The Love Beach Read online

  Davies heard Conway move out of his cabin. He more or less knew where Conway would be going. He was surprised when his own cabin door was pushed open. Conway put his head in, saw Davies was awake, and stepped in like a large burglar.

  'I'm going to have a chat with Mother MacAmdrews,' said Conway.

  'I thought you might be.'

  'Well, she's lonely. Christ, she's only about thirty and shegets nothing.'

  'She's been giving you the agony?'

  'No. She hardly mentioned it. But the way she looks. Well, you know, mate, it's there. She's only getting all that fat on her because she's eating too much. Compensation.'

  'While her old man's on the bridge.'

  'Yes, that's about it. She says he always goes up to see the tub through the reef. These are the sort of nudges she was giving me after dinner tonight. Wasn't that meat stuff bloody awful?'

  'Couldn't touch it,' said Davies. 'The beef I mean, not Mrs MacAndrews. So why are you telling me?' He looked cautiously at the Australian.

  'Help, just a little help. That's what I want,' smiled Conway. 'You can hear the old man thumping about overhead, can't you? You will also be able to hear him coming down from the bridge. Well, if he does that while I'm in there, jump across the corridor and bang on the door. It's only a few yards.'

  'God, you've got a cheek,' said Davies.

  'Old MacAndrews doesn't care,' said Conway to pacify Davies's puritanism. He was unsure whether Davies didn't like the object or the method, or both. 'As long as he's got his batting averages and all that he's happy. She's told me so. He wouldn't like to walk in on it, that's all.'

  'It wouldn't be cricket,' suggested Davies.

  'A great humorist,' commented Conway. 'Is that okay, then?'

  'I'm not sure it is.'

  'I've got lots of influence in the islands,' said Conway. 'Official influence, you know. I'll introduce you to plenty of people who need butter and fats.'

  'Get stuffed,' said Davies mildly. 'Anyway, how do you know I won't drop off?'

  'You wouldn't do that,' said Conway. He went out and left the door open. Davies closed it, then got up and opened it again. He listened for MacAndrews's footfalls above. He was still walking the bridge.

  It was not unusual for him to lie awake at night, anyway. Now he was doing it for Conway, and indirectly, he consoled himself, for the well‑being of Trellis and Jones, wholesale grocers, exporters, and importers, of Circular Quay, Sydney, and through them the well‑being of Isslwyn Davies, and the natives of the Apostle Islands who would be getting their butter and fats on time for the first time in their turbulent history.

  MacAndrews was still above, sounding like a man laboriously using a big wooden mallet on the boards, hesitating between strikes, have a puff and a blow, and then continuing for a while before stopping again.

  It was funny, wasn't it, he thought, that last Sunday at home, before he had gone to catch the ship for Australia.

  After all, it was November, and it was all the wrong time to go to the beach. But the children had wanted to go and Kate had said that it would be all right as long as it didn't rain.

  'It's all very well going to Barry Island in August and it rains,' she said. 'At least you can get in and have a cup of tea somewhere but there's nothing open now.'

  'They want to go,' Davies had said looking at the children. 'And it's the last day.'

  That last day. The words kept on being repeated all the time, didn't they. He said them, and Kate said them, and David and little Mag. The last day. The last time they would be together in Wales, of course, is what everybody meant. And they weren't sorry about that. After all, Australia had more sun than Wales, and better houses and much better beaches, and it was cheap at ten pounds each. Almost as cheap as Barry Island.

  They got the train from Newport and there was hardly anybody on it, not like a summer Sunday. David and Maggie pushed against the window, the boy standing and stretching, the girl kneeling on the plum railway upholstery. He and Kate sat on opposite sides and smiled at them and then at each other. He became aware that the cuff of his shirt was still frayed. She had promised to mend it too. She saw him looking at it and grinned. He could see her sitting back there now, her nice face and her hair done up by herself. It looked all right too. Her coat was getting old, but she wouldn't need a coat in Australia. She would get a nice tan too, going out on the boat, and he would meet her in Sydney, and they would be able to start again. He had answered her smile and nodded for her to come across to him and sit beside him. Sometimes they were a bit too much like parents. Doing that he felt a little childish, it was like trying to get her in the back seat of his old car when they were first going out together. They did not have that any longer either.

  Lying in the bunk, with the thin mattress all lumps beneath him, Davies smiled up at the ceiling on which Captain MacAndrews was still bumping. Kate had refused to go across the gap in the compartment and he had laughed and had surrendered and gone across to sit by her instead. He had held her hand while the train ran through the marshy Welsh plain that goes down to the Bristol Channel.

  It was a solemn day, grey but mild, with no stirring on the marshes and the ships in Newport Docks sitting up in the distance as though they were voyaging on the grass and reeds and mudflats.

  'Mam,' said David. 'is that Dad's ship? Is that the ship for Australia?'

  Davies remembered answering for Kate. Kate had told Mag to be careful not to fall from the seat. Mag, who was four, said: 'We are going on the ship too! We're going too!'

  'Soon,' he had assured them. 'Quite soon. When I write a letter to Mam.'

  Kate had put the little girl on her lap and showed her the sea‑birds from the Channel who had come to winter in the marshes. They went through Cardiff, Bute Street trying to get its Sunday morning eyes open, and then to Barry where they got a taxi to the beach because the little seaside station was closed at that wrong end of the year.

  What a day that had been. What a wonderful last day. He had never realized the beach was so big and he had been going there all the years he could remember. All the rubbish of summer had been taken away by the huge tide and by the corporation workmen. The sand was flat and damp, the sea grey and tired, and there was no one there but a man taking a mongrel for a walk. The road made by their footsteps went clearly along the sand into the remote end of the beach and up there the man could be seen throwing stones for the dog.

  Davies and Kate, hands held, each holding the glove of one child, walked the empty beach. David and Mag wanted to go into the sea or make sand castles. Kate told them they could draw pictures and write their names in the sand. Davies walked her on a little way. A dozen oyster catchers, strangers, black and white with orange beaks, hobbled about like men on crutches.

  'Never see them down here in the summer,' he had said. 'Don't blame them,' replied Kate. They seemed to have less to discuss today than ever. He was going to tell her again, how good it would be in Australia, but he stopped himself. He had already said it. The funfair was all closed up and covered with sheets of tarpaulin and canvas, like an exhibition waiting to be unveiled. The cafés and the hotels across from the beach looked out to the slate sea and the cold ships moving on it, speechlessly and with blind, shuttered eyes. No one, it seemed, had anything to say.

  'We'd better go back,' she had suggested, half turning as she said it. 'We can't leave them too far behind.'

  'No, of course,' he said. The ' children were drawing and digging by the shore and had not looked up. Davies turned and as he did so caught Kate and clumsily folded his arms about her. She was a bit taller than he was and it had always embarrassed him to embrace her standing up. It had probably looked just as odd on the beach, on that last day, but there was no one to see or to laugh. He put his lips to her cheek and turned her head so that they could kiss properly. It was not timed very well, not very successful he thought now, but they kissed anyway, miles from anybody but David and little Mag.

  'It'll be all right, you
know,' he had said. 'It will, truly, Kate.'

  'Yes,' she had answered.

  It had been a wonderful last day.

  Conway pushed against the cabin door. 'Didn't go to sleep on me did you?' he said.

  Davies turned. 'I didn't,' he confirmed. 'Did she?'

  Conway breathed a laugh without any sound coming out. He angled his head to hear the boots of MacAndrews. 'Still navigating eh? He's a fine skipper that.'

  'And you're a fine bastard,' said Davies.

  Conway said: 'And you're a great butter and fats salesman, not to mention adulterer's look‑out. Thanks.'

  'I wasn't sleeping anyway. The boots keep me awake.

  21

  Were you well received, or is that being a bit indelicate for a mere adulterer's look‑out?'

  'Very well received,' nodded Conway. 'You should try it yourself. She's open all night.'

  'No thanks. I'm married anyway, and I keep to it.'

  'Do you?' said Conway as though Davies had revealed some strange hobby. 'Where's your wife. In New South Wales?'

  'No, the old one.'

  'Oh, I forgot, you're one of those bloody Taffy people.'

  'And adulterer's look‑out.'

  'You should try it some time. Help you a hell of a lot. You wouldn't be so worked uD and intense.'

  'I told you, she's in South Wales.'

  Conway said: 'That's a long way to go for a shag.' He went out and closed the door. Davies heard Captain MacAndrews clump down from the bridge and he realized that the ship was riding still in calm waters.

  Two

  George Turtle left his bungalow at 15 Laburnum Avenue, Sexagesima, at eight‑thirty. It was the last month of the rainy season, a hot, brown, and grey morning with one rattling shower just tailing over St Peter's Island, heading for St Barnabas, and another coming in with the certainty of a train on time from the seaward direction of St Paul's and St Mark's.

  It would be like that for most of the day, and every day until April when the last of the rain trains would pass the islands and the ocean sun would be left to itself in the ocean sky. Mr Turtle had only gone a few yards towards the lean‑to which sheltered the green Morris Minor he had shipped with him from Isleworth, but by that time his shirt under his plastic mackintosh was breathing heavily with the day's first sweat. It must be eighty already, and before noon it would be ninety or more and there would be four hard showers in the morning, and a further seven before nightfall. There would also be an electric storm.

  He unlocked the fading Morris with keys sticky with moisture. Inside the car it stank like a humus heap. NU Turtle could not decide whether to steam in his plastic bag as he drove or whether to take it off and have to get into the uncomfortable cocoon again in five minutes when he reached the radio station. The rain was banging down on the roof of his lean‑to. He decided to leave the mackintosh on. He started the car and backed it out into the thick wall of rain. It drilled frighteningly on his roof and he couldn't see through the rear window. But it also meant he could not see Minnie waving from the bungalow window and he would not have to wave back. That was something anyway. She had received a letter from her sister in Isleworth in the consignment of mail newly arrived in The Bafjin Bay and Minnie was upset because it had been snowing in Isleworth.

  23

  'Poor things,' she kept saying as she went about the bungalow. 'Poor things.'

  George had bright eyes and no hair. He was one of those men who show photographs of army groups taken at Aldershot in 1944 and challenge you to guess which is him. No one had ever guessed right. He had bushy hair in his military days and it gave him added height. Even he had not realized how small he was until he went bald after meeting and marrying Minnie.

  Going cautiously down the running red mud of the hill which fell from his bungalow to the radio station, the windshield wipers pathetically losing their battle with the Pacific rain, George had a quick thought that he had moved from Isleworth because of the weather. But he felt guilty about it, and thrust it away with an annoyed twitch of his head. It was like having a short steamy dream about an old mistress. Not that George had any mistress, old or otherwise, although he did occasionally have short, steamy dreams. He did feel guilty about them, but the guilt never lasted. After all, with Minnie he felt he deserved some recompense somewhere.

  Snow in Isleworth. Poor benighted devils. He could picture them now sliding about on the pavements, trying to claw their way on to buses, jammed like pigs in the underground, trying to make some progress in their cars through the freezing slush and the frozen traffic. Hah! He was lucky to be out of that lot. Rushing to get to their offices; little cups of tea, wet coats and shoes, neon lights that sent you blind by the time you were forty‑five. My God, how fortunate he had seen it all as it really was, and in time too. In time, that was the important thing. He was only forty‑three and he had seen it all in time. What fools they were, those Isleworth idiots, those Dagenham dolts, those Twickenham twerps, those Russell Squares even. He took one hand from the wheel and smugly patted the back of the other, congratulating himself on his alliteration. He really must write a book one day. I Went To Paradise. Not bad. I Ventured Paradise. Much better. A good title that. It had that sniff of arrogance, bravery, romance about it. I Ventured Paradise.

  Very good indeed! He would definitely start writing this time. That evening. After the British Legion meeting.

  Not that you could see much of Paradise today. The outer islands had been gobbled by the rain, the lagoon lay like waste water from a miner's laundry. The Baffin Bay was out there riding irritably at anchor while the little boats went out to get her cargo. She had been a whole day late again which had put everyone on the island in a filthy humour. MacAndrews's fault obviously, hanging around on the journey. No adventure, MacAndrews. Everyone agreed on that. And a day late again.

  As the Morris was slithering the final few yards to the base of the hill, a wild pig came out of the wall of undergrowth at the side and gave the car a violent blow with its backside as it went by. George braked as soon as he saw the shape through the rain on his windscreen. Not through any particular humanity towards wild pigs, but through some remnant of suburbia, some deposit of Isleworth still left in his instincts, which made him react like that. It annoyed him immensely and he hoped that another couple of years among the islands would see the flaw eradicated. Kendrick and Hassey and a lot of the others were always driving up to the British Legion Club with something or other they had hit sticking like a trophy to the front bumper. Dogs, chickens, goats, and Hassey had once turned up with a very old man from one of the native villages transfixed there. That had cost him twenty‑three pounds ten shillings, one way and another.

  Mind, you had to be going at a reasonable speed to get the better of a wild pig on a rainy morning. He got out of the car into the almost solid rain. It beat on his plastic mac, with its pixie hood, making him feel as though he were in a paper bag. There was a dent in the mudguard. These pigs were getting troublesome around the town. He got back into the car. The rain funnelled down the creases of his mac and made an infantile pool around his feet. Something ought to be done about them. He would bring it up at the next meeting of the Roads Committee of the Sexagesima Town Council. Feeling through his outer covering was like rummaging through wet cabbage leaves. But he made it with as little discomfort as possible. He took out his Apostle Islands Horticultural Society Diary and wrote in the memorandum with a ball‑point pen.

  The British Governor of the Apostle Islands, Sir William Findlay‑Stayers, watched the rain pebbling the water of the lagoon and shivering the palm trees just outside his study window. He thought how much heavy rain made palms ,look like old ill men, heads bowed, arms hopelessly dangling.

  If Sir William had been afforded a choice of islands upon which to live, he would not have chosen this one anyway. Luing, in the Inner Hebrides, was more his place, or Seil, where you could walk to the highland mainland over a flower‑thick bridge across the narrowest neck of th
e Atlantic Ocean. He was not fond of sea travel and if it were possible to walk to an island he preferred it. He liked cold wet islands, too, not hot and wet.

  He went to his study window again and looked grumpily over the cut‑up water to The Baffin Bay unloading her cargo. So far no official mail had arrived, but this was not unusual. The Chinese shopkeepers in the town invariably got their letters before his arrived. On Her Majesty's Colonial Service meant nothing to the postal service, but since it was run by a Jew, the only joint public operation in the entire archipelago, this was to be expected. In fact he shrewdly suspected that the French Governor perused the British official dispatches before he did. That is why they were always so late. He had, on one or two occasions, heard Etienne Martin, his French counterpart, drop accidental remarks at social affairs which could only have been the result of reading the British letters. Still, Sir William was disinclined to make an issue of it because relations were never less than strained, and, in any case, through some addressing error the monthly consignment of excellent French liqueurs and brandy unfailingly turned up on the doorstep of British Government House, and Sir William enjoyed them.

  'Funny game,' he muttered to himself, thinking around these things. 'Aye, a funny game.' He was in the tradition of gaunt highland Scots, his face like a retired sparrow‑hawk, sharp and powerful but having lost its hunting look and aggressive intentions. He yearned for home, for the bald brown hills and the winter waters of the Lom, for fat cattle and fat women, and for great roaring fires. After he had been Governor of the Apostles for two years he had abruptly surrendered to an orgy of nostalgic patriotism, had ordered a stone fireplace to be built at his residence, and, when it was done had, regardless of the terrible Pacific heat, sat alone, kilted and dirked, before a huge blaze, drinking toddy and singing the songs of the islands, sweet and rough. After this he had been in hospital for three weeks suffering from severe dehydration and the fire had not been kindled since.