Silver Bay Page 11

  Mike took a big bite of his sandwich. 'It's research, mainly. Background information for financial deals.' His voice was muffled with food.

  'Oh,' said Greg, dismissively. 'The boring stuff.'

  'Is it your own company?' said Hannah.

  Mike shook his head, his mouth apparently too full to talk.

  'Pay well?' said Lance.

  Mike finished chewing. 'I do all right,' he said.

  I waited until Hannah had gone in before I spoke to him again. 'Listen, I'm sorry about earlier. If I gave you a fright, I mean. I just couldn't work out how to get rid of those boats. But it was stupid. I acted . . . hastily. Especially with a passenger on board.'

  He had had a couple of beers and looked about as loosened up as I imagined Mike Dormer got, collar open above the neck of his sweater, sleeves rolled up. He was leaning back in his chair, staring at the black nothing where the sea should have been. The clouds obscured the moon, and I could just make out his smile from the porch light.

  'It was a bit of a surprise,' he said. 'I thought you were going to harpoon them.'

  That smile made me wonder how I had ever suspected he would talk to the police about me. But that is how I am: my default position, if you like, is one of suspicion. 'Not this time,' I said, and he grinned.

  He was all right, Mike. And it was a long time since I'd thought that about a man.

  My room was at the back of the hotel. I was at the furthest end of the corridor, the furthermost point of the building, if you like, with nothing but glass and timber between the ocean and me. Hannah's room was next door in, and in the small hours still, more frequently than either of us cared to admit, she would pad along the corridor and crawl into my bed as she had when she was small, so that I could wrap myself round her, grateful for her presence and the sweet scent of her warm skin. I only slept soundly when I could feel her against me. I would never have told her so: she had enough burdens to carry without me making her responsible for my only chance of sleep. But from the way she always fell into a deep slumber almost before I had pulled my covers over her, I thought the same might be true for her.

  Milly slept between me and the window, stretched out on the rug on the floor, and from the day I had arrived I had slept with it open, lulled by the sound of the sea, comforted by the endless stars in the uninterrupted sky. There had never been a night cold enough for me to close it completely. There, two storeys up, I could be alone with my thoughts, and, when alone, cry without anyone hearing. Those were the only times when I closed my window, so that any sound I uttered did not carry down to the whale crews or to stray listeners below. But the reverse was also true: just as the east wind sent my muffled tears downwind, so the gentle breeze from the west carried their words, their laughter, straight up to me. Which was how, as I hauled my fleece over my head, and stood there half undressed, I heard Greg's voice. It was a little lubricated by drink, its warmth gone. 'You won't get anywhere with her,' he was saying emphatically. 'I've been waiting four years for her, and I tell you, no one's got closer than me.'

  It was several seconds before I grasped that he was talking about me. And I was so mad at his arrogance, that he could dare to presume any kind of ownership over me, that he could say any of this to a stranger, that I had to fight the urge to get dressed again, go down and say as much.

  But I didn't. I was too shaken by the day's events to pick another fight. I just lay awake, cursed Greg Donohoe and tried not to think about things that could be brought back by an English accent.

  It was a good hour before I realised I hadn't heard Mike Dormer's reply.

  Eight

  Kathleen

  He thought I couldn't tell. He didn't realise it shone out of him like a beacon every time he looked at her. I could have warned him, could have told him that what Greg had said was partially true. But what would have been the point? People hear what they want to hear. And I've never yet met a man who didn't think he could turn the world on its axis if he wanted something badly enough.

  That said, the prospect of him making a move on my niece made me look a little harder at Mr Michael Dormer of London, England. I found myself examining innocent exchanges for signs of character, trying to glean a little more about his history. Hannah had said he worked in the City, and the little more he had told me suggested nothing particularly interesting in that. Some people might have been impressed by the fact that he obviously had money, but that has never meant much here, and certainly not to me. Besides, running this hotel I've seen the effect of money on character, and it's rarely pleasant. No, Mike Dormer seemed kind, was unfailingly polite, always had time to indulge Hannah, no matter how trivial the query, and all these things were in his favour. He was handsome, at least to my eyes - not that that means much, according to Hannah - and despite his quiet, easygoing manner, he was no pushover, as I had observed when, one late evening recently, Greg had tried to warn him off my niece. 'Thank you for your advice,' he had replied. I had stood back in the doorway, unsure whether to be prepared for an explosion. But he continued, in that clipped accent of his, 'You won't mind if I ignore it, since my private life is none of your business.' And, to my surprise, Greg - perhaps as wrong-footed as I was - had backed off.

  He still looked like a fish out of water, even after the best part of three weeks in Silver Bay. His collars had become a little looser, and he had bought himself a storm jacket. But sitting with the whalers, as he did most evenings, he was still no more at home than I would have been in the boardroom of some City firm.

  Oh, he tried: he responded good-naturedly to their jokes, accepted their off-colour teasing, bought more than his share of drinks. And when he thought he was not being observed, he gazed at my niece.

  But something about Mike bothered me. I had the feeling he wasn't being straight with us. There was an absence at his core that left me uneasy. Why would a single young man spend so long in a quiet little resort like ours? Why did he never talk about his family? He had told me one morning that he wasn't married, and had no children, then politely changed the subject. Most men, I've found, especially successful men, will talk about themselves at the drop of a hat, yet he didn't seem to want to impart to us anything about himself.

  Then there was the afternoon I saw him at the council offices. I was in town, picking up a new school dress for Hannah - Liza had had two trips planned that day and couldn't get away. As I stood outside the bank, having drawn some cash to pay for it, I saw him coming down the steps, a big folder under his arm, two at a time.

  In itself that wouldn't have bothered me. The tourism office is on the ground floor, and plenty of my guests head there at some point, often at my urging. I can't explain it too clearly, but he seemed more upright, a more dynamic character than the one we saw at home. And his expression when he caught sight of me: I know when someone feels they have been discovered, and it was there in the jolt on his face.

  He recovered pretty quickly, came striding across the road and made small-talk with me about what he had seen in town, asked the best place to buy postcards. But it shook me a little. I felt, suddenly, that Mike had something to hide.

  Nino told me I'd made too much of it. He knew a little of Liza's history - as much as he needed to know - and thought me overprotective. 'She's a big girl,' he said, 'a very different character from the one who arrived here. She's thirty-two, for God's sake.' And he was right. In fact, I can chart the truth of Nino's words in the photographs she and my sister sent me, the story of her life over the past fifteen years.

  A life told in photographs is not unusual - but what was, was the way Liza's appearance so nakedly reflected her circumstance; you could see it in the size of her eyes after my sister, her mother, died - a year later she was wearing garish, dark makeup that presumably gave her something to hide behind and certainly made her seem alien to me. It was hard to believe that the girl who had written me rambling letters about ponies and the hardships of the fourth form, the child who had visited here and turned cartwheels th
e length along the jetty, was under that camouflage.

  Then a few years later, I saw something else: the softening and vulnerability that comes with motherhood. There she was, proud, exhausted, just hours after giving birth, her hair stuck in sweaty fronds to her face, and later on when Hannah was a toddler, kissing her fat cheeks in some cramped passport-photograph booth. When she met Steven the pictures had stopped coming. In the only one I have from that period I have never wanted to put up, he looks smug, his arm round her shoulders, apparently proud to be a father. Nino thought I'd overreacted there, too. 'She looks beautiful,' he said. 'Groomed, expensively dressed.' But to me her eyes are veiled, saying nothing.

  We have no pictures of the time when she arrived here. What would have been the point?

  And now, five years on, what would a photograph of her show? A wiser, stronger woman. Someone who might not have come to terms with the past, but whose character contains a fierce determination to elude it.

  A good mother. A courageous, loving person, but sadder, more guarded than I'd like her to be. That's what her photograph would show. If she'd let us take one.

  The following morning, as Hannah and Liza sat at the kitchen table eating breakfast, a delivery man arrived, his van - like all delivery vans - skidding to a halt in the grit outside. Audibly chewing gum, he handed me a box addressed to Mike, which I signed for. By the time Mike came down - he was eating with us in the kitchen most days now - Hannah was in a frenzy of curiosity about it.

  'You got a parcel!' she announced, as he appeared. 'It came this morning.'

  He picked up the box and sat down. He was wearing the softest-looking sweater I had ever seen. I fought the urge to ask if it was cashmere. 'Quicker than I'd thought,' he observed. He handed it to Liza. 'For you,' he said.

  I'm afraid the look she gave him was of deep suspicion.

  'What?'

  'For you,' he said.

  'What's this?' she said, staring at it as if she didn't want to touch it. She hadn't yet tied back her hair, and it fell round her cheeks, obscuring her face. Or perhaps that was the point.

  'Open it, Mum,' said Hannah. 'I'll open it, if you want.' She reached over, and Liza let it slide from her fingers.

  As I sliced bread, Hannah attacked the plastic security wrapping, digging at the stubborn bits with the knife. A few moments later she ripped it off and examined the cardboard box underneath.

  'It's a mobile phone!' she announced.

  'With a video facility,' said Mike, pointing to the image, 'like mine. I thought you could use it to film those boats.'

  Liza stared at the little silver gadget; so exquisitely small, it seemed to me, that you couldn't have dialled a number without a pencil point and a microscope. After an age, she said, 'How much did it cost?'

  He was buttering a slice of toast. 'Don't worry about it.'

  'I can't accept it,' she said. 'It must have cost a fortune.'

  'Can you make films on it?' Hannah was already rifling through the box for the instructions.

  Mike smiled. 'Really, it cost nothing. I did a deal a while back with the company that manufactures them. They were happy to send it to me.' He patted his pocket. 'That's how I got mine.'

  Hannah was impressed. 'Do lots of people send you stuff for free?'

  'It's called business,' he said.

  'Can you get anything you want?'

  'You usually only get something if the person giving it thinks they might one day get something in return,' he said, and added hurriedly, 'In business, I mean.'

  I thought about that phrase as I put down the milk in front of him, a little harder than I'd intended. I tried not to think of our meeting the previous day.

  'Look,' he said, when Liza had still not touched the phone, 'treat it as a loan, if you like. Take it and use it for the whale-migration season. I didn't like what I saw the other day, and it would be nice to know that you had some more ammo against the bad guys.'

  I could see that this was a persuasive argument for my niece. I suppose he had guessed that she couldn't have afforded a piece of equipment like that if she'd had two full boats a day for the entire season.

  Finally, tentatively, she took the phone from Hannah. 'I could send pictures straight to the National Parks,' she said, turning it over in her hand.

  'The minute you saw anyone doing anything wrong,' he said. 'May I have some more coffee, Kathleen?'

  'Not just the disco boats, but all sorts of things. Creatures in distress, wrapped in fishing lines. I could lend it to other boats if I wasn't using it.'

  'I could take a film of the dolphins in the bay and show it at school. If you took me out to see them, I mean.' Hannah looked at her mother, but Liza was still staring at the little phone.

  'I don't know what to say,' she said eventually.

  'It's nothing,' said Mike, dismissively. 'Really. You don't have to say any more about it.' As if to underline the point he picked up the newspaper and began to read.

  But just as I could tell he wasn't taking in the printed words before him, I had a feeling about that phone, which was confirmed later in the day when, as I was making his bed, I found the receipt. It had been ordered in Australia, through some Internet site, and had cost more than this hotel takes in a week.

  The day that Liza and Hannah arrived here, I drove the three hours to Sydney airport to pick them up, and when we got back to the hotel Liza lay down on my bed and didn't get up for nine days.

  I was so frightened by day three that I called the doctor. It was like she was in some kind of coma. She didn't eat, she didn't sleep, she took only occasional sips of the sweet tea that I placed on the bedside table and declined to answer any of my questions. Most of the time she lay on her side and stared at the wall, sweating gently in the midday heat, her pale hair lank, a cut on her face and a huge bruise down the side of her arm. Dr Armstrong spoke to her, pronounced her basically healthy and said it might be something viral, or possibly a neurosis, and that she should be left to rest.

  I guess I was just relieved she hadn't come here to die, but she had brought me enough to cope with. Hannah was only six, anxious and clingy, prone to tearful outbursts and often to be found wandering weeping through the corridors at night. It was unsurprising, considering she had travelled for a day and two nights to a place she didn't know to be looked after by an old lady she had never met. It was high summer, and she came out in a rash from the heat, got bitten half to death by mosquitoes, couldn't understand why I wouldn't let her run around outside. I was afraid of the sun on her fair skin, afraid of letting her too close to the water, afraid of her not coming back.

  If I wasn't watching her, if I was distracted by some domestic task, she would creep upstairs and hold on to her mother like a little monkey, as if she could hug her into life. The way she cried at night broke your heart. I remember calling up to my sister in the heavens, asking her what the hell I was meant to do with these offspring of hers.

  By day nine I had had enough. I was exhausted from looking after the guests and this tearful child, who had not been able satisfactorily to explain what was going on, just as I in return could explain nothing to her. I wanted my bed back, and a moment's peace. I had never had a family of my own, so I wasn't used to the chaos that children bring, their endless morphing needs and demands, and I got snappy.

  By that stage I half suspected it was drugs: Liza was so distanced from life, so pale and disengaged. It could have been anything, I had concluded, with some discomfiture - we had had so little contact over the past few years. Fine, I thought. If this was what she was bringing to my doorstep, she would have to address it. She would have to abide by my rules.

  'Get up,' I yelled at her, opening the window and placing a fresh mug of tea beside her. When she didn't respond, I pulled back the covers, trying not to wince at how painfully thin she was. 'C'mon, Liza, it's a beautiful day and it's time for you to get up. Your daughter needs you, and I have to get on.'

  I remember how she turned her head, her eyes
dark with remembered horrors, and how my resolve vanished. I sat down on my musty bed, taking her hand between mine.

  'What is it, Liza?' I said softly. 'What's going on?'

  And when she told me I hauled her into my chest and held her, white-knuckled, my eyes on the distant horizon, as finally, twelve thousand miles and several hundred hours later, she wept.

  It was after ten o'clock that evening when we heard that a baby whale had beached. Yoshi had called me on the radio that afternoon to tell me they had seen a female humpback in distress, swimming up and down at the mouth of the bay. She and Lance had come quite close but they hadn't been able to work out what was wrong: she bore no obvious signs of illness, dragged no loose nets that might have cut into her. She just kept swimming, following some strange irregular path. It was abnormal behaviour for a migrating whale. That evening, as they took out a night party, a boatload of office workers from an insurance firm in Newcastle, they discovered the beached calf.

  'It's the one we saw before,' said Liza, as she put down the receiver. 'I know it.'

  We had been sitting in the kitchen; it was a chilly night, and Mike had retreated to the lounge to read a newspaper in front of the fire.

  'Can I help?' he said, when he saw us in the main hallway, pulling on our jackets and boots.

  'Could you stay here so that Hannah's not alone? Don't tell her what's going on if she happens to wake up.'

  I was surprised that Liza asked him - she had never so much as employed a sitter since she'd been here - but we had to get out as quickly as possible, and I suppose she had made up her mind about his character as I had. 'We may be a while,' I said, patting his arm. 'Don't wait up. And whatever you do don't let Milly out. The poor whale will have enough on its plate without a dog running around it.'

  He watched as we climbed into the truck. I had the feeling he would rather have come with us and helped. In my rear-view mirror I saw him silhouetted in the doorway the whole way down the coast road.

  There are few more heartbreaking sights than a beached calf. Thank God I've seen it only twice in all my seventy-odd years. The baby lay in the sand, maybe two metres long, alien and vulnerable, yet oddly familiar. The sea pulled at it gently, as if the waves were trying to persuade it to go home. It could only have been a few months old.