The Long Forgotten

by David Whitehouse

  Dusk was setting in, and it was just the right time of year to wash the sky a pale purple. Peter made out a thin strip of twinkling lights in the distance, a village or town. But by now he could hardly walk and the lights moved further away the nearer he came. So he said it, actually said the words.

  ‘I am going to die.’ And then he sat down by a wall of rocks with the baby beside him, screaming. He was absent from his mind and body. The world was an assembly of ochre shadows. But the cry was fuel. He knew not who he was, or even who the baby was, but on a level of basest instinct, that the baby must be taken to safety. That was all there was left. So he was walking. Carrying Dove. Moving towards the light. Dying.

  After a while he found himself in a town square. One of the lights was blue. He set the boy down. And then, unable to remember the basket by his feet, the child in it or any of their past, he started to walk again.

  He slept and walked for three weeks straight. When they found him he couldn’t speak. He was alive but not alive, how he would always be without her.

  ‘Zachariah Temple?’ the man said, a battered passport in his hand.

  SEVENTEEN

  Professor Cole despises beaches, always has, always will. Quite why anyone would willingly spend precious leisure time on or around sand is a source of endless bafflement to him. It’s a displeasure that goes largely unvoiced these days, mainly because it annoys his wife enough that she says it brings her out in hives. For as much as she’s prone to exaggeration, she loves the sun and nothing pleases her more than a fortnight’s beach holiday in southern Spain. Apparently it dampens her excitement to have him remind her of his reason for hating beaches. Sand is death.

  So to be standing on a beach in his best suit and shoes is almost the exact opposite of what he wants to be doing – playing with his granddaughter in the garden – at this precise moment in time. However, he promised Dr Dash he wouldn’t complain, at least until they were back in her car, driving up the motorway towards home. That, however, seems ages away.

  Another thing Professor Cole doesn’t enjoy – though ultimately no one does – is memorial services, but he nods solemnly as the priest reads a eulogy, shouting over the rumble of the tide.

  An old lady shuffles to the front of the small congregation to lay a wreath on the sand. She is crying. Cole is glad he’d worn sunglasses this bright morning, their lenses big enough to hide the wetness in his eyes. His own father died in a car accident months before his birth, and even now he experiences what he terms phantom pangs in the middle of the night: a longing for a man he’s never met. Who is he to judge the extent of her grief? For a husband perhaps? A son? Remarkable, really, that she still hears the echoes of her loss thirty years on. Maybe that’s why people worship the beach, he reasons. Billions of years of the past between your toes is a nice reminder of a lifetime’s wider insignificance. To know we’re grains of sand on the beach of history is to grieve a little less for life’s end.

  The woman is on her knees. Two young men try to lift her to her feet. No pain greater than a memory, he supposes. Cole can’t watch. He thrusts his hands into the pockets of his coat, takes a few measured steps back and looks further down the beach, to where he sees a small group of people climbing out of a car. He assumes they are embarrassingly late for the service. And they’ll be later still. With the large lady in the overbearing jewellery is a young, sick-looking man, charged with pushing an older gentleman in a wheelchair out onto the beach at which he points. What a ludicrous thing to attempt. Still, with some persistence and a considerable amount of effort, the young man manages it, positioning the wheelchair at the lip of the ocean. Good job my wife isn’t here, Cole thinks. He’d not hear the end of this if she was. Age is the only excuse she deems acceptable for Cole despising beach holidays, and yet here is a man as old as the earth’s crust, content to be pushed onto the sand in a wheelchair.

  ‘So you’ll still say a few words?’ Dr Dash stands beside him, scarf wound twice around her neck.

  ‘What?’ he whispers.

  ‘You agreed, remember?’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like me. I don’t agree to things.’

  ‘You agreed to speak at the end of the service.’

  ‘Must have been under duress.’

  ‘I think everyone would like to hear what you’ve got to say, Professor Cole. You’re the hero of the piece, after all.’

  ‘Hero?’ he says, a little too loudly. A man in front, tall and broad-shouldered enough to resemble a wardrobe in silhouette, turns around and shushes them both with a serious brow. Dash lowers her voice to a level Cole can barely discern over the heckle of a passing seabird.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘There are heroes greater than I.’

  ‘I’m sure there are,’ she says. ‘But it’s you whose words we want to hear.’

  Cole has even less time for public speaking than he does for picking loose sand out of his underwear. But events have aligned in such a way that delivering a short eulogy is a civic duty only he can fulfil. He turns away again, hoping that not looking into the crying eyes of the relatives of those lost on The Long Forgotten may help him find a few words of tribute that won’t be considered overly sentimental. Sentimentality gets civilization nowhere, as any true scientist knows. That said, sentimentality has a time and a place, and when he remembers his and his wife’s courtship, he comes over all gooey, as though his bones are as soft as his heart. Those were happy times, studying in New York City, writing silly little love letters to the botany student he had fallen for and leaving them in books for her to find, feigning knowledge of flowers in the hope she’d be impressed.

  The young man who had been pushing the wheelchair lies on the beach where the dry sand turns to wet. He seems peaceful enough, gently cajoled by the nudge of the waves like a beam from an ancient shipwreck washed ashore. The woman watches as the old man stands from the wheelchair, takes the few steps towards the young man and kneels to cradle him in the ocean. As the waves burst around them, Cole thinks of his favourite sub-aquatic creature, the seahorse. Most of his peers pay little attention to its study, but for Cole, the humble seahorse is that most special of living creatures. Not for its unusual shape – the prehensile tail for clinging to underwater vegetation, the tube-like mouth for sucking in tiny crustaceans, the protective bony plates in the skin – but for a trait unique to the family Syngnathidae, and indeed natural life. The seahorse is the only creature in which the male of the species becomes pregnant and carries the young. Births them out into the depths of the sea to try their luck on life’s capricious currents.

  What led him down this train of thought? Ah yes. The man and the boy. Father and son, he’s no doubt. And with that, it is time to speak.

  EIGHTEEN

  Peter holds Dove in the water as if in baptism, and sure enough says his name: ‘Dove’, as though it is being given. For the first time in Dove’s life, it feels right. It is his.

  He sees a flicker in Peter’s eyes, and knows that now they both remember. This is where they once made it to land.

  ‘Dove,’ Peter says again, smiling this time, and his arms coil around Dove’s chest so tightly that Dove feels as if he’ll never be let go of again.

  ‘You’re Peter Manyweathers,’ he says, and Peter nods, lost in reminiscence of a time long forgotten, thirty years before, when he was a cleaner and a flower hunter from Brooklyn, New York. In his hands, a piece of Harum. In his hands his son. ‘You’re my father.’

  Rita waits further up the beach. She is crying. Beyond her, a crowd of people, apparently gathered in mourning, their sobs also carried on the wind: sounds that seem to Dove so entirely misplaced. This isn’t an ending. It is a beginning.

  ‘You’ll freeze out here,’ Rita says. ‘I’ll go and heat up the car.’ But Dove hasn’t noticed the cold. The drum of the waves soothes the ache in his head until finally it is gone. He knows it will not return. There is nothing else to remember. Everything is complete.

 
The thin, silvering man finishes speaking to the people, who break into a ripple of applause. This moves the man so much that he too starts to cry. The woman who’d been accompanying him comes to his side and stands on tiptoes to wrap her arms around his shoulders. They step aside so that another woman in a black hat and veil can lay a wreath made of roses where the man had stood.

  Two red petals are plucked free by a stiff and sudden breeze. The petals tumble and joust in mid-air, carried high above Dove and Peter’s heads as Dove stands, takes Peter’s hand, helps him to his feet and walks with him over the sand towards home.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My friend and editor Francesca Main is perfect. No book without her. Thank you. Thanks to Paul Baggaley, Kish Widyaratna, Laura Carr, Katie Tooke, Lucie Cuthbertson-Twiggs and everyone at Picador.

  Thank you to Cathryn Summerhayes, brilliant and indefatigable friend and agent. Thanks to Irene Magrelli, Katie McGowan, Amanda Davis, Hannah Young, Melissa Myers and Siobhan O’Neill.

  Onwards, occasional partners in writing crime and crime writing, Michael Holden, Michael Gillard and Rebecca Lucy Taylor.

  Team Bon Volks.

  Love to Jill and Keith Whitehouse, mum and dad. Love to Alison, Darren, William and Oliver Munro. Love to Glenn, Alex, Thomas, Anna and Jonathan Whitehouse.

  Love to all the Jakemans, Mark, Elaine, Edward, Sam, Evie, Grace, Rob, Amy, Betsy and Buddy.

  Love to my friends.

  Without Lou and Douglas, nothing. A love beyond expression.

  David Whitehouse is an award-winning novelist, journalist and screenwriter. His first novel, Bed, won the 2012 Betty Trask Award and his second novel, Mobile Library, won the 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. Originally from Warwickshire, he now lives in Margate.

  Also by David Whitehouse

  BED

  MOBILE LIBRARY

  First published 2018 by Picador

  This electronic edition published 2018 by Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5098-2754-1

  Copyright © David Whitehouse 2018

  Cover illustration © Sarah Arnett

  Author photograph © Ollie Harrop

  The right of David Whitehouse to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Pan Macmillan does not have any control over, or any responsibility for, any author or third-party websites referred to in or on this book.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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