Although it was awkward, however, it was not quite as bad as Floyd had feared, and the main reason for this was the way he had won at Roehampton. In the week following the championship, letters and cards of congratulation poured in. They came from family and friends, from other players, from the media and from dozens of commercial companies. There were phone calls from people who had watched Floyd play and now wanted to offer sponsorships for his future career. There were calls from sports reporters and magazines asking for interviews, and there were invitations from tennis tournaments around the world offering Floyd free accommodations and a generous allowance if he would agree to come and play.
It was, Floyd knew, deeply frustrating to his parents that he refused to accept or even reply to any of these offers, but there was also a certain pride in the scale of his achievement. If you have devoted more than ten years of your life to turning your son into a tennis star, it is comforting to see that you achieved at least part of your ambition. It was, as Mike had said, good to go out on a high.
There was another reason that his parents did not seem to be quite as upset as Floyd had expected, and it was that neither of them really believed that he had given up tennis for good. Since winning the championship at Roehampton, Floyd had not so much as set foot on a tennis court, but both his parents were convinced that he would return to the game one day. After much discussion, they had come to the conclusion that they had been pushing their son too fast and too hard. If we give him time, Mr. Beresford told his wife, if we just step back and give him space, he’ll come back to it. I know he will. Given a sufficient period of rest and recovery, they were sure that their son would eventually return to the game in which he displayed such obvious skill.
It was probably with this in mind that at lunch on the same day that the letter from Dr. Pinner arrived, Floyd’s father suggested that it might be a good time to take a vacation.
“A vacation?” said Floyd. “Where would we go?”
“We can’t go anywhere,” said his mother. “Not this time of year. You know that.”
In the business of building tennis courts, July and August are among the busiest months for orders and construction.
“But we thought you might like to go to Cornwall,” said his father, “and stay with your grandmother.”
Floyd’s grandmother lived in Bude, on the North Cornish coast, and was always asking if her only grandson could come and stay.
“We thought it might be good if you got away from things for a bit,” said his mother.
And Floyd thought getting away from tennis and parents and all talk of invisible friends sounded like an excellent idea.
Granny Plum—her real name was Victoria—was waiting on the platform when Floyd got off the train at Exeter.
“Goodness, look at the size of you!” she said, reaching up to give him a hug. “I’m not sure you’ll fit in the car!”
She led the way to her little Nissan Micra, but in fact she was the one who had some difficulty squeezing herself in behind the steering wheel, pulling out the seat belt to almost its maximum length before strapping herself in.
“So, how long can you stay?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” said Floyd. “A few weeks? If that’s all right?”
“The longer the better as far as I’m concerned!” His grandmother patted his knee as she launched them into traffic. “I’ve been trying to get your parents to let you come for a real stay for years.”
Later, speeding down the divided highway, still in third gear, she asked about the tennis.
“Your father told me you’d just won a big tennis match at Rotherham,” she said.
“Roehampton,” said Floyd. “Yes, I did.”
“He sounded very pleased about it.”
“Did he?”
“But then he said you’d decided to take a bit of a break from tennis. He said you’d gotten overtired and needed a rest.”
“I’m not taking a break,” said Floyd. “I’ve given up tennis. I’m not going to play anymore.”
“Goodness …” Granny Plum gave him a sideways glance as she spoke. “Have you told him?”
“Yes,” said Floyd. “Several times.”
“Did he mind?”
“Yes, he did. Quite a lot.”
“Well, I’m not surprised,” said Granny Plum. “He’s always taken your tennis very seriously.” She said this as if it was something that Floyd himself might not have noticed. “But then of course he takes everything seriously. He was like that as a boy. Always very ambitious.” She gave a sigh. “I don’t know where he got it from. Certainly not from me. I’ve never taken anything that seriously. Except possibly food. I take food quite seriously … Which reminds me, I thought I’d do a pizza tonight. Do you still eat garlic bread?”
Arriving at Bude, and at the little town house that looked out over the Bude Canal, Floyd’s grandmother gave him a plate of freshly baked scones and clotted cream and jam—to welcome him to the West Country, she said—then suggested he take a walk down to the beach while she cooked supper.
The beach was less than two minutes away, and it was a familiar route. Floyd’s parents had brought him down here several times in the past, though they normally stayed at the Falcon Hotel when they did, because the hotel had a tennis court, so Floyd could keep up with his training.
He walked along the road, crossed the canal over the lock gates, and then went down the steps onto the sand. The beach was beginning to clear now as families drifted back to their hotels and guesthouses for a bath and an evening meal. The tide was out, and Floyd walked past the lifeboat station and across the sand until he reached some rocks where he sat down and stared out to sea.
He had been there only a few minutes when he realized that, sitting only a few feet away, was Mike. It was a surprise but, curiously, a rather pleasant one, and Floyd found himself smiling at the sight. There was a trace of a smile on Mike’s face as well, as he turned to Floyd and gestured briefly out to sea in a movement that plainly said, Isn’t this fantastic!
Floyd agreed that it was, and the two of them sat there in companionable silence for a while, gazing out at the few remaining children running in and out of the water, at a group of surfers determinedly trying to stand up on waves that were not much more than ripples, and at the gulls screaming overhead.
And at some point as they sat there—Floyd could never quite remember when exactly it happened—he found something inside him had changed. It was, he later told Dr. Pinner, as if he had been carrying a very heavy weight on his back, carrying it for so long that he had ceased to be aware that it even existed, but now, sitting on the rock looking out at the sea, he felt it slide from his shoulders and quietly vanish. Its disappearance left him with a giddy, almost light-headed sense of freedom.
He drew in a long deep breath of sea air and, beside him, Mike finally spoke.
“Thalatta! Thalatta!” he murmured softly, and Floyd was about to ask what that meant when his friend disappeared.
The pattern of Floyd’s days that summer was soon set. He would get up at about seven, an hour later than he would have at home, and sit in the kitchen while Granny Plum cooked him breakfast. After that he would help her with some of the household chores. His grandmother had a long list of things that could only be done by someone younger, taller, and stronger than herself, so Floyd would climb a ladder to clear the gutters, carry things up into the attic for storage, dig out a tree stump in the garden … but whatever the task, at some point in the middle or late morning, his grandmother would tell him that was enough, remind him he was supposed to be on vacation, and tell him to go off and enjoy himself.
So Floyd would head down to the beach, and from there he would start walking—either north in the direction of Hartland Quay, or south toward Boscastle—and depending on the tide he would either take the path along the cliffs or follow the line of the shore across the sand and the rocks.
When he got hungry, he would stop and eat the sandwiches and dri
nk the bottle of juice that Granny Plum had put in his backpack, and then later he would start walking home again. By the time he got back, he would find his grandmother preparing a supper even larger than his breakfast, and the rest of the evening would be spent in front of the television. Granny Plum was a big fan of the soaps and would keep up a running commentary on the characters while Floyd dozed, or watched with her, or read a book.
Mike appeared on several occasions during these walks. The first time was when Floyd was making his way along the coastal path near Widemouth. He came over the brow of the hill and there was Mike, a few paces in front of him, his coat blown backward by the breeze, one hand stuffed in the pocket of his jeans and the other pointing out to sea.
Following the line of his finger, Floyd looked down and saw a group of dolphins, no more than a hundred yards from the shoreline, leaping in and out of the water as they moved across the bay.
“They’re not dolphins,” said Mike.
“No?” Floyd had taken a pair of binoculars from his bag. “So what are they?”
“Page one hundred seventy-three,” said Mike with a smile, and again Floyd was about to ask what that meant, when he found that Mike had gone.
That evening, he told his grandmother about seeing the dolphins that weren’t dolphins.
“How do you know they weren’t?” she asked.
“I don’t really,” said Floyd, “but there was someone else on the cliff, and he seemed very certain. I might try the library tomorrow and look them up.”
Granny Plum said nothing, but burrowed briefly in the bookcase to her right before producing a volume that she passed across. “It’ll probably be in there somewhere,” she said.
The book was A Field Guide to the British Shoreline, and Floyd was about to look in the index to see if it had anything on dolphins when a thought popped into his head and he turned, instead, to page one hundred seventy-three.
There, sure enough, was a short chapter on the distinguishing features of sea mammals that could be seen from the shores of coastal Britain.
“Porpoises,” said Floyd. “The things I saw were porpoises.”
“Were they, dear?” said his grandmother. “That’s nice.”
Floyd flipped through some of the other pages in the book. “Could I borrow this?” he asked.
“It’s yours,” said his grandmother. “Your grandfather gave it to you when you were five. You used to spend hours looking at the pictures.”
The Field Guide accompanied Floyd on all his walks after that. From it, he learned the names of some of the varieties of bivalve that were glued in the millions to the rocks. He learned about the different types of seaweed, so that he could tell the difference between thongweed and dabberlocks, and he took to carrying a trowel as well as the Field Guide so that he could dig in the sand for beach worms and amphipods. As the weeks passed, he spent less of his time walking and more of it crouched over a rock pool, or studying the debris of marine life that had been washed up along the shoreline.
When Mike appeared, it was usually to point out something that Floyd might otherwise have missed. It was Mike, for instance, who pointed out the impressively toothsome jaws of an anglerfish lying bleached among the debris left by the tide. And it was Mike who, on the beach at Holacombe, pointed out a turtle, a genuine sea turtle, walking casually across the sand down to the sea before swimming away.
And it was Mike, of course, who led to his meeting with Charity.
It was late afternoon, almost three weeks after his vacation had started, and Floyd was walking back to Bude from Morwenstow when he saw Mike just ahead of him, kneeling on the sand, peering into a rock pool. Floyd came over to join him and found his friend staring at a fish floating on the surface of the water.
It was dead, washed there by the tide, but Floyd was puzzled as to what it was. His Field Guide had given him a good working knowledge of most of the things to be found on the shoreline, but it did not cover fish, like this one, that presumably came from deeper waters.
“So what is it?” he asked the figure beside him, but the voice that answered was not Mike’s.
“No idea,” it said.
The person kneeling on the sand beside him, Floyd realized, was not Mike, but a girl. She had short dark hair, a quizzical look on her face, a small yellow bikini, and she was looking intently at the fish.
“I’ll ask Dad,” she said. “He’ll know.”
Standing up, the girl turned and called to a man crouched over a different pool a dozen yards away. “Dad? Look at this!”
The man came over, glanced briefly at Floyd, then bent down to study the dead fish. “Interesting.” He spoke in a soft American accent. “You ever seen one of these before?”
Floyd shook his head. “Never. And it’s not in my book.”
“I’m not surprised. It’s not really a shoreline creature. It’s an amberjack. You can tell it’s a young one from those wavy lines on its side.” The man pointed to a tear in the fish’s mouth. “Probably caught by a fisherman earlier today. He threw it back in the sea for some reason, and it got washed here by the tide.” He stood up. “My turn to show you something now.”
He led the way back to the rock pool he had been studying earlier and pointed. “Any idea what that is?”
His finger indicated a starfish, not much more than a quarter inch across, covered in tiny spots.
Floyd studied it carefully. “It’s a cushion star, isn’t it?”
“It is.” The man nodded approvingly. “Do you know what kind?”
Floyd admitted that he didn’t.
“It’s Asterina phylactica,” said the girl. “If it was Asterina gibbosa it would be bigger and wouldn’t have the little spots.” She grinned. “But I only know that because Dad just told me.”
The man, Floyd learned, was Dr. Richard Lamont, and he was a marine biologist from Boston in the United States, on vacation with his family. The girl in the yellow bikini was his daughter, and his wife was somewhere farther up the beach, lying on a towel, reading a book. Dr. Lamont seemed to know even more about marine life than the Field Guide, and for nearly an hour they sat and talked about some of the things they had found, and some of the things they had hoped to find but hadn’t yet. Dr. Lamont was particularly intrigued to hear about the turtle Floyd had seen in the bay near Holacombe and agreed, from his description, that it had indeed probably been a loggerhead.
It was the first time Floyd had spoken to anyone apart from his grandmother since coming to Cornwall, and he enjoyed it. It was interesting to talk to someone who knew so much about marine life, and interesting, too, to be with the girl. Her name was Charity. She was almost exactly the same age as himself and … it was a very small bikini.
When Charity’s father announced that it was time they were getting back to their hotel, Floyd felt a stab of disappointment, and then was curiously pleased when the girl asked if he would be around the next day.
“We normally come down to the beach after lunch,” she said, “and stay for a couple of hours. We might see you again, if you’re around then.”
And Floyd agreed that they might.
The next day, Floyd did not walk as far as usual. He went north to Steeple Point, but then turned around and was back at the beach at Bude by one o’clock, sitting on the breakwater looking out over the sands at the retreating tide.
The wind had veered around to the north, bringing down a layer of clouds, and the resulting drop in temperature meant there were fewer people on the beach. Those who had braved the chill were mostly wrapped in coats or sweaters, but none of them was Charity and, an hour and a half later, there was still no sign of her.
Floyd had actually decided there was no point waiting any longer and that he might as well go home when he saw Mike standing at the edge of the surf, the waves almost washing over his shoes.
Floyd walked across the sand to join him. He half expected his friend to point out some rare animal or plant, but all Mike said was …
“Y
ou need to wait.”
“For Charity?”
Mike nodded. “And when she gets here, you should tell her about me.”
“Oh … Are you sure?”
Mike did not answer, but gazed calmly at the horizon.
“It’s just I was thinking,” said Floyd, “that if I tell her about you, she’ll probably think I’m crazy.”
“Possibly,” Mike agreed. “But you should still tell her.”
“All right,” said Floyd. “If she ever turns up I will, but I wouldn’t mind knowing how long I’ll have to wait because …”
He was interrupted at that moment by a shout and turned to see Charity running across the sand toward them.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said a little breathlessly when she reached him. “We got stuck in Tintagel. Dad was giving a talk and everyone kept asking him questions and … anyway, I’m glad you’re still here.” She smiled, and at that exact moment the clouds parted and the sun came out. “Do you want to go for a walk or something?”
“Great,” said Floyd, but looked at Charity’s shoes and her dress. Both were rather formal.
“I know,” she said. “I need to get changed first. And I need to tell my parents where we’re going, and I need to grab some lunch, but I promise I’ll be back here in ten minutes. Can you wait that long?”
Floyd agreed that he would wait.
“I thought, if it’s not too far, you could show me where you found the turtle,” said Charity. “Your friend can come too if he likes.”
“My friend?”
“The boy you were talking to just now,” said Charity. “Long black coat? Dark, curly hair?”
“You saw him?” Floyd could not hide his surprise.
Mike Page 7
