Still Water by Catherine Marshall
Jem smiled inwardly at the thought of having ‘outlets’. “I have a stall, which I trundle onto the pier when the weather’s good and into the market when it isn’t.”
“What about other shops? In town, I mean?”
“There were a couple, but they’ve closed down over the last couple of years. That’s what today is about for me, raising my profile here. There’s a place in St Agnes and one in Porthleven which take a basic range, but I’ve tended to stay away from the bigger towns.” Her lines were coming back to her more readily than she had expected. It felt odd, hearing herself discussing her work as she had used to do, as if it were something that mattered.
Atlanta was nodding with enthusiasm. “You see, I love your pieces. I could buy a dozen of them straight off, just for myself. There’re a bit more funky and edgy than I usually sell, but I imagine there’s a real market for that here.” She replaced the last piece on Jem’s board, hesitated a moment. “So when you’ve been to the other places and heard what they’d like to offer you, come back to me. Because I’d like to talk to you about exclusivity.”
“Can I get you anything?” Gil offered. “A drink? Some breakfast? Cecily rustles up a mean waffle.”
Eve Callaghan, the Lady from the Press, surveyed him for a moment. “I’m fine, thank you.” She sat down. Gil remained standing.
“So,” he smiled. “How can I help?”
She gazed up at him. She was wiry with age rather than slender with youth, he noticed, lines criss-crossing faintly above her sallow cheeks, her auburn hair dusty around its parting. “The parents of the boy whose life you saved are very grateful.”
He pulled out a chair, sat backwards on it, his arms resting on the toprail. “How is he, do you know?”
“He’s fine. Discharged from hospital last night. You did a good deed.”
Jeez, Gil thought. Letting the guys buy him drinks all night in the privacy of Patrick’s had been one thing. Making this all about him in the local press was another. He shrugged. “Anyone would have done it. ”
“Nobody else did.”
“No, well, it was kinda quiet.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Every year someone drowns out there. Usually, like last night, a stupid kid. Sometimes a child. Sometimes a grown-up who should know better. But every year someone drowns.”
“I know.”
“What I want to do,” she explained, “is write this piece as a cautionary tale. Of course, this time and thank God it will be celebrating someone’s rescue, but I want it to sound the warning bell nonetheless. And I want to keep sounding that bell all summer. I know holiday makers don’t tend to read the paper and no one ever thinks it’s going to happen to them anyway but even so. If a bit of publicity now makes just one idiot teenager think twice we’ll both have earned our place in heaven.”
Gil thought that in his case it might take rather more than that but nodded anyway. “Right.”
“And you’d be happy with that?”
“Sure.” For what else could he say? ‘No, don’t make me part of a campaign which might save lives’?
“All right. So.” She uncapped her pen. “You’re Gil Hunt?”
“I am.”
“Gil short for Gilbert?”
“Gilman. It was my mother’s maiden name.”
“Like the painter.”
“The painter?”
“Gilman Hunt.”
He laughed. “You mean Holman Hunt. The Pre-Raphaelite guy. The Scapegoat, Lady of Shalott.”
“Of course,” she said dismissively. Clearly she didn’t like being corrected. Nor, he thought, had she heard of the paintings. “And you’re … ?”
“More a Rossetti man myself.”
She frowned. “How old are you?”
“Oh. Twenty-eight.” She had thick, masculine hands, he noticed and chastised himself for being uncharitable in his own head. What was there to like about her? He considered her while she wrote. Her quest to save lives, of course. The way the khaki silk vest she wore complimented her hair. The … no, he couldn’t be bothered to think of anything else.
“And not a local?” she continued.
“Nope, I live in Bristol. I come down every summer, stay with my friends, get some work done, chill out.”
“Are you an artist?”
“Hardly. I make furniture. Carve stuff.”
“That’s a kind of art, isn’t it?”
“It’s knocking cabinets together. It’s … ” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess, if you want to call it that.”
She glanced at him. “Tell me what happened last night.”
He did so, without melodrama or embellishment. The café had grown busy around them and he wanted to grab some breakfast and head up to the studio, start planning a project for the summer which would remind him that he did this for love as well as to earn money.
She wrote fast, glancing at him now and then as he spoke. “When I told you that every year here someone drowns, you said that you knew.”
“Like I said, I’m here every summer. I’ve heard that particular bell toll too many times.”
“And what would you say, to warn people?”
He smiled. “ ‘Don’t be a dick’.”
To his surprise, she smiled too. “How about something I could use?”
“Oh, you want a sound-bite?”
“Can you manage that?”
“I can do cheesy and misogynistic. ‘The sea is like a woman’s wrath: underestimate it at your peril’.”
She frowned. “No, I kind of like that.”
He laughed. “It’s awful. Seriously - you’re not going to use it?”
She slipped her notebook and pen into her bag. “Watch this space.”
When she’d gone he stepped back up into the kitchen to find Cecily alone and the workbench piled with order slips. “Henry gone to the beach?”
“Yep.”
“Surf dudes, eh? Heads up their own arses.” He picked up the oldest slip. “Has this gone yet? Table five, two cappuccinos, cinnamon muffin, pancakes.”
“Yes, I’m doing table two. Can you look at three for me?”
“Sure.” He read the order, swiftly assembled two English Breakfasts from the array on the hob. Cecily glanced across at him.
“You didn’t like that woman. The journalist.”
“It showed?”
“Body language. All you need to know.”
“Oh and mine is so transparent?”
“It is actually.”
He grinned. “Aah, she was all right in the end.” He whipped two latte mugs under the Gaggia. “Done.”
They dealt with the first morning wave of customers with easy efficiency, so familiar were they with each other, with the work. “It’s like a dance,” Gil said, twirling her round when the café had emptied a little and everyone remaining had been served. She spun away from him at the length of his extended arm, back towards his chest. “Ballet of the Petit Déjeuner.”
“Lunchtime Tango and Evening … ?”
“Tarantella.” He kissed the top of her head, released her hand. “What is the tarantella?”
“Italian folk dance. Bells and tambourines.” She smiled. “Coffee? Left-over muffin?”
They ate and drank, stacked the dishwasher, kept a weather eye on the café. A single shaft of sunlight slanted across the workbench. “I sense,” he said, “a beach party coming on.”
“It’s only just stopped raining.”
“It’ll be fine by tonight.”
She cocked an eyebrow at him.
“This week, though? Go on, go on, say yes, you know you want to.”
Cecily laughed. “I do. Yes, this week. You going to round up the boys?”
“Rub two sticks together and they’ll be there. Right, I am going to nip down into town and pick up a couple of things and then I’m working. Thinking about working. Preparing to think about working.”
“Go on,” she smiled. “See you later.”
He spra
He strolled past the pub and the palm trees to the steep descent into town, threading his way through shortcuts of snickets and stone steps, between whitewashed holiday cottages, their hanging baskets trailing luxuriously with lobelia and nasturtiums, chalk board menus appearing on the pavement outside tiny, half-hidden restaurants. Already the sun had grown warmer: the streets were filling with people shrugging out of their jackets and cardigans; he glimpsed between buildings children in swimsuits digging up the harbour beach. The list in his head was comprised of the dullest of essentials but he decided to take a detour, check out what was new, what was happening. He understood that at some point in the last twenty years this little seaside town – always beautiful, always popular - had made the transition from quaint to cool and nowhere was this more in evidence than The Walk. The owners of the upmarket restaurants and expensive little boutiques made him smile with their bid for hip, exclusive nonchalance as though they thought they were in Santa Barbara or Venice Beach. He wanted to slap their shoulders and tell them to get over themselves, to buy them a beer in Patrick’s and chill out.
The girl stepped out a yard in front of him, a huge board tucked under her arm with which she could do a fair amount of collateral damage if she whipped round too fast. He pulled up, registering long dark hair, purple t-shirt bearing some sort of seventies festival logo, black cargo pants, a great deal of silver jewellery. She turned, joining the slipsteam of holiday-makers and after a minute he lost her in the crowd. He frowned, certain that he had never seen her before in his life and yet equally certain that the chord she had struck in him for that briefest of moments had been one of recognition.
“Dad!” Jem left the back door open to the late afternoon sunshine, moved her right arm a further inch from her body to allow her display board to slide gently down her side to the floor, and dumped her carrier bags on the kitchen table. “Dad!” She leaned the board against the wall, unpacked strawberries and fresh trout and own-brand champagne.
“Well.” Alex smiled. “No need for me to ask how it went, then.”
She flung her arms round him and kissed his cheek, handed him the bottle. “Open it.”
He looked at the label, back at her, dead-pan.
“It’s the spirit,” she told him. “Pretend it’s Bollinger. We’re having trout pan-fried with almonds and strawberries for dessert and yes it went well but that’s sort of not the point.”
He untwisted the wire around the bottle’s neck, pressed his thumbs beneath the cork. “The point being?”
“The point being…” She paused as the cork popped, held up the glasses for him to fill. “The point being that I was out there, selling my work and people liked it. The woman at The Joshua Tree liked it so much she’s talking about exclusivity.”
“Is she indeed? And what did you say?”
“Not very much. She’s waiting for me to get back to her.”
Alex smiled, clinked his glass against hers. “To you. It’s good to hear you talking like this again.”
Jem smiled too. “It’s good to feel like this again.”
“Come on.” He patted the table. “Sit down and tell me all about it.”
She put the fish in the fridge and sat. Alex liked her to give detailed accounts (though only her, he insisted – anyone else’s bored him rigid) especially laced with wit and insight and she always enjoyed delivering. She described at length the woman who looked like Grace Kelly and whose family had been named from a great American novel, the bemusingly jolly Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett goth shop couple, the teenage girls who’d tried on her samples and declared them ‘sick’. Alex listened, discreetly swapped his champage for a bottle of German lager, and discussed with her the pros and cons of an exclusive deal. They shared the cooking; Jersey potatoes and salad with the trout and almonds, dipping the strawberries into melted chocolate from the fondue pot she’d found some years ago grown dusty at the back of a cupboard. Alex drank another lager. Jem dripped the remaining champagne into her glass.
“I’ve so much to do,” she mused. “Stock to build up, my web site to update, publicity to design.”
“Busy summer,” Alex observed.
“Bring it on.”
He laughed. “I’ve been thinking about work too.”
“Oh yes?”
“Mm. I’ve been thinking I need to start something new. Drive up the coast, find something that inspires me. I’ve always fancied doing a series on Tintagel.”
There was the smallest of silences. She said, “When?”
“Oh I don’t know.” His expression was more guarded than his words. “Later this month maybe.” He paused. “You’d be…”
“Fine. Absolutely. You go.” She smiled. Watched him for a moment. “You’re sure?”
He shook his head, amused. “You are daft to be worrying about me.”
“So I’m daft. So shoot me.” She held up her hands in surrender.
Later, climbing the stairs on her way to bed, she thought of all the ways in which she had worried about him, and he about her, and how all that time had now spiralled away from them. Her past lay dark, furled and heavy somewhere and she stood chilly and poised for flight. A fresh new dawn. She shivered with apprehension, stopped outside the door at the top of the stairs, trailed her finger lightly down its stained and splintering wood.
“Puddle?” Her father, in the hall below, frowning up at her. “You all right?”
“I’m fine, Dad.” She smiled, to reassure him, to reassure them both, but it would be invisible to him in the yellow wispy light of the hall, and was invisible to her always.
Cecily weighed scoops of soft, cool sand in her palms then tipped her hands and opened her fingers to let the grains run loose. She did it rhythmically, her eyes fixed on the dusky horizon, on surfers she didn’t know riding the last of the day’s waves, on a middle-aged couple strolling the white edge of froth. She remembered years ago being told that distant figures were painted as carrots: the indistinct, frondy head; the width of shoulders tapering to the point of feet. Her heart contracted and she blinked hard, scooped sand a shade more compulsively. The beach emptied fast in the evenings when there had been little heat in the day and she could see barely a dozen carrots either way she looked, only the horseshoe of rocks which created this cove and the wide, flat sea ahead.
She drew in her breath.
She had always thought of restlessness as a gentle, meandering sort of state. A luxury, almost. An indulgence. Instead it turned out to be incapacitating and laced with panic. It had her short of breath and sharp of temper and fearful of the years to come. It unnerved her, which was ridiculous when her survival strategy had always been rooted in the belief that it was not the hand you were dealt that mattered but the way in which you played it. She had steered herself through life playing her hand as calmly and as stoically as she knew how, with grim resolve when times had been stormy and a bitter awareness that she must shoulder the responsibility for her own sorrows. It had served her well. Would continue to serve her well. She fixed her gaze on the horizon, dark now beyond the lapping shoreline. C
Later she trod softly through the shadows of her empty café and up the wooden staircase to her sanctuary, a sprawling attic with tiny shower room and kitchen built into alcoves, her bed with its faded patchwork quilt tucked beneath the eaves, living space defined by the blue striped sofa, the rug, the television on the whitewashed chest. She kicked off her sandals and stretched out across her bed, switched on her laptop. Google offered several businesses for sale in this corner of the county but none – as far as she could tell – as well situated or as desirable as her own. She searched restaurant businesses in Spain, Italy, the Californian coast. Typed in volunteering in africa and postgraduate certificate in education and couldn’t bring herself to look at any of the responses. Instead she rolled onto her back and stared up into the dusky corners high above white painted beams. Breathed in deep and out long. You’re fine, she soothed herself, you’re fine. It’s all fine.
Alex mixed the precise shade and consistency of turquoise he needed to describe the water filling the rock pools at Clodgy Point and applied it to his canvas. He had left the door to The Wharf on the latch, letting distant voices and footsteps lap at the edge of his tranquillity. In a couple of weeks’ time, when the Easter weekend heralded the beginning of the season, he would have that door propped wide, he’d have hung the paintings currently either - depending on Marianne’s temper and his point of view - stored in or cluttering up the cottage and the racks for the prints would have arrived. Before which he needed to whitewash the walls, install a dozen spotlights and ink his name in large black italics into the huge window overlooking the harbour. Part of him was intoxicated with the combination of achievement and promise. Even the other part, charged with remaining eternally watchful and sober, felt hopeful this bright spring morning. At his easel, in the centre of this great echoing space which would become his workshop, he was at peace.