~
Jerry caught up with him later, as he turned onto Coastguards' Parade for the second time that morning, undecided about his plan for the day. It was only later that he began to suspect that she had been watching the house, that she had engineered this 'chance' meeting.
He had paused at the corner to look out across the bay. It was clearer today, with a freshness that made him grateful for his old jacket. One or two yachts dotted the sea, and down towards the Naze Nick saw the black hulk of a Thames barge. On the horizon, a cargo ship merged with the haze. He wondered how much the town would be changed by the Channel Tunnel, luring away the passenger trade and the freight.
"Nicky, is that you?"
He turned and Jerry Gayle was approaching him, a quizzical look on her face. She'd let her hair grow, so that now it brushed her shoulders, but it was still the same streaked blonde. The way it hung around her face, combined with her distracted air, made her look vaguely like some starlet from the sixties. Her wide, cobalt eyes were edged with crows' feet, he saw, although she was only a month or two older than Nick.
She stopped, suddenly nervous, unsure.
"It is you, isn't it?"
He saw that her clothes were expensive: printed silk with a crumpled linen jacket and skirt. Her body, as slim as he remembered, if not more so. He had a sudden mental image of Jerry's naked torso, its angular form, the bones jutting, the small breasts rising and falling rapidly with her breathing.
"Jerry," he said, trying to blot out the image, cursing his mind for the tricks it played. "Hello." He half-turned, paused, and she joined him, walking slowly along the wide pavement of Coastguards' Parade.
"You're looking good," she said, with a sideways glance.
Good, not merely well. He swallowed. He never knew how to handle these situations. A bar fight, yes: he could pick out the key figure—not the one who started it, but the one who looked most likely to keep it going—and eject him from the premises. He could deter a group of drunken students who had been barred from a nightclub. He could sort out any of these situations with hardly a thought. But this...
He swallowed, licked his lips. "I look after myself," he finally said. "You learn to." He risked a glance, knowing that he would store up every image, every gesture. The light, shining back off her lips, those eyes which were never still until suddenly they locked on your own.
He realised he had broken the rules. He should have returned her compliment with one of his own—You look even more beautiful than I remember—instead of defensively trying to explain himself.
"Have you come back to stay?"
"I don't think so," he said. At least he could try to answer a straight question. "I'm in a B and B for now. I just wanted to see the old place again. And some of the old faces."
She smiled at this. "You've never been back in the entire twelve years?"
She remembered exactly how long he'd been away. He shook his head. "Things get in the way," he said.
"Don't they always? Do you have time for a drink?" They had reached the junction with Station Road now, and there was a terrace with tables and brightly coloured parasols, part of the Bay Hotel.
He nodded. Of course he had time for a drink. The hotel formed the end of a four-storey Regency terrace. The rest of the row was the natural hue of the local brick, but the Bay Hotel had been stuccoed white, with ornate cast iron and baskets full of tumbling geraniums and lobelia dotted at regular intervals across its facade. They went inside to order—Earl Grey, slices of lemon—then returned to the terrace.
"What's happened to you in the last twelve years?" Nick asked. He remembered her inconsistent moods, how sometimes she would talk and talk, when at others the best she could offer was a semi-detached gaze and half a smile. "Have you been here all the time?"
Her eyes were wide, suddenly fixed on the Bay. Nick thought she was going to drift, but then she smiled, her eyes flicked towards him, then away again, and she said, "I've been away. I've come back. It's my home—it always pulls you back in the end, don't you think?"
He couldn't argue with that. A woman brought their tray of tea out, making little secret of the fact that she thought them insane to be sitting outside on a day like this.
Jerry picked up a slice of lemon and squeezed it into her tea, then took another slice and let it float on the surface. She licked the juice from her fingers with delicate dabs of her tongue, then glanced, again, at Nick. "My little treat," she said, and for a dizzy moment he wondered what she meant.
He put milk in his tea, then three sugars. "You're only the second familiar face I've seen since Sunday," he said.
"Oh?" A questioning tone, but she clearly wasn't interested.
He changed tack. "I went out to Riverside, this morning. Looked for our old house in Rebow Road. It's a building site now. I don't know what I expected."
They exchanged brief smiles. "Well you're the early bird," she said. "Catch any worms?"
They smiled again.
"I run," said Nick. "Or work out. Every morning, before the rest of the world starts up. It's the best time of the day. Everything's new, the air's better. The day hasn't had a chance to be spoilt by then."
"You make me want to join you." She giggled. "But look at me: I'm so out of shape. I couldn't run to catch a cold."
He looked and she sucked in a deep breath, patted her abdomen, giggled again. He looked away. "You look fine to me," he mumbled.
When finally he returned his gaze from the yachts, now multiplied across the Bay, her gaze locked on his own. "Where have you been Nick?" she asked. "All these years? Why did they take you away from me?"
~
He had left Bathside when he was fourteen, after the worst six months of his life. Jerry knew about his mother. She knew that she had been ill, that she had died, that Nick had been taken away.
It had been so sudden, even though it took half a year in the end. One minute, it seemed, his mother was organizing the AGM of the local history society and then he had come home from school to find her waiting for him, when she should still have been out at work.
The look on her face would be imprinted on his brain forever. It was a blend of the stubbornness, which he knew he had inherited, and some strange serenity he had never seen before and had never seen in anyone since.
Somehow—from that look, he supposed—he had known before she told him. "I'm going to die, Nick," she said, simply.
She always talked straight with him.
He had known about her stomach pains, and her frequent visits to the doctor, but he had never suspected that it was cancer, a cancer that had insinuated itself so rapidly that it was already inoperable.
She fought it, because that was the way she was, but it seemed that every day she was a little worse, a little weaker. He did what he could, but he was only fourteen. For a long time, before and after, all he had wanted to do was wreck the world that had done this awful thing.
"She made arrangements for me," he told Jerry, aware of her eyes on his face. "But it was confused. They didn't work out."
"What about your family?"
He nodded back along Coastguards' Parade to the Minesweepers' Memorial. "Uncle Jack's on there," he said. "The rest are under stones at St Nick's, or All Saints, or buried at sea." His family was a Bathside family of long standing—his mother had traced them back to the days they had worked in Sir Anthony Deane's yard, building ships for Charles II—but Nick was the last of the line.
"You had nobody?"
He'd never known his father, and his mother had never spoken of him. That was up to her, Nick had always thought. If the truth hurt her then he didn't want to know.
He shrugged. "The Council took me in. I went to a temporary place in Colchester, then down to Chelmsford for a couple of months. Then two places in Norwich until I was old enough to get out."
"You moved a lot, Nicky. That can't have been good for you."
He met her look now, and smiled. "I wasn't exactly cooperative," he said. "I k
ept getting into fights. Trouble has a way of finding me."
Jerry smiled at that. "Like I found you this morning, perhaps? What happened when you were old enough to get out of the system?"
"Like I say: trouble has a way of finding me." Suddenly he didn't want to talk about it any more.
His tea had gone cold in the cup. Her eyes were flitting about again. He marvelled at the way she could change from vacant gaze, to sudden focus, to this skittishness.
It would be easy to become infatuated again, with a creature such as this.
He waited until she was looking at him, then said, "Will I get a chance to see you again, while I'm in town? Or is this it?"
She smiled, then dabbed her mouth with a serviette. "Of course you'll see me again, Nicky. Didn't Ronnie invite you out to the Strand for the weekend?"
~
Who, exactly, was he trying to fool? It was never a question of whether he would become infatuated all over again. Seeing her had been enough: the infatuation had never died. For the rest of the day he had been unable to get her out of his head. Ghost images of her face, fragments of their conversation. You're looking good.
Over the course of the day, he came to believe that he had discovered the real reason for his return to Bathside. He had come back for a second chance.
She had always been his.
Next morning, he was up with the sky still dark. He hadn't been able to sleep. At first his head had been full of Jerry; later, it had been congested with doubts. Alone, in the dark, he could no longer believe what his senses had told him during the previous morning, as he had sat on the terrace outside the Bay Hotel, sharing a pot of Earl Grey with Jerry Gayle.
He ran along an alleyway, separating the back yards of two rows of terraced houses, to the Main Road, then out, past the hospital and the golf club and the end of the new bypass until he reached Westquay Station. There was a police box in the middle of the road here, only allowing through traffic for the station or the docks.
He turned back, passing through a huddle of terraced streets built for the first influx of dockers and railwaymen into Westquay, about a hundred years ago. He came to the end of a road, swung himself over a gate with one flowing movement and then he was running over a tract of wasteland which stretched all the way back to the old cement works at St Augustine's. This whole area was known locally as the Hangings, although Nick knew that the name strictly only applied to a short, abandoned stretch of railway cutting by Ray Island Cemetery.
He followed a track that ran by the railway, with the estuary just beyond. At one point he heard a wader crying—seven brief whistles—and he remembered that it was a whimbrel, the smaller cousin of the curlew. For the first time since yesterday, his head was clear. All he was aware of was the wild land all around him and the power of his own body. Early morning was always the best time.
Later, he went to call on Jerry's parents.
~
When he had known her the first time around, Jerry had lived in Caulders Road. The houses here were detached, modern, with gardens laid out like military kit for inspection. The road dropped away down one of the steeper hills in Bathside, from Bay Road at the top, to Coastguards' Parade at the foot. Because of the hill, the view across the bay was unimpeded, and to young Nick Redpath, living in his damp, prefabricated council house on Riverside, this house had been a sure sign of Jerry's class.
Now, he saw that the street was no more than comfortably middle class. Pilots and teachers would live here, he supposed, and moderately successful local businessmen.
He recognised the house, with its front garden all paving slabs and gravel and those awful miniature conifers. He crunched up the path and rang at the doorbell.
"Mr Gayle?" he said, to the man who answered the door. He wasn't sure, after such a long time. He had only ever seen Jerry's father once or twice. The door opened wider, to reveal a tall man with steely grey hair, slicked back behind fleshy, furred ears. His nose had been broken and then reset askew and then Nick noted those eyes: the deep cobalt blue, flitting from Nick's face to his clothes, to his shoes, to the street beyond, then back to his face.
"Mr Gayle, I'm sorry to bother you. My name's Nicholas Redpath. I used to know your daughter. I wondered if I might have a few minutes of your time?" He was conscious of the change in his own manner: the straightening of the spine, the formality of his tone.
Mr Gayle's expression remained politely blank for a few seconds, then he gave a single nod and stepped back from the door. "Just brewing up," he said, in exactly the clipped, educated voice Nick had expected. "Assam?"
"Very kind," said Nick, crossing the threshold with a sudden thrill. Entering the house where Jerry had been raised. They went through to the kitchen, where a large china teapot sat in the middle of a polished table, a pair of delicate cups inverted in their saucers by its side. Out through a glass door and the conservatory window, Nick saw Mrs Gayle settled on a plastic kneeler, plucking the dying summer bedding from a sloping border with a steady rhythm. She looked a good ten years younger than her husband, although still well into her fifties.
"Redpath, you say," said Mr Gayle, producing another cup and saucer, then turning all the cups up the right way. "Local History Society. Am I right? Fran—my wife—knew your mother. Lost touch, I'm afraid. You moved away, you said?"
"I left the area when I was a teenager," said Nick. "My mother passed away."
A look of horror crossed Mr Gayle's face. "God, I'm sorry," he said. "My mind was elsewhere. Of course. It all comes back. You must think me terribly..."
Nick shook his head, then spooned the sugar into his tea.
"The old brain's a little slow these days. Of course. I should have made the connection. Fran and Geraldine were terribly upset at the time, of course. I should have realised." He paused to pick up the third cup of tea. "You must come out into the garden—Fran will want to see you, of course."
Nick followed him out.
"Nick Redpath," said Mr Gayle, as his wife rose to her feet, peeling yellow rubber gloves from her hands. "Mrs Redpath's lad. Local History." His demeanour had changed in his wife's presence: less stiff, more boyish.
"It must be years," said Fran Gayle, clinging limply to Nick's hand. "Does Geraldine know you're back? She still talks of you, you know?"
Nick felt awkward under the scrutiny of Jerry's parents. "I did bump into her," he said. Yesterday morning. But she forgot to give me her number or address. That's why I called, really. I wondered if you might...?"
"Of course, of course." Mr Gayle went back into the kitchen, produced a jotter and began to write. Then he paused and glanced out at Nick, the penetrating, mischievous look his daughter used so well. "You know she's married, of course?"
"Of course," said Nick, smiling, nodding. "She told me yesterday. What's his name again?" He didn't, and she hadn't—he'd have noticed a ring on her finger, he felt sure—and it was all he could do to keep the shock from writing itself in bold capitals right across his face.
"Matthew Wyse," said Mr Gayle, resuming his writing, apparently satisfied. "Antiques and art dealer. Premises in Colchester and Manningtree. Here. They live on the Stoham Road—no street numbers. Just past the Yew Tree, you know it?"
Nick accepted the slip of paper and nodded. "I'm most grateful," he said. "Thank you for your time."
"Welcome, boy. I have plenty to spare since I left the Service." Nick recalled that Gayle had been something in the Civil Service. "You'll come again, will you? You don't need an excuse, you know."
~
He couldn't sort it all out in his head. He had probably misinterpreted the whole encounter with Jerry—she had recognised him and shared a pot of tea, no more—he had misread all the signals. But why should that be the case? The simple fact that she was married didn't mean she was uninterested, that an old spark hadn't been stirred.
But he knew that everything was different for him now. The fact that she was married might not prove anything, but it did increase the likel
ihood that he had got it all wrong. And even if he had not, and she had been doing more than idly flirting, any further developments would have to be secret, they would always be plagued by the fear of discovery. Was it more exciting that way? Or simply more shabby?
Some time during the next two days he realised that he was being foolish. He'd been thirteen, fourteen, and smitten by a girl he had never really got to know. Now he was twice that age, but still with the same foolish thoughts.
He was being stupid.
On Friday morning, as he ran as hard as he ever did—across the sands, hurdling the groynes, up the steps to the Prom and down the next flight to the beach again ... as he ran he knew that he would not get into his old VW that evening, to drive out to Ronnie Deller's get-together at the Strand. He couldn't go through with it.
Mrs Geraldine Wyse was a stranger to him and young Jerry Gayle was a part of his childhood dreams, a fragment he should keep untainted in his own mind, rather than risk spoiling it with unpleasant factors like truth and reality.
Back at his digs, showered and changed back into jeans and a T-shirt, he went down for breakfast. His landlord was waiting in the corridor. "Had a 'phone call," he said. "Lady. Said she'd call back at half-nine."
"Thanks," said Nick, his resolve dissipating in a matter of seconds.
McClennan turned and headed for the kitchen. "Not a bleedin' answering service, is it?" he muttered, before the door slammed shut behind him.
~
It was Jerry, as Nick had known it would be. He had waited by the telephone since just before the appointed time.
"Daddy said you called round," she said, after the exchange of greetings.
Now was the time to tell her, Nick thought, but instead he just said, "That's right. He made me tea."
"That's good," said Jerry. He recognised her mood. She would be staring off into some private distance as she spoke, slightly detached from the real world.
"You never told me you were married."
"Should I have?"
He had no answer to that and so there was silence for a time, which Nick felt reluctant to break. Finally, he said, "I was thinking of leaving. I'm not cut out for all this." There. He had said it with a single phrase: all this. All this subterfuge. I don't sleep with married women. I like things out in the open.
One More Unfortunate Page 3
