The House Beneath the Cliffs

by Sharon Gosling

  As they came back downstairs they saw Robert talking quietly with Terry and Susan.

  ‘I want to see the rental next,’ Pat said, holding one of the photographs of Frank that had been on the sideboard tight to her chest. ‘I need to check out the damage.’

  Robert smiled at her gently. ‘Best not, Pat. Not right now.’

  Pat’s face crumbled. ‘It’s gone, then?’

  ‘I think so, yeah,’ Robert MacKenzie said softly, and Pat sunk her head against his shoulder with a sob that cracked Anna’s heart wide open. Robert wrapped his arms around his friend and rocked her where they stood.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, after a few minutes. ‘Let’s head back for now, shall we?’

  The helicopter followed them as they left, a weary band of survivors carrying what possessions they could. The sound of the whirring blades blurred with the noise of the waves and the increasing wind as the Cassie’s Joy pulled out into the bay. No one spoke. They simply clung to each other. Anna studied Pat’s face, but Pat had become silent, staring steadily out to sea, and Anna wondered whether she was seeing anything at all.

  * * *

  ‘I saw you on the news,’ Cathy told her later. ‘Oh Anna, I’m so sorry.’

  Anna rubbed a weary hand across her face. The emotional strain of the past few days was taking its toll. She longed to hide away in a dark room, but she had arranged to meet up with Rhona to oversee the catering for Frank’s funeral. It was the least she could do. Pat herself had asked Phil to take her into Elgin – something to do with a meeting with her bank. Anna had begged Pat to leave it for a while, but she had been insistent. Anna had the sense that she needed to feel in control of something again, and could see why that would be important.

  ‘You’ll know more about what the village looks like than me then,’ she told Cathy. ‘I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch it yet.’

  ‘It doesn’t look good,’ Cathy admitted. ‘Two of the houses look as if they’ve been completely demolished. And that landslide that took out the road…’

  Anna shut her eyes. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  The phone rang again almost as soon as she’d finished the call with Cathy. Anna answered it without paying attention to the number and regretted it immediately as she heard Geoff’s self-satisfied voice on the line.

  ‘Saw you snatching another five minutes of fame on the news,’ he said. ‘Getting to be quite the celebrity, aren’t you?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘How about a bit of gratitude?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For calling to give you another chance to say yes to my offer after seeing what a mess your life is in.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s right, I’m going to save your career,’ he said, voice unctuously smug. ‘You’ll still come aboard in the new kitchen, although I’ve decided that I’m going to take on the executive chef role myself, at least to begin with. We can take it from there once I know for sure you can handle the pressure. So you’ll be under me. But you always worked best like that, didn’t you?’

  Anna let a beat of silence hold the line as she contemplated what he’d said.

  ‘Geoff,’ she said then, with slow deliberation. ‘Please believe that this is said with all due respect. You are such a dick.’

  She cut the call and blocked his number.

  Thirty-Two

  Frank’s funeral took place at the church in Gardenstown. The place was full – he’d had a lot of friends. The vicar spoke movingly about Frank’s life, both before he moved to Crovie and since. Anna learned so much about him that she hadn’t known, and it was the thought that she could no longer find out these things from him that made her weep. She hadn’t realized how very important a figure Frank had become in her life, a fixed point by which she had begun to navigate. He could never replace the hole her own father had left, but she’d been thinking of Frank and Pat as her family for months now. It was only with the diminishment of their trio that she realized the true depth of that connection.

  The wake was held in the Garden Arms in Gamrie. The pub was crowded, mostly with people Anna didn’t know, or knew only vaguely. She stayed with the Usual Suspects, watching out for Pat. Anna was amazed by the woman’s strength, by her grace, despite the deep well of her grief. Anna hated to think of her trying to deal with the aftermath of the storm alone, trying to sort out the mess that was the Weaver’s Nook, let alone the devastated rental house.

  ‘You’ll help her, won’t you?’ she said quietly to her gathered friends. ‘I mean, obviously I know you will, it’s only that I hate the thought of not being here to do it myself…’

  Rhona glanced at the others. ‘Sounds as if you’ve made up your mind to leave, hen,’ she said.

  Anna stared into her glass of lime and soda. ‘Realistically, I don’t know what else I can do.’

  There was a pause. Rhona raised an eyebrow at Phil. Susan nudged him. Terry nodded. Marie shrugged.

  ‘What?’ Anna asked. ‘What’s going on?’

  Phil looked over his shoulder to where Pat was talking to another knot of people, then back at Anna. ‘Excuse me for a moment.’ He extricated himself from their circle and went over to Pat, apologizing for the interruption and then speaking a few words in Pat’s ear. Pat looked over at Anna and nodded. As they came towards her, Anna felt a terrible feeling of misgiving.

  ‘Can I talk to you for a moment, love?’ she asked. ‘Outside. I could do with a bit of air, to tell you the truth.’

  Anna looked at the others, who offered smiles and nods as she followed Pat outside. Together the two women walked down the Strait Path that led from the pub to Gamrie’s shore. The tide was out again, the sun was warm, and there were families with small children playing among the rockpools. Across the bay they could see Crovie’s battered shoreline. The weather was lifting, no more storms forecast for the immediate future, and a low light was breaking up the cloud, pale sunbeams casting God-light over the damaged houses. From this distance it looked like a toy town, carelessly dropped from the pocket of a passing toddler.

  Pat settled herself on the old stone wall. Anna perched next to Pat and felt, not for the first time, that her belly was beginning to swell into a proper pregnancy bump. She laid a hand there, and Pat smiled.

  ‘You’re really beginning to show.’

  ‘I know,’ Anna laughed. ‘At least I have more than one excuse to buy a whole new wardrobe.’

  Pat smiled again and looked out to sea. ‘Poor Frank. He was so excited about the baby, you know. Could hardly talk about anything else.’

  ‘Oh, Pat—’

  Pat reached over to take Anna’s hand. ‘Don’t fret, love,’ she said softly. ‘You’ll start me off, and that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. Now, before I begin, it’s important to know that there’s no reason for you to feel pressured. It’s likely that we would have thought of doing something of the sort whether or not you’d been here, given what the storm’s done to the village.’

  Anna shifted on the stone, uncomfortable and anxious. ‘What are you talking about, Pat? Do what?’

  Pat looked out to sea again. ‘We’ve decided that we’re going to buy the Crovie Inn. All of us, I mean.’

  Anna blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘We had some savings put by, Frank and me, and he would have thought it a fine idea. Obviously the offer’s low-ball, taking into account the current state of the village, and it’s dependent on a structural survey.’ Pat turned to Anna, her grey eyes tired but lit by a brightness that hadn’t been there since Frank’s death. ‘I’ve invited the rest of the Usual Suspects to be part owners in it, too, and they’ve all agreed. Phil and Marie, mainly – they’re the ones with the most to invest, besides me. But Terry and Susan, Rhona, David and Glynn, Old Robbie – when I suggested the idea, they all wanted to be part of it. And together, we can afford it.’

  Anna was utterly stunned. ‘But… Pat, the rest of the village – the rental house
– won’t you need any savings you have to deal with all of that?’

  Pat shook her head. ‘I’ve seen the news footage, love. The rental house is done with. The most I can hope to get out of it is some insurance to pay off the last of what we owed on the place, and that some other party will want to take it on for a rebuild. Terry and Susan will need somewhere to live while they assess how to deal with their place, and possibly permanently if it can’t be saved. So will I, for the time being – I can’t live in the Weaver’s Nook right now, and I can’t impose on Old Robbie forever. If it turns out we can all go back home eventually – which is what we’re all hoping – we’ll run the Inn as a B&B. We can do it up ourselves while we live there, bit by bit. Together.’

  Anna was silent, processing this information. She looked out at the bay, at the gentle blue-grey-green waves rolling into shore. When it was like this it was hard to imagine it being any other way – hard to conceive of the violence of the storm that had shattered their lives and yet also bound them all together even more closely than before.

  ‘There’ll be room for you and the baby,’ Pat said quietly. ‘If you decided you wanted to stay. And there’s the downstairs, of course.’

  ‘The downstairs?’

  Pat smiled, but she was looking out to sea again. ‘The kitchen, love. The dining room. There’s a whole restaurant sitting there, waiting for someone to make use of it, just as Phil’s been saying since the night he first met you.’

  Anna couldn’t speak.

  ‘I know it’s a lot to put on you, and today of all days,’ said her friend, grasping Anna’s hand again. ‘We – I – am not trying to trap you into anything. I want to be very clear about that. I don’t want you to feel obligated to stay. It’s another option, that’s all, and God knows none of us will hold it against you if you don’t take it.’

  Pat went back to the wake a short while later, but Anna felt that she needed some space.

  She walked slowly down to the harbour. The water was still calm, the waves barely enough to break white against the sea wall. As she looked across at Crovie, a single shaft of sunlight broke through the cloud and glanced against the roof of the Fishergirl’s Luck. From here it didn’t seem damaged at all. It seemed whole, as self-contained as it had been when Bren had first converted it into a home.

  Anna made her way towards the village. The snook that ran around the base of the cliff was clogged with debris thrown up by the storm – rotting seaweed, bits of old net, sand, rocks and mud. It took her some time to pick her way along the route. When she reached the village, it was as silent as it had been two days before. Anna wiped the worst of the detritus from her shoes and stood looking up at the Inn. It seemed as untouched as it had during her last visit.

  She passed it, walking carefully along the sea wall to the Fishergirl’s Luck. Inside, sound was muted, overlaid by the intermittent flap and ripple of the tarpaulin that had been fixed over the broken roof. For a moment Anna stood listening to the sound of the gentle sea filtering in from outside, such a contrast to the event that had brought her here, to this point. A bright shaft of sunlight gleamed through the cloud – she could see it gilding the tiny window over the sink, naked of its shutters – and blue light suffused the room, refracted through the tarp. Anna lifted her face, for a moment feeling as if she and the Fishergirl’s Luck had been caught in the tank of some huge aquarium.

  Anna wandered about. She wanted to go upstairs but dared not risk it. From beneath the tarp came the pervasive smell of damp. Everything in her bedroom would be ruined, she knew, as would the wardrobe and probably all her clothes. Maybe even the floor.

  Downstairs, though, much had been protected. The kitchen, certainly, was virtually untouched, though still cluttered with everything they had dragged across from the Weaver’s Nook. Even the bench table beneath the stairs had been spared the brunt of the rain thanks to the staircase – which Anna thought would probably need replacing. Anna looked up at her cookery books, still snug in their narrow bookshelves overhead. She reached up for one of Taymar Zetelli’s, wondering whether it would be damp. She couldn’t reach, but before she could find something to stand on, a voice spoke from behind her.

  ‘Let me help.’

  It was Robert MacKenzie, strangely smart in a suit and jacket, although he’d taken off the tie he’d worn for the funeral. He came to stand next to her and reached up to pull down the book she’d been reaching for, handing it to her without a word.

  ‘I wanted to see if they were wet,’ she explained. ‘I wondered whether the damp had got into the floor upstairs.’

  Robert looked around. ‘It’s not safe to be here.’

  ‘I needed to see it again,’ she said. ‘To be sure.’

  He turned back to look at her, his eyes in shadow. ‘To be sure? Of what?’

  ‘Of what to do with the Fishergirl’s Luck. It needs so much work.’

  There was a silence. In it he turned away. ‘What will you do? Sell it?’

  ‘I don’t want to. Really, I don’t. But it needs so much repair. I can’t let it go to ruin. There’s so much history here. I can feel it, can’t you? It’s in the walls. It’d be wrong to let it rot because I can’t afford to fix her myself.’

  Robbie didn’t answer, and for a few minutes there was nothing apart from the faint snicking of the tarp, the flickering of the strange blue light.

  ‘Pat said you’ve put money into the Inn,’ Anna said.

  Robert nodded, still not looking at her. ‘Dougie’s going to need somewhere to live.’

  Anna looked at him in astonishment. ‘Douglas McKean’s going to live there? Do the others know that? Does he know that?’

  He laughed at that. ‘Yes. There’s nowhere else for him to go, Anna. He’s never lived anywhere but Crovie. I can’t make him go into a home, at least not for a while yet. I couldn’t do that to him, not now.’

  There was another brief silence. ‘Maybe he should live here.’

  Robert froze for a second, then turned towards her. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Once the roof and whatever else needs repairing is fixed, Douglas McKean could live here, at the Fishergirl’s Luck. Do you think he would?’

  Robert MacKenzie didn’t say anything. He turned his head away, towards the light visible through her kitchen window. Anna watched him.

  ‘You—’ he said, and then stopped before trying again with a slight shake of his head. He slid his hands into his pockets. ‘You’ve already decided, then. To leave Crovie. The Fishergirl’s Luck.’

  It was a statement, not a question. His tone made her heart thump.

  ‘Look at the place, Robert. Even before the storm hit, raising a child here would have been tough.’ She glanced down at the book in her hands, at Taymar Zetelli’s face smiling at her brilliantly from the cover. ‘I haven’t told any of you this yet, but…’ she held up the book. ‘This chef has offered me a job.’

  Anna could feel Robert’s gaze fixed on her face, though she couldn’t bring herself to meet his eye.

  ‘She wants you to work for her?’

  ‘Yes. She’s opening a new place. She needs a head chef. She’s a good person to work for, she’s got a good reputation for being supportive of women with children. It’s a great opportunity for me. I mean, it would have been whatever the situation, but now…’ Anna trailed off.

  ‘Where?’ he asked. ‘Where’s the restaurant?’

  Anna swallowed. ‘Newcastle.’ She tried for a slight laugh. ‘It’s not as far as London.’

  He nodded, turning away again.

  ‘Pat says—’ Anna started, then had to stop and take a breath before trying again. ‘Pat says there’ll be room for us both at the Inn. Me and the baby, I mean. There’s no way I could live with Douglas McKean, not even temporarily, but if he could stay where he is until this place is renovated, and then move here – that would work.’

  She watched him go very still. Slowly he turned towards her again. ‘What?’

  Anna put the cookbook down
on the table, light-headed, every nerve-ending jangling. The moment was coming crashing towards her, as powerful as a storm, and as inescapable. What are we? What am I to you, what are you to me?

  ‘I’ll live with Pat at the Inn. Even if Terry and Susan have to stay there for a while, there’ll still be more room. It’ll be easier with the baby – I can have a monitor with me in the kitchen, I’ll always be able to hear if I’m needed, and there’ll be other people around. It’s always better to live on-site, especially right at the beginning of a start-up, it makes everything far less complicated, cuts down on costs, and—’

  Anna realized that her nerves had set her rambling. Robert had moved closer, his face no longer cloaked in shadows.

  ‘You’re going to stay?’

  She let out a laugh, a tiny explosion, a release of pressure. ‘Of course I am. Of course I am! Did any of you really think I wouldn’t if there was any chance – just a chance – I could work out a way to stay?’

  ‘We… I thought you might not,’ he confessed. ‘I wasn’t sure there was enough here for you, not when it would be so much easier to go elsewhere.’

  Anna looked around. ‘You’re right,’ she admitted. ‘Taking Taymar’s offer would be easier.’

  He took another step closer. ‘Then why stay?’

  Anna was aware she was looking anywhere but his face. She took a deep breath, and then looked up at him.

  ‘This is home,’ she said simply. ‘And I don’t want to be anywhere else. And there are things here… people… I can’t imagine ever being able to leave without leaving a part of myself behind, too.’

  He smiled, and Anna thought, not for the first time, that she could spend a lot of time watching him do that. Robert moved closer still, until they were almost toe-to-toe. He hesitated for a moment and then reached out to take her hand. He rubbed his thumb across her palm, his eyes downcast to her fingers. Anna’s heart was out of control. She wondered what he was waiting for, whether he needed her to be the one to make the first move, and then worried that he wasn’t on the same page at all, that this was nothing more than another show of friendship, of the kind Auld Robbie MacKenzie had been offering her so steadfastly since before she had even moved into the Fishergirl’s Luck.