Silver Bay (10 page)

‘I’ll get there. I was wondering . . . would it be possible to eat here this evening?’

‘Eat now, if you want. I’m about to put some soup out for the crews. Grab your jacket and join us.’

I saw his hesitation. I don’t know why I pushed him. Perhaps it was because I felt suddenly tired myself and couldn’t face the thought of laying out a whole meal for one guest. Perhaps I wanted Liza to see a male face that wasn’t Greg’s . . .

‘This is Mike. He’ll be eating with us this evening.’ They murmured hello. Greg’s glance was a little more assessing that the others’, and his voice carried a little further after Mike had sat down, his jokes a little more hearty.

Stirring the soup as I listened through the kitchen window, I nearly laughed at his transparency.

I took the food out on two trays. (I don’t offer the crews any choice – I’d be there all night.) Each man reached for a bowl and a hunk of bread, hardly looking up as they thanked me. But Mike stood and climbed out of the bench. ‘Let me help you,’ he said, taking the second tray.

‘Strewth,’ said Lance, grinning. ‘Can tell you’re not from round here.’

‘Thank you very much, Mr Dormer,’ I said, and sat down beside him.

‘Mike. Very kind of you.’

‘Ah, don’t go giving Kathleen ideas,’ said Greg.

Liza looked up then, and I saw her glance at him.

He seemed embarrassed by all the attention. He sat down, looking somehow out of place in his ironed shirt. He was probably no younger than Greg, but in comparison his skin was curiously unlined. All that time cooped up in an office, I thought.

‘Are you not cold in just a shirt?’ said Yoshi, leaning forward. ‘It
is
nearly August.’

‘It feels quite warm to me,’ Mike said, glancing around him, as if at the atmosphere.

‘You were like that when you first came, Liza.’ Lance waved a finger at her.

‘Now she wears her thermals for sunbathing.’

‘Where do you come from originally?’ he asked, but Liza didn’t appear to have heard him.

‘What do
you
do, Mike?’ I said.

‘I work in finance,’ he said.

‘Finance,’ I said a little louder, because I wanted Liza to hear that. I had had a gut feeling that there wasn’t anything to worry about.

‘A jackeroo rides up to a bar,’ said Greg, his voice lifting. ‘As he gets off he walks round the back of his horse, lifts its tail and kisses its arse.’

‘Greg,’ I warned.

‘Another cowboy stops him as he goes to walk into the bar. He says, “S’cuse me, mate, did I just see you kiss that horse’s arse?”’

‘Greg,’
I said, exasperated.

‘“Sure did,” says the jackeroo. “Can I ask why?” says the cowboy. “Sure,” he says. “I’ve got chapped lips.”’

He looked around, making sure he had the table’s full attention. ‘“Does that cure ’em?”’ says the cowboy. “Nope,” says the jackeroo. “But it sure stops me lickin’ em.”’ He slapped the table with mirth. As Hannah giggled, I raised my eyes to heaven.

‘That’s terrible,’ said Yoshi. ‘And you told it two weeks ago.’

‘Wasn’t any funnier then,’ said Lance. I noticed their legs were entwined under the table. They still thought nobody knew.

‘D’you know what a jackeroo is, mate?’ Greg leant across the table.

‘I can guess. The soup’s delicious,’ said Mike, turning to me. ‘Do you make it yourself?’

‘Probably caught it herself,’ said Greg.

‘How are you finding Silver Bay?’ Yoshi was smiling at Mike. ‘Did you get out at all today?’

He paused while he finished a mouthful of bread. ‘Didn’t get much further than Miss Mostyn – Kathleen’s kitchen. What I’ve seen seems very . . . nice. So . . . ah . . . do you all work on cruise boats?’

‘Whalechasers,’ said Greg. ‘This time of year we’re out pursuing moving blubber. Of the non-human variety.’

‘But Greg’s not fussy.’

‘You hunt whales?’ Mike’s spoon stopped in mid-air. ‘I thought that was illegal.’

‘Whale-watching,’ I butted in. ‘They take tourists out to look at them. Between now and September the humpbacks travel north to warmer waters, and they pass by not far from here. Then they pass us again on the way back down, a couple of months later.’

‘We’re modern-day whalechasers,’ said Lance.

Mike looked surprised.

‘I hate that phrase,’ said Yoshi, emphatically. ‘Makes us sound . . . heartless. We don’t chase them. We watch from a safe distance. That phrase gives the wrong impression.’

‘If it was up to you, Yosh, we’d all be “licensed marine observers of cetacea whatever-it-is”.’

‘
Megaptera novaeangliae
, actually.’

‘I never thought about it,’ said Lance. ‘It’s what we’ve always been called out here.’

‘I thought that was why you were staying,’ I said to Mike. ‘Most people only stop here for the whale-watching.’

He glanced down at his bowl. ‘Well . . . I’ll certainly . . . It sounds like a good thing to do.’

‘Careful if you go out with Greg, though,’ said Yoshi, wiping her bread round the edge of her bowl. ‘He tends to lose the odd passenger. Unintentionally, of course.’

‘That girl jumped. Bloody madwoman,’ Greg expostulated. ‘I had to throw a lifebelt overboard.’

‘Ah. But why did she jump?’ said Lance. ‘She was afraid she was about to get – ahem – harpooned by Greg.’

Yoshi giggled.

Greg glanced at Liza. ‘Not true.’

‘Then how come I saw you taking her number later?’

‘I gave her my number,’ he said slowly, ‘because she said she might want me to take out a private party.’

The table burst into noisy laughter. Liza didn’t look up. ‘Oooh,’ said Lance. ‘A private party. Like the private party you gave those two air stewardesses back in April?’

Mike was gazing at my niece. She was saying little, as was common, but her stillness marked her out in the exact opposite way that she had intended. I tried to see her through his eyes: a still-beautiful woman, who was both older and younger than her thirty-two years, her hair scraped back as if she had long since stopped caring what she looked like.

‘And you?’ he said quietly, leaning towards her across the table. ‘Do you chase whales too?’

‘I don’t chase anything,’ she said, and her face was unreadable, even to me. ‘I go to where they might be and keep my distance. I find that’s generally the wisest course of action.’

As their eyes locked, I became aware that Greg was watching. His eyes followed her as she rose from the table, saying she needed to pick up Hannah. Then he turned to Mike, and I hoped that only I could see the wintriness in his smile. ‘Yup. Generally the best course of action when it comes to Liza,’ he said, his smile as wide and friendly as that of a shark. ‘Keep your distance.’

Six

Mike

The bay stretches around an area of four miles between Taree Point and the outlying Break Nose Island, a short drive north from Port Stephens, a large port favoured for recreational activities. The waters are clear and protected, perfectly suited to watersports and, in the warmer months, swimming. There is little in the way of a tidal system, making it safe for bathing, and there is a thriving but low-level cottage industry in cetacean-watching.

Silver Bay is three to four hours’ drive from Sydney and accessible most of the way by a major highway. The seafront is made up of two half-bays. One, at the northernmost point, is virtually undeveloped, and another, home to Silver Bay proper, is a short drive away, or perhaps a ten-minute walk. This supports a number of small accommodation units and retail outlets, most of whose business comes from residents of Sydney and Newcastle. There is a . . .
I paused, staring at the screen
 . . . an existing operation ripe for redevelopment, and numerous buildings with little economic worth. It is highly likely that the owners would see a fair financial settlement as advantageous both to themselves and the local economy.

As far as competition is concerned, there are no local hotels of any size or stature. The only hotel located within the bay is half its original size, having suffered a fire several decades ago. It is run on a bed-and-breakfast basis. There are no recreational facilities, and it would be unlikely to create a problem in terms of competition should the owner be unwilling to sell.

I couldn’t present anyone with this, I thought. It was all over the place. And it didn’t matter how many facts and figures I had gleaned from the local planning department and chamber of commerce, I still felt as though I was writing about something I knew nothing about.

I had discovered almost as soon as I had arrived that this was not a straightforward site. I was used to square footage in the City; executive apartments, razed seventies office blocks waiting for a new health-and-fitness chain, new prestige headquarters. On such jobs I could go in, look around unobserved, work out the local rental yields against property prices, the disposable income of nearby residents, and, at the end of the day, disappear.

This, I had known from the moment I stepped into Greg’s beer-can-filled truck, would be different.

Here, I was acutely aware of my visibility. Even in a sweatshirt and jeans I felt as if my lack of a salt crust gave away my intentions. And considering how empty it was, the area seemed too inhabited somehow, too influenced by its people. It was a new experience for me, but somehow I couldn’t see straight.

I sighed, opened a new document and began to type in headlines: Geography, Economic Climate, Local Industry, Competition. I thought, with a little resentment, about my new two-seater sports car, the one I had promised myself on the back of this deal; the car that was waiting for me, paid for and polished, on the dealer’s forecourt. I consulted my watch. I had been sitting there for almost two hours and strung together three paragraphs. It was time for another tea break.

Kathleen Mostyn had given me what she described as her ‘good’ room, some other guests having recently departed, and the previous night had brought up a tray with tea- and coffee-making equipment. She wouldn’t have given it to the last occupants, she muttered, because they ‘would no doubt have complained that the water didn’t boil fast enough’. She was the kind of woman who in England would have been running a school, or perhaps a stately home. The kind who makes you think ‘Age shall not wither her’, sharp-eyed, fiercely busy, wit undimmed. I liked her. I guess I like strong women: I find it easier not to have to think for two. My sister would have other theories, no doubt.

I boiled the kettle and stood at the window, preparing a cup. The room was not luxurious but was oddly comfortable; the polar opposite to most of the executive-class hotel rooms I stay in. The walls were whitewashed, and the wood-framed double bed was made up with white linen and a blue- and white-striped blanket. There was an aged leather armchair and a Persian rug that might once have been valuable. I worked at a small scrubbed-pine desk with a kitchen chair. I had the feeling, when I looked around the Silver Bay Hotel, that Kathleen Mostyn had long since decided that decorating for guests required far too much in the way of imagination, and had chosen instead to whitewash everything. ‘Easy to clean, easy to paint over,’ I could imagine her saying.

I realised pretty quickly that I was her only long-term guest. The hotel had the air of somewhere that might once have been pretty smart, but had long since settled for pragmatic, then decided it didn’t want much in the way of company anyway. Most of the furniture had been selected for practicality rather than some great aesthetic. Pictures were largely confined to old sepia-tinted photographs of the hotel in its former glory, or generic seaside watercolours. Mantelpieces and shelves, I had discovered, often contained odd collections of pebbles or driftwood, a touch that in other hotels might have signified stylistic pretensions, but here were more likely just the day’s finds, needing a home.

My room looked straight out across the bay with not even a road between the house and the beach. The previous night I had slept with the window open, the sound of the waves lulling me into my first decent night’s sleep for months, and I had been dimly aware, as dawn broke, of the whalers’ trucks, their tyres hissing on the wet sand, and the fishermen heading back and forth across the shingle to the jetty.

When I told Nessa about the setting, she had accused me of being a jammy bugger and said she’d given her father an earful for sending me away. ‘You wouldn’t believe how much I’ve got to organise,’ she’d said, her voice half accusing, as if my presence in London had been of any help.

‘You know, we could do this differently,’ I ventured, when she had run out of complaints. ‘We could fly off somewhere and get married on a beach.’

The ensuing silence was lengthy enough for me to wonder what it was costing.

‘After all this?’ Her voice was disbelieving. ‘After all the planning I’ve done you want to just fly off somewhere? Since when did you start having opinions?’

‘Forget I said anything.’

‘Do you know how hard this is? I’m trying to work and do all this and half the bloody guests haven’t even replied to their invitations. It’s so rude. I’m going to have to chase up everyone myself.’

‘Look, I’m sorry. You know I didn’t ask to be here. I’m working on this deal as hard as I can and I’ll be back before you know it.’

She was mollified. Eventually. She seemed to cheer up when I reminded her it was winter over here. Besides, Nessa knows I’m not a holiday person. I have never yet managed to lie on a beach for anything resembling a week. Within days I’m scouting inland, looking at the local paper for business opportunities. ‘Love you,’ she said, before she rang off. ‘Work hard so you can come home soon.’

But it was hard to work in an environment that conspired to tell even me to do the opposite. The Internet connection, routed through the phone line, was slow and temperamental. The newspapers, with the city pages, didn’t arrive until nearly noon. Meanwhile the beach, with its elegant curve and white sand, demanded to be walked on. The wooden jetty called out to be sat on, bare legs dangling into the sea. The long bleached table where the whale crews relaxed on their return spoke of ice-cold beers and hot chips. Even putting on my work shirt that morning hadn’t motivated me.