by Tim Pears
‘It’s not so bad,’ I said. ‘And the forecasters don’t always get it right. Specially in coastal areas.’
Mary hauled boxes of food into the kitchen-diner, dumped them on the table.
‘Could brighten up tomorrow. You never know.’
Mary looked at me. ‘Why don’t you leave me to unpack?’ she suggested. ‘Take the children with you.’
I gazed out of the bleary window at rain bouncing on the chassis of our car, its own windows all steamed up. ‘How?’ I asked.
‘Bribery. Ice cream. Oh, I don’t know, Simon. Think of something.’
Anorak hoods on, heads down, we walked into the rain. The beach was deserted, almost, not quite. Two children skipped in the choppy shallows. An old man strolled, bent over, studying shells. Each raindrop hit the wet sand like a bullet, made its own splash amongst millions. You could just make out boats tied up in the bay, rocking furiously in the seething sea.
‘I don’t want an ice cream,’ Ellie yelled.
‘I can’t hear you,’ I said. The sea roared, rain poured down from the heavens.
Jack tugged my arm. He was squinting up at me, his spectacles a blurred screen. ‘Hot chocolate?’ he wondered.
My only sibling was two years younger than me. Our father was a GP, our mother a science teacher, and we each disappointed them in our own way. I drifted through school, happy only with a sketch pad in my hand. Through childhood, youth, I drew the world: a hundred views of the city of Exeter; trees, fields, animals along the Teign valley where we lived. At art school I was encouraged to draw what I saw inside my head. In my twenties I combined the two: colours and movement in oil on canvas, Turner my master then and always. Irregular exhibitions, sporadic sales; enough to pretend I was a serious artist. But perhaps I became one. It’s what I do, it’s who I am, and I don’t know what’s more important, inherent talent or dedicated engagement, honestly I don’t.
James had similar leanings, it emerged, but in him it was in his hands as much as his mind. The beauty of objects made. Catapults, bows and arrows; go-karts; a treehouse at the bottom of our garden that grew in spurts of activity then lay neglected, mossy and rotting. He left school at sixteen; our father found a course in cabinet-making at a small place in north Devon, gave James a set of chisels with Swiss ash handles and gleaming steel. A whetstone. Oil.
My brother had a feel for wood, but he didn’t stick the course, couldn’t get on with the tutor. ‘Wanker,’ James confided in me, smiling. ‘I come up with ways to do things better, he doesn’t want to know.’
Dad got him an apprenticeship of sorts with a well-known furniture designer who had his own workshop near Bovey Tracey, three or four blokes working for him, commissions all over the country. James lasted six months; it wasn’t clear whether he’d been asked to leave. ‘Tosser,’ he told me, grinning, shaking his head. ‘Enjoyed having slaves follow his designs to the sodding letter. Loved it, Si.’
James had talent, lacked only what it took to see a job through. He lived at home for a while, and the house, and garage, began to fill with beautiful pieces of unfinished furniture. He got odd jobs as a carpenter, made no effort to disguise the fact that the work was beneath him. Lived hand to mouth, with women whose homes he moved in and out of.
Whenever I visited my parents, James was mostly what we talked about. It took a long time for them to lose their faith in him. He was always on the brink of a breakthrough, my mother believed: turning things around, coming into his own, at last. It didn’t bother me that they gave him money, but he hit thirty and it never stopped, and they grew older, and he began to beg for wodges of cash to pay a month’s rent, get a new vehicle, help him out of some fix.
Our parents live not far from me now, in Oxfordshire. My mother is anxious. My father, confused by lapses of memory, worries about what will be there if they need it; that he and our mother will find themselves impoverished at the end of their days. Last week I offered to look through their finances, just to reassure them. A large sum of money had recently been taken from one of their savings accounts. My father had no idea where it had gone. My mother, when I pushed her about it, finally admitted she’d given it to James.
‘Oh, Simon, I had to,’ she said, querulously. ‘It was to pay off a debt. I dread to think what they’d have done to him.’
***
Ellie and Jack had been placated, hot chocolate followed by handfuls of silver for slot machines in an arcade. The sky cleared. Other people emerged from cafes, the cinema, small crowded shops; gathered on the seafront, gazing across the calm sea at a salmon-coloured sunset. Big ships crawled along the horizon, this way or that.
When we got back to the chalet park, there was a rusting Volkswagen camper van jammed in between our Vauxhall Mondeo and the cabin. As we sidled past the van I saw there was someone inside: a girl, with long brown hair, staring straight ahead. She was nodding to herself, steadily, as if agreeing with some internal conjecture. Suddenly she blinked, and gazed through the smeared window at me, then Ellie, then Jack. It was a boy. He had a thin, delicate face.
There was a commotion behind us. I heard my name called, and turned to find myself clasped in a meaty embrace by my brother. ‘Si,’ he sighed in my ear. ‘It’s so good to see you.’ When eventually he allowed us to part and shifted his attention to the children, I ascertained what I’d felt, prickling: James had grown a beard. It was trimmed short, and flecked with grey, and, though his eyes sparkled impishly as ever, the beard aged him. It looked like a disguise, and it was. Whenever you’d not seen him for a while my brother always looked different – haircut, earring, glasses.
We began shuffling into the chalet. I glanced back at the boy in the van. He reached in through his long hair and pulled out two tiny earphones, and leaned towards the sliding side door.
Squashed in the kitchen with Mary was another woman, to whom James introduced me: Delilah. I put out my hand but she reached beyond such formality, planting a kiss on each of my cheeks. She was terribly pretty – as James’s girlfriends always were, though it still surprised me. And she would surely turn out to be intelligent too, yet gullible, like all the others, fooled into falling for my brother.
‘Thought they’d come a day early,’ Mary said. She spoke as if delighted, though there was an ironic tone buried there, for my ears only.
‘We found we could,’ James said, grinning, ‘and thought, Why not?’
We ate supper on our knees, pasta and pesto Mary stretched to seven, she and I eating out of cereal bowls. From glass tumblers we drank wine James had brought, two bottles of vintage claret so rich and smooth it was like drinking velvet, superior to anything I’d ever tasted in my entire life.
‘Smuggled it out of Léoville a month ago,’ James told us.
‘They’ll be after you,’ Mary said, murmuring with pleasure. ‘They’ll want it back.’
James chuckled. ‘I thought we could do with a treat.’
It was entirely typical of my brother. He would turn up skint, wearing brand-new designer clothes. He once arrived at our house on a new bicycle, unable, he said, to afford a car. I noted the make and model of the bike and looked it up on the internet: it sold for about £2,000.
How much the wine had cost I couldn’t imagine. Mary caught my eye at one point and raised her glass, said, ‘Cheers,’ and I understood she was wondering the same thing too.
‘What are you most looking forward to?’ James asked Ellie.
Our daughter frowned, giving herself a moment to make sure it wasn’t a trick question. ‘Sailing,’ she decided. ‘Or windsurfing if we can find somewhere.’
‘Julian likes surfing,’ said Delilah.
‘I’m going to find a fossil,’ said Jack, opening his arms out wide. ‘This big.’
After supper James went out to the van and came back with two guitars.
‘The kids probably need to get an early night,’ I objected.
‘No we don’t!’ they chorused disloyally.
James passed a
guitar to Julian and they began tuning up. I couldn’t look at Mary. We once found ourselves camping with James and his then girlfriend, and each evening descended into a droning sing-song around the fire. Mary or I had only to sing the one word Guantanamera to bring the whole awful episode back; it became part of our lexicon of private humour. The arrogance of amateur minstrels! When Delilah began singing the words to ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ in a fake Southern accent and a high purity of tone that was like a tribute to Joan Baez herself, I saw we – and now our children, too – were in for another such ghastly evening.
I had to admit, however, as the trio played their way through a succession of mostly American folk songs – ‘Two Soldiers’, ‘Solitary Man’, and others I didn’t recognise – that it wasn’t that simple. Delilah’s voice, once you accepted the cod accent, soared through the tunes. And while James just strummed the chords, I realised that not only I but Mary and our children too all had our attention drawn to the same spot: while the slender fingers of Julian’s left hand pressed on the frets, those of his right hand picked notes from the strings in an intricate dance around the spine of each song. Bent over the guitar, the boy’s brown hair fell in front of his face. Whether he or his mother, singing with her eyes closed, was leading the other I was not sufficiently musical to determine. Together, they entranced us. I couldn’t help but hope that my feckless brother had at last found someone he might abide by.
That night it occurred to me to whisper to Mary – before she did to me – ‘How long are they staying?’
‘How would I know?’ she whispered back.
‘You were chatting with Delilah.’
‘When are you going to talk with him?’
‘I’ll find a moment,’ I said. ‘Don’t you worry.’
***
In the morning Ellie and Jack had already been outside and scouted around when the van’s occupants funnelled into the chalet, first to take turns in the tiny bathroom – you could hardly avoid hearing what went on in there – and then to help themselves to breakfast.
The morning was glorious: blue sky, glassy sea, wheeling seagulls whose caws seemed to invite people down to the smooth sandy beach. We spent it building a sandcastle. James initiated the enterprise as soon as we’d established our position on the beach, grabbing Jack’s spade and curving a great arc for the castle moat. It must have been four or five feet in diameter and in that one declarative flourish, my brother committed the entire family to hours of hard labour, interspersed with dashes into the freezing English Channel.
James worked furiously. We brothers had twin physiques: big-boned, barrel-chested. I’d guess we both weighed within a pound or two of fourteen stone. Back to back, armed with a spade each, we gouged out the moat until we met up around the other side. Then we criss-crossed the castle compound with internal gullies, leaving four segments, platforms on which we adults could each unleash our sandy creativity. James went for bulk, and volume, amassing material; Mary began building a pyramid of damp sand; Delilah collected shells and seaweed.
While we worked, Ellie fell laughing off her bodyboard in the gentle waves; Jack let Julian tow him, running silently through the shallows. Occasionally one or other would visit us like some juvenile Pharaoh checking up on their slaves’ progress, adding a decorative pebble before running back to the water.
Without consciously intending to, I found myself competing with my brother: at two opposite corners of the castle rose towers. James’s grew ever higher, a great obelisk; while mine, once it reached about four feet, I began to crenellate. Our children were delighted. Mary and Delilah found common ground in decrying the blatant symbolism of their men’s infantile contest – though there was an edge of derision in Mary’s voice, where in Delilah’s I heard only flirtatious affection. This reminded me of the nature of my brother’s inconstancy: when that playful tone in the voice of his woman faded, he’d leave her.
On the crowded beach passers-by tarried to appreciate our citadel. Children stood and stared. James recruited them: half a dozen little navvies joined Julian, Ellie and Jack digging a long runnel down the beach to the shoreline, ready for the incoming tide. They all looked like they were copying my brother, backs bent, shovelling sand with their hands, sweating.
Along the promenade people wandered behind perky dogs on long leads, and ate ice creams. An old couple sat in a pair of deckchairs, dressed in winter clothes. The crowd jostled to and fro. Small sports events sprang up around us: stout women played beach ping-pong; men with muscled legs chased Frisbees, bellies wobbling. Their beautiful offspring frolicked in the water. You might infer from the scene that there was human progress, one generation to the next, ugly couples producing miraculous children, if you didn’t know that puberty would come and twist them into their parents.
James’s architectural ambition had, it became gradually clear, committed us not only to a long morning’s construction but the afternoon too, for how could we abandon our fortress without witnessing its surrender to the ocean’s assault? The women returned to the chalet to collect lunch, I rubbed dry my shivering children, applied suncream to their reddening shoulders. Julian gleaned sticks of driftwood.
We munched sandwiches, crunched apples. Out in the bay, small dinghies with single sails – blue, red and yellow triangles – scurried from side to side. Manned by teenagers in wetsuits and orange life jackets, they tacked and turned about. I’ve never found conflict easy. Whenever our parents argued I left the house. My brother and I rarely fought; when we did I was brought to tears more often than he. Mary and I merely bicker, and she disciplines our children. But I knew I couldn’t let things go on as they were.
‘James,’ I said. ‘Let’s find a cafe, you and me.’
‘Wait,’ he said, launching himself to his feet. ‘Hang on, Si. Had an idea.’ He strode off between picnicking families to the back of the beach, hopped over the low stone wall on to the busy promenade, and disappeared.
Julian beat his driftwood drumsticks on stones he’d grouped in a small semicircle. It was less a performance than a private experiment, but Ellie and Jack watched, spellbound, while Mary and I tidied up the remnants of lunch. Delilah lit a pink Sobranie. Between elegant puffs she held the cigarette aloft, as if doing so with style was obligatory.
James reappeared with a multicoloured pack of felt-tip pens. ‘We need stones,’ he told the children. ‘Smooth and pale as you can find.’
Needless to say, we all became involved, drawing faces and flowers and patterned designs in a familial burst of visual flair. We pressed the coloured stones into the walls and turrets of our sandcastle, as the tide made its sly approach. The beach below us thinned out; children playing in the shallows came closer. People traipsed away, heavy-laden, for the long climb up to the car parks.
By the time an advance party of seawater flowed into the moat, our citadel, with its eccentric quartet of towers, was the most finely adorned in Christendom. Mary took photos on her mobile, members of the construction gang kneeling proudly around. Ruination followed, surprisingly rapid, and we watched with that fascination destruction offers the human soul. Once the moat filled up and the walls were breached, the towers, undermined, soon subsided, and the brightly coloured stones sank beneath wet sand.
A fish and chip supper was voted for and we joined a queue at a place whose aroma of fish and vinegar and deep-frying fat enticed us.
‘You pay for this, Si,’ James suggested. ‘De and I’ll go get some wine. Catch you at the chalet.’ Delilah whispered something to Julian, he nodded, and she and James went off.
‘Nothing too expensive,’ I called out. He raised an arm in dismissive acknowledgement. After twenty or thirty yards he and Delilah reached towards each other, and their fingers entwined.
It was dusk. We’d long since consumed our supper, washed down with water, when the lovers returned. They made no apology for having been gone more than two hours. On the contrary, they seemed mightily pleased with themselves, as they handed me tw
o bottles of supermarket plonk. ‘Two for the price of one,’ Delilah announced, and I calculated that our disjointed dinner had cost me £35, my brother a fiver. Nor did they seem bothered by the extent to which their meal, kept warm in the oven, had dried out. Rather, they hymned the delights of the brittle chips and crusty batter, pantomiming for the benefit of our children, who watched them closely. James stuck a chip in each nostril: Jack hooted. Delilah pretended to be Chinese, a pair of thin chips becoming chopsticks with which she struggled to eat others, and I could see our ten-year-old Ellie noting a role model’s every movement.
It struck me with instant certainty that James and Delilah had somehow had sex somewhere during their wine-buying interlude.
At least they retired, with the silent Julian, to their camper van and let us all turn in at a decent hour, our eyelids droopy, our bodies weighted down with the beautiful exhaustion that comes from the ocean air.
The following morning Mary suggested a visit to the fossil museum.
‘I’d rather head straight out and look for our own,’ James said.
‘So would I!’ exclaimed both Ellie and Jack.
‘Might it be an idea,’ I wondered, ‘to learn what to look for first?’
‘You can tell us if we’re doing it wrong,’ James declared. ‘Can’t he, kids? I’ve got a hammer in the van. Basically, you just break stones open.’
Agreeing to meet back at the chalet at noon, Mary and I watched the others cross the pebbled beach towards the fossil cliffs. Delilah held Ellie’s hand. Seven-year-old Jack walked beside Julian, every few yards glancing up at him, as if worried the older boy might open his mouth and say something, and Jack miss it. My brother strode in front, leading the way like some Pied Piper in his cut-off jeans and sandals.
‘Do you think they’ll be all right?’ Mary asked.