Brodmaw Bay (8 page)

They had lunch in a pizzeria at Gabriel’s Wharf. They walked on to the south side of Lambeth Bridge. There, at the café on the small pier tucked into the side of the bridge, James drank a cappuccino and bought an ice-cream sundae for Jack, reminded of what a complex age thirteen was. It was an age when you lusted after pretty actresses and still spent your pocket money on sweets. It was turbulent and contradictory.

Jack had made his school sound as brutal and hierarchical in some of its bleaker characteristics as a top-security prison, let alone a place of learning. Prisons were there to house criminals and his son was innocent of any crime. School was supposed not to punish but to educate. It was a complication he did not need in his young life. The stress of it was making him unhappy. Getting him out and away was the right thing to do.

‘Your football might suffer, if we move. The competition, the leagues, they won’t be so strong in the south-west.’

Jack just shrugged. He spooned ice cream into his mouth.

‘Don’t you care?’

‘In the squad, at South London Boys, we’re told that we have to want it more than anything, or we won’t make the grade. And then we’re told by the very same coaches that we shouldn’t let it rule our lives, because any of us could pick up an injury that could ruin our chances and because almost nobody makes it through to the top level anyway. If I’m good enough, I’m good enough, Dad. I can’t play at all till Christmas, the surgeon said so.’

‘You’ve had a change in attitude.’

‘Not really. I think I’ve got the ability. You know that police officer who came round?’

‘Detective Sergeant McCabe.’

‘We got talking when you were making the coffee. He was an amateur boxer. He represented England. He was undefeated as a middleweight. I asked him why he didn’t turn pro. He said he got the offers, but that he wanted to make a difference, so he became a policeman.’

‘I don’t see your point, Jack.’

‘I think I’m good enough to go all the way. I think that one day I’ll play in the Premiership. But if I don’t, it won’t be the end of the world. I’ll do something else.’

‘You could be a police officer. Like DS McCabe.’

‘Don’t you think that’s cool? Wanting to make a difference?’

‘I think it’s very commendable,’ James said.

They discussed going to the Imperial War Museum a couple of blocks away, but Jack had been there recently with his school and was unenthusiastic. He had tired, too, his father thought. The walk in the sunshine had tired him. He was recovering from his beating but was nowhere near at full strength yet, despite the cosmetic evidence.

They went and looked at Captain Bligh’s grave in the churchyard of St Mary at Lambeth, just across the road, almost opposite the café. Bligh had been buried a hero after the feat of navigation that got him and his few loyal crewmen to safety during a prodigious voyage in an open boat. That was before the family of the mutineer Fletcher Christian began the propaganda campaign that successfully besmirched his reputation.

James explained all this to Jack, who walked around the handsome stone tomb and read the inscription carved there without comment.

‘Won’t you miss all this?’

‘What? Some old guy’s grave?’

‘Not just that, all this history on your doorstep.’

Jack shrugged. ‘I’m sure this place in Cornwall will have a history.’

James held his arms wide. ‘All this, I mean, the river, everything, the whole spectacle of London.’

‘You sound like a tour guide, Dad.’

‘Won’t you miss it?’

Jack smiled. ‘Why would I miss a river, when we’re going to live by the sea?’

That night, the Greers went out for a family dinner. James and Lillian told Olivia about the possibility of the move. Like Jack, she must have heard it all before, her father thought, as he described some of the charms of Cornwall. But eight was a vastly less cynical age than thirteen. She seemed intrigued and excited by the scheme.

‘Your dad’s going to take a look, before we commit to anything,’ her mother cautioned.

She nodded enthusiastically, her eyes wide above a broad smile. James thought the dark romance of the west of England was probably appealing to the latent Goth tendencies his daughter’s wardrobe and reading matter had hinted at. She was an imaginative girl. She was also very much at the centre of her own drama. She probably wouldn’t miss her friends as much as he had feared she might. In what he knew of her evolving social life, she led rather than followed. She was not as hostile to her school as Jack was to his. She had not been given reason to be. Nor, though, was she attached to school as emotionally as some children became.

Children were ruthless and elitist in an instinctive way caring adults learned to temper. That was the essence of maturity. But at their ages, among their peers, what mattered about Jack and Olivia was that they were good-looking and skilled communicators and that they each wore fashionable clothes and owned an impressive hoard of cool stuff. They were kids who scored on all counts. And they would be a novelty, wouldn’t they? They would make friends easily. They would have children’s amenability to change. They would probably relocate more painlessly than their parents would.

Olivia turned in as soon as they got back from the restaurant and Jack followed her half an hour later. He had been determined to demonstrate his rank by going to bed later than his younger sister, but by the way he trudged up the stairs, would be asleep the second he closed his eyes.

James took a drink into the study. He looked out of the window. It was never completely dark in central London. There was always some ambient light and with the interior light switched off, he could see the hedges and shrubs at the back of the garden shift and shiver in the night breeze. Lillian followed him in there, reaching her arms around him, resting her head on his shoulder, kissing his ear. He looked from the garden to his desk and the book she had illustrated still open on it, at the picture of the looted church.

‘This move could be the making of us, Lily.’

‘I hope so, darling. You haven’t been happy for a long time.’

‘And you’ve thought about leaving me. You have only stayed for the sake of the kids.’

‘Not entirely. I still love you. But you don’t love yourself. You don’t even like yourself much, James. It makes you hard work, sometimes.’

He nodded at the book on the desk. ‘Have you remembered doing that?’

She laughed softly into his ear. ‘The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker,’ she said. ‘No. I haven’t. It’s very curious. I’m going to have to investigate, see if I underwent any treatment for amnesia in my second year at art school. When do you plan to go? I’ll be very happy to take next week off, if you like.’

‘No pressing deadlines?’

‘I’m on top of things.’

‘You’re always on top of things.’

‘It will be good to have a few days at home, give Jack some motherly TLC. I’m becoming excited about this scheme of yours, darling. We might finally do it, this time.’

His eyes were taken by some momentary movement beyond the window, in the shrubs. But it was surely only the bolt into flight of a small bird or more likely a bat. He put his hands over Lillian’s, which were linked by their fingers around his waist. Her skin was smooth and cool and the touch of her never failed to bring the stir of arousal. Repeating himself, aware he was, he said, ‘It really could be the making of us.’

Chapter Three

It was the Monday before he got the chance really to investigate thoroughly the history of Brodmaw Bay. After dropping Olivia at school, Lillian returned as she had promised she would, to give Jack the motherly TLC she really needed no excuse to lavish on her son. They were an affectionate family, naturally and uninhibitedly demonstrative in their affections for one another. Sometimes, when they watched television together, it looked to James like Jack was welded to his mother. James thought it wonderful. He was just sorry that adolescent self-consciousness would probably, fairly shortly, inhibit his son’s tactile nature. And when it did so, where his parents were concerned, it would likely do so for ever. It was a shame.

Lillian’s return gave James the time to lock himself away in the study and learn about the idyllic settlement beside the sea on the way to capturing their hearts and futures. He planned to drive to Cornwall early the following morning. He would take the family car, their beaten-up old Saab, rather than the Jaguar. The Jag would likely add another ten grand to the speculative value of any property he viewed in the mind of the seller, should he spot somewhere they might like to make an offer for on his trip. He knew enough about the traditional shrewdness with which Cornish folk dealt with outsiders, to guard against that sort of opportunistic profiteering as best he could.

Fewer than four hundred people lived in Brodmaw Bay. It had grown over the years. At the time the Domesday Book had been compiled, it had been a coastal hamlet of sixty souls. So it had not grown that greatly in the nine hundred-odd years since then. Topography determined its physical size. The land rose steeply behind it and its harbour sat at the centre of a claw-shaped breakwater hewn from the coastline by nature. To either side of it, the land receded sharply, isolating the area that could actually be built upon.

Then there was its economy. It survived on what its fishing fleet brought in. The prosperity or poverty of the town was determined entirely by the weight and character of what was landed in the nets. There was no land worthy of cultivation in the area. Thin soil and salt saw to that. There had never been a tin mine in the vicinity worth working. Everything, ultimately, depended upon the catch.

There was some patronage and had been down the centuries. The Penmarrick family were local and very wealthy. The wealth was long established, but its source was obscure. It could not be fish, James concluded, wryly. Crabs and lobsters would always have fetched a fair price at the market towns inland. But not profit on that scale. It seemed to be dynastic wealth. But the Penmarricks held no baronial title bestowed in Norman times by a grateful king. It was a bit of a mystery where the money came from.

He thought that perhaps it originated in tin deposits or land owned elsewhere. It could have been generated abroad at some time in Britain’s imperial past. Maybe a distant Penmarrick ancestor had been a successful mercenary in the pay of the Crown during the century of war with the French in medieval times. Or there was piracy, which had brought immense rewards from about the fourteenth century on. It did not greatly matter. Richard Penmarrick was rich and generous and rightly popular. That was what counted. In Brodmaw Bay, his was a powerful and very influential voice.

The only really unusual thing about the history of this Cornish fishing village was its association with witchcraft. The first trials had come in the aftermath of the Black Death, in the fourteenth century. But they had been followed by a further, even harsher incidence of persecution inflicted by one of the Witchfinder Generals in Cromwellian times. His name had been Jacob Ratch. There were some etchings of the executions, women in the black habits they had been ordered to wear for their interrogations.

The images were grim and pitiful. James thought that the witchfinder must have been very enterprising in his accusations and questioning to find quite so many servants of Satan in such an isolated spot. Either that or the informers who had summoned him had been particularly spiteful and convincing.

Beyond the left claw of the Brodmaw breakwater, there was a shore beneath a cliff. This shore was strewn with boulders. The legend was that these rocks were the litter left by careless giants from a game of quoits played in ancient times. In the witch trials, suspects had been chained to them at low tide. Cromwell’s man had argued that any woman who survived this ordeal was guilty. The innocent, drowned, would blamelessly ascend to paradise. A total of twenty-eight women drowned chained to the rocks. By the time he read this, James already assumed that Jacob Ratch had probably been clinically insane.

There was a circular plain where the rising land finally flattened to a plateau to the rear of Brodmaw Bay, overlooking it. This grassy circle was marked out by a series of ancient standing stones. There were twenty-one of them and they were evenly placed and dated from the Neolithic period. Nobody knew their exact significance. But they had fostered their own legend over the centuries.

The stones were said to be the remains of a druidic temple dedicated to the summoning of the Singers under the Sea. There were no images of the Singers. But James did not very much like the idea of them. To hear their chorus was to suffer their curse. It delivered madness and death. He could not imagine why even the most self-aggrandising druid would wish to summon them. It sounded a very dangerous party piece. He wondered if the women chained to the rocks on the shore accused of witchcraft had heard their song with the incoming tide.