He walked to the end of the wharf, where the old canal lock was closed, holding back the water till someone wanted to go out to sea in one of the fishing boats. From this vantage point, he could see the town rising above him to the north, with the old Promontory King George Hotel-a place for adventurous tourists now-acting as doorman to a different world.
Things change, Selevan thought. That had proved the case in his life, even when it had seemed to him that nothing was ever going to change at all. He’d wanted a career in the Royal Navy to escape what he’d seen as a life of unfaltering drudgery, but the fact of the matter was that the details of that life had altered in minute ways, which led to big ways, which led to life not being drudgery at all if one just paid attention. His kids grew; he and the wife turned older; a bull was brought by to service the cows; calves were born; the sky was bright one day and threatening the next; David moved off to join the army; Nan ran off to marry…One could call it good or bad or one could just call it life. And life continued. A bloke didn’t get what he wanted all the time, and that’s just how it was. One could thrash about and hate that fact or one could cope. He’d seen that daft poster in the library one time and he’d scoffed at it: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Bloody stupid, he’d thought. But not really, he saw now. Not altogether.
He took a deep breath. One could taste the salt air in this spot. More than at Sea Dreams because Sea Dreams was way up on the cliff and here the sea was close, yards away, and it beat against the reefs and wore them down, patiently, drawn by the course of nature and physics or magnetic forces or whatever it was because he didn’t know and it didn’t matter.
He finished his takeaway coffee and crushed the cup in his hand. He carried this back to a bin and paused there to light a fag, which he smoked on the way to Clean Barrel. There, Tammy was working at the till. The cash drawer was open and she was counting up the day’s take, alone in the shop. She hadn’t heard him come in.
He observed her in silence. He saw Dot in her, which was odd, as he’d never seen the similarity before. But there it was, in the way she cocked her head and exposed an ear. And the shape of that ear…that little dip in the earlobe…it was Dot all right and he remembered that because…oh this was the worst of it, but he’d seen that earlobe time and again as he’d mounted her and done his loveless business on her and there couldn’t have been a scrap of pleasure in it for the poor woman, which he regretted now. He hadn’t loved her, but that hadn’t been a fault of hers, had it, although he’d blamed her for not being whatever it was he’d thought she should be in order for him to love her.
He harrumphed because things were dead tight inside him and a good harrumph had always loosened them up a bit. The noise made Tammy raise her head, and when she saw him, she looked a bit wary and who could blame her. They’d been having rather a dicey time of it. She’d not spoken to him other than in polite response to what he said to her since he’d found that letter under her mattress and waved it in her face.
“Shouldn’t be in here alone,” he told her.
“Why not?” She put her hands on either side of the cash drawer, and for a moment Selevan thought she was doing it because she expected him to leap on the funds and shove them down the front of his flannel shirt. But then she pulled it out altogether and carried it to the back room, where extra inventory and cleaning supplies and the like were kept along with an overlarge antique safe. She stowed the cash drawer inside this safe, slammed its door home, and twirled the combination lock. Then she shut the back room door, locked this as well, and put the key in a hidey spot that had been created for it on the underside of the telephone.
Selevan said to her, “Best ring up your guv, girl.” He was aware that his voice was gruff, but it was always gruff when he spoke to her, and he couldn’t make it any different.
She said, “Why?”
“Time to leave here.”
Her expression didn’t change, but her eyes did. The shape of them. Just like her auntie Nan, Selevan thought. Just like the time he’d told Nan that she could sodding shove off if she didn’t like the house rules, one of which was her dad deciding bloody who his daughter would see and when she would see him and believe you me, lass, it’s not going to be that yob with the motorbikes over my dead body. Five of them, mind you. Five bleeding motorbikes and every time he’d roar up on a new one with his fingernails all gone to grease and his knuckles blacked and who the bloody hell would have thought he’d make a go of it and create those…what did they call them? Choppings? Chopped? No, choppers. That was it. Choppers. Just like in America, where everyone was bloody crazy and rich enough to buy just about anything, weren’t they. This is what you want? he’d bellowed at Nan. This? This?
Tammy didn’t argue as Nan might have done. She didn’t storm round the shop and slam things about to make a scene. She said, “All right, then, Grandie,” and she sounded resigned. She added, “But I don’t take it back.”
“What’s that?”
“What I said before.”
Selevan frowned and tried to recall their last conversation which had been a conversation and not merely a request to pass the salt or the mustard or the bottle of brown sauce. He recalled her reaction when he’d waved the letter in her face. He said, “That. Well. Can’t be helped, can it.”
“Can be helped. But it doesn’t matter now. This doesn’t change anything, you know, no matter what you think.”
“What’s that?”
“This. Sending me off. Mum and Dad thought it would change things as well, when they made me leave Africa. But it won’t change a thing.”
“Think that, do you?”
“I know it.”
“I don’t mean the bit about leaving and the things changing in your head. I mean the bit about what I think.”
She looked confused. But then her expression altered in that quicksilver way of hers. Did every adolescent do that? he wondered.
“S’pose,” he said, “your grandie’s more’n he seems to be. Ever reckon that? I wager not. So collect your belongings and make that phone call to your guv. Tell him where you’ll leave the key and let’s shove off.”
Having said that, he left the shop. He watched the traffic coming up the Strand as townsfolk returned from their jobs in the industrial estate at the edge of town and farther away, as far as Okehampton, some of them. In time, Tammy joined him and he set off back towards the wharf with her trailing at a slower pace that he took as she likely meant it: reluctant cooperation with her grandfather’s plans for her.
He said to her, “Got your passport with you, I take it. How long’ve you had it out of its hidey place?”
She said, “A while.”
“What’d you mean to do with it?”
“Didn’t know at first.”
“But you do now, do you?”
“I was saving up.”
“For what?”
“To go to France.”
“France, is it? You heading for gay Paree?”
“Lisieux,” she said.
“Leer-what?”
“Lisieux. That’s where…you know…”
“Oh. A pilgrimage, is it? Or something more.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t have enough money yet anyway. But if I had it, I’d be gone from here.” She came up to his side then and walked along with him. She said as if finally relenting, “It’s nothing personal, Grandie.”
“Didn’t take it that way. But I’m glad you didn’t do a runner. Would’ve been a rough one to explain to your mum and dad. Off to France, she is, praying at the shrine of some saint that she read about in one of her sainty books that’s she’s not supposed to be reading anyways but I let her read cos I reckoned words’s not going to do much to her head one way or ’nother.”
“That’s not precisely true, you know.”