The Darkest Secret (30 page)

It's winter dawns like this that make him glad to be alive. When the tourists have slowed to a trickle and the estuary sands are empty, a million shades of red seeping through last night's clouds and the Atlantic still roaring out there to his left. Everyone warned him over and over again that the seaside was different out of season, that he'd find it grim, but it's the grimness that pulled him, always was. John was never a bucket-and-spade sort of person. Angry waters call to his Celtic soul in a way that sun-loungers and palm trees never did.

Chip and Canasta run ahead across the sand, daring each other forward to celebrate the day. With their thick Collie coats and the shore full of flotsam, they love the winter too. No children falling over and blaming them, no family picnics or yappy lapdogs, the fishing boats all out until the tide comes in, or on chucks in the boatyard getting their annual overhaul, the rolling stretch of sand and all its tidal pools and secrets there for them alone. A gull swoops down on to a heap of something black – a great tree of weed ripped from its moorings and carried up the river mouth by the tide, some fishing net carelessly dropped from the back of a trawler – and the dogs step up their pace as one, barrel, barking, towards it until it flaps away with a resentful shriek. He doesn't bother to call them. They know better than to go into the water at this time of year, and they have the beach to themselves.

The wind is still high. He's wrapped up tight in his oilskin coat, flat cap clamped over his thinning hair and two layers of gloves to keep his hands from falling off, but his ears are starting to hurt. They have never been the same since that infection twenty years ago: drops in temperature, the pressure of an aeroplane cabin, background music are all nuisances now, his pockets never free of decongestants, but the remains of his Christmas cold is making them hurt actively. He stops and unwinds his scarf from around his neck, wraps it over the top of his head, hat and all, and ties it tight around his chin. I must look like a baboushka out on the Steppes, he thinks. Isn't it amazing how age and comfort will eventually erode away even the most deep-rooted of vanity?

Eight years on, and he still finds it hard to believe how much his life has changed. I was feeling so old in Vauxhall, he thinks. Trying to look as if I was enjoying the scene as the people got younger and younger around me and my body could no longer take the stimulants required to keep up. And here I am now, no more gym body, no more walks of shame. My twentysomething self would have reeled at the thought that I'd end up alone in the middle of nowhere one day, Chip and Canasta the loves of my life, but this is the happiest I've ever been. Appledore's a gossipy little place and getting through the visiting crowds is a pain in the season, but it's great to come out of the flat door in the morning and have your neighbours greet you, and I enjoy the pleasure on people's faces as they find just the
perfect
seaglass necklace, the most
wonderful
water-bleached wooden bail, the
loveliest
rusted coupler in the shop, and so what if they get it home to Basingstoke and wonder what on earth they were thinking?

The howl of wind and the rattle of rain in the eaves at night are always an enticing sound to him, because it means that in the morning the tide will have thrown more of his means of living up the river and on to the sand. He started off selling gaudy glass, trinkets and wind chimes and glinting waterfall mobiles to hang in the window – still does – but the discovery that the estuary is a trove of shipwreck jetsam, that after each storm its shifting sands will reveal something that has lain buried for a hundred, two hundred years, was a moment of pure exhilaration. It's actually better in here than it is out on the sands at Westward Ho!, perhaps because that beach is hardly ever deserted. People love a souvenir of someone else's disaster. The
Titanic
trade seems to get more enthusiastic with every cap-badge those submarines bring up. They'll slosh their holiday money about like drunken sailors if you can throw a few salty sea-dog tales into the mix when they start to finger a verdigris-coated capstan or a blunted whaling hook, and, if there's one thing the wild Atlantic coast has to offer, it's vivid yarns of mass drownings and miracle rescues by the hundred.

The dogs are feeling the morning. Of all the many gifts they have brought to his life, the greatest is the forgetting of age. Out here on the sand the three of them can shed the creep of the years, ignore the aches and the sadness, the fact that there is less time ahead now than there is behind, and simply be. Gentle Chip and snappy Canasta, racing each other in some imaginary hunt, tumbling over themselves in the rush to be first. Just the three of them and a container ship tossing in the far distance on the open sea. John inhales deeply, enjoys the salt pleasure of the sea air.

Head protected, he trudges on towards the edge of the river channel. He knows better than to stand still for any great length of time; though the sand is mostly firm, it has patches that suck liquidly, and a fair number of unwary people have had to be fished out by the coastguard as the waters rose above their chests. He finds a stick – just an ordinary stick, not skeletonised the way the tourists like them – and throws it overarm for Chip, who has trotted back to see what he's doing. The dogs race off in pursuit. For a moment he feels a wobble of fear when he thinks he might have thrown too hard, that they're going to plunge into the fast-flowing river, but it lands a few feet from the water's edge. Canasta, more sprightly and more competitive than kindly Chip, dives past her brother and snaps at it with her hard white teeth. She misses. Dog and stick somersault towards the water in a blur of black and white and flying sand and John holds his breath as he waits for them to land.

She hits, skids, enters the water with a mighty splash. ‘
Canasta!
'
he yells, pointlessly, above the wind. Should have done that before, he thinks. Not now. Not now she can't hear you. Not that she would have listened anyway. Bloody dog. So wrapped up in herself she doesn't listen to
anything
, and now I'm going to be one of those people you read about in the papers, drowned as they jumped in to save their dog from floodwater…

The wave recedes and Canasta bobs up like a cork, grinning around the stick. She struggles against the suck, then he sees her paws scrabble into the shifting ground, gain traction, pull her forward on to the sand. She bounds a few steps towards land, then stops to shake herself off. That's it, he thinks, that's enough for today. My blood pressure can't take any more of that.

‘Come on, you silly bitch!' he calls. Always uses the appropriate noun when her recklessness gets too much. ‘Come out of there!'

Chip has come back of his own accord and is sitting at his feet. He leans his chunky body against his leg and grins up at him with friendly, rolling eyes. John chucks him behind the ear, bends down and plants a kiss on his sweet white forehead. How two dogs can come from the same litter and be so different he will never know: Chip soft and gentle and loving, Canasta all bluster and barks.

The girl arrives and he takes the stick from her mouth while she growls and threatens, as she always does. He slings it through the air again, back towards the shoreline, and she races off in pursuit, showers of salt water flying off her. Chip trots sedately after. It lands by the pile of weeds he noticed earlier, and she snatches it up, then drops it and begins to bark. Look! she yells. Look what I've found! Come and see!

Chip lets out a sound that's somewhere between a sigh and a whimper, then falls into stride behind him, huffing, as John obeys orders. Sometimes the things Canasta barks about are indeed worth looking at. Chip, bored by his steady gait, races on ahead to his sister – and joins the barking.

Oh, God, thinks John, and steps up his pace. He reaches the dogs and feels a prickle of cold around his ears despite the scarf. What looked like another piece of marine discardings isn't that at all. It's a man, yellowish skin bloated by immersion in water, long black leather coat that must have contributed hugely to the speed at which his feet have sunk into the sand. He's buried up to the thighs, his eyes and mouth wide open in horror at the approach of the tide that has covered him. And, even in death, he clutches at the neck of a half-drunk bottle of vodka.

‘Watch out, boss! Here comes trouble.'

Janusz looks in the direction of Tomasz's pointing finger and sees the man from next door stop at the foot of the drive. ‘Fucking hell!' he shouts over the roar of the crane's engine, ‘What now?'

‘What time is it?'

‘Twelve-fifteen. If he wants to complain, he's getting this right up his pipework.' He waves the giant wrench with which he's been coupling the flexible pipes attached to the pool liner's outlets to the filtration system, and the men laugh out loud. The atmosphere is cheerful on the site today, despite the heat. After ten days in which most of the crew allowed themselves to feel miserable with homesickness as the prospect of relieving it drew nearer, the fact that they have reached the home stretch has acted like a shot in the arm for them all. Everyone's joking as they throw themselves into scooping rubble into barrows to tip into the extra couple of feet they've dug out from the swimming pool hole, and the casuals he's called in for the day are keen to make a good impression and get on the full-time roster for the next project. Until one minute ago it was looking as though they were going to make their delayed deadline easily. But they can't afford any more delays, if that's what this man's bringing.

The man has one of his little twin daughters with him. They stand beside the tracks of the digger and watch the pool liner swing in the air above the hole, an army of labourers easing it carefully into position. Janusz signals to Gabriel, behind the controls of the crane, and hears the brake go on and the engine stop. A moan of disappointment goes up from the team. He walks over to the slope to greet them; switches to his English-speaking brain as he goes. He's close to bilingual now, even after just nine months, but he still has to concentrate when he switches from one to the other.

‘It's afternoon,' he says, by way of greeting. He wants to make it clear from the off that he's not tolerating any more complaints. They've kept to their side of the bargain, but they can't give him any more.

‘No, no,' says the man, and gives him a smile that makes him think fleetingly of vampires. For someone who's on holiday he looks exhausted, his rich-man's tan washed out in the bright sunlight. ‘Not come to make a nuisance of myself, I promise.'

‘Okay,' says Janusz suspiciously, and comes down the slope. Takes his hat off and gives the little girl a tentative smile. She stares for a moment then smiles back. Tiny white teeth and dimples, and the sort of baby-blonde hair that will be mousey by the time she's eight. ‘Good afternoon,' he says to her, solemnly. She gives him the big eyes, and sidesteps in behind her father's legs. Suddenly he's missing his own four-year-old, Danuta, so badly it feels as though his heart is strained. She does the same thing when faced with strange adults. Only twenty-four more hours and I'll be with them, he thinks, and then we have a whole month of beautiful autumn days on the banks of the Vistula.

‘We just came to say thank you,' says the man. ‘We had such a lovely day yesterday, and a marvellous lie-in this morning, and we really appreciate it.'

‘Okay,' says Janusz again. There has been no noise from his employers, as the men predicted, and it's looking as though he, Karol, Tomasz and Gabriel will be going home with a nice little tax-free bonus. ‘You're welcome.'

‘Coco has a present for you,' says the man. ‘Come on, darling. Come out from there!'

The little girl steps unwillingly out from behind. Her father bends down and places a cardboard box into her hands. ‘Go on, darling,' he says, ‘give it to him.'

It's so large and so heavy that she has to hold it in both hands and clutch on tightly, for the fingers can't get a purchase on the corners. She walks forward. She's wearing a pretty little pink dress and jelly sandals with white socks. He smiles at the sight of them. Only a man, he thinks, would take a kid on to a building site in white socks. There are already a couple of brown stains where she has splashed into a passing puddle. ‘Thank you,' she says, shyly, clearly reciting a pre-prepared speech, ‘for letting Daddy have a happy birthday.'

He bends down and takes it from her before she drops it. It's whisky, in a presentation box.

‘Knockando,' says Sean, ‘1973. A single malt from a good year. Thought you might enjoy something to remind you of England.'

‘Thank you,' says Janusz, though he's pretty sure that the whisky comes from Scotland. He nods solemnly at the little girl. ‘Thank you, Coco,' he says, ‘that's very kind. Where's your sister?'

‘They went to the beach without me,' she says mournfully. But then she brightens up. ‘But I had chips.'

‘That's good,' says Janusz. ‘My little girl likes chips too. With mayonnaise. How do you like yours?'

‘With ice cream,' she says, confidently. Janusz laughs and the father makes a sort of rumbling noise that he assumes is a sound of humour. ‘Together?' he says.

‘Yes,' she replies, firmly. ‘Strawberry is best,' and he laughs again.

‘So how's it all going?' the man asks. He's much friendlier today, the air of arrogance he carried when surrounded by his well-fed friends stripped away in the presence of the child. ‘Think you'll make your deadline?'

Janusz nods. ‘I think so. Pool's almost in now and the sealant's all mixed, so we should make it.'

‘Well, thank you for delaying,' he says. ‘It's greatly appreciated. When's your ferry again?'

‘Last sailing. Eleven-thirty from Portsmouth.'

‘And you're all packed up?'

‘Yes. Everything's in the van and ready to go.'

‘Terrific,' he says, then repeats the word. ‘Long drive? Where are you going to?'

‘Krakow. We all come from Krakow.'

‘Ah,' he says. ‘Nice.'

‘You have been?'

He looks a little flustered. Janusz has noticed this about English people: that they can never simply admit to not knowing about something. ‘No,' he says, ‘but I hope to go, some day.'

Sure you do, thinks Janusz, and tosses his box in his hand. ‘Well,' he says, ‘thank you for this. But if we're going to get finished before dark we need to get on now.'

‘Sure,' says the man. ‘Sure. Listen: you guys seem to have done a good job here. And you're clearly adaptable. You don't have a card, do you? Only, I employ construction people a lot, and frankly I'm not crazy about the ones I'm using at the moment.'

‘A card? No, I'm sorry,' he says. ‘But I have a mobile phone.'

‘Great!' He gets out his own, a BlackBerry, the sort of phone owned by people who do a lot of business. ‘Let's swap numbers. When are you coming back?'

Janusz reels his number off and Sean types it in. ‘In a month, I hope.'

‘Great. Let's speak then. What's your name, by the way?'

‘Janusz Bieda.'

He sticks a hand out to shake. Better late than never. ‘Sean Jackson,' he says. ‘And this is Coco.'

He shakes Coco's hand too. His big hand goes halfway up to her elbow. ‘Have a lovely day, Coco,' he says.

‘I'm going to Neptune's Kingdom,' she confides. ‘They have slides.'

‘Oh, good,' he says, and makes a mental note to take Danuta to Park Wodny when he's at home. If this little one's old enough for water slides, then she must be too.

He carries his ill-gotten gains back up the slope and signals to Gabriel to carry on. Stashes the bottle in his work bag. He can break it out once they're on the ferry; it'll pass the time and save them money on the four-hour crossing to Le Havre. Funny, he thinks. You can never go by first impressions. If you'd asked me yesterday what Sean Jackson was like I would have said he was an arrogant wanker. I guess he was stressed. Everyone seems to be stressed these days. Especially in this country. You'd have thought that all that money would make them less stressed, but it doesn't seem that way.

The men get into position and the pool liner is gently guided into its final resting place.