The Last Kings of Sark (27 page)

Do you remember how the gravel on the Avenue was so fine that it looked like someone had brushed it? Because the roofs are low and flat, I realized it's the only place on the whole island where the shadows are straight. The bakery that had been new, and once shone like glazed pastry, had no customers. I couldn't even see any bread. The lacquer has chipped. I looked through the window and the girl at the till was eating crisps. Instead, I went into the Island Stores to buy water. They'd swapped the greetings cards and chocolate bars around. I had a sudden fear that someone would recognize me and busied myself by the freezers.

There is – and I don't know why – a shame in wanting to go back.

When I paid, I recognized the woman completely; her hair was shorter, her lines more etched, her necklace the same. She smiled at me as she would have done to anyone, but then they must have seen a thousand faces at their till, and we only saw theirs as we handed over Guernsey bills. We had a place and practice to attach to them. To them, we were just girls who bought a lot of butter.

Still, the Sark faces stay with me more than most. I see them on buses, in cafés. I still see backs of heads and imagine that when the person turns around the face will be familiar. Sometimes I think that was the summer when my eyes formed. Maybe not ‘formed', but saw things, and thought what they would be in words. I looked so hard at everything.

At the other end of the Avenue, past the post office with its blue postbox, carriages were still for hire – those carthorses with bellbottom fringes over their hooves. There were bikes for hire too, with once-white tyres, and bells with Spice Girls stickers on. I wanted to walk, though. And it felt different, not to be cycling. I realized how fast we'd gone.

The first place I went back to was Bonita's. The gnomes were gone, and the grass was shaved short as a head. There were leaflets on the gatepost announcing it as ‘Bonita and Son' now. I wanted to go in. It would be easy, I told myself. I imagined myself opening the gate, getting to the door, knocking. I fast-forwarded to tea, broken biscuits, own-brand cola, Bonita smiling, being able to talk about you. Four times I walked up the path in my mind, and four times I didn't take one step.

So I went to the Coupée instead. I'd forgotten the thickness of the concrete spikes. They seem to ask you to touch them, because so many people already have. The harder rocks in the gravel stand out now, but smoothly, and shine, polished by passing hands. I counted the spokes as I walked across and there are twenty-one on each side. It felt, in a strange way, as if each one was a year. As I walked across, it was like I was growing up again. Or going back, year by year, to when I was last here.

I want to ask how it was for you between then and now. I got it wrong and right. Wrong has to go first. Right last, because it's right, now. I want to tell you that I went to Paris. Not just for you, but a bit for you. At the start, anyway. I looked for you there and I thought I saw you on the métro and I imagined again and again what I'd say if we spoke. I lived there for three and a half years. The Eiffel Tower was a stupid place for me to say I'd meet you. No one who lives in Paris ever goes there.

When I'd crossed the Coupée, I climbed the low hill to the fields where the Czech boys used to stay, but there were no more tents there. All the grass was high and the same colour. I found Cider Press Cottage, and then my way back to the beach where we swam naked. In a few months, when it will be warmer, day-trippers will push the path clear, but right now it's thick and wild. I pulled my sleeves long over my wrists, found the bare bits of thorned sticks and picked a slow way through.

I was glad there was no one else on the beach. Just birds surfing on driftwood, and the sea with a champagne foam that was thick, milk-white. It was too cold to swim, but I remembered the heat of that last day – the sun burning through hair, drying shells, changing shoulders – and that made it warm enough, it really did, to dip my feet in.

And all around the edge of the island, Sofi, on the wall of the cliffs, there's a line of yellow, two metres up from the sea, that wasn't there before. It makes you think that the sea used to be a different height, that it's getting less now, or that Sark is getting taller. I thought it would feel smaller, like a family house you knew as a child, and go back to as an adult. But if anything, the island seemed bigger. It was easier to get lost.

At a certain point, maybe three o'clock, the sun changed sides and lit up a different half of the island. I went back to the Avenue, back to the café we always wanted to go to. The gate was white and heavy, you have to lift it to make the latch work.

The waitress was pretty, in this very precise way. Her eyes looked drawn with a compass, and there was eyeliner in her tear-ducts. She brought me cake with my coffee. It wasn't as good as yours. Not enough salt. No nail clippings, no long gold hair you would spot at the last moment and finger-pinch out of Pip's slice.

Pip with his blond freckles and blonder eyebrows and bobbing Adam's apple. I heard from him just once. He contacted the tuition agency and they gave him my parents' address. He sent a letter. His handwriting was even smaller, but he'd filled four sides. There was something formal about it – fountain pen, navy. I got the impression he had written it out a few different times.

He asked me where I was. He said he had been living in Paris, but was leaving in two weeks. He said he thought of me. He told me about where he'd lived, and a concert he'd seen the night before. German opera. He told me about the books he had read, and wrote down his favourite lines, with the edition and page numbers in different pen in the margin.

Halfway down the last page he told me, as if he were telling me about the weather, that he'd got a girl pregnant. That they hadn't been sure, but now they were, and that he had a feeling everything was going to be OK. Her name was Clémence and she was French. He said I'd like her – that we had things in common – and he made a joke, or perhaps it wasn't a joke, about calling the baby Jude. That way, he said, it didn't matter if it was a boy or a girl.

And in the line before last, he said he had seen you. He said you were in Le Havre. He told me the name of the bar, and said he was worried about you and it would be good if I could call.

The letter arrived too late though. Or rather, I arrived too late, at Christmas. My parents had left the envelope on the hall table for six months, like they expected me home any evening. I recognized the handwriting straight away. I took the letter up to my room and opened it as I lay in a crooked star on my childhood bed. Pip had left no address post-Paris, and when I tried to call Le Paris, the number no longer existed. This was years ago. I had missed you both.

When I tried to eat the cake in front of me, I couldn't swallow. I missed you both. One cloud, one of the only clouds that day, blew between the café and the sun, and light lost its shine for a minute or so.

*   *   *

Pip's house, their house, the house that became our house – was the last place I went back to. I almost left it so late that even if I changed my mind, time at least would get in the way.

I could feel it even in the path. It is unusual to go to a place day after day after day, and then not to go at all for such a long time. The body reacts. The approach to a house is a strange thing. The weight of what waits. An empty house is harder still – it's both life and time which have come undone.

The house, the garden, they were changed, unchanged. It was as if I could see two things at once: the reality now, unmoving, and then things I had seen before, playing like a film on top. Pip with a book tent on his chest, the outline of Esmé's black sunhat, how quickly you could climb a tree. Maybe we've done this to our minds with cinema, maybe we've always done this. It was something like cross-cut or collage. For a moment, it was like you and I, and Pip and everyone – all of us from summer – existed again. Flowers in wicker crowns, we lay in a wide, tangled circle with each of our heads on someone else's lap.

It seemed to me that I had never looked at the house as a whole before. I'd seen the island from the other side of its windows. From back crabs in the garden or from the gazebo where we ate lunch, I had caught it upside down, or in the corner of my eye. Now, I stood alone at the bottom of the garden and looked at it straight on. With trees that had grown taller, and ivy at its corners and the cream-blue sky, it was framed like a painting.

They had not been there for a long time. The curtains in Esmé's upstairs room were drawn, the windows thickened with double-glazing. A child's swing in the garden made it clear someone else had lived there since. Leaves had gathered on the seat, the house was empty now. A ‘for sale' sign next to the bird bath looked as if it had been there for years. I stood there, and the air felt thin, and like on the first last day, I took in everything.

*   *   *

The first time I came home from Sark, I felt time pass by looking for blackberries and tasting them. I'd go for walks and check there still were some left, and as they got sourer and the ones that were light red refused to get darker, I knew that that summer was over. Blackberries are still the way I see the furthest end of summer fall.

This time, if I cried on the ferry home, it was not strictly sadness. The sun was setting. Plane trails crossed one another and made tartan in the sky. There are times when the universe makes tears inevitable. Actually, I could not work out which it was: happiness or sadness. It was one foot on a tightrope between the two, and sometimes they feel the same.

Back at St Peter's Port, the boy and girl I'd watched in the morning were still sitting on the bench. Perhaps they'd never even moved. She was wearing his jumper now. She'd curled her feet up under her, was sitting on them. They weren't talking any more, just leaning on each other, slow, unworried. I remembered a teacher years ago, telling our class that every young person is beautiful. We'd looked around at one another then, and pushed one another and laughed. None of us understood what she meant.

But it's how unfolded the skin is. Possibility, time. How much time there is.

That night in Guernsey. I don't remember it ending – not
an
ending, anyway – but sometimes I think about something you said before we stopped. Your head was higher than either of ours. My cheek was on your chest, Pip's head, light, was down by one of our hipbones. I think it was mine. One of your arms was stretched up and your underarm looked like it was sprinkled with tiny iron filings. I ran my finger over them and kissed you there, then kissed your arm, then your neck. Soap. I remember how the hotel room smelt – everything we normally keep inside us was in the air. You shifted down the bed, ran a thumb over my forehead and whispered into my temple. You said something about ‘first time', and maybe you meant with three, or with a girl, but I said ‘me too' because it didn't matter which of those you meant, it was true.

I probably still do not understand it – love, whatever it is, whatever those feelings were. What makes us catch it, or why we throw it, so often, in the wrong direction. It's never wasted though. I say this with no motive, just gratitude that you were kind, but that summer, and for a while afterwards, I did love you, Sofi. I loved you completely, and it was my first time. I can say it now, there's no harm in it. No one ever minds someone having loved them.

I want to find a way to send you this. I want to tell you that I am happy. Look back over your shoulder at me. I hope, wherever you are, you too are happy.

I am nearly home now, and suddenly it's not cold, as though the air has caught on that it's just been day. The clocks went back a week ago, and the length of the evenings is still surprising us. By this time, though, it's almost dark and the person I love now is waiting for me.

But that's how it was. Just like that, I walked back into childhood, and it was an island. If it's an island, it has rules that don't make sense anywhere else. If it's an island, it's the smallest one, where the sun shines white, and we went there, and we knew we could not stay.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my real and lasting gratitude to:

Tor Henman, coach supreme to an all-blonde girls' football team, who knew I watched
Masterchef
and wondered if I'd like to join her as a private cook on Sark.

Andrew Miller, who employed us, and his fun, charming sons, who were fortunately a very different family from the one is this book. You have a cameo on page 69. I truly do promise that Sofi's kitchen hygiene was not based on my real-life practices.

The Men of Balzac – thank you for letting me be your pseudo-secretary for nearly two years. Most of this was written at your desk, fuelled by your Nespresso capsules.

My very first readers – Jethro, Dave, Sophie, Raoul, Laura – beloved friends who were kind enough to send positive postcards even though what they read then was skeletal, if not terrible.

Shakespeare & Company, and Charles and Clydette de Groot. It is a wonderful thing you do. The Paris Literary Prize changed my life wholly.

Hedgebrook writers' retreat on Whidbey Island. You have created a place of generosity and hope. Women writers – look it up, do everything in your power to go.

My editor Victoria Pepe and my agent Karolina Sutton, for taking a chance on this book. I have felt in safe – and exceptional – hands.

Aline, Anna, Ania, Philippa, Freya, Alex, Marie-Cybèle, Amanda, Paul, Natalie, Ralph, Leila. Friends who, in particular, read, supported, shared. My family: my beautiful godson Alex, Hanna, Babsy, Musa and Nina, the Winterburns, Trina, Sarah, John, Marianne, Ellie, Jacob and their baby-to-be, and my clever, kind Uncle Charles, an English teacher and majestic pianist, who never got the chance to read this, but gave me more book tokens, films and music than I thought was humanly possible.