Brodmaw Bay (12 page)

He did not think it could be the husband. She had mentioned him vaguely. He had sounded dull and inconsequential to Robert; a talent-free man devoid of charisma who had hit the jackpot with his wife and then squandered his winnings. He hadn’t just sounded dull, actually. He had sounded terminally dull. Some problem with anxiety had sounded the most interesting aspect to his character. He was some kind of software design hotshot and this flaw had hampered his ability to present to potential clients and handicapped his progress in his career.

Creativity was not a very democratic attribute. You possessed it or you didn’t. But Robert did not feel lucky in possessing his own talent. He had exploited it, working bloody hard. He was consistent and prolific. If he had not earned his talent, that was all right, because no one did. It was a gift. He felt, though, that he had justified the gift he had been given. And he felt that achievement made him special, singling him out, apart from the rest.

The press release version of his life sold him as the Celtic product of picturesque Ennis in far-flung County Clare. It was a portrait misty with soft-water rain that dwelt on standing stones, peat-warmed cottages, the vastness of the Burren and the gaunt magnificence of the Cliffs of Moher. Had there been a soundtrack to it, Enya would have provided it. Or it would have been the Cranberries when they were still largely wistful and acoustic, before their antsy singer changed their sound.

The reality was a council house on a miserable estate, an absentee father and a mother who regretted bitterly leaving rural Spain as a teenager for a man she quickly stopped loving. His early years had been bleak and lonely. It had not been a childhood for dwelling on nostalgically. It had been the sort you escaped. His talent had given him the means to escape it and his industry had done the rest, but he was intelligent enough to know that you never truly escaped your origins because what happened to you when you were very young shaped your character for the rest of your life.

The Seasick Steve album he had listened to the previous evening summed it up very well for Robert. Its title was
I Started Out With Nothing and I’ve Still Got Most of it Left
. He knew how that felt. He had started out with nothing. He had grown up deprived of possessions and self-worth and parental affection.

Now he had lots of things. He had a state-of-the-art laptop and a growing collection of expensive wristwatches and his Queenhithe penthouse and the Harley Davidson motorcycle in the basement garage below. He was proud of the oil painting over the marble fire surround on his sitting room wall. It was of modest size. But the signature in its bottom right-hand corner was Peter Doig’s. He had a thriving investment portfolio and money in the bank and the respect of his peers.

All of this was important to him. He had constructed himself, piece by punctilious piece. And overall, he was pleased with what he had fashioned. He wouldn’t be thirty-one for another month. He was the third bestselling children’s author in Britain and the fourth most borrowed from the nation’s lending libraries. His books had been translated into fourteen languages and he had a development deal on the new series with a major Hollywood studio.

He still had the common touch. That very afternoon, he was scheduled to give a talk to the sixth-formers of a large north London comprehensive. The subject was creative writing. He would read passages from one of his own novels aimed at the young adult market. It would hit the spot. It always did. Afterwards, he would inspire them with some off-the-cuff observations about how many enjoyable ways there were to translate aspects of the world into words on the page.

He was a natural with kids. He liked them and they responded positively to him. He had been looking forward to meeting Jack and Olivia, Lillian’s two children; the two reasons, he thought, with something like self-loathing, that her body bore those tell-tale signs of motherhood he had just goaded her about.

He groaned and threw the phone at his sofa. It bounced off the buttoned leather and skittered on to the floor. He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror hung artfully on the wall opposite the balcony to backlight anyone who looked in it. He looked tanned, composed and compellingly handsome. It was a Dorian Gray illusion. He felt soiled and tormented. He looked at the costly ticking bauble that kept the time on his wrist. It was seven-thirty. If he took a sleeping pill now, he would be groggy at the school later and would under-perform.

Robert trudged to his bathroom to get a Valium from the cabinet there. The cabinet had a mirrored door but he managed to open it without undergoing the ordeal of seeing himself for the second time in less than a minute just by glancing instead at the tiled wall. He swallowed the pill and drank a pint of water, standing over his kitchen sink. The kitchen gleamed. In the early light, everything did. He was dehydrated and his mouth tasted drily of stale booze. There was darkness here, he thought, but all of it lay within.

He took off his clothes and discarded them on his bedroom floor. He lay down naked and buried his face in the pillow. He would sleep till noon. The alcohol and narcotic effects would have worn off by then. The injury to his heart would only have become more raw and unbearable.

He did not really know what to do. He had never been in this predicament before. The emotional stakes had never been so high. He would awaken later sober enough to see the situation he was in with greater clarity and calm. All he was sure of, as sleep gratefully claimed him, was that he would not give up on her. The prize was too great. He would never do that. He would never give up. He knew above all else that Lillian was worth fighting for.

The road reached towards the village of Brodmaw along a series of acute hairpins in woodland so dense James realised it was the reason why the route had been invisible in Lillian’s painted view from the sea. He had to put on his headlamps to pick out the way. The trees were ancient and deciduous. He could smell the bark and bittersweet, full summer leaf scent of them through his open driver’s window. Then he was out of the twilit tunnel they formed and in front of a painted iron sign bearing the name of his destination.

There was no hotel in Brodmaw. He had booked a room at the pub opened with the proceeds of his ring career by the prizefighter Gregory Abraham. He had memorised the way there. His sat-nav had packed up about twelve miles back, just beyond the outskirts of Truro. But he reckoned the village too small a place to get lost in.

His first thought on seeing the narrow streets and alleyways through the Saab windscreen was that Brodmaw was characterised in a weird way by absence. It wasn’t that there were few people about, or that the traffic seemed very light, though both those observations would have been fair ones. It was that James saw nothing that signalled generic trade. Driving along the high street he did not see a Starbucks or a McDonald’s or a Subway. There was a shop that sold cards but it wasn’t a Clinton. There was a bookshop, but it wasn’t a Waterstones and there was a bakery but it did not say Greggs in bold lettering above the door.

He supposed that the small population and consequent lack of trade would put off the big retail franchises. But he thought there might have been a recognisable off-licence, given what thirsty folk fishermen were reputed to be. There wasn’t a bank or even a cash machine, at least not on the high street, there wasn’t. There were shops with bright frontages, glass gleaming as though freshly cleaned and awnings gaily striped. But they were all independents. He was reminded of Lillian’s jokey remark about the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker and wondered whether his wife hadn’t lived here in a former life. He was walking from the small car park to the rear of the pub with his overnight bag in his hand when he realised that he had not even seen the familiar red livery of a post or telephone box.

He took a moment to examine the Portland stone statue of Gregory Abraham, on its plinth outside the Leeward Tavern.

‘He didn’t really look like that,’ a voice from behind him said.

James turned. The man facing him was about six feet four and broad-shouldered and had the coarse, reddened complexion of a lot of exposure to the sun and the salt air. He looked about forty years old, older at first glance because his hair and beard were a grey becoming prematurely white. Between his arms, he held a basket of fresh loaves. James could smell their freshness and see the flour powdered on their crusts. The man bent and put the basket on the cobbles and dusted his palms and said, ‘You’ll be Mr Greer.’

‘And you’ll be related to the fellow on the plinth.’

‘Charlie Abraham.’ They shook hands. The landlord smiled. He had a broad smile and bright eyes, somewhere between grey and green, sea-coloured, thought James, who warmed to this fellow immediately.

They went inside. The Leeward was low-ceilinged and lamp-lit, dark after the sunshine outside, but more atmospheric, James thought, than gloomy. There was a lunch menu done in chalk on a blackboard on the wall behind the bar. There were horse brasses and odd bits of nauticalia mounted and shelved. There was music, but it was not the sea shanty he would have expected on his experience of the village so far. It was Fleetwood Mac. It was Stevie Nicks, warbling her histrionic way through ‘Sarah’.

The music was coming from an old cassette player on a shelf under the optics. Charlie Abraham went behind the bar and turned it down. ‘Always had a soft spot for Stevie,’ he said. ‘Can I offer you a drink, after your journey? The first one is on the house. There’s tea, there’s a pot of coffee fresh on, or since you must have been up since the crack of dawn, you’re most welcome to a glass of beer, if that’s your preference.’

James thought it astonishing. The landlord of the Leeward spoke in a dialect that sounded as if it might have travelled intact from the eighteenth century. He was no expert on idiom or semantics, but thought that this was exactly the way the man celebrated on the plinth outside would have sounded. He accepted a cup of coffee and Charlie Abraham poured one for each of them and they sat down at a table under the big curved window overlooking the bay on the far side of the pub from the bar.

‘Beautiful view,’ James said. The ocean glittered, boundless, under sunlight. The compliment was redundant.

‘It’s fair all right, Mr Greer.’

‘Please call me James.’

‘Then it’s Charlie to you.’

‘What did you mean, Charlie, when you said your ancestor didn’t resemble the likeness outside? Did the sculptor not know his business?’

‘Oh aye, he knew his business. His job was to render something formidable in stone. But prizefighters were agile, crafty men. No one built like the stone fellow outside could fight seventy rounds. He couldn’t go seven, carrying all that muscle. Old Greg had as much guile as strength. He was a wrestling champion, before he turned pugilist. He taught Lord Byron some of his ring craft.’

‘I’d heard they boxed an exhibition.’

‘More than that, old Greg coached him. They became friends and corresponded. Byron was always very concerned about his weight. I’ve got the letters his lordship sent along with a poem his lordship wrote in honour of the Brodmaw Battler.’

James absorbed what he’d just been told. ‘Where are these papers?’

‘They’re in my safe.’

‘Have you had them valued? Do you know what they are worth?’

Charlie smiled down at the table and blinked and then raised his head and looked at James squarely. ‘I know what they are worth to me,’ he said. ‘That’s the only value with which I concern myself. When the time comes, I will pass the papers on to Victoria, my eldest child. She can have the cache valued, should she wish to do so.’

But she won’t, the look on the landlord’s face said. To do so would never occur to her as it never has to me.

When he had put his bag in his room, James reflected on this. He was in a place where little ever changed. Tradition endured. Family was fixed and distant ancestry was viewed with an intimacy untouched by the remoteness of calendar years. It was a way of thinking that guaranteed identity and brought security. There was the solid comfort of continuity.

Charlie Abraham had not had the Byron correspondence valued because he would never have dreamed of selling it, regardless of the market price. He would not even have regarded it as his property to sell, James realised. He was only taking care of the cache for the next generation of Abrahams to treasure and take rightful pride in.

His bag on the bed, James unpacked what few items he had brought with him on the trip. It amounted really to a couple of T-shirts and a change of underwear. He was only going to be here for two full days. He felt very positive, very optimistic about his first impressions. He represented business, obviously, so it was in the man’s interest to be polite. But the pub landlord had seemed to him much more open and friendly than the Cornish, with their reputation for a surly sort of insularity, were often held to be.

He went back down and decided he would fuel his afternoon on an early lunch. Charlie told him that the kitchen opened at twelve. It was now almost ten. He would walk through Brodmaw and climb the hill and look at the standing stones on their plateau above the village.