Brodmaw Bay (2 page)

After delivering the glad tidings to his wife, James sat at his son’s bedside in the private room for which his credit card had paid. The monitoring equipment to which Jack was attached by various tubes and wires beeped discreetly every now and then. Time passed until outside, beyond the hospital buildings and its grounds, he began to hear the idling lorries and the raucous cries of the porters unloading them at the neighbouring market. Air brakes hissed, carts and trolleys clattered, laughter erupted at swapped banter. As Jack slept his oblivious, healing sleep, his father was reminded that the city in which they lived never slept at all.

There was no practical point to his being there until Jack awoke. But he was a father who very much loved his son and the situation here was way beyond the practicalities. He would not have chosen to be anywhere else. Pads of cotton wool were blood-soaked under wound lint covering Jack’s head, entirely concealing his features. His chest rose and fell with his breathing and his father put a hand there gently just to feel the proof of the life in him. It was an hour before he sought any diversion beyond sitting and gazing at his son’s bandaged head and face. When he did, he saw that there was a shelf of books and heaped magazines mounted to the left of the door.

The light was low in the room, but he had become accustomed to it and could see perfectly well. He got up and walked across and looked at the spines of the books. None of their titles or authors really took his fancy. He needed diversion but did not have the concentration for a plot and the books were mostly thrillers and espionage stories and romances. Only one volume intrigued him, took his eye, so he levered out the book and took it back to his chair to look at it.

It was a children’s story and as soon as he glanced at the cover of the book, James was aware that Lily had been responsible for its artwork. His wife’s style of illustration was vivid, atmospheric and, to him, instantly recognisable.

The front cover showed a village rising above a curved inlet as it would be viewed, or imagined, looking landward from the sea. The cottages of the village were clustered cosily under the ascent of a grassy hill contoured with deep green tussocks. The dwellings, picturesque and mostly whitewashed, rose above a sea wall. The beach was covered in orange shingle and the intense tones of the picture and its long shadows suggested sunset. To the left of the panorama, a small flotilla of fishing smacks sat at anchor. The picture was detailed and authentic-looking but James thought it much too unspoiled and charming to have been taken from life. The title of the book, lettered in gold over the deep blue sky above the summit of the sheltering hill, was
Brodmaw Bay
.

The calendar provided what slight plot the story possessed. It followed the seasons from autumn through to summer and the bay was pictured by his wife in all its varied and entrancing moods. It was a tribute, he thought, to the fertility of Lily’s imagination, as well as her decorative skill. Brodmaw Bay had not just charm but character. He was distracted, looking up every now and then from the images on the pages to watch and listen to Jack’s breathing, making sure for himself, despite the battery of hi-tech monitors, that his son was not slipping elusively away from the short life he had enjoyed.

The author of the book was credited, but he could find his wife’s name nowhere between the covers or on the fly-leaf either. It had been published by Chubbly & Cruff, a house he had never heard of, and the year of publication was given as
1993
. Lily had still been at college. She must have done it for rent money in the period when she’d been struggling along on a tiny grant and the tips from Covent Garden waitressing shifts.

How things had changed, he thought. Now, she was one of the most sought-after illustrators of children’s books working anywhere in the world. Characters she had copyrighted were animated on children’s DVDs. They appeared in comics and on the backs of cereal packets and it all ticked along very lucratively.

Brodmaw Bay was an atmospheric place, with its slate roofs and lobster pots and steep cobbled lanes. There was a chandlery and a boatbuilder’s yard and a butcher’s shop with partridges and hares hanging from hooks above the display of sausages and choice cuts of lamb and beef in the window. There was a pub with a wooden sign and welcoming yellow light in the darkness behind its mullioned glass. The place was all of a piece, James thought, an idealised bit of Little England, quaint and folkloric, from a time easy to feel nostalgic for that had never really occurred.

Only one image jarred in this portrait of an idyllic coastal village. A church was pictured on one page towards the back of the book. It was seen from the perspective of a gate leading to its porch and in the foreground there were graves to either side of the short path to the church door. The season was winter. Snow sat in white slabs topping the headstones of the graves and sagged in ripples on the roof of the porch. The headstones had mostly surrendered to some instability of the earth and were canted at angles that seemed sinister. Moss and lichen had crawled across their inscriptions. They did not look as still as James thought gravestones should. The church spire was crooked too, a casualty of the subsidence that had shifted the graves, but the effect on it was slyer, more subtle. The church had about it the sunken character of faith undermined.

He saw that the windows of the church were smashed, the small panes between their lead lattices, each and every one of them, broken. The damage looked deliberate and vindictive. Then he noticed that the door in the porch hung slightly open, an iron hasp twisted where he supposed a padlock had been forced, a hint of darkness where it opened inward, to the right of the doorframe.

Studying this scene, James shook his head. The whole image was out of sympathy with the rest of the illustrations, weirdly out of kilter with the mood of starry-skied, lantern-lit cosiness conjured by the other pictures in the book. He thought its inclusion a misjudgement, on the part of his wife and on the part also of whoever had overseen the editing. But its inclusion suggested something intriguing. It hinted that Brodmaw Bay, far from being a townscape of his wife’s imagination, was somewhere real she had simply documented with her palette and brush.

Jack groaned then in his sleep. He coughed and the cough was wet-sounding and his father rose and waited with dread for blood to bubble and well from his mouth. He continued to wait. He thought about saying a prayer. Instead, he just watched, tense, with his own breath poised. But no blood came. He realised that the book about Brodmaw Bay was still in the grip of one hand. He thought the location sounded Cornish. It had resided in the Cornwall of his clever wife’s dreams in her student days. Either that or she had actually been there. He must ask her about it. He walked over to the shelf and put back the book.

Towards dawn his bedside vigil was interrupted. A nurse came into the room and measured Jack’s pulse and took his temperature and made sure that the drip providing him with fluid was functioning properly and the bag supplying the saline solution still adequately full. She told James that it would be at least another few hours before his son stirred. It would be about lunchtime before the sedative wore off sufficiently. She smiled, he supposed to relieve the look of worry his face wore. She said that Jack’s heart rate was slow and steady and his pulse strong. James nodded. The nurse patted his shoulder and left. He thought the contact probably a breach of protocol. It was comforting and he was grateful for it.

Light was entering the room, through its single tall window, from a courtyard space beyond the glass. It was June and dawn broke early in London in June. The room was in an old part of the hospital. The floor was black and white tiles of marble scored and faded with feet and polishing. There were still pipes on the wall, painted over, that must have fed the gas lamps that once provided the room’s illumination. James decided he would go and get something to eat. Somewhere would be open. There would be a café, one of those old places with Formica-topped tables and steam from a tea urn and buoyant London banter. He needed a break, a change of scene. He needed to get some perspective on what had happened to his son and its implications.

He walked out in the early summer air to cobbles and bronze street bollards and iron railings topping old walls and the peal of a summoning bell from a church probably the work of Wren or Hawksmoor in the aftermath of the Great Fire in the time of Charles II and his Restoration. He could smell the cool drift on the wind of the Thames. This was an old part of London and the city wore its history in this vicinity in every lane and almost every building. Once it had charmed him. Once it had beguiled him.

It had gone further than that, hadn’t it, he thought, sitting down to his fortifying mug of café tea. London in his younger life had been his vindication. The fact that he had prospered there and bought a home and found a wife and raised a family there and established a professional reputation had been the proof of him. He had arrived as a raw and provincial northerner and London had tested and challenged and then opened its welcoming and generous embrace to him.

He had believed the Johnsonian adage about the man who was tired of London being tired of life. But he did not believe it any more. The older you got, the more abrasive London became. Or perhaps it was just that the older you got, the less tolerance you had for London’s unchanging abrasiveness. As you matured and your values and responsibilities became inevitably different, aspects of the capital revealed themselves that were less and less easy to tolerate.

And the place was changing. The demographic was altering. The
Guardian
was James Greer’s newspaper of choice. But he had eyes in his head.

Turkish drug gangs fought turf wars in Finsbury Park. Muslim kids from Pakistan had beaten up a Shoreditch vicar because they were affronted by a church they claimed should have been transformed into a mosque. It didn’t matter to them that the church had been consecrated in the eighteenth century. Their own faith had been set in stone much earlier than that. Now a group of Somali youths, schooled in the medieval ghetto values of Mogadishu, had beaten his son almost to death in Peckham for the sake of a mobile phone with a street worth of perhaps ten pounds.

It was called white flight, wasn’t it, the middle-class escape from this sort of urban pressure? That was the contemptuous name given it by the lofty liberal commentators who still set the tone in James Greer’s newspaper of choice. But he didn’t care. He really didn’t, not any more. He had tolerated the alternative for long enough. What had happened to Jack had been both a punishment and a warning. London had been very good to him and even more lavishly generous to Lillian. But they had changed. They had become vulnerable. And the city in which they had both lived the bulk of their adult lives had changed too. If they were not to risk becoming its victims, the casualties of its changed character and increasing hazards, they should exercise the luxury of the choice their prosperity had given them and simply leave.

He was down to the leaves of his tea. It was one of those places where the beverage was poured from the sort of steel communal pot they would have used in cafés just like this one seventy years ago in the London Blitz. He was seated on a tall stool at a narrow counter that ran the length of the window. Behind him he could hear market porters and cabbies and hospital orderlies debating the previous evening’s middleweight title fight. He could smell bacon frying and the pungent tartness of brown sauce smeared on warm plates. Outside, through the steamy glass, he could see the flagstones of the pavement glazed by the strengthening sun. Directly outside was a cast-iron lamp post, thickly painted in a municipal black and carrying a crest cast in Victorian times.

James Greer liked his Dickens and his Peter Ackroyd and he thought he knew what they were feeling when they celebrated London in their prose reveries. He shared the sentiment. He loved Gabriel’s Wharf and Hampstead Heath and the river at low tide at Chelsea Reach and the Tate Modern and the hung game and pewter light of Borough Market at Christmas time when the stalls smelled of mulled wine and freshly baked bread and biscuits spiced with cinnamon. But he could carry all of these things with him in his memory. It was time to leave. It was time for the sake of the kids, for the sake of all of them. The adventure of resettlement would be exactly what Jack would need to help with his recovery from the trauma of attack and injury.

His son would not make it back to school for what remained of his term, even if they elected to stay. It would soon be the summer holidays and the best time possible as far as schools were concerned to make the break. Children were adaptable. Both Jack and Olivia had good friends they would certainly miss. But they had their social networking sites so the loss would not turn to grief. And he did not think that Jack would miss the running gauntlet of his daily bus ride to the Peckham badlands.

When he thought about it, he did not honestly know how Lillian might react to his insistence that they uproot and leave. She had shared his sofa-born dreams of escape to somewhere at the seaside. They even subscribed to
Coast
magazine and had often spun verbal fantasies together about a wave-lapped refuge from their daily lives in Ventnor or Whitstable. But he did not know everything about his wife. In some ways she was unpredictable and in some ways unreadable.