‘And there are ivy leaves everywhere.’
He looks around in surprise. ‘Of course there are. I hadn’t made that connection. I thought they were just a decorative theme, but maybe they mean something.’
‘And the lead horse is more worn,’ I say. ‘Do you think that was her horse? That was where she sat, day after day, waiting for the love of her life to come back?’
He looks over at the horse I’ve just been cleaning. ‘You’re good at this too, you know that? I’d noticed the wear but hadn’t read anything into it.’ He looks at my hand still resting on his shoulder and then looks up and meets my eyes, but he doesn’t seem to mind it there, so I give it a squeeze, determined not to let go yet even though I don’t need the support.
I reach out and run my fingers over the lettering again. ‘Maybe this is why the ghost still rides it – so it doesn’t stop turning. She can still believe there’s hope of him finding her again for as long as it turns.’
‘I hate to be the unromantic voice of reason here, but it’s been many decades since this thing turned, let alone played ghostly music in the dead of night.’
‘I know, but … even without the ghost bit. All those years ago. If there’s any truth in the story, she sat here for years, watching and waiting for someone who never came.’
‘Well, that’s love for you, isn’t it? Always a let-down.’
I glance at him but he’s still intently focused on the words in front of us and his face doesn’t give anything away. ‘And now it’s stopped turning. She must have thought he stopped loving her.’
‘Aw, don’t worry, Ness.’ He reaches up and pats the hand on his shoulder and then jumps up abruptly, making it drop. ‘We’ll get it back working for ol’ Ivy. I wouldn’t mind knowing a name and date in exchange though. Do you think our ghostly friend will share that with me?’
‘No, but there must be some locals who know more than Camilla does … We could ask around.’
‘Are we going to get anything but ghost stories though? I don’t want romanticised old tales, I want to know his name, when he made this, when he lived, when he died, if he made anything else. Fact not fiction.’
‘I want to know what happened to him,’ I say. ‘They were madly in love. He must’ve spent years making this for her. He wouldn’t have just disappeared after that, would he?’
‘Probably realised love was a load of bollocks.’
‘Aww,’ I mutter as he goes back to his engine, and I follow his cue and get up and return to cleaning the lead horse, wondering if she’ll provide any more clues about her namesake, listening to the roll of the waves as they come closer and the distant chatter of passersby.
‘I think you’re right,’ he says after a while. ‘I think he loved her.’
‘Are you saying you believe a romantic old ghost story?’
‘You know I said I like to feel the things I work on?’ he says after a long hesitation. ‘You can feel it. This whole carousel is a strange thing. It’s carved beautifully, but not efficiently. It’s incredible to look at but it’s so big and bulky that it’s not practical. This isn’t someone trying to make money or better the work of what’s already out there. Every inch of it is made with love and that comes across, even all these years later. The story reinforces what I can tell from the carousel and the carousel reinforces the story. It shows me why there are all these little touches, like the ivy leaves everywhere, that don’t serve any purpose and actually make it bigger and bulkier than it already was. Generally carousel makers wouldn’t do that – they need to make them as streamlined as possible.’
I love listening to him talk about this. I could sit here and listen to him all day, and not just because of the soft lilt of his Yorkshire accent.
‘At least you’re here to fix it. It will turn again for Ivy and her missing love.’
He snorts as he undoes something on the engine. ‘Not like me to be fixing love.’
I pause mid-horse-leg and look over at him. There’s something so sharp in his voice that I can’t stop myself pursuing it. ‘How come you’re so anti-love?’
‘I’m not anti-love, I’m just anti-me-in-love. I’m sure it’s great for other people – Ivy and her missing man for instance, Charles and Camilla, probably the Pearlholme couple and the royal couple – it’s just not something that works for me, but good on anyone who’s found it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I genuinely like other people being happy.’
I throw him such a glare that he actually recoils. ‘You know full well I meant you. Why doesn’t love work for you?’
He’s silent for so long that I’m sure he’s decided to ignore me.
‘I’m divorced,’ he says eventually, so quiet that I can barely hear him.
When I look over, his head is bowed and he looks like it’s such a shameful secret that I wonder if there’s a hidden meaning I’m missing. ‘Regular divorced or, like, just got out of prison for divorcing your wife’s head from her body?’
He laughs and it eases the tension I can see in him. Instead of crouching next to the engine, he sits on his knees and looks at me. ‘Just regular divorced. And there’s no kids or messy exes or owt like that. I just thought I’d met someone to share the rest of my life with … Turns out I was wrong. We married at twenty-three and I was thirty-one when we got divorced.’
‘Five years ago?’
He nods.
‘Like your shoulder injury?’
He nods again. ‘Yeah, it was a great year.’
‘That’s a long time to be married to someone.’
He nods yet again.
‘What went wrong?’ I ask, wondering if I’m pushing him too far when I can clearly see that he doesn’t want to talk about it.
‘Everything and nothing,’ he says with a shrug. ‘I was too young and too head-over-heels. I thought love worked like you see in the movies – you fall in love, you get married, and you live happily ever after. I had no concept of the idea that it might not work out.’
‘At least you gave it your all,’ I say, thinking about how much I hold myself back with everything I do, no matter how much I want to throw caution to the wind and jump in headfirst. ‘I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have committed to someone you loved, even if it didn’t end up working out. You know what they say – it’s better to have loved and lost …’
‘Why do you have a way of making everything sound better than it is?’ he says, looking at me with a soft smile. ‘And why do you make me want to tell you everything that’s ever happened in my life? I start talking to you and I just don’t stop.’
‘I don’t mind that,’ I say, without adding that ‘don’t mind’ is quite possibly the understatement of the century.
‘And no, it is definitely not better to have loved and lost. Load of old bollocks. Almost as much rubbish as carousel ghost stories. If I could meet my twenty-three-year-old self, I’d whack him round the head with a wooden horse leg.’ He nods to a broken one lying on the floor nearby. ‘Anything to stop him making such a stupid mistake.’
He sounds so bitter and hurt, even so many years later, but there’s no heat behind his words. They sound like a well-practised front that he’s used to hiding behind, and the urge to go over and hug him returns. But it doesn’t seem right. Even though I feel like I’ve known him for years, I have to keep reminding myself that it’s only been a few days. It’s not right to feel this close to someone in such a short amount of time, and he’s obviously shy and reserved, and so am I usually. I don’t know what’s got into me lately.
‘Better than me,’ I say instead, because I don’t think he’s going to share anything else and it might make him feel better to know he’s not the only one with a disastrous love life. ‘I tried to force a relationship that was clearly going nowhere. The “perfect on paper” guy who my mum loved. My friends had already chosen the colours of their bridesmaids’ dresses. I convinced myself that all relationships were as devoid of love and affection as ou
rs was. We shared a flat and, honestly, I was more excited to see my neighbour’s dog when we passed in the stairwell than I was when he came home after work.’
‘How long?’ he asks, looking like he’s grabbing the chance to talk about something other than his own love life.
‘We were together for three years but the relationship was over for at least two of them.’
He makes a pained face. ‘Ouch. You broke it off?’
‘Yeah, and my friends and family still haven’t forgiven me. He was thereafter forever renamed “poor Andrew”. My mum joined Facebook solely so she could keep in touch with him. She still phones weekly to tell me about the pictures he’s posted of him and his new girlfriend travelling around Thailand. Apparently he’s much fitter now but he always looked so much happier with me. But that’s the point. We weren’t happy, we were making each other miserable. And everyone kept telling me that he was perfect for me, and rather than trusting myself, I kept thinking they must be seeing something that I wasn’t, but eventually, you just …’
‘… have to give up,’ he finishes for me, sounding like he understands.
I nod and give him a grateful smile and he smiles back.
‘When’d you break up?’ he says quickly, almost like he’s aware the conversation has shifted back to him and he doesn’t want to give me a chance to ask any more questions.
‘Two years ago now. All my friends and family think I’m some kind of heartless cow for breaking it off out of nowhere … well, what they thought was out of nowhere. And my best friend’s been on a mission to find me someone else ever since.’
‘The pregnant one who hates Carousel?’ I nod and he continues. ‘And she’s never succeeded?’
I wrinkle my nose and make the face I always make when Daphne’s talking about guys she wants me to go on a date with, the face that annoys her no end. It makes Nathan smile. ‘I met “poor Andrew” through online dating. Daphne and I made a pact to try it together and we both met nice guys around the same time, and hers was her now-husband, and mine was … very much not. I felt like I’d tried too hard to find someone, like I’d been too desperate for something to work and tried to make it something it wasn’t. I don’t want to make the same mistake again. I don’t want to force something, and going on blind dates with guys she’s interviewed for some weird article like “how to live with an extremely long penis” feels a bit too … force-y,’ I say, knowing Zinnia would be impressed with my butchering of the English language.
‘I bet people on the other end of the long penis say the same thing,’ he quips, and it takes us both a while to recover from the laughter.
‘I know what you mean,’ he continues. ‘Well, not about the long penis. Wait, I shouldn’t say that. I should say something flirtatious like “maybe, but you’d have to find out for yourself,” shouldn’t I?’
‘Oh my God, Nath,’ I say, struggling to speak because I’m laughing so much, more at the horrified look on his face than anything else.
‘Please, please continue this conversation from before any mention of penises arose. And arose and penises aren’t words you want in the same sentence, are they? Oh God, I’m making it worse. Can we go back to before the penises and pretend the interim never happened. Please, Ness, I beg of you before I embarrass myself any more.’
I grin at him because he’s so adorable. He tries to be flirty but it just doesn’t work, and that’s part of the charm. ‘Okay, let’s forget all about the penises. There are no penises here … although is the plural penises or penii? No one wants grammar mistakes when it comes to penises.’
He can’t answer because he’s busy dying of laughter. Or embarrassment. I am too, but seeing him laugh so much somehow makes it worth it.
‘I just thought if I was ever going to have another relationship, it should happen naturally,’ I say when we can both breathe again. ‘I’d bump into someone somewhere and there’d be a click and butterflies and I’d just know, and maybe it would have more chance of succeeding if it had started organically … and if it never happens, then it’s still better than what I had before.’ I realise I’ve never said that out loud. I’ve been so busy thinking up excuses for not going on any of Daphne’s dates that I’ve never actually told her that one simple truth. I don’t want another ‘poor Andrew’. I want something real or nothing at all. I would rather live alone and adopt seventy-nine cats – as she always tells me I’ll end up doing if I don’t try harder to find love – than have another loveless relationship. ‘What about you?’
‘No clicks, no butterflies, no looking.’ He drops the unused tool in his hand onto the wooden floor and walks across to the side of the tent nearest me. ‘I don’t ever want to go through that again. It was such a mess that it’ll never be worth the risk.’
‘Ever? Doesn’t the story of Ivy and her mystery carousel maker inspire you to believe that there’s real, true, enduring love out there?’
He looks at me like I’ve lost the plot. ‘Yeah, and look where it got her. A lifetime of sadness, riding a merry-go-round day after day, so distraught that apparently even death wasn’t enough to stop her misery. If anything, this carousel proves that even with the best of intentions, love isn’t worth the pain.’
I abandon my wet wipes and go over to stand next to him, looking out at the bay in front of us. The tide is far up the beach now. It’s reached the highest point and started to go back out again, leaving layers of wet sand in its wake, and it makes me wonder how the afternoon has gone so quickly. I haven’t even noticed the time passing.
‘Yeah, exactly,’ I say, swallowing hard. ‘It’s not worth the misery it’ll undoubtedly bring.’
He lifts his left arm and drops it around my shoulders, squeezing me in to his side. ‘What a pair we make, huh? Here we are at the most romantic carousel in the world and its sentiment is lost on us.’
I reach up and put my hand on his injured shoulder and give it a gentle squeeze. ‘Yeah, completely lost.’
He sighs and rests his head against mine for just a moment, then he starts humming ‘If I Loved You’ from Carousel, and we stand and look out at the ocean, glistening blue under the bright summer sun, and I can’t help thinking the romance of this gorgeous old thing might not be quite so lost after all.
Chapter 11
‘I am going to die.’
‘You can’t die, you have to be alive to call an ambulance when I keel over,’ Nathan pants, making me feel slightly better about my lack of fitness because he’s struggling just as much as I am with this climb.
‘Did you at least tell someone where we were going so they know where to send a search party before vultures tear all the remaining flesh from our rotting carcasses?’
‘I don’t think we have vultures in Britain.’
There’s an ominous squawk of a gull overhead and we both look up at the sky, then back down at each other and chuckle nervously.
‘All right, maybe they’re not vultures but there could definitely be unknown species never before seen by humans this far up. There are probably a few bears, wolves, and yetis having a tea party, safe in the knowledge that no idiot with half a brain would be daft enough to come up here.’
‘You said yes,’ he says with a grin.
‘I believe my exact words were, “You’re insane, but I can’t let you die up there, cold and alone, on this ridiculous pursuit.”’
‘Actually, your exact words were, “I’d love to, that sounds like fun.” I remember them because I doubted my own sanity in suggesting it and I was touched that you had so much faith in me.’
‘I’m starting to think that was misplaced,’ I mutter as I stop and bend over with my hands on my knees, trying to get air into my screaming lungs.
We’re not even halfway up the cliff where the ruins of the house stand. It seemed like it might be doable at first, as we walked up past the cottages of Pearlholme and along gently sloping grassy paths, then it got a bit more hilly, then we hit monstrous sand dunes, and it only got worse from
there on out. We’re now on the bit that, from the beach, I thought was the cliff collapsing with subsidence, and now up close, I see that I was right. These are not just sand dunes, they were once solid grassy cliff face that has fallen away over time, which is always a comforting thought when you’re standing on it. We’re not even anywhere near what looked like the hard part, and I can’t describe how much I’m looking forward to reaching that. If we make it there alive.
‘Here.’ Nathan presses my water bottle into my hand and stands up to take a long glug from his, and I can’t help but watch the way his glistening Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows and swipes a forearm across his forehead and shakes sweat from it. Which, again, makes me feel better about how hot I look. And not in the attractive way. I’m wearing a plain T-shirt and three-quarter-length black trousers, but it could be a bikini and I’d still be too hot, and that would put Nathan right off his sandwiches too.
Not that he’s told me what his mysterious secret sandwich is yet.
He’s quite the gentleman, actually. He’s made lunch for both of us, been to the shop and got fresh pastries, borrowed water bottles from the cottage, and carried the whole lot in the rucksack over his shoulders to save me having to carry anything.
I look down the dune we’ve just clambered up. ‘If we lose our footing for even a moment, gravity will slide us straight back down to the bottom again.’
‘Bloody gravity. It wasn’t even a good film.’
I nod my agreement because I’m too out of breath for unnecessary speaking.
‘Something else we can agree on,’ he says. ‘Overhyped films and the joys of toaster pizzas.’
‘There’s such a thing as toaster pizzas?’ I say in surprise.
‘Oh, what a sheltered life you lead.’ He puts on an American accent. ‘Stick with me, grasshopper, I’ll teach you everything there is to know about junk food.’
I hand my water bottle back to him and watch as he pushes it into his backpack and swings it onto his shoulders. ‘Should you be carrying that?’
The Little Vintage Carousel by the Sea Page 15
