Those were Jack’s best years too, in some ways. He had nearly died, and survived it. A quietness came to him that he had never had before – gratitude, perhaps, or an awareness for the first time that he would be gone one day. He was a better husband, after his heart attack. He became the man she’d hoped for, all along. She remembers holding his hand in this garden, on a summer’s morning like this.
Her peonies nod in the breeze.
How does a person ever speak of their loss? How do they find the right words for it? Emmeline has never really been the talking kind.
She looks down at her hands. The hand cream has served no purpose. She has soil beneath her fingernails, again – brown crescent moons. Only a farmer or his wife would have hands like this, day in and day out. She had made her wedding vows with neat, square nails, and the following evening she’d glanced down at her hands – dirtied from the chicken shed, and from picking blackberries from the patch by the back door – and had thought this is how it will be, now. These are my married hands. She nearly lost her wedding ring, once, during the lambing season. A farmer’s wife’s hands, even now.
Briefly, there is resentment. It rises a little, like a far-out wave.
Emmeline looks up. A man is coming to her. He is a man, but he is also one of her sons, and so despite his age she still sees the child who had knocked his front milk teeth out when he fell on the quayside, the boy who believed, solemnly, that he’d heard sleigh bells on the roof one Christmas Eve. Nathan wears a white shirt. He walks with his hands in his pockets and when he sees her, he frees one hand and holds it up at her. He bends his fingers in a small, boyish wave.
Hello, she says. She hugs him by the peonies, and she can smell the sea in his hair. She does not hug for long, but when Emmeline goes to pull away from him she finds that Nathan is still holding her. He holds her very tightly, too tightly. She waits. She stays as she is, being held, and it is only when his arms start, at last, to soften, that she leans back from him and looks at his face – at the straight nose, the shining eyes – and she breathes, what is it? What’s wrong?
* * *
Nathan knew it had to be him who told her. Ian wouldn’t think of it. He’d call it unimportant or nothing to do with me. He probably slept well last night, snoring in Wind Rising as if nothing had changed, as if no man had been found at Sye.
Nathan has not slept at all. He knows it shows. Kitty said as much when she crept downstairs to find him still sitting in the armchair, an empty glass tilted in his lap. She’d said, you look like crap, Mr Bundy, smiling and stroking his knee.
As he’d walked along the lane to Easterly he’d tried out the different words in his head, whispered them under his breath, and he’d hoped that perhaps his mother would be out – that he’d find a note on the doormat saying gone to shop or elsewhere. But he’d looked up and seen her. She’d been tending to those pink flowers of hers, and he’d thought she looks old. The hunched back, the iron-grey hair.
When they’d hugged, Nathan had felt small again.
Now, they stand inside. She is looking at him, waiting. She licks her lips as she always does when she is nervous, and she says is it Kitty?
No.
Hester, then? Ian? The grandchildren?
No, Mum. Everyone’s fine.
You? Are you fine?
Been better …
Are you ill?
Mum … He’s forgotten the words. He tries to think of them but cannot so he puts his hands on top of her hands and says listen. Some stuff happened last night. At Sye.
Sye? She is frowning. The cove?
Sam Lovegrove was walking up there –
What happened? Did he fall, or …?
Sam’s OK, too. Mum, listen – he found a man. Washed up on the beach.
Emmeline is still.
Sam thought he was dead, but he wasn’t. He was lying on his front … Sam ran to the farm and got us – me, Ian, Jonny. We all went to Sye, and we carried him back. Took him to Aunt Tabitha’s.
Nathan pauses, breathes. He watches his mother’s face, and waits until her eyes show what he knows she will, shortly, be thinking. He waits. He waits. And then he sees her eyes change.
She says, Oh God …
Mum, it isn’t Tom.
How do you know? It might be.
He takes her wrists. No. It’s not. That’s what I’m here to tell you. It is not Tom.
Does he look like him?
Nathan winces. In part, I guess. Yes. But he is too tall. He is too tall, and he is wider than Tom ever was. The teeth are wrong, and –
It’s been four years. People change in four years. They grow.
Mum –
He’s at Tabitha’s? She breaks frees of him, hauls her jacket off the hook behind the door. I’ve got to go there.
Mum, he’s not Tom –
She shakes her head, she can’t hear him. She is fumbling in the pocket of her jacket, finds the car keys, and she trips out of the house into the sunlight and gets into the car.
Nathan calls, Mum! But he only calls it once. He is too tired to stop her, and knows she cannot be stopped. He stands on the grass and watches her go – over the potholes, past the log-pile. Once her car is gone he shuts his eyes.
The wind pushes at him. He can feel it, buffeting.
When he looks again he sees a plastic toy windmill on a stick, beside the fence. It turns, in the breeze. It is red, or it was – years of sun have faded it. He watches it turn. A northerly breeze.
What now? He knows.
Somebody else needs to be told – about this washed-up man.
* * *
The plastic windmill turns, and catches the light.
In the mending room at Lowfield, the stranger still sleeps. Tabitha watches his chest rise and fall.
In the harbour, a gull stands on a boat’s tarpaulin cover. It drinks from a pool of rainwater that has gathered there. To swallow, the gull lifts his beak to the sky, straightens its neck and gulps twice. Afterwards, it shakes its tail.
Sam sees this gull. He is at the top of the harbourmaster’s house – a double-fronted, red-bricked building that sits on the quayside. From his attic room, he can see everything – the harbour, the sea wall, the open water beyond it. He can see the mainland too – dipped and bluish, like a sleeper’s back. It is a good room. The eaves mean that Sam must stoop in places but he likes being here at the top of the house. His bedroom is untidy, boyish – a music system, a games console, a dartboard, crumbs on the carpet, mugs of cold tea, a row of free weights that he lifts in the evenings as he looks at the view. A single bed which is never made.
He sits on this bed now. He sits with his hands underneath him, looking out to sea. Sam did not sleep last night, or barely. When he closed his eyes he was there again – standing on the coastal path and looking down at Sye. He could see the man exactly. He can see him now.
Dark hair.
The fingers that tried to close around a stone.
Last night, Sam had thrown up by the sea wall. When