Brodmaw Bay (35 page)

‘What the fundamentalists call smells and bells,’ Lillian said.

‘Exactly,’ Angela said.

No attempt to revive St Stephen’s was made until after the Great War. Then in
1921
, a cleric belonging to an independent branch of the Protestant faith arrived and bought the freehold of the site from the diocese and had the building blessed and refurbished and began to try to convert followers.

‘He had been an army padre,’ Angela said. ‘He had known Adam Gleason. He had ministered to the men of Gleason’s battalion and they had forged a friendship on the Western Front. Like Gleason, the Reverend Baxter was a poet, though he was not anywhere near so gifted.’ She was silent for a moment. She said, ‘Can I give you the rest of this account in the garden? I would like a cigarette and I do not smoke in the house.’

Lillian looked at her watch. It was ten past seven.

‘Do you have time?’

‘Yes. And I’m all ears.’

They went outside. It was still warm and bright. It was bright, Lillian remembered, because they were on the coast and the sky was lightened by the sun reflected back off the sea. She thought about her children in their wetsuits and orange life jackets smiling as they paddled off in their kayaks. Then she thought of the obscenity, stinking and ferocious in death, in the church tabernacle.

Something gave Baxter a sour demeanour, began Angela. It was as though he bore some grudge against the people of the bay. He would walk the lanes in a black cassock with his hands clasped behind his back and a scowl worn permanently on his long, ascetic face. Some of the villagers began to suspect that Adam Gleason must be responsible for this. They could not think of any other explanation. He must have said something deeply disparaging about the place or its community. Had he accused them of some sin, of some corruption of the soul?

Lillian remembered Richard Penmarrick’s remarks about the soldier-poet Gleason; the slight tone of sarcasm, discussing him in the Topper’s Reach kitchen, she had not really understood the reason for.

One of Baxter’s parishioners most ardent in his Christian belief was a St Ives-born mariner called Thomas Cable. Cable back in those days owned half the bay’s fishing fleet. In the spring of
1923
he commissioned Jasper’s yard to build him a new boat. The
Carol-Anne
was launched, with much fanfare, in the September of that year. She was blessed on the slipway by the Reverend Baxter before the chocks were hammered from under her and she entered the water. Almost everyone in the bay had gathered to see the launch ceremony and they all witnessed this.

It was a gentle day. The
Carol-Anne
’s newly recruited crew were young lads. But they had been familiar with boats since infancy and the skipper was an experienced man of twenty-eight. They set off on their maiden voyage with much cheering and waving of handkerchiefs and toy flags from the quayside. A fog quickly descended. In those days before sonar, there was a lightship in the bay to warn of the reefs at its southern extremity and its bell began to toll.

‘The
Carol-Anne
never returned,’ Angela said. ‘The fog swallowed her.’

‘The sea swallowed her,’ Lillian said. ‘She must have sunk.’

‘It was taken as an omen,’ Angela said. ‘The church was subsequently vandalised. The porch was burned down in an arson attack carried out at night. Baxter’s milk was tainted on his doorstep and the food spoiled in his pantry and people ostracised him. Not the bay’s finest hour, I don’t suppose, but Brodmaw people in those days were very superstitious. They took against the arrogant incomer in the dog collar and the disdainful frown and when he could take the hostility no more he packed up and left.’

‘And the church has been derelict since then?’

‘It has.’

‘Were there no other boats out that day when the
Carol-Anne
was lost?’

‘There were two. They did not see anything. The fog was blanket thick.’

‘Did they not hear the cries of the crew when she foundered?’

‘I’ll tell you what they said they heard. You can make of it what you will. Most of them stayed silent on the subject. Three or four of them swore they heard the sea, singing.’

James Greer sat in the departure lounge at Denver Airport trying to inventory the good things about his life. It was his way of trying to deflect the disappointment threatening to overwhelm him. There would be a point at which disappointment became despair. He knew he was close to it. More accurately, it was close to him. He had to try to force a perspective that diminished what he felt. The Americans had coined that phrase, hadn’t they, about keeping it in the day.

The difficulty with keeping it in the day for him was that his disappointment centred on something over which he had been toiling for close to a decade. Even on the flight on the way out there, he had spent the time tinkering on his laptop embellishing, improving, fine-tuning in a last-minute effort to make his game not just good, but perfect.

Americans spoke in a code. In business meetings they did, anyway. He had sat with the beaming reception committee of geeks and they had told him his game was a masterpiece. And then they had spent two hours telling him how he could improve it even further by turning it into something completely different from what he had always intended it to be.

They used this word all the time, which was
terrific
. Except that
terrific
had a completely different meaning in American from what it signified in English. His concept was
terrific
. His execution was
terrific
. The structure of his game, its internal architecture, its levels and avatars and variously realised landscapes and domains were all
terrific
. And what this actually meant was mediocre, lightweight, rankly amateurish and nowhere near achieving the potential as a package the concept deserved.

He peeled the cellophane from a tuna and cucumber sandwich and took a bite and then folded what remained back into its package and rose without appetite and walked over to what the Americans called a trash can and dropped it inside. He chewed, unable to taste anything, the swallow reflex reluctant to come, a physical symptom of the malaise afflicting his soul.

They had wanted two fundamental changes to his medieval survival epic. The first of these was the introduction of a character, a roaming mercenary they even had a name for. He was to be called Krull. He was an assassin, an executioner. He was utterly cruel, totally ruthless and profoundly cold.

The player was supposed not just to root for Krull but to admire and aspire to be him. His let-off, the secret gimmick that enabled him to avoid the moral consequences of all the slaughter he was responsible for – and the Americans were very pleased with this – was that he came from another planet. His planet was very advanced. This made Krull’s slaying of medieval humans no worse morally than puffing ant killer on to a troublesome nest.

The second improvement was a mobile torture chamber that trundled through Europe in the charge of a psychotic sect called the Marauders. James had researched the medieval period very punctiliously and he was absolutely bloody sure the Marauders had not trundled through Europe then with their wagon train of portable racks and flays and whips and branding irons. Why would they? What would have been the point? Anyway, someone would have stopped them. The world in the Middle Ages wasn’t some anarchic free-for-all.

He had wanted something with the values and sophistication of Risk and Diplomacy wrapped in a software package complex enough to seduce cutting-edge gamers. They had wanted yet another apocalyptic, heavy-metal gore-fest. He had left the meeting after three hours without having signed the proffered contract or even having agreed anything with them in principle.

His son and his daughter, he thought. His children and their love were the best things in his life. And the love of his beautiful and adulterous wife, that was important to him too. Three people elevated his existence. Emotional pain had figured rather too much in his recent family experience, but it was Lily and Jack and Livs on whom he relied for happiness and fulfilment. The game was not important compared to them and the Colorado experience was a setback he could and would live with and overcome.

Krull had his nemesis in their version of his game, of course. But it wasn’t some veteran of Crécy or Agincourt schooled since the age of seven to be invincible in martial conflict. A knight on a warhorse, a noble-blooded European warrior of the period was too mundane for them. Krull’s nemesis was a mythic winged creature, a dragon, for fuck’s sake. He was quite surprised they hadn’t dragged Merlin into the mix.

He was in his seat aboard the plane and the seatbelt sign had been switched off before he remembered the notebook Lillian had packed for him and his promise to his daughter that he would read it. He would do so now, he decided. He had to keep his children’s faith. The contents of the notebook might divert him for the duration of the flight, or at least for some of it.

Chapter Ten

June
21
1916

The house is very empty without my beloved wife and cherished daughter. They haunt it. They do not do so in the spectral sense. They do so through the abundant and joyful memories I have of them. They filled these rooms with their energetic and playful spirits as they filled my heart with love. It is not possible to continue to live without them. I do not know whether we meet those to whom we were closest in some afterlife. I have never possessed the zealous certainty of religious faith. I pray it is true, to a God I only half believe in, because it is the only hope left to me now.

These are the last words I shall write. I am certain at least of that. I shall return to France and seek the bullet that will end my mortal existence. I am impatient enough to provide it myself if the enemy should prove reluctant to do so. My grief is beyond endurance. It has cost me whatever poetic gift I possessed. There are not verses to describe this loss. The language does not possess words freighted with sufficient sorrow.

Might I have saved them, had I returned sooner? The answer is that I would have died with them. They could not have been saved. They had been chosen. There would have been no influencing the likes of Teal and Tamworth, Jasper, Carney, Worth, Sharp and Flood. And I would never have been able to persuade Penmarrick or that cold and beautiful creature he calls his bride. The old ways are sacred to him. The ancient spirits must be appeased. The prosperity of the village depends upon it. More: its very survival. Neglect to honour the Singers under the Sea and the legend says caprice will turn to spite and then destruction.

My mistake was in marrying an incomer. Doing so provoked the thirst for fresh blood which my wife and daughter have paid for with their innocent lives. I see them manacled to the rocks in my mind whenever I close my eyes. They wait for the tide to creep upward and touch and slowly engulf them. They see the Harbingers caper and fret on the night shingle awaiting the sound of the demons they serve. And they hear the music toil from the depths as they struggle against their iron bonds, drowning. Such a desolate death and deliberately so because the spirits the old way serves are strangers to mercy.

Everyone born in the bay grows up knowing its secret. Thus is the ritual made to seem simply a part of the pattern of existence. It is a custom, a tradition and a necessity. I matured into adulthood believing all of that. Then I went away to Cambridge and university and instead of reflecting on the pagan strangeness of the place in which I grew up, I almost forgot about it altogether.

I suppose I thought of it, if I thought about it at all, as a necessary evil. And Penmarrick’s glib reasoning has a certain objective logic to it. He calls it the price only occasionally exacted of the very few for the profit and permanent wellbeing of the many. I accepted this. Only when the price was exacted of those nearest to me did I see it for what it is: which is ritual murder and human sacrifice and not something with any place or justification in a civilised world.

I should start at the beginning, in medieval times, when witchcraft first summoned the sea spirits we call the Singers with an incantation legend insists was composed in druidic times and then secretly taught and remembered through the centuries. The druids believed that the sea spirits were far stronger than those that roamed the land. They would bring you luck and prosperity and could even grant those wishes not based on personal greed. But they were powerful and once summoned could not be dismissed again. And their potency came only at mortal cost.