He was all right, Mike. And it was a long time since I’d thought that about a man.
My room was at the back of the hotel. I was at the furthest end of the corridor, the furthermost point of the building, if you like, with nothing but glass and timber between the ocean and me. Hannah’s room was next door in, and in the small hours still, more frequently than either of us cared to admit, she would pad along the corridor and crawl into my bed as she had when she was small, so that I could wrap myself round her, grateful for her presence and the sweet scent of her warm skin. I only slept soundly when I could feel her against me. I would never have told her so: she had enough burdens to carry without me making her responsible for my only chance of sleep. But from the way she always fell into a deep slumber almost before I had pulled my covers over her, I thought the same might be true for her.
Milly slept between me and the window, stretched out on the rug on the floor, and from the day I had arrived I had slept with it open, lulled by the sound of the sea, comforted by the endless stars in the uninterrupted sky. There had never been a night cold enough for me to close it completely. There, two storeys up, I could be alone with my thoughts, and, when alone, cry without anyone hearing. Those were the only times when I closed my window, so that any sound I uttered did not carry down to the whale crews or to stray listeners below. But the reverse was also true: just as the east wind sent my muffled tears downwind, so the gentle breeze from the west carried their words, their laughter, straight up to me. Which was how, as I hauled my fleece over my head, and stood there half undressed, I heard Greg’s voice. It was a little lubricated by drink, its warmth gone. ‘You won’t get anywhere with her,’ he was saying emphatically. ‘I’ve been waiting four years for her, and I tell you, no one’s got closer than me.’
It was several seconds before I grasped that he was talking about me. And I was so mad at his arrogance, that he could dare to presume any kind of ownership over me, that he could say any of this to a stranger, that I had to fight the urge to get dressed again, go down and say as much.
But I didn’t. I was too shaken by the day’s events to pick another fight. I just lay awake, cursed Greg Donohoe and tried not to think about things that could be brought back by an English accent.
It was a good hour before I realised I hadn’t heard Mike Dormer’s reply.
Eight
Kathleen
He thought I couldn’t tell. He didn’t realise it shone out of him like a beacon every time he looked at her. I could have warned him, could have told him that what Greg had said was partially true. But what would have been the point? People hear what they want to hear. And I’ve never yet met a man who didn’t think he could turn the world on its axis if he wanted something badly enough.
That said, the prospect of him making a move on my niece made me look a little harder at Mr Michael Dormer of London, England. I found myself examining innocent exchanges for signs of character, trying to glean a little more about his history. Hannah had said he worked in the City, and the little more he had told me suggested nothing particularly interesting in that. Some people might have been impressed by the fact that he obviously had money, but that has never meant much here, and certainly not to me. Besides, running this hotel I’ve seen the effect of money on character, and it’s rarely pleasant. No, Mike Dormer seemed kind, was unfailingly polite, always had time to indulge Hannah, no matter how trivial the query, and all these things were in his favour. He was handsome, at least to my eyes – not that that means much, according to Hannah – and despite his quiet, easygoing manner, he was no pushover, as I had observed when, one late evening recently, Greg had tried to warn him off my niece. ‘Thank you for your advice,’ he had replied. I had stood back in the doorway, unsure whether to be prepared for an explosion. But he continued, in that clipped accent of his, ‘You won’t mind if I ignore it, since my private life is none of your business.’ And, to my surprise, Greg – perhaps as wrong-footed as I was – had backed off.
He still looked like a fish out of water, even after the best part of three weeks in Silver Bay. His collars had become a little looser, and he had bought himself a storm jacket. But sitting with the whalers, as he did most evenings, he was still no more at home than I would have been in the boardroom of some City firm.
Oh, he tried: he responded good-naturedly to their jokes, accepted their off-colour teasing, bought more than his share of drinks. And when he thought he was not being observed, he gazed at my niece.
But something about Mike bothered me. I had the feeling he wasn’t being straight with us. There was an absence at his core that left me uneasy. Why would a single young man spend so long in a quiet little resort like ours? Why did he never talk about his family? He had told me one morning that he wasn’t married, and had no children, then politely changed the subject. Most men, I’ve found, especially successful men, will talk about themselves at the drop of a hat, yet he didn’t seem to want to impart to us anything about himself.
Then there was the afternoon I saw him at the council offices. I was in town, picking up a new school dress for Hannah – Liza had had two trips planned that day and couldn’t get away. As I stood outside the bank, having drawn some cash to pay for it, I saw him coming down the steps, a big folder under his arm, two at a time.
In itself that wouldn’t have bothered me. The tourism office is on the ground floor, and plenty of my guests head there at some point, often at my urging. I can’t explain it too clearly, but he seemed more upright, a more dynamic character than the one we saw at home. And his expression when he caught sight of me: I know when someone feels they have been discovered, and it was there in the jolt on his face.
He recovered pretty quickly, came striding across the road and made small-talk with me about what he had seen in town, asked the best place to buy postcards. But it shook me a little. I felt, suddenly, that Mike had something to hide.
Nino told me I’d made too much of it. He knew a little of Liza’s history – as much as he needed to know – and thought me overprotective. ‘She’s a big girl,’ he said, ‘a very different character from the one who arrived here. She’s thirty-two, for God’s sake.’ And he was right. In fact, I can chart the truth of Nino’s words in the photographs she and my sister sent me, the story of her life over the past fifteen years.
A life told in photographs is not unusual – but what was, was the way Liza’s appearance so nakedly reflected her circumstance; you could see it in the size of her eyes after my sister, her mother, died – a year later she was wearing garish, dark makeup that presumably gave her something to hide behind and certainly made her seem alien to me. It was hard to believe that the girl who had written me rambling letters about ponies and the hardships of the fourth form, the child who had visited here and turned cartwheels the length along the jetty, was under that camouflage.