Telling Tales (8 page)

Chapter Nine

After the Sunday lunch at Springhead House, James was surprised to see Emma huddled in conversation with Robert in the kitchen. He knew he enjoyed these family occasions better than she did and she wasn’t usually easy in Robert’s “company. James had never been able to work out what objection she could have to her parents. They were perfectly reasonable and civilized. They made few demands. He knew better than to say so, but when Emma complained about Robert and Mary, he thought she was acting like a spoilt child. He didn’t mind too much. It had been her youth which had attracted him in the first place; she’d seemed untarnished by experience.

They were sitting in the living room at Springhead, drinking tea and eating fruit cake, when the subject of families came up. James had known it would happen sometime, but now he was unprepared. The conversation began safely enough.

“It’s Mary’s fiftieth birthday next month,” Robert said. “We were thinking of having a party.”

“Were we?” Mary was crouched by the fire, trying to poke life into it. They were burning elder which was still green and gave off no heat, but her face was red because she’d been blowing into the embers.

“Well, I thought we should. We didn’t do much for our silver wedding and I’d like to make a fuss of you.”

“I don’t know…” The prospect seemed to terrify her, though Robert didn’t notice. “Who would we invite?”

“I thought we could make it open house. Ask our friends from the church, the youth club even. I miss having young people in the place.”

“Oh, no, really, I don’t think that would be a good idea at all. I’d rather something smaller. Just the family.”

That was when the unexpected happened.

“If that’s what you’d prefer,” Robert said. “I did think it would be a good opportunity to get to know James’s family at last. You won’t mind them, I’m sure.”

James felt the stab of panic, hoped he was concealing it better than Mary had hidden hers. “That’s very kind. But there’s no one really. No one close.”

“I always found that hard to believe. It was so sad that there were no relatives to help you celebrate your wedding. If it’s a question of a family feud, surely this is the time to make up. There’s a new generation to consider now.”

“No,” James said, more sharply than he’d intended. “There’s nothing like that.”

“Think about it,” Robert said. “If you remember anyone, ask them along. We all have ancient aunts, second cousins. We’d like to meet them.”

“Honestly.” James kept the irritation from his voice. “I’m quite alone. That’s why I’m so grateful to be an honorary Winter.” He knew at once that had been the right thing to say. Robert beamed.

In the car on the way home Emma apologized for her father’s behaviour. “Really,” she said. “He’s so rude. He can never stop prying. He’s just the sort of person who gives social workers a bad name.” She was always in a better mood after a Springhead Sunday. The ordeal was over for another week. James, in contrast, felt unusually jittery. Though he’d satisfied Robert this time, he suspected there’d be more questions.

Once they were in the house he relaxed, thought his panic had been ridiculous. The baby had been fractious in the car and Emma took him immediately upstairs to bath. James changed out of his suit then stood leaning against the bathroom door to watch. This was all he had ever dreamt of. This house. This family.

They went to bed early because he was still on call, and by now he must be near the head of the turn list. He worked twelve days on and eight days off. He fell immediately into a deep sleep, untroubled by worries about Robert.

Emma had married him because she had a romantic notion about the sea. And him. And he hadn’t lived up to the fantasy.

The thought came to him, unbidden, in a flash, between the second when the phone woke him and the moment of answering the call. Then it disappeared from his mind, like the remnants of a dream once you are properly awake.

It was a summons to work as he had known it would be. Two women worked in the data centre, collecting calls from ships’ agents, then contacting the next pilot on the turn list to join the vessel, which was either approaching the mouth of the Humber or preparing to leave port. He recognized the voice at once. Marcia. He preferred her to Jo. Marcia was efficient and always respectful. He switched on the bedside light and jotted down the few details he needed.

“It’s a ship out of Goole, Mr. Bennett.” Her voice was calm. She made him think of a hospital sister in charge of a ward at night. “Russian. A cargo of wood.”

Goole was always a long job at least eight hours from door to door but today he didn’t mind that. He dressed quickly, though at this time of night with no traffic, there was less pressure. Daytime could be a nightmare. All it took was a hold-up on the road into Hull and you could miss the tide. There was no slack in the system. These days it was all stress, even the drive to the office. Emma didn’t realize that. She thought he had no emotions. That he felt nothing.

She had stirred when the phone rang, but now she was asleep again, deeply asleep, lying on her back. He had waited to find the right wife and had known as soon as he’d walked into the classroom where she’d been preparing her first lesson, that he had found her. She had been writing the Russian alphabet on the board, frowning in her concentration to keep the line straight. He’d been first to arrive and she’d ticked his name off on the register, a little girl playing at teachers. When the evening class was over, he’d hovered in the corridor, and asked if he might buy her a drink. To thank her for making the first lesson so painless. He’d said he hated school as a child and had been nervous about enrolling in adult education.

Of course there had been other women before her but he had promised them nothing, made it clear that commitment wasn’t an option. He had planned his life. He was in every sense a self-made man. The right wife had been as important as becoming the youngest first-class pilot on the Humber. He stuck rigidly to the structure, would consider no flexibility. He was ambitious, but there was more to it than that. The plan was all that held his life together. And it had worked out. Emma had been everything he had hoped for.

Outside it was still raining, but a persistent drizzle. He thought this part of the country had more shades of grey than anywhere he had ever visited. And he had travelled the world to get his master’s ticket. Grey sea mist in the summer, slatey storm clouds, a sea that was almost black. Tonight it was a dense, pale grey, like thick smoke, which bounced back the car’s headlights.

The windscreen wipers had a soporific effect and the car journey to the pilot office was so familiar that it took no concentration. Occasionally James came to a junction, saw a pub sign or a church lurk out of the gloom and became aware with a jerk of where he was. Otherwise he drove automatically, in a daze. It would have been easy to lapse into thoughts of the past in this state. Robert’s probing about his relatives had disturbed him There must be someone… We all have ancient aunts, second cousins. And then there was Keith Mantel. His face was everywhere. Staring out of the television, the front page of newspapers. It would be easy to allow himself to dwell on that. But James had trained himself to avoid unpleasant thoughts. He had too much to lose by giving in to panic. He breathed slowly and thought of Emma, the perfect pilot’s wife, gentle and undemanding, lying dreaming in his bed.

He had come to the outskirts of the city. Everywhere, along the river, there were scars of development. Half-built new roads, sleeping cranes, the skeletons of demolished buildings. Until a year before, the pilots had been based in an eighteenth-century house which stood on the corner of a pleasant street and looked out towards the waterfront. James had loved working from there. He’d sensed the men who’d gone before him when he walked through the door, imagined he could smell them, their tobacco and the salt on their clothes. It had been his way of making himself part of the tradition. For many of the men that came naturally. Their fathers and grandfathers had been pilots and they’d been boys together in the Trinity House School. Whenever he came to work, he planned his route so he still passed the old pilot office. It was empty, waiting for refurbishment, too valuable an asset to be used for the purpose for which it had been built. He slowed the car as he drove past, enjoying the lines of the building, allowing himself the memory of his first day there. Then he saw that the house had been sold. A huge notice with a familiar logo had been fastened to the front wall, between the two lines of long windows. Property acquired by Mantel Development for conversion to luxury apartments. All enquiries to our Kingston upon Hull office.

For a moment the reaction to this notice confused him. He didn’t recognize the emotion. It had been so long. Anger, of course. There was a moment of liberation when he felt he could give into it. Then there was only disgust. As if someone had ground dog muck onto a valuable carpet. And by the time he walked into the shabby prefab which had become the pilot office, he was all smiles, all quiet charm.

“What is the name of the ship? I didn’t catch it on the phone. Oh yes. The skipper’s an old friend. There’ll be no problem tonight.”

He picked up the keys to the pool car and went on his way. The M62 was almost empty and he drove too fast.

Goole is a small town, dominated by the docks. The river seems to cut right into the heart of the web of narrow streets. It must be strange to look out of a bedroom window and see a huge container vessel sliding past, so close that you feel you could reach out and touch the hull, that the seaman drinking from a mug in the cockpit might offer you a drink too. When James drove through the town it was empty. Two in the morning, and still raining. He could believe that everyone was sleeping except for him and the crew who waited for him.

But as he walked from his car to board the ship, out of the corner of his eye he saw a man standing next to a pile of containers. The figure was familiar. Hair so short it looked as if it had been shaved. The navy donkey jacket. James had to stop himself from calling out. Only later he told himself it would be impossible to have seen colour in this light. That it had been a mistake or a hallucination. He didn’t believe in ghosts.

Chapter Ten

Some men hated the night tides, the lack of sleep, the effort of making conversation with a captain who wanted to practise his English in the early hours of the morning. But James had practised the art of being pleasant until it came naturally. He could be almost asleep on his feet, but still he would look at the photos of the skipper’s wife and children back home, discuss the relative merits of the goods displayed in the Argos catalogue with a seaman who was astounded by the variety reproduced on the cheap, shiny paper, gratefully accept a mug of tea although the milk was sweet and thick and came out of a tin.

Tonight he spoke Russian. The skipper’s English wasn’t bad, but James’s Russian was better, and he was glad of the necessity to concentrate. It stopped him thinking of the glossy sign outside the pilot office. The shadowy figure on the dock. Drowned men returned to life. James had enlisted in Emma’s evening class to learn a few basic phrases: ten degrees port, Captain, twenty degrees starboard. So there would be no misunderstanding when he gave directions and he wouldn’t be dependent on someone else to translate. He’d done Spanish the term before for the same reason. But then he’d seen Emma and he’d stayed in the class all year,

working harder than he’d ever done at school, eager to impress. He had an A level to show for it. And a wife and child.

There was no room for error bringing a ship out of Goole. The River Ouse was narrow there, with concrete sides like a canal. It was tight for a boat of this size. For a containership it seemed impossible on the approach and seamen who’d never visited the port before were horrified. What is this place you bring me to? This is not possible. No, there is some mistake. James enjoyed the delicacy of the work. It was a challenge, a test of his skill.

The ship moved slowly away from the dock, which was spotlit like a movie set. Black and white. The silhouettes of the cranes and warehouses two dimensional as if they’d been built from hardboard. The river widened and the wind became fresher. The rain stopped and the visibility improved suddenly, so he could make out each bank, marked by pinpricks of light: street lamps, headlights, the lit-up windows of insomniacs and feeding mothers.

A boy with a mouthful of decaying teeth brought him more tea and a meal, a greasy stew with livid orange carrots and grey potatoes, which tasted better than it looked. He would have eaten it anyway. It seemed a long time since lunch with his in-laws at Springhead, and it would have been bad manners to turn the food away.

At the mouth of the estuary the wind increased again into sudden gusts which whipped the river into little pointed waves and sent spray over the deck. In the daylight it would be possible from here to see the spire of St. Mary Magdalene church in Elvet, the track along the shore, where sometimes James took the baby in his pram. To walk and remember. It was six o’clock. Morning. Matthew would soon be waking. The coxswain on duty at the Point would have been warned that James would need collecting in the launch.

That thought, or rather the coincidence of thoughts Mary Magdalene and the coxswain of the launch -forced a connection of memory, and James realized that the man who’d been sitting in front of them in church the day before had been Michael Long. James hadn’t recognized him at the time. He’d been a bluff, rather aggressive man when James had worked with him, impervious, it had seemed, to James’s charm. Of course he’d been in the church to mourn his daughter. Suicide. A terrible accusation. James shivered although where he stood at the helm he was protected from the weather and the small room was warm, almost stuffy. He wasn’t given to fancies but suddenly he was aware of the depth of water below the hold of the ship, wondered what it must be like to drown.

They were rounding the Point. James could see the jetty all lit up, the fretwork of black metal, and the VTS tower where the pilot master would be sitting. The waves were longer and deeper here and the ship was starting to roll. Soon they would be in open water.