Brodmaw Bay (19 page)

All the leading lights of the little coastal community seemed to be in the Leeward that night, packing Charlie Abraham’s pub to its oak rafters with boozy conviviality. The good cheer was almost palpable. The pub that evening was the village itself in gossipy, backslapping, flirtatious, chummy microcosm. And there was no man of the cloth present. There was not a dog collar anywhere to signal the vicar or priest whose job it would be to minister to the spiritual needs of the village and its inhabitants. This did not strike James as odd or unusual at the time. He was far too busy enjoying himself. Later, he thought of it as an omission so glaring he wondered how he could have missed it. But by then, it was far too late.

At about ten o’clock, sensing a lull in the storm in the lengthening pauses between thunder peals, he decided to brave the weather outside for a breath of fresh air before the singing began. The smell of salt was strong in the darkness and the washed cobbles black under a streaked sky still sullen and threatening. The storm had only paused to gather itself for a fresh assault, he thought.

He wondered what it would be like, then, to exist alone, in isolation. He was away from his wife and children for the first time he could remember. What if he could never go back to them? What if they did not exist and this place and the people here comprised the whole of his future? It was an odd, distressing, dislocating thought. His family, for James, were the whole of him. Without them, he would be the one to cease to exist. The charm of Brodmaw was intrinsic to the place. It was honest and unspoiled and picturesque. But its allure for him was entirely as a refuge for the three precious people who made up his personal world.

He was not alone though, was he? He was not even alone in the storm lull outside the pub. Someone was there, watching him. He looked and saw that it was Angela Heart. Her black clothing and black hair when she’d had her back to him must have concealed her in the surrounding darkness. But she was facing him now, pale-complexioned and crimson-mouthed and smoking a cigarette, standing next to the plinth on which Gregory Abraham maintained his granite guard.

Just for something to say, to allay the awkwardness of the moment, he said, ‘Do you think the storm is over?’

She pulled on her cigarette. When she had exhaled, up towards the sky, her jaw taut and the skin of her exposed throat startlingly white, she lowered her head and smiled at him and said, ‘I think the storm has only just begun.’

It was something of a contrast to a traditional night of song in a Bermondsey pub, James thought, when the music began. He was more familiar with the London knees-up, complete with pearly kings and queens and jouncing piano keys. There was always something very contrived about those events, a stagey air of knowing self-parody that made them seem bogus to someone from the north of England like him. After a few pints he’d find himself half expecting Dick van Dyke to take to the stage, dressed as a chimney sweep. London was like that, always peddling its own myth, striving to live up to the stereotype. The music in the Leeward that evening, by contrast, could not have been more authentic.

The wind and rain howling and hammering at the exterior of the pub increased the feeling of intimacy shared by those sheltering inside. The interior light was so dim that the major source of illumination seemed to be the fire, flickering as pockets of resin in the logs were found by the heat and flared into life. The thunder continued to boom sporadically above. Ale was an amber glitter in the glasses drinkers raised. Faces were shiny in the firelight and rapt with expectation as the first performer took to the small raised stage and coughed to clear his throat and began, in a strong tenor voice, to sing.

Sitting with Richard and Elizabeth Penmarrick, the three of them sharing a table, it struck James that the songs sung and the instruments that accompanied them combined to make sounds that would have seemed familiar to the pugilist celebrated on the plinth on the cobbles outside. There were eternal verities: truths common to every man and woman, subjects like love, loss, sacrifice, grief and joy that resonated in the human heart through and in spite of the passage of years. And these songs celebrated them in a way that was not so much traditional as timeless.

Billy Jasper sang a selection of sea shanties, finishing up with ‘The Wild Goose’. Ben Tamworth sang ‘The Sleepless Sailor’. Philip Teal sang George Butterworth’s setting to music of ‘Is My Team Ploughing?’ from
A Shropshire Lad
in a high tenor voice so affecting that it silenced the pub entirely for a few seconds before earning a fierce and sustained ovation. Michael Carney recited a poem. Rachel Flood sang the Scottish lament ‘Annan Waters’.

The stage cleared after the pharmacist had finished her sorrowful Highland song about a lover drowned on the way to meet his sweetheart and James had a heretical moment when he thought that perhaps Angela Heart, Brodmaw Bay’s answer to Marlene Dietrich, might get up and growl her sultry way through ‘Stormy Weather’. But of course that did not happen. Instead, Elizabeth Penmarrick stirred in the chair to his left and smiled across him at her husband and rose and, to loud clapping from what seemed every pair of hands in the pub, took to the stage.

She strapped on a guitar and tuned it, saying quietly that she was going to sing a Sandy Denny song. This announcement provoked a further ripple of applause. Either the population of the bay contained a disproportionate number of folkies, or they had heard her sing the song before. James assumed the latter. Elizabeth looked beautiful on the stage, lit by a single lamp and dabs of ochre from the declining fire. She looked calm and self-possessed and as comfortable in the scrutiny of an audience as anyone he had ever seen on a stage.

She strummed the opening chords of the song and he recognised it as ‘The Sea’. Then she began to sing. Her voice was a contralto with no trace of sibilance or vibrato in it at all. It was a pure instrument. And it was a powerful surge-tide of sung emotion, thrilling, engulfing, almost overwhelming in the force and feeling with which it delivered words and melody.

‘She’s unbelievable,’ he said to Richard, when the song had finished and the applause had finally subsided sufficiently for him to be able to be heard. ‘She’s a force of nature.’

Richard smiled. He raised his eyebrows and nodded at the stage signalling that his wife had not quite finished performing yet.

Elizabeth sang ‘John Barbury’. She sang it without accompaniment. Where she had sung ‘The Sea’ with a sort of powerful grandeur, she sang this lovely, wistful song with a delicacy that was almost heartbreaking. James sneaked a look round. By the final verses it seemed like half the audience were sniffing and dabbing at moist eyes with hankies.

Her interpretation of the song was precise and lovely and unbearably poignant. He struggled not to shed a tear and James was not a demonstrative man where emotions were concerned. He had simply never heard timbre or phrasing like that this woman possessed. The sung words shaped by her lovely mouth emerged into the room and left her audience spellbound. He felt as she finished that nothing of him had been left unaffected by her voice. It had stirred him to his core. It had flayed his heart. His very soul had been shaken just listening to it.

She slipped off the stage and sat down and took a sip from her drink. She cast her eyes down at the floor. The shyness had come upon her again. All around her people were on their feet, roaring and stamping and clapping wildly in celebration of a gift so profound that to James it seemed more than merely human. He had not over the course of the evening drunk more than three or four beers, but he wondered in the intoxication of the moment if he had not just heard the singing of an angel.

Chapter Six

After the concert had concluded and the last drinks had been downed and the farewells said and the pub doors finally closed and locked, James knew that the sensible thing to do was to go to bed. He had the drive back to London the following day and it could not be done in less than four hours even in ideal road conditions. The weather forecast was good, but it took only one breakdown or collision on the eastbound carriageway of the A
303
to cause substantial delay on that journey.

He did not go to bed. He remembered his phone conversation with the detective sergeant on the beach after his swim in the afternoon. Its detail and implications returned to him and brought with them anger and frustration he knew he had no way of resolving.

There was such a thing as natural justice. At least in theory, there was. But to a crime victim such as his son, it seemed destined to remain an abstract concept. There was little likelihood of any justice for Jack, natural or otherwise. Nobody was likely to be called to account. James was honest enough with himself to admit that what he really wanted was probably better described as retribution rather than justice. He wasn’t going to get that either, was he?

Perhaps it was a situation in which it was best simply to count his family’s blessings. If you believed the tabloid newspapers, gangs of feral youths on Britain’s council estates had respectable and industrious residents living in siege conditions. Emasculated police forces and impotent courts could do nothing to ease their predicament. These residents could not afford to escape the problems besetting them and blighting their lives.

He and his family could and were going to. Plus, he had stumbled by pure good fortune on a place that would enable them to live securely and even idyllically in a lovely location where the residents were apparently prepared to welcome them with a degree of spontaneous warmth as sincere as it was surprising.

He did not go to bed. He drank with Charlie Abraham from a bottle of brandy the landlord cracked before the dying embers of the fire. The label of the bottle was obscured by dust and very faded. But from the depth and complexity of the flavour when he sipped it, James suspected that it was an old and valuable vintage. He was flattered at the compliment. He was further flattered when Charlie asked if he would like to see the cache of letters sent to his ancestor by the poet pugilist Lord Byron.

The letters were written in his lordship’s admirably legible hand. They were informal in tone, witty and confidential and obviously genuine. They alluded a lot to the poet’s constant battle with his weight. Gregory had given him tips on the best exercise regimes for controlling it and it seemed to have been working and he was obviously grateful. There was quite a lot about boxing technique and James was reminded that Byron had been combative by nature, a soldier as well as a poet, a warrior determined to liberate Greece in a war of independence.

‘Did he ever come here?’

‘Yes, on two occasions. He stayed in the room I’ve given you.’

‘It was a hell of a way to come on a horse.’

‘Robust times, James. Robust men suited to those times. They thought nothing of it.’

‘It must give you such a sense of security, of belonging, being able to trace your ancestry back through the centuries in the one location. It’s becoming rarer, the way the world is now. People are so much more rootless. They’re not anchored in the same way.’

Charlie shifted his weight and his chair creaked under him. He replenished their drinks from the bottle between them on the table and looked at the greying embers of the fire. ‘It isn’t all Arcadian delight, James. Communities like this one have bad as well as good about them. You saw the good tonight.’

‘I certainly did. I heard an angel singing.’

Charlie smiled. ‘Or a siren,’ he said.

‘It was wonderful. It was unearthly, magical.’

‘You want to be careful how you apply those terms.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘This is the west of England. There’s bad as well as good magic and there’re those as still practise it. You are an awfully long way from London, James. This is an ancient and remote corner of England. Not all of its traditions would look appealing held up to the light. And yet there are those who revel in them.’

‘Are you trying to warn me off?’

‘I told you, fresh blood is welcome here. That’s the truth. But you want to come here with your eyes open if you do come.’

James considered what he was being told. And he considered its source. He did not want to be rude. He thought that Charlie Abraham spoke sincerely and out of concern rather than contempt or hostility towards a stranger. ‘You believe in magic, Charlie? You actually believe in the supernatural?’

‘I understand you’ve seen a ghost of your own.’

James did not know what Charlie meant. Then he did. ‘The little girl I saw up at the stone circle the day before yesterday? I’m sure there is an explanation for her.’

‘I’m sure there is,’ Charlie said. ‘My fear is it is not one you would easily countenance.’

James drained his glass. ‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘I should go to bed.’ He nodded at the letters, carefully rolled now and put back in the cardboard sleeve that protected them. ‘Thank you for showing me those. They are fascinating.’