Silver Bay (30 page)

I shot Hannah a look that would have stopped me in my tracks, had I been her age. But the young seem so much less mindful of such things, these days.

‘Kathleen, I told you I would fix this, and I’m doing my best. But we have to have a strategy and, believe me, this is the only strategy available to us at the moment.’

Mike had had three days to recover his equilibrium, and although he still looked tired, he had regained that peculiar self-containment, the professionalism, that had characterised his early days here. If anything, he had become more serious since his return. He had come back to save us, he had announced, with some fervour, when we stumbled across him in the Whalechasers Museum. It’s hard to take a man seriously, even a longed-for saviour, I’d told him afterwards, when he’s lying drunk on the floor with wet shoes and seaweed up his nose. He appeared to have taken this to heart.

‘Really. I’ve had specialist media advice on this.’ He was wearing an ironed shirt. It was as if he thought this might make us take him seriously.

‘Mike, I know you mean well, and I’m touched you saw fit to come back to help us. But I’ve told you, I don’t want to dredge up all that Shark Lady business again. It’s been the bane of my life, and I don’t want the attention.’

‘I thought you might be proud of it.’

‘Shows how little you know.’

‘You should be proud of it,’ said Hannah, cheerfully. She had been surprisingly pleased to see Mike – certainly more so than her mother. ‘I’d be proud of killing a shark.’

‘I don’t think killing is ever something to be proud of,’ I muttered.

‘Well, then, use the death of that shark to help the whales.’ Mike nodded at me.

‘I’m not going to be the Shark Lady again. I have enough on my plate without stirring all that up.’ I pursed my lips, and hoped he’d leave it there.

‘Liza then,’ he said. She had been doing her best to ignore him, her head buried in the newspaper. But she was, I noted, in the kitchen, rather than her bedroom or on board
Ishmael
, her traditional places of retreat.

‘Liza what?’ she said, not looking up from the paper.

‘You’d make a great figurehead for the campaign.’

‘Why?’

‘Well . . . there aren’t many female skippers. And you know a lot about whales. You’re . . .’ here he had the grace to cough and flush ‘. . . you’re a good-looking woman. I’ve been told how it all works and—’

‘No,’ she said abruptly.

I stood very still at the sink, wondering what she would say next.

After a moment she added, a little defensively, ‘I don’t want – Hannah exposed to . . . all that.’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Hannah. ‘I’d like to be in the paper.’

‘It’s the only way to stop the development,’ Mike said. ‘You have to galvanise as much support as you can. Once people know what’s—’

‘
No.
’

He stared at her. ‘Why are you being so stubborn?’

‘I’m not.’

‘I thought you’d do anything for the whales.’

‘Don’t you dare tell me what I should be doing for the whales.’ Liza folded up her newspaper and slammed it down on the table. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, none of this would have happened and we wouldn’t be in this bloody mess.’

‘Liza—’ I began.

‘You really believe that?’ he interrupted. ‘You really think this area would have been untouched for ever?’

‘No – but it wouldn’t have happened yet. We would have had more time . . .’ Her voice tailed away.

‘What do you mean, “more time”?’

The little room went quiet. Hannah glanced up, then down at her homework.

Liza looked at me and shook her head, a delicate, discreet movement.

Mike caught it and I saw it register on his face as disappointment. I started to tidy away the empty cups, as a kind of distraction. Both Mike and Liza handed theirs to me, as if grateful for it.

‘Look,’ he said, finally, ‘one of you is going to have to do something. You two are the best chance we’ve got to stop this development, and at the moment even that chance is pretty slim. I’ll do everything I can to help you – and, believe me, I can’t do more than I already am doing – but you have to cut me a little slack.’

‘No,’ said Liza. ‘You might as well get this straight, Mike. Neither Hannah nor I will appear in any publicity. I’ll do anything else you suggest, but I won’t do that. So there’s no point you going on about it.’

With that, she got up and left the kitchen, Milly following tight at her heels.

‘So what are you going to do?’ he called after her. ‘Fire rockets at all the jet-skiers like you did with the boats?’

Hannah gathered up her things from the table, gave Mike an apologetic smile and followed her mother.

I heard him sigh deeply.

‘Mike, I’ll think about it,’ I said, more to be kind than out of genuine intention. He was so disappointed, I had to say something. He gazed after Liza’s departing back like a starving man whose last meal has been whipped away from him, and his feelings were so obvious that I looked away.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘On with Plan B, then.’ He gave me a lopsided grin and flipped a new sheet of paper. ‘I just have to work out what Plan B is.’

I discovered pretty quickly that Mike had given up everything to come back to Silver Bay. He admitted he no longer had a job, or a girlfriend, or apparently even an address. ‘I can pay, though,’ he said, when he asked for his old room back. ‘My bank balance is . . . Well, I don’t need to worry about money.’

He seemed oddly changed by his month away. The slickness had disappeared, and a new uncertainty had crept in. He tended to ask, rather than state, and his emotions sat more obviously on the surface, no longer masked by a deceptively bland shell. He also drank more, so I took pains to remark on it, which brought him up short. ‘Is it that bad?’ he asked quietly. ‘I guess I’ve tried not to think about it.’

‘Perfectly understandable,’ I said, ‘as a short-term measure.’

He got the picture. I found the new Mike Dormer rather more endearing. It was one of the reasons I had allowed him to stay. One of the few I was prepared to confide in Liza.

Meanwhile, every disco boat, every two-bit operator who had once seen an oversized sardine and now described itself as an eco-tour, found their way into what our crews had considered their waters. It was as if they were sizing us up, trying to work out how far they could impinge on our business. The coastguard told me there had been talk of extending Whale Jetty, so that others could move in. Twice the disco boats had come as far as our bay, and Lance had complained to the National Parks and Wildlife Service, blaming them for the disappearance of the whales. The official line was that perhaps migration patterns were changing, that perhaps global warming was shifting either the timing or the distance of the migration. The whalechasers didn’t buy it –Yoshi had spoken to some of her old academic friends and they thought it was likely to be something more local. The dolphins were still occasionally visible in the bay, but I wondered if they felt bullied, the focus of so much daily attention because they were now the only thing for the passengers to see. For every pod there were now two or three boats a session stopping nearby, the tourists leaning overboard with their cameras.

Perhaps because she was so distracted by the plight of the whales and – although she would not admit it – Mike’s return, I persuaded Liza to agree to Hannah having sailing lessons. I took her to the first, with her friend, at Salamander Bay, and when I saw her out on the water I saw, with a start, that it couldn’t have been the first time she had negotiated her way alone in a dinghy. She confessed afterwards, with a grin, that I was right, and we agreed that it was probably best not to tell her mother.

‘Do you think she’ll let me take out
Hannah’s Glory
?’ she said, as we drove home, the dog drooling happily over her shoulder. ‘When the teachers say I’m good enough?’

‘Don’t let that dog take your sandwich,’ I said, pushing at Milly’s nose.

It had been a beautiful day, but clouds were moving in from the west, a dark forbidding line. ‘I don’t know, sweetie. I think we should just take it one step at a time.’

‘Greg says she won’t – just to get up his nose.’

‘He told you that?’

‘I heard him say it to Lance. They didn’t know I was listening.’

I’d have words with young Greg. ‘What your mum thinks about Greg has nothing to do with it,’ I said. ‘You’ll get your boat. But, as I said, you have to be patient.’

I slowed down on the coast road to say g’day to old Mr Henderson, returning on his bicycle from the fish market. When I turned back to Hannah she was staring out of the window. ‘Can you change the name of a boat?’ she said, gazing at something in the distance.

‘Why?’

‘I thought I might change the name of mine. Once I’m allowed to take it out.’

‘It can be done,’ I said. I was half thinking about what I could cook for dinner that night. I was no longer sure how many whalechasers I could expect. I should have asked Mr Henderson what was on special at the market. ‘You might not want to change it, though – there’s some say it’s unlucky.’

‘I’m going to call it
Darling Letty
.’

I braked so hard the dog nearly fell into my lap.

For a moment neither of us spoke, and then Hannah’s eyes widened. ‘Can’t I even say her name?’ she cried.

I pulled the car over, raising a hand in apology to the van that had had to brake suddenly behind me. When it had disappeared I turned in my seat and stroked her cheek, trying to appear less rattled than I felt. ‘Sweetie, you can say whatever you like. I’m sorry. You just gave me a start.’

‘She’s my sister,’ she said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘She was
my sister
. And I want to be allowed to talk about her sometimes.’

‘I know you do.’ The dog was clambering into her lap, whining. She hated anyone to cry.

‘I thought if my boat had her name I could say it whenever I wanted without everyone going all weird.’

I stared at my great-niece and wished there was something, anything, I could say that would alleviate what I now knew she had been hiding.

‘I want to talk about her without Mum looking like she’s going to collapse or something.’

‘It’s a lovely idea, a really smart one, Hannah, but I’m not sure that’s ever going to happen. Not for a long time yet.’

When we got home, I climbed slowly up to my room and pulled out the drawer where I kept the picture of Liza with her two little girls. The edges are a little uneven, where I’d cut that man out with a little too much resolve. Liza thought the only way to protect them all was to bury Letty, I knew. It was the only way she herself could continue to live, and the two of them could exist safely.

But it wasn’t as simple as that. They couldn’t bury Letty then, and they couldn’t bury her now.

And trying to pretend otherwise was no kind of living at all.

Every afternoon I visited Nino Gaines. I brushed his hair, brought him freshly laundered pyjamas and, when I felt brave enough, I even gave him a shave – not out of sentiment, you understand, but because there wasn’t anyone else to do it. Okay, so Frank might have been able to, or John John, or perhaps John John’s wife, but the young are busy. They have their own lives to lead. So I volunteered, and sat there for a few hours every day and read him the bits I thought he would enjoy from the newspaper and occasionally berated the nurses on his behalf.

I had to come. I reckoned he hated it in there by himself, his nostrils filled with the smell of disinfectant, his strong old body hooked up to bleeping monitors, and tubes that fed him God only knows what. Nino Gaines was built for the outdoors: he had strode up and down the lines of his vines like a colossus, occasionally removing his hat as he stooped to take a closer look at this or that grape, muttering about bloom or acidity. I tried not to see him as he was now: too large for the hospital bed, but somehow diminished. It was clear he was not asleep, no matter how hard I tried to convince myself that he was.

His family were happy for me to stay; they came and left food that mouldered beside his bed. They brought photographs, in case he opened his eyes, and music, in case he could hear. They whispered together, held his hand and talked in huddles with the doctors about prognoses and medication, reassured by the EEGs, which said that his brain was working fine. I could have told them that. I talked to him: about the vineyard, how Frank had said the first buds of this year’s growth were about to show through, and that some supermarket buyer had made a special trip to see him all the way from Perth because he’d heard how good his wines were and wanted to stock them. I told him about the planning inquiry, which had received an unprecedented number of public objections, including a whole folderful from the children of the Silver Bay Elementary School who had deemed their whales more important to them than a smart new school bus. I told him about Mike and the hours he spent alone in his room on the telephone, doing what he could to stop the development. I told Nino about my sneaking affection for the young man, despite what he had brought to bear on us, and about the watchfulness in Mike’s eyes that seemed to me a reflection of what he expected of himself as much as anyone else, and the way that when they alighted on my niece I felt I might have done the right thing in letting him stay.

And I told him about the disappearing whales and the poor, beleaguered dolphins, and about my niece, who seemed so rattled by Mike Dormer’s reappearance in her life that she didn’t know what to do with herself. She was busy and she was not busy. She went out by herself on
Ishmael
and came back in a worse mood than when she had left. She ignored Mike at every meal, then scolded her daughter if she did the same. She was furious with both of us for allowing him to stay at the hotel. She swore she had no feelings for him – and when I finally told her she couldn’t see what was in front of her face she had the temerity to use the words ‘pot and kettle’ at me.

But she was a fool and Nino Gaines was an older fool. He lay there uncharacteristically still, the tubes flowing in and out of him. He said nothing, did nothing, just let me pour my troubles into him as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Sometimes I left feeling hopeful. Sometimes his immobility made me mad. One day the nurse caught me shouting, ‘Wake up!’ at him with such ferocity that she threatened to get the doctor.