Palmer-Jones 05 - Sea Fever Read online

  Then there came routine enquiries from the mother of a prisoner who wanted details of the probation coach which carried visitors to the nearest remand centre, and from a young mother whose gas was threatened with disconnection. Jane dealt briskly with the immediate problems and ignored the glances, the hesitation, as her clients went out. They were hoping she would ask: “Is there anything else? How can I help you?” so they could unload onto her the loneliness of their lives, the stories of husbands’ infidelity and children’s ingratitude. At least Roger and I never had children, she thought, as she hardened her heart and showed them to the door.

  Just before lunch one of her favourite customers came in. From her office Jane could hear Mary down the corridor calling cheerfully to the receptionist, who was still sniffing into her handkerchief. Mary was an elderly Irish woman, an alcoholic who had no permanent address and was often seen wandering around one of Bristol’s modern shopping centres. She always dressed in layers of clothes, like a Russian grandmother, and in the hot weather, she smelled. She wanted money. She only ever came to see Jane when she wanted money.

  “Where are you living now, Mary?” Jane asked. There had to be the pretence of an interview before she handed over the cash. It was a ritual they both understood.

  The woman winked. “I’ve got friends,” she said proudly. “ I’ve always got somewhere to stay.”

  Eventually Jane had given her money. She had a sudden foolish impulse to take Mary out for a meal. She wanted to feel her gratitude and childish happiness in the shared experience. She realised just in time that would have been unprofessional, so Jane just saw her to the door, slipped a few pound coins from her purse into the wrinkled brown hand, and wished her luck.

  “Good luck to yourself,” the old woman said, “though you’ll not be needing it, a fine lady like you!”

  And they say that the Irish have second sight! Jane thought.

  In the afternoon she left the grimy office on one of the city’s bleakest housing estates and drove to a smart village just beyond the suburbs to interview a separated mother before writing a contested custody report for the divorce court. The woman was educated, superficially civilised but more bitter and dishonest than any of Jane’s clients from the criminal court. Jane returned with relief to the office. She had more in common with the separated mother than she liked to admit, and the similarity disturbed her. She began to write the report but could not concentrate and knew she would have to complete it while she was in Cornwall.

  At five-thirty Jane hovered in the tearoom, hoping that one of her colleagues would suggest that they should go for a drink after work, but everyone else hurried away, and she was forced at last to go home.

  She knew as soon as she walked in through the door that Roger was furious. There was a pile of suitcases in the carpeted hall, and he was waiting for her. The house seemed lifeless and empty. Watching his anger, she felt as detached as she had been when interviewing the heroin addict. She could recognise how good-looking he still was despite his grey hair and lined face. She could remember how she had loved him.

  “You know I wanted to start early,” he fumed. “ You promised me you’d be back on time tonight. It’ll be midnight before we get to Rose Pengelly’s.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She was sorry. She liked Rose. She liked Cornwall.

  He looked at her suspiciously. “ You haven’t been to the pub with all your friends from the office?”

  She roused herself to self-righteous anger, too.

  “No,” she said. “ Of course not. I’m a probation officer, not a teacher. I don’t have twelve weeks’ holiday and finish work at four o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  She could not tell what he was thinking but knew he was not sorry. He never regretted anything. He was humouring her. He often treated her as one of the difficult adolescent girls he taught at school. She knew he hated teaching the girls. He could shout and rage at the boys or tease them with his sarcastic good humour, but he was afraid of making the girls cry.

  “Can we go now?” he asked, trying to restrain his impatience. “Everything’s packed. We’re all ready.”

  He’s frightened I’ll make a scene, she thought, surprised by his politeness. As she followed him to the car, she felt suddenly and irrationally more hopeful. It would be pleasant to be cut off from the town for a while. Seawatching made Roger happy, and he liked being with other birdwatchers.

  He had always been competitive, and it mattered immensely to him that he had seen a greater number of species than any other birder in Britain. He was famous. In every gathering he was surrounded by admiring twitchers, and he relaxed and blossomed. Perhaps there was the chance of a peaceful week, a return to the old closeness. They had spent their honeymoon in Sennen, in a small hotel by the shore. She had been young; marriage had made her feel tranquil, generous. She had thought they would be happy forever. Now she was forty and tired, and she wanted a drink.

  Anne James was supervising her daughter’s piano practise. She sat on the arm of a chair looking over Lucy’s shoulder to the music. Sunshine came into the room from the open French window. Outside in the orchard the fruit was reaching its best. Like Lucy, she found it hard to give her full attention to the playing. She loved summer in Somerset, but she was worried about her husband, and her anxiety had clouded the whole day. He had been working too hard recently, she thought. He had always been too conscientious. She listened for his car on the drive. The news that he had arranged a long weekend away in Cornwall had delighted her. She felt he needed a holiday, and besides, she could savour the last of the summer better without him.

  Duncan James heard the piano through the window and saw his wife and daughter from the hall through an open door. He still felt a stranger in this house, though they had been living there for more than a year, partly because it was so much grander than anything he had known as a child and partly because it was, in every way that mattered, Anne’s house. He had bought it, but she had created it. She expressed herself through it as other people expressed themselves through work or art. Sometimes he felt she considered him and the children as essential but integral parts of the house, like the crockery or the linen. She tended to them as she tended to the garden. He was not offended by that. He was only glad she was happy.

  He stared at his wife and daughter, seeing them as if the drawing room was a stage set and his family characters in a play. It was a light, spacious room. Anne, of course, had chosen the furniture. There was a lot of polished wood. The play, he thought, would be Victorian, rather sentimental.

  Anne looked up from the keys, saw him, and smiled, but Lucy was staring at her fingers and did not notice he was there. She was eight, thin and brown, as quick-moving as a fish. It was an effort for her to sit at the piano, and she fidgeted on the stool and swung her legs. Duncan watched her with love, astounded again that he could have produced something so beautiful, glad that he was able to provide for Lucy and Philip a childhood so different from his own. Lucy had her pony, her pretty bedroom, her best friend to stay at weekends. Philip, three years younger, was already more confident than Duncan had ever been. Yet still he could not believe that it would last. He was convinced that in the end he would be left with nothing.

  Anne often told him that his insecurity was caused by an inferiority complex, that he deserved his success, but he never believed her. Any of his achievements had been inspired by her. Even now he wondered how she had come to marry him. He had always been ugly, shortsighted, stooped. He still spoke with a heavy west-country accent, and her voice was so light and pretty.

  He walked hesitantly into the room, kissed his wife, then stood beside her while Lucy continued to play.

  “I’m sorry I have to go away,” he whispered over the child’s bent head. “Are you really sure you don’t mind?”

  “Of course not.” She smiled. “ There’s plenty to do here. You need a break.”

  He thought with bitter
amusement how strange it was that she should consider that the week in Cornwall would be a pleasure for him. Perhaps she felt he would be more at ease there. He had been born only twenty miles from Rose Pengelly’s cottage, and she had a romantic notion that he needed to return occasionally to his roots.

  Lucy finished the scale she was playing and looked at her mother in supplication.

  “I must have had twenty minutes practise now,” she said. “Isn’t it time to go out to play?”

  Her mother nodded, and Lucy was away, out through the French window towards the end of the orchard, where her brother was playing on a swing.

  “Hey!” Anne shouted. “Aren’t you going to say goodbye to your father? He’ll be away this week.”

  Lucy stopped in her tracks and came back into the room.

  “Is it work?” she said.

  “Sort of.”

  She kissed him and disappeared again.

  “I’ll miss you all,” he said suddenly. “ Perhaps I shouldn’t go.”

  But Anne smiled at him with maternal indulgence and drove him past the neat gardens filled with flowers to the station.

  As the evening grew darker and the pubs along the harbour wall became rowdy with holidaymakers and Friday-night drinkers, Louis Rosco prepared the Jessie Ellen for the next day’s charter.

  Other boat owners in Heanor paid eager young men to scrub out and stock up with supplies, but Rosco preferred to do the work himself. He had sacrificed too much for the Jessie Ellen to entrust her to some lad who skipped school because he thought the sea meant adventure or a fortune from the fishing.

  As Rosco carried boxes of beer aboard, he thought with gratitude that birdwatchers did not have such strong stomachs as the divers who usually chartered the boat, and he need not take so much booze. The seawatching trips were a relatively new venture, and he was grateful to Rose Pengelly for having put him onto it. He started to think about Rose Pengelly but stopped himself. It would not do to brood.

  When his work was finished, he went to the Blue Anchor for a drink. It was in a side street just up the hill from the harbour, so grimy and unwelcoming that most holidaymakers ignored it, and the locals who patronised it were spared the loud voices, pink thighs, and smell of suntan oil which pervaded the other pubs near the quay. When he went through the door, there was a sudden silence, and he knew they were all looking at him. They still wondered how he had come back to Heanor with a flash boat and no bank loan. Let them wonder, he thought. He ordered a drink and sat alone in a corner with his back to the room. The buzz of conversation resumed.

  Louis Rosco had been one of a big family who lived hand-to-mouth in an almost derelict cottage on the shore by Porthkennan. The mother had been feckless and easy. She’d do anything, they said, for a rum and shrub. Louis remembered her with affection as laughing and generous. His father had been a thin, sickly man, a grafter who took any work that was going—potato picking, casual shifts in the fish factory, and washing dishes in the big hotels in Penzance in the summer. Everyone said he would work himself into the grave, but it was Ellen Rosco who went first. She died quite suddenly in her early forties, when she was walking with a sailor from Falmouth down Harbour Street. She had a massive heart attack and frightened the sailor so much that he almost fell into the water. People talked of nothing else for months.

  The family split up then. Most of them were old enough to earn their living, and the others left soon after. Old man Rosco stayed on in the cottage, working in the fish factory until he was old enough to draw a pension, then doing odd gardening jobs in the big houses round Porthkennan. The children scattered all over the country. If anyone asked old man Rosco if he had heard from them or how they were doing, he would vaguely nod but give no details. There had been so many. Perhaps he had lost count and grown confused.

  Then Louis had come back with the Jessie Ellen and a master’s ticket. He was forty-five, thin and small like his father, secretive about his past. Old man Rosco lived only long enough to be taken out for a trip on the Jessie Ellen and bought a drink in the Blue Anchor. Louis took over the cottage and put the boat out for charter to divers and fishermen. He was polite to the people who tried to talk to him, but he gave nothing away. They invented their own explanations for his return. There was something hard about him, they said. He must have been in the army or the navy. He had the look of someone who’d been to prison. Perhaps he had committed some terrible crime.

  In the Blue Anchor Louis had one drink, then drove back to Porthkennan. He slowed down past Myrtle Cottage as the road steepened, and he saw the light in the baby’s room and the shadow of Rose Pengelly in the kitchen.

  Chapter Three

  They met late in the evening on Heanor Quay. Below them the Jessie Ellen moved with the incoming tide. They stood in shy groups at first, awkward and uncertain what to do. The boat was in darkness. Then Rob Earl emerged from the nearest pub with a clipboard and a list of names, and Louis Rosco came in his rust-holed van, with Rose and the baby in the passenger seat. She could bring the child, Louis had said. He had nothing against it. He had never yet heard of a baby who had been ill on a boat, and if the others didn’t mind, he didn’t think she’d get in the way. Then the thin, silent boy who assisted Louis came on a bicycle, and Fat Freddy, who did the cooking, waddled down from the town. Freddy had been sacked from one of the big hotels for erratic timekeeping but said he didn’t mind. He preferred going out with the charter boats. It was a better sort of life. Almost immediately there was a smell of coffee.

  “I’ll need some help with the chum,” Rob said. “Louis brought it in the van, but we’ll need to get it on board.”

  “Chum?” Duncan James said. He thought the weekend would be a nightmare. He hated the sea.

  Rob looked at him as if he were an idiot. What was he doing on a trip like this if he had never heard of chum?

  “It’s the bait to bring the seabirds to the boat.”

  “What’s in it?” George asked.

  “Fish heads, fish guts, popcorn, and the leftover oil from the chip shop in Heanor. We hire a cement mixer to mix it. It’s in drums in the back of Louis’ van.”

  At last, when the drums were stacked on deck, they were allowed on board. They stood, leaning against the deck rail, looking at the lights of the town.

  “We’re still missing one,” Rob said. “ Greg Franks.” He looked at his watch. “ We’ll give him ten minutes; then we’ll have to start without him.”

  George, already mesmerised by the motion of the boat and the dream of new birds, hoped that Greg stayed away. He wanted no distractions. There is nothing, he thought, echoing Rob Earl’s words, more exciting than seawatching.

  Terry, the thin adolescent, was preparing to cast off when there was the squeal of brakes as a car turned into the harbour carpark, shattering the quiet, robbing George of his dreams. The purple Mercedes had been replaced by a small red sports car. They heard the loud music of its stereo when the engine was turned off, then as soon as that was quiet, Greg Franks’ voice. He had lost his Bristol accent. He was rootless, classless. A modern Gypsy, George thought. Or a mercenary. Greg shouted to them that there were some friends in Exeter he had to look up. Business. They knew how it was.

  As Terry helped him aboard and the engine started, he was still talking, shouting to be heard, so they missed the exact moment of departure. He hadn’t been in the country long, he said. He’d just done India, Pakistan, Nepal. Of course he’d been before, but there was some endemic stuff he still needed. No offence to Rob, of course, but really, travelling alone was the only way to do it. I mean, those group trips. All dudes and wrinklies. He paused and smiled around at them encouraging their agreement.

  “I’m not talking about pelagics, of course,” he said. “ I mean, this is something else. I’ve been looking forward to this for months.” He beamed round at them again and winked. “ With the birds I hope to get this weekend,” he said, “I hope to extend my list considerably. You never know, I might even get close t
o Roger’s.”

  Then, without waiting for an answer, he led them into the saloon and held court to them, mocking and entertaining them, not allowing them to forget him for a moment.

  George would have put off delivering the Franks’ message to Greg, but Molly would not allow it. He could sense her disapproval across the saloon, and though he tried to ignore it, to concentrate on the field guides and monographs spread over the table, on the characteristics of Madeiran and Wilson’s petrels, he knew she was right.

  Eventually, feeling pompous and feeling in a superstitious way that what he was doing would bring them bad luck, that by breaking the circle of attention on the seabirds he would spoil their chances of seeing them, he asked if he could talk to Greg on deck.

  “Sure,” Greg said. “ Of course, George.”

  His tone was still breezy and confident, but George sensed a watchfulness, a challenge, and when the message was passed on, a relief. They stood at the stern of the boat, watching the lights of the mainland disappearing behind them.

  “What’s this all about?” he said lightly. “ Why the mystery?”

  “Your parents sent me here to find you,” George said.

  “Hey! What do you mean? What’s wrong? I mean, why the drama?”

  “They want to sell your father’s business,” George said. “They felt you should be consulted. They didn’t know how to get in touch with you.”

  “I’ve been around,” Greg said defensively. “I’ve been living in Bristol actually. I phone them sometimes.”

  George shrugged. “ That’s none of my business,” he said. “They hired me to give you a message, and I’m passing it on.”

  “What exactly is this message, then?”

  “They’d like you to go home to discuss the sale of the business.” George hesitated, feeling some distaste before continuing, “They say that a share of the profit might be yours.”