorable.
He glances at me with a soft look on his face making me wonder if I said that out loud.
I go back to concentrating on the wooden horse. Like every other part of the carousel, it’s buried under a century’s worth of grime, and I set about rubbing it off, pleased when the industrial-strength wet wipes glide through it and reveal cracked but bright paint underneath. The horse was white once, with decorations in various shades of blue, a navy saddle with five-petal flowers painted in baby blue, a carved blonde mane and tail, and feet of royal blue with silver hooves. I can’t quite get my head around the fact that this is so old. Apart from a bit of dirt, it’s amazing that something so elaborate can have survived for so long.
I look at the other horses standing nearby, all with different designs and colours, but none quite as fancy as this one. Even though they’re all in the same mucky condition, there really is something different about the saddle on this one. As I clean it off, I can see the blue paint is worn through to white undercoat and back to the original wood in some places, and the wear is in the exact shape of someone sitting on it. None of the others have the same problem. It makes me think about Camilla’s story, minus the ghost part. Maybe someone really did sit on this horse for years on end, going round in constant circles waiting for the love of their life to return. It’s a sad story, especially knowing he never did. It’s a far cry from the joyfulness that you usually associate with carousels.
I shake myself because it’s far too beautiful a day, a beach, and a carousel to feel this sad. ‘So what’s your next step with these after they’re clean?’
‘Firstly check for damage. Any breaks, any cracks, any missing pieces. I can already see a few ears that need replacing, so I’ll have to make replacements and glue them in place.’ He shows no sign of being annoyed by my questions, even though I’m pretty sure he’s used to working by himself. ‘Then I need to find as close as possible colour matches to all the paintwork, sand the whole lot down, basecoat and repaint.’
‘You make it sound so easy.’
He shrugs. ‘I love my job. This doesn’t feel like work to me. If I could do anything I wanted, I’d choose to be restoring a Victorian carousel on a beach. I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to get paid for doing this.’
I smile at the way he smiles without even realising it as he talks. I have never felt like that about a job in my life. ‘And what’s your biggest challenge? What’s the biggest problem that you’re going to have to fix here?’
He thinks for a moment. ‘If I start up this engine and discover it doesn’t work. They don’t make ’em like this anymore, and the chances of finding a new one would be slim-to-impossible. Secondly, the organ, although that’s not such a big deal. If I can’t get that working, there’s still a firm in Blackpool that will make them on commission. The owner would have no chance of getting one before the summer holidays, but even that can be solved with any sort of modern-day music player, although it wouldn’t give it the true carousel sound, and my brief says he wants to retain that as much as possible with a few modern updates … Sorry, I’m rambling again. You should know better than to ask me questions about carousels by now. I don’t shut up once I start.’
I bite my lip as I watch the way he goes back to twisting something on the engine like it needs as much concentration as landing a space shuttle. I want to go over and give him a hug, but it’s a line I don’t feel like I can cross yet. ‘What other problems are there, Nath?’
He looks up at me and raises that gorgeous eyebrow again. ‘You’re going with the Nath thing then?’
‘I figure that if you think using your full name equates as someone disliking you, then shortening it as much as possible equates as liking you and your carousel knowledge,’ I say. ‘And if Bunion Frank can get away with it, so can I.’
He laughs, an unrestrained cackle that makes him throw his head back and tears form in the corners of his eyes. I feel the atmosphere slip away as he goes back to talking about how worn the sce
nic panels that disguise the engine are and how he’s got to make two more chariots to make the carousel fully accessible.
It’s the sort of thing that sounds impossible to me, and leaves me in awe of his talent and how easy he makes it sound, and how excited he is about it.
I concentrate on rubbing a wet wipe over the underside of the horse and getting my fingers inside the hole where the pole goes through, while Nathan shifts the engine and makes a noise of surprise. He suddenly leans forward and runs a hand over the inside of one of the wood panels in front of him. ‘Oh, wow. Ness, come and have a look at this.’
The wooden base is warm under my feet as I walk over to where he’s kneeling.
‘I hate to admit it, but I think there might be something in your romantic old ghost story,’ he says as I crouch down beside him and he points at the inside wall of the panel.
Ivy is carved into the wood, with a scroll and some ivy leaves around it, and underneath in carving so neat it could almost be handwritten are the words I will love you until the carousel stops turning.
The atmosphere in the tent changes again. Everything feels suddenly intense, like we’ve just seen magic for the very first time. The hair on the back of my neck stands on end, like a ghost has just walked by.
I nearly overbalance and grab Nathan’s shoulder for support as I reach out to touch the words too. My little finger brushes against his as we both feel the intricate carving.
‘This is hidden right in the heart of the carousel,’ Nathan whispers, because it would feel wrong to talk in normal voices. ‘This panel protects the engine. Without the engine, the carousel doesn’t turn.’
‘Ivy must be who the carousel was built for. The name of the ghost.’
‘The lead horse is called Ivy,’ Nathan murmurs. ‘Usually they have individual names painted on their necks, but these ones don’t. Only the lead horse has “Ivy” carved in the traditional place.’
The Little Vintage Carousel by the Sea Page 14