The only time I saw my mother cry was when she threw a cherished porcelain shepherdess at my father’s head. It broke, of course – no fragile ornament could have survived such a trajectory. But after it smashed, she slumped to the floor, cradling the pieces and weeping as if she had come across the scene of some terrible accident. I remember standing in the doorway and feeling shocked by my mother’s uncharacteristic show of desperation, yet repelled by it. My father, his temple bloodied, had been standing by the sofa, and said nothing. As if he accepted that it had been his fault.
He had a small engineering firm, which my parents had run on hippieish lines, allowing everyone a say and doing their best to share profits. Surprisingly, for ten years it had worked quite well. It grew, my parents became more ambitious, and decided to open a second plant about an hour away. We would move too – and as all their money was ploughed back into the business they had been delighted to find a large country house available for a knock-down rent, due to its general state of disrepair. The hot-water system was eccentric and half of the rooms were too damp to live in, but this was in the days when unmodernised houses like this were not unusual, and central heating not a necessity. My sister and I loved it. We spent five years roaming the woods, setting up camps in the unused wings of the house, not really minding as the damp spread and the number of habitable rooms shrank commensurately. My parents were too preoccupied with the business to do much more than the bare minimum of repairs.
Eventually the owners announced that they would not renew the following year’s contract. No great disaster, my father observed. It was probably time we bought our own place.
Then they were alerted to the small print on the lease. My father had signed up to a ‘renew and repair’ clause. He had agreed to restore the house to a condition it had not known for several decades. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ my father protested. ‘The house was barely habitable when we moved in.’ But the solicitor just pointed to the print. My father should have read the contract, he said. He should have taken pictures and agreed the property’s initial condition. He could not argue with what was there in black and white. The solicitor read out an estimated sum for renovations, and my parents knew that they were ruined. The shepherdess figurine was the first casualty.
My sister and I were moved to an unfriendly school, forced to share a bedroom in a grim maisonette, and for years there were no holidays other than in borrowed caravans at cheap seaside towns. For years I held up that porcelain ornament as a symbol of what happened when you fell foul of sharp practice, when you were not on top of the deal, when you believed that people had a natural tendency to play fair. Now I saw things differently. My father had rebuilt his business into an ultimately more successful company, run on more efficient lines. My sister and I were probably more resilient, and more ambitious, because of our early brush with loss.
My parents were still together. The shepherdess, painfully glued together, was still on the mantelpiece. ‘It showed us what was important,’ my mother would say, touching the cracks fondly.
It sounds stupid, but it was only now that I realised she was not talking about reading the small print.
I knocked three times on the back door before I caught sight of the note. ‘Lance/Yoshi: Help yourselves, we are at the hospital. Back soon. Please write down what you take in the book. L.’
I held it for a minute, feeling winded to have her little note in my hands, then looked down to the jetty. There were no boats except Ishmael, and as it was only a quarter past ten in the morning, it was possible that Liza and Kathleen would be gone for some hours. I sat down on one of the empty benches for a few minutes, then walked to MacIver’s Seafood Bar and Grill and ordered a coffee. My body didn’t want coffee – it told me it was late at night still, contrary to what my eyes could see. I drank only half of it, letting the remainder stain a dark brown ring round the inside of the pale blue cup as it cooled.
‘You the English guy?’
The owner, a large man in a grubby apron, was staring at me.
‘Yes,’ I said. There was no point in asking which English guy he meant.
‘The guy from the development company, right? The one that was in the paper?’
‘I’ve just come in for a quiet coffee. If you want to pick a fight about the development, I’ll leave, if you don’t mind.’
I put my wallet into my pocket and reached for my case.
‘You won’t get a fight from me, mate,’ he said, picking up a plate and drying it with a tea-towel even filthier than his apron. ‘I’m looking forward to it. Glad of the extra business.’
I said nothing.
‘Not everyone’s against it, you know, no matter what the papers are saying. There’s plenty like me who think the town needs a bit of investment.’
I must have looked disbelieving because he continued, walking over and sitting down heavily at the other side of my table. ‘I’ve got a lot of respect for the whale guys – Greg’s an old mate of mine – but, strewth, I reckon they make a big deal about these old whales. Those big fish have been swimming past this bay for a million years and a few little jet-bikes ain’t going to make any difference to that. Oh, sure, they might quiet off for a while, but they’ll be back.’
‘Quiet off?’
He jerked a thumb towards the jetty. ‘Oh, they’re all moaning, saying they’ve already gone. Like the fish know what’s coming. I ask you!’
‘Who’s gone?’ I was having trouble keeping up with the conversation.
‘The whales. There’s none showing. They’ve had to shut down the whale-watching early and now they’re just going round the bay to see the dolphins. I don’t reckon it makes a big difference to their profits. They can do two dolphin trips in the time it takes to do one whale trip. I don’t know what they’re complaining about.’
I sat there for a while, digesting this. Then I turned to him. ‘You wouldn’t serve me a drink, would you?’ I had a feeling that the next conversation I had would require of me rather more Dutch courage.
He raised his bulk from the table, both hands resting like fat hams in front of me as he levered himself upright. ‘Mate, I reckon you guys are about to do me a big favour. This one’s on the house.’
It took me almost an hour to make it back up the coast road to the Silver Bay Hotel. I had run it several times in less than ten minutes. Normally it would have taken twenty to walk. But the jet-lag had combined unhappily with the several large Scotches that my new best friend Del of MacIver’s Seafood Bar and Grill had pressed on me, and despite the elegantly discreet curve of the coastline it was difficult to maintain a straight line. A few times I sat down on my case and thought hard about how best to continue my journey. The hotel was there, within spitting distance, but somehow kept moving away from me, like a mirage in the desert. Once I thought of having a paddle in the sea – the water looked inviting, and it was a lot warmer than when I had last been here – but for some dim reason it was important that I looked smart. Besides, I could no longer remember how to remove my shoes.