Silver Bay (46 page)
No one had wanted to come too close, knowing what my mum was like about her privacy, but everyone had wanted to be there. My mum didn’t care. To be honest, I don’t think she’d have noticed if the Queen of England had turned up to watch. For twenty-four hours she had hardly spoken, just stared at her watch and calculated and occasionally reached out to hold my hand. If Mike hadn’t stopped her, I think she’d have moved into the arrivals lounge two days ago and waited there.
Mike’s calculations were spot on. Even with our extra stops we got there fifteen minutes before the flight arrived. ‘Fifteen,’ Mr Gaines muttered, ‘of the longest minutes of our lives.’ At least twenty more, Mike calculated, for baggage and Passport Control. And for every single one of them, there Mum stood, as still as anyone ever had, her hands gripping the rail, while we tried to make conversation around her, eyes on the gate. At one point she held my hand so tightly that my fingers went blue, and Mike had to get her to let go. Twice Mike went to the Qantas desk and came back to confirm that the plane had definitely not dropped out of the sky.
Finally, just as I thought I might be sick again, the first trickle of passengers from flight QA2032 came through. We stared in silence, each of us straining to see the distant figures through the swinging doors, trying to match that image with the one we had on a crumpled bit of paper. What if she didn’t come? The thought popped into my head, and my heart filled with panic. What if she’d decided she wanted to stay with Steven? What if we stood there for hours and no one came? Worse, what if she came and we didn’t recognise her?
And suddenly there she was. My sister, almost as tall as me, with Mum’s bright blonde hair and a crooked nose like mine, holding tightly to Mike’s sister’s hand. She was wearing blue jeans and a pink hooded top, and walked with a limp, slowly as if part of her was still afraid of what she might find. Mike’s sister saw us and waved, and even from that distance you could see the smile on her face was as big as a mile. She stopped for a minute and said something to Letty, and Letty nodded, her face towards us, and they began to walk faster.
We were all crying then, even before they had reached the barrier. My mother, silent beside me, had begun to shake. Aunt Kathleen was saying, ‘Thank God, oh, thank God,’ into a handkerchief and when I looked behind me Yoshi was crying into Greg’s chest and even Mike, his arm round my shoulders, was gulping. But I was smiling as well as crying because I knew that sometimes there’s more good in the world than you can possibly imagine and that everything was going to be all right.
And as Letty got close Mum ducked under the barrier and started to run, and as she ran she let out a sound I’d never heard before. She didn’t care what anyone thought – she and my sister locked eyes and it was as if they were magnets, as if there was nothing in the world that could stop them moving towards each other. My mother grabbed her and pulled her in and Letty was sobbing and had hold of Mum’s hair and the only way I can describe it is to say it was as if each of them had had a piece of themselves given back. I pushed through then, and I held on to them too, and then Aunt Kathleen, and Mike, and I was dimly aware of all the people watching who must have thought she was just another kid coming home. Except for the noise. The noise my mother made, as they sank to the floor, surrounded by all of us, wrapped in arms and kisses and tears.
Because the sound that came from my mother, as she rocked my sister in her arms, was long and grievous and strange, and spoke of all the love and pain in the world. It echoed through the great arrivals hall, and bounced off the shiny floor and off the walls, stopping people in their tracks, and causing them to peer round to see what it was. It was both terrifying and glorious. It sounded, Aunt Kathleen said afterwards, exactly like the song of a humpbacked whale.
Epilogue
Kathleen
My name is Kathleen Whittier Gaines and I’m a seventy-six-year-old bride. Even to say those words makes me wince with the silliness of it all. Yes, he caught me in the end. He told me if he was going to pop his clogs he’d like to do it knowing I was nearby, and I figured that was not a lot to ask of a woman, not when she knew she had been loved by a man her whole life.
I don’t live in the hotel any more. Not full time, anyway. Nino and I couldn’t quite agree on where to settle: he said he had to be near his vines, and I told him I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my days inland. So we split our week between our two houses, and while the rest of Silver Bay thinks we’re a pair of mad old coots, this is an arrangement that suits us both fine.
Mike and Liza live in the hotel, which is probably a little smarter and a little more welcoming than it was when I ran it alone. Mike has fingers in other pies, interests that keep him busy and bring in some money, such as marketing Nino’s wines, but I don’t pay much heed, as long as we have a bottle or two of something nice on the tables in the evening. Every now and then Mike gets ideas about making more money, or increasing yields, or whatever the hell it is he talks about, and I disagree, and the rest of them nod and smile and wait quietly for him to blow himself out.
There will be other developments, and other threats, and we’ll keep fighting. But now we do it without fear. Nino Gaines – or should I say my husband? – bought the old Bullen place. A wedding present for me, he said. A bit of security for the girls. I don’t like to think too hard about how much he paid for it. He and Mike have ideas for the space. They occasionally go down together to the faded hoardings and walk the land, but when it comes down to it, neither of them seems like they actually want to do anything. And I get on with doing what I always have, running a slightly ramshackle hotel at the end of the bay and getting a little fidgety if we have too many visitors.
Down the coast road, the southern migration is shaping up just fine. There are reports every day of pods, mothers and babies, and on the surface, passenger numbers are pretty well what they were at the same time last year. The whalechasers come and go, the occasional new face replacing the old, bringing the same salty tales, the same jokes and complaints to my benches each evening. Yoshi went back to Townsville to study whale conservation, promising to return, and Lance often talks about visiting her, but I doubt he will. Greg is courting – although that may be too delicate a word for it – a twenty-four-year-old barmaid from the RSL, and she seems to give him as good as she gets. He spends less time around the hotel, anyhow, and I can see that suits Mike fine.
And Letty thrives. She and Hannah hang on to each other as if it was five days they were separated, not five years. Several times I’ve found them sharing a bed, and made to move them, but Liza says not to bother. ‘Let them sleep,’ she says, looking at them entwined. ‘They’ll want space from each other soon enough.’ When she speaks there’s such a lightness in her voice that I can’t believe she’s the same woman.
The first few weeks were strange. We tiptoed round the child, afraid that this strange series of events, this sudden shift of circumstance would leave her shattered. For a long time she stayed glued to her mother, as if afraid that she would be ripped apart from her again, and in the end I took her down to the museum and showed her my harpoon and told her that anyone who thought they were coming near any of my girls would have Old Harry to answer to. She was a little surprised, but I think she was reassured. Nino tells me drily that there was probably a reason I never had children.
She was better once her father had called: he told her he was happy for her to stay here, and would allow all decisions to be hers. From that point on she slept properly – albeit in her sister’s bed. And there it ends. Mike’s sister, true to her word, never printed her story. Mike says it’s actually a love story – not about him and Liza, although you only have to look at them laughing together to know that that’s the case – but about Liza and her daughters. Sometimes, if he’s teasing me, he says it’s about me and Nino.
I tell him I don’t see it that way. Look out at the sea for long enough, at its moods and frenzies, at its beauties and terrors, and you’ll have all the stories you need – of love and danger, and about what life lands in your nets. And the fact that sometimes it’s not your hand on the tiller, and you can do no more than trust that it’ll all work out okay.
Almost every day now, if Liza doesn’t have too many trips booked, they head out together on
Ishmael
to see the whales still making their way back to their feeding grounds. At first I thought it was Liza’s way of creating a family, of binding them together, but soon I realised that they were as drawn to it as she was. It’s not just about the creatures they see, they tell me. It’s about what they don’t. The girls like to watch the humpbacks disappear, enjoy the thought that, after some spectacular breach, there’s a whole life beneath that they cannot see. Songs being sung into an abyss and lost forever, relationships being forged, babies being nurtured and loved. A world in which we and the mindless things we do to each other are unimportant.
At first Mike laughed at them for being fanciful, but now he shrugs and admits: what the hell does he know? What does any of us know? Stranger things have happened, especially in our little corner of the world.
And I watch the four of them now, running down Whale Jetty in the sunshine, and I think of my sister, and perhaps my father, who would have enjoyed a story like this. (‘We thought you had company,’ I tell them, wherever they are. ‘But, boy, were we mistaken.’) They would have understood that this story is about an elusive balance; about a truth we all struggle with whenever we’re blessed enough to be visited by those creatures or, indeed, whenever we open our hearts – that sometimes you can damage something wonderful merely through proximity.
And that sometimes, Mike adds firmly, you don’t have a choice. Not if you want to really live.
I never let him know, of course. I can’t let him think he has it all his own way. But I have to say in this case, just in this case, I agree with him.
Acknowledgements
Thank you, in no particular order, to Meghan Richardson, Matt Dempsey and Mike the Skipper of the
Moonshadow V
, the Nelson Bay whale-watching community and to all the crew members who gave up their time during August 2005 to talk to me about whale behaviour and life out on the waves. Thanks also to the New South Wales police for explaining to me which particular seaborne offences they were likely ‘to get picky’ about.
Thank you to Hachette Livre (formerly Hodder) Australia and New Zealand, whose efforts helped prompt this book in the first place: particularly Raewyn Davies, Debs McInnes of Debbie McInnes PR, Malcolm Edwards, Mary Drum, Louise Sherwin-Stark, Kevin Chapman and Sue Murray, as well as Mark Kanas of Altour, none of whom were fazed by having to transport a particularly chaotic family of five through the Antipodes on a tight schedule.
Thank you, as ever, to Carolyn Mays, my editor, who managed not to sound panicked when I decided to ditch the book she had been expecting in favour of this one, and to Sheila Crowley, my agent, for her usual enthusiasm and selling abilities. Thanks to Emma Knight, Lucy Hale, Auriol Bishop, Hazel Orme, Amanda O’Connell and the whole team at Hodder UK?for their continued hard work and support, and to Linda Shaughnessy, Rob Kraitt and everyone at A PWatt for the same.
Closer to home, thanks to Clare Wilde, Dolly Denny, Barbara Ralph and Jenny Colgan for their practical help and friendship in a difficult year. I hope you know how much it was appreciated.
Thank you also to: Lizzie and Brian Sanders, Jim and Alison Moyes, Betty McKee, Cathy Runciman, Lucy Ward, Jackie Tearne, Monica Hayward, Jenny Smith, and everyone at Writersblock.
Most of all thanks to Charles, Saskia and Harry, the motors for my spluttering engine. And to Lockie, for showing us that perfection is a relative term.
Jojo Moyes, July 2006
About the Author
Jojo Moyes was born in 1969 and was brought up in London. A journalist and writer, she worked for the Independent newspaper until 2001. She lives in East Anglia with her husband and three children.
She is the author of
Sheltering Rain, Foreign Fruit,
which won the RNA Novel of the Year award for 2003,
The Peacock Emporium
and
The Ship of Brides,
shortlisted for the 2005 RNA award.
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