The Fish Ladder (11 page)

I had tried to prepare for this visit by Rupert. I felt soft, closed, like a soap bubble. Before Rupert arrived my friend Mike had lent us a wooden dinghy. It was painted Baden-Powell blue and was called the Mirror. Whether Mirror was its name, or described the kind of boat, I didn’t know, and hadn’t wanted to show my ignorance by asking. I had been fascinated by the noise the water made as we cut through the waves, the ripple of the wind against her blood-red sail. I had become accustomed to small sounds, to not talking, and not touching, or being touched, other than in my day-to-day contact with Evie, and now Rupert was here. Over the next two weeks we would laugh, love, and argue. There would be a chink of glasses. A rectangle of light stretching over the garden as we kept ever later nights. I would become a half of something, or rather, a third. For some reason I was unsettled by this. The arguments that had railed over the baby, the possibility of the baby, the things that had been said, that could not now be unsaid lay between us like a badly made rope bridge upon which I dared not trust my weight.

The realisation that our baby should now be in my arms spilled and stuck to the surface of my mind, garish as white paint flung across a road, as difficult to remove. I felt more fiercely alone, perched on the wooden steps, Rupert sleeping behind me, Bronwen and Evie in the cottage, than I had ever felt when I was actually alone.

There was a hip flask full of damson gin in the shepherd’s hut. I reached for it and removed the lid, took a sip of the clear liquid, garnet red, flecked with fragments of blue-black fruit skin, which were ticklish on my palate, like tea leaves. I had made it with my brother, John, three years ago on my birthday. We had gathered the damsons from a tree in his garden that is no longer there.

I tiptoed into the cottage, heard a movement.

‘Bronwen, are you awake?’

Her voice came from the other side of the wooden panel that separated the bedroom from the living room: ‘I am.’

‘Shall we go for a swim? It’s high tide in less than an hour.’

‘Brilliant!’

We left a note and headed for Lifeboat Bay, a secluded beach at the tip of the headland. As we walked the sun lifted behind us, and the mist over Garn Fadryn grew lacy. In front of us the sea and the sky were merged into a single sheet. Blue as smoke, soft as silk. Lifeboat Bay was exactly what it said it was: home to the RNLI station. The water looked still, although warning signs discouraged swimmers, advising them to keep off the concrete ramp. Strong currents pulled just off the point. We ignored the signs and dived from the ramp, into sea that was as limpid as oil, and as cool as the light. The earless wet-dog head of a seal peered at us from beyond the current.

A radio was playing. And there was litter on the beach. It was still only five o’clock. I was about to say something when Bronwen caught my eye and pointed, bright water falling from her outstretched arm. An untidy head had lifted from the foreshore and a young man stared at us, incredulous. I watched him trying to assimilate the populated nature of his wilderness experience: two women and a seal eyeing him from the middle of the bay. He started to pick up beer cans and discarded clothes, watching us as though we were the police. I felt for him; my own experience at Spurn Point was still fresh and perplexing to me.

As the sun lifted higher we could see through the water to sand-coloured crabs betrayed by their shadows and squid-like pulsing seaweed. A darting shoal of little fish, camouflaged against the sand, was momentarily visible as it changed direction. The surface of the water had seemed sheer when we entered it – but I could now see that it was speckled with flies, leaves and dust motes caught in a vast meniscus.

The night before Rupert returned to Barcelona we visited our friends Peter and Jackie in their cottage on the beach. We ate lobsters, caught by Ken the fisherman. The usual debate about how best to kill the lobsters had fizzed around the beach like gunpowder. For the most part we were all agreed on the ‘freezer method’, which meant putting the lobsters in the deep freeze until they were drowsy and then dropping them, dribbling, into boiling water, which we believed to be ‘humane’. My friend Lucy had trained as a chef in France and she advocated stabbing them in the back of the head with a knife, but Peter had tried this and missed the spot, or maybe he hadn’t, but the lobster had clattered to the floor, and then set off in an erratic dance, the knife waving like a metronome, frightening the children and dissipating the appetites of the guests. But in time the shells had turned from dusty blue to scarlet, and now lay empty, as did several bottles of wine. Evie had fallen asleep, and was tucked up in a bunk bed with her cousin, Lauren. After Rupert and Peter crashed through a chair, their high spirits reducing it to kindling, the three of us set out in Peter’s rib for the middle of Nefyn Bay, so we could see the phosphorescence in the water. Jackie was visible as a bright point on the sand, a funnel of light from her torch reminding us where the shore was. Every so often I looked back at her. She must have been walking up and down the beach, because the tiny funnel moved first one way, and then the other, with tiny erratic jumps indicating her footsteps. We were all so drunk I was amazed she’d had the foresight to think of this. Beyond the bay were some of the most treacherous waters in the British Isles. Both the sky and the sea were black. But in the bay, tonight, the water was calm. Rupert and I trailed our arms in the inky sea, the cold fit like opera gloves. The glow of phosphorescence illuminated us, our arms and fingers were green. It lit up Peter’s face above the tiller and frothed behind the propeller in ghostly, cheerleader pom-poms. Beyond the little boat, the starless darkness pressed about us.

The next day Evie and I waved Rupert off from Liverpool Airport, his smile disappearing as he passed through to Security, leaving an imprint fading in the air, a moment of brightness, an impression of light, and then he was gone. People swarmed around us, holding plastic zip-lock bags and their hand luggage. Walking back to the car we picked our way through the holidaymakers as they surged about us, arriving – tanned and tired, or departing – pale and anxious. As Evie and I began the two-hour drive back to the cottage I found myself thinking of the Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould, whose recording of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue from
The Well-tempered Clavier
is on a satellite headed for the end of the galaxy. Gould believed that there was a ratio between the time one could spend in company, and the time it subsequently took to recover from it. Our days in the Llŷn had, ordinarily, a sequestered quality about them. But the recent weeks had been packed with company. This was a good thing, we were cushioned in friendship – but suddenly I too had a yearning to travel, to move on, to go somewhere else. It was a sensation that I knew well. It was the same hankering after remoteness that had brought me to the Llŷn Peninsula in the first place.

Caherdaniel

Our departure from the
Llŷn
Peninsula happened almost straight away. Less than a week after Rupert had returned to Barcelona, I received a phone call. Evie and I were walking along the sand, Evie scouting for skimmers, when the phone buzzed and I recognised an Irish prefix, although not the number. It was my friend Sean:

‘It’s Pamela.’

‘What’s the matter?’ Pamela had often been unwell; she’d had a string of operations. Evie had found a stone. She held it up to show me, then threw it, and it skipped in lively arcs across the waves.

‘It’s serious, man. She’s on life support. They’re turning it off tomorrow.’ I looked at the phone in my hand, and then put it back to my ear.

‘Are you in Belfast?’

‘I’m in Tralee. Can you get here?’ I stared at Evie; the sea stretched behind her like tarpaulin. A black-and-white collie-dog was dancing alongside her; he clearly thought the stones were for his benefit.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I hope to be . . . I’ll be there when I can.’

I wasn’t quite sure how I got Evie off the beach, but suddenly we were driving back to Mum’s house, two hastily packed overnight bags behind us. I tried to book a flight from Liverpool or Manchester but neither Mum nor I had a computer. It was almost impossible by phone. Sean rang again and I realised I wasn’t going to make it to Tralee. I focused my energies on the funeral, which was to be held in Limavady, County Derry. Mum took Evie to her cousins’ house, and I booked a morning flight to Belfast.

I had first met Pamela the day that I turned thirty. I had held a birthday party, and over a hundred people came to a sunlit ballroom in Earls Court Square. I had been due to leave in a couple of weeks for a new job, in Belfast. Senator Mitchell’s Peace Process was just about to begin, and I was going to play my part developing grass-roots drama among the divided communities, as a script editor with BBC Northern Ireland. The party was a send-off as well as a celebration. There had been an enormous table covered in tea-lights that joined the dots between vases stuffed with cow parsley, which Rupert and I had gathered that afternoon from Brompton Cemetery. An armada of half-filled glasses floated, bubbles blinking between the fingers of gesticulating hands. At a certain moment the voices rose, and then relaxed, becoming a part of something whole, and the room filled with a sudden expansive loudness. I had never really had a party before, certainly not one on this scale, and I watched with wonder as the glow-worm constellations of tea-lights asserted themselves before a slow, but eventual, sunset. There were some unexpected faces, friends, I supposed, of friends, and one in particular caught my eye, or rather my ear, because it was the sound of laughter that made me turn my head.

In the 1990s London people always wore black, occasionally white, although there was a season they’d all worn brown, and while this undoubtedly widened the palette, it hadn’t left much of an impression. Pamela was wearing an aquamarine linen shift, her red hair smooth as a helmet. She was like something from antiquity, classical and rare, and when our eyes met she began to move across the room, pulling her companion by the arm.

‘I know, I know –’ I caught her voice, the sing-song, soon-to-be-loved Limavady tilt. ‘I hope you don’t mind but I
had
to come, I was talking to Jackie here and it all just sounded . . . so
lovely
.’

On my first Thursday in Belfast Pamela telephoned me:
Just pack a bag and take it with you tomorrow, then come up to the house after work
. I had been wary as I set out from the new city. The Union flags and the tricolour kerbs of the different tribes perplexed me, and the fortified police station at Dundalk unnerved me, with its razor-wire fence and bulletproof glass. I had driven over the Glenshane Pass, and wondered at the heather beginning to shine against the dark, underlying peat. From Limavady I followed Pamela’s directions:
Find the low bridge and then continue up the lane, you can’t miss the house
.

No, I couldn’t miss the house. I turned into a driveway between crenellated turrets to gaze, at the end of a long lawn, into rows of windows that reflected the evening back to me. Walworth was a large, fortified plantation house. I had heard of such a thing but never troubled to imagine it. The façade was grand and appeared to be Georgian, but turning the corner into a yard I found a cluster of other dwellings, including a cottage that stuck out in an L-shape. Clearly those who the house had been built to protect, who had come to ‘plant’ the land, had not ventured very far from its cover. In spite of the unquestionably Protestant nature of the estate an Ulster flag waved from a pole on the lawn.

When I walked into the kitchen I had found a small, wiry woman, muscularly building a fire in an enormous grate. I assumed this was Pamela’s mother, and held out the flowers I had brought with me. The woman took them and put them in a vase and called:
Mrs Brown, there’s someone here for you
, and an elegant woman of indeterminate age appeared in the kitchen, holding out both her hands in greeting.
Hello, I’m Noreen, you must be Kate; Pamela said you were coming
. We had eaten supper in a long panelled dining room where I counted eight grown-up children including Pamela, some with lovers and children of their own. I was trying to figure out who they all were when Noreen caught me looking.

‘Brian is my second husband,’ she said. ‘We have four children each, well, Brian also has a fifth, Felicity, but she isn’t here tonight. Actually, she grew up in England,’ Noreen nodded. ‘She’s got young children.’ As the wine spilled, and the night yawned, a story began to come together. Noreen and Brian had been lovers for years. Both of them had young families, both had despaired of their marriages. One night, Noreen’s husband Arthur had appeared at the door of the house and set about Brian with a blackthorn walking stick, beating him to the ground and cracking two ribs.

‘You had to hand it to him,’ Brian said. ‘She was a woman worth fighting for, and I dare say I deserved it!’

Noreen wore a large emerald ring and I asked her how she came by it. She had been holidaying with her family in the Far East and Brian – unable to part from her – had followed them and even stayed in the same hotel. He had bought the stone and given it to Noreen when Arthur’s back was turned. Of course she couldn’t wear it or even declare it at Customs, so she re-entered the country with the emerald hidden. She smiled at the recollection, and glanced at the ring as she talked: deep as sea-glass, and spilling dark light, it was clustered around with diamonds.