The Boat House

TWENTY-SEVEN

"You're looking tired, Peter," Alina said when Pete came through to breakfast the next morning. He'd heard her moving around and had almost panicked, thinking that he was late; but then he'd checked his old wind-up alarm and realised that he wasn't, and so then he'd used the spare fifteen minutes to stand under the tepid shower in an attempt to shock himself awake.

He said, "That's no surprise. The yard's having its busiest season in ten years, and two of us are handling it all."

This was hardly an overstatement. The yard staff presently consisted of Pete himself and Frank Lowry, with very little practical help from its owner. Business had started to pick up with a May heatwave that had brought out the sun umbrellas and the city hordes. The umbrellas were on the Venetz sisters' restaurant terrace, and the hordes were under them and everywhere else. They jammed the roads with their trailers and caravans, they turned up in shorts and sandals and herded in the village centre looking for postcards and souvenirs, and they crowded the inshore waters of the lake with dinghies and windsurf boards and dangerously cheap inflatables. They sat on blankets on the shore, they dropped ice creams on the promenade, they tried to fly kites, they argued. They pulled into the passing places on the narrowest roads and treated them as laybys, setting up a whole living room's worth of furniture by the open tailgates of their cars.

And when those cars broke down — which, many of them being underserviced and badly prepared, they tended to do with an inevitability that amazed only their owners — they demanded instant service from the staff of an auto marine yard that was already being run under the strain of some of the heaviest lake traffic that it had ever experienced.

He hefted the old tin kettle. It was half full, and still warm. He set it on the stove to heat up again.

"How do you do it?" he said, picking up the cereal boxes and shaking to see which was the least empty.

"Do what?"

"You work longer hours than I do, you walk all the way there and back, and you don't even sleep at nights. I'd really like to know what's keeping you going."

She gave a slight shrug. "I don't even think about it," she said. "Why do you mention it now?"

"Forget it," he said, and he gathered up the cereal box and a bowl and everything else and headed out through the house to breakfast alone on the covered terrace.

She appeared after a couple of minutes, and set one of the cabin's old china mugs alongside him.

"I made your tea," she said.

He looked down into the mug.

"You always make it black," he said.

"Only because you took the milk," she said.

He looked at her. He'd never seen her looking better; her eyes were bright and her hair shone and her skin glowed like a small child's. Pete, by contrast, was feeling as if he'd been broken into pieces and badly reassembled.

He looked away.

He hadn't intended to sigh, but he did it anyway.

"What's the matter?" she said, moving around him and half-hitching herself onto the wooden rail so that he couldn't avoid her again; and Pete felt embarrassed, because he knew that he was acting with just a touch of stupidity.

"Nothing," he said. "Really, nothing. I'm sorry. It's just the pressure of the work, I think it's wearing me down."

But he knew that this was only a part of the answer. Late at night, when Alina was out and he was unable to sleep, he'd find himself thinking that maybe — just maybe — he could pick up a phone at this hour and dial the old number, and his mother would answer the same as always. Not at any other time, but only then; that particular hour of the night when the rest of the world seemed to have closed down and the morning stood at a distance almost beyond imagination. But he'd no phone in the house, and to leave the house would be to break the spell; and so he'd lie there, and after a while he'd be further twisted by the certainty that she was waiting somewhere, waiting on the other side for a call that would never come.

That had to be it, didn't it? For what else could have bypassed his defences, what else could have burrowed so far under his skin?

"I know what you need," Alina said.

"Really."

"Yes, really. Listen to me, I'm serious." But she was smiling, so it was that kind of serious. Behind her was a backdrop of Spring woodland, sunlight and shade moving in a gentle morning breeze.

She said, "You've been on your own for too long. You need someone. I don't mean someone like me, just being around, I mean you really need someone to be close to. People who've lost, they become vulnerable. Believe me, I know."

"What are you leading up to?"

"Mrs Jackson. From the Estate. I heard how you danced with her on the night of the party. She'd be perfect for you, Peter."

He could only stare.

She said, "Doing what I do, I hear all kinds of things. About everyone. She had a husband, they say he used to 'knock her around'. If that means what I think it means then she needs someone like you, too. You're one of the kindest people I ever met. I know that probably embarrasses you, but it's true. You ought to give her a chance to see it in you. That's my idea, I can help it to happen if you want me to. What do you think?"

Pete said nothing for a moment.

And then he stood up.

"For Christ's sake," he said, and he stalked back into the house leaving everything behind.

After a few moments, she appeared in the doorway to his room as he rummaged for a spare work shirt.

She said, "People having a conversation usually stay in the same building."

He turned to her.

"You really don't know what you're saying, do you?"

"Tell me."

"Forget your matchmaking. Don't even think about pushing me together with anyone because it isn't going to happen. It isn't going to happen because they look at me and they look at you and they put two and two together and what they come up with tells them, back off. You think you get to hear all the gossip down there but, believe me, there's talk going on that you obviously don't even dream about. I'm the kindest person you ever met? Yeah, well, so much for the good that it's done me. I'll tell you what, I'll have them put it on my gravestone. Here lies Mister Nice Guy, but who gives a shit anyway. I mean, look at you. You're out every night like fucking Dracula, or something. And me, I might as well have rabies. If that's where kindness gets you, I'm going to kick pigeons. Even Hitler had a fucking girlfriend, and who's got a good word to say about him?"

He was sorry immediately, of course, but too much of the truth had come out for him to want to take any of it back; so he sat heavily on the bed and he looked away from her and he rubbed at his still-tired eyes, anything to avoid meeting her gaze and then having to concede his embarrassment. Now it was as if his anger had blown away into the air, like so much steam.

She sat beside him, and laid a hand on his shoulder.

"Oh, Peter," she said.

She didn't seem to be offended. It was a voice of sadness, almost of pity. He looked at her then and her face seemed to be saying, I understand; and then he tried to speak, but the sense of it somehow skipped away from him like a stone across water.

"Listen to me," she said. "I'm sorry it came to this, and I want to set it right. I'm going to leave you. I'm going to leave you soon, but first I want you to understand how much you've done for me."

"I just blew up," Pete said, giving in to it as he'd known that he would. "I'm sorry. This isn't necessary."

"Yes it is, and that's why I'm moving out. I don't mean this minute, probably not even today. But as soon as I can, I will. I won't even tell you, I'll just go. You'll see me around, but after a while I'll just be someone you once knew. I wish I could get out of your life forever, but I don't think that's possible any more. You see, I have to stay in the valley — I've started to make it my home, and every time you leave a home you die, just a little. And there's only so much life in any of us… use it all up and we're gone, even though we're still walking around. That could have happened to me already, if it wasn't for you — you brought me here and you set me up and suddenly I was in a place where I felt I could belong again."

She stood up and, walking out of the room, left him there.

Well. This was exactly what he wanted. Wasn't it?

Wasn't it?

He could hear her moving around elsewhere in the house. After a minute, he got up and followed the sounds to her room.

Her door was open.

"I appreciate what you're saying," he said, as she looked up from folding some of her clothes for the drawer. "But something about all this bothers me."

"What do you mean?" she said, leaving the drawer and walking across the room toward him. She'd made almost no changes in here; with its bare walls and almost complete lack of ornamentation, the room looked almost as it had on the day she'd moved in.

Pete said, "You once told me you were losing a battle. Inside."

She didn't seem to understand.

"I feel fine," she said, and closed the door on him.

By the time that he'd reached the yard, Frank Lowry was already in and working.

There was a Vauxhall on the hoist and a Land Rover half-inside the workshop with its bonnet already open. Five more cars already stood on the strip outside, and others would undoubtedly join them as the day went on. The phone was ringing. Hanging on its regular nail, the clipboard on which the boatyard worksheets were kept was well overloaded and straining at its spring. Pete flicked at the papers as he walked by, and the clipboard rocked like a pendulum. No matter how hard he worked to clear it, the backlog was getting bigger and bigger. The phone was still ringing.

Ted Hammond came around from behind the hoist, and picked it up.

He glanced at Pete as he took the call, something about a brokerage job, and he winked. The differences in him were slight, but immediately noticeable. His shirt was clean, he'd shaved, his hair had been combed. While he wasn't exactly back to normal, he had the bright, clear-eyed look of a lifelong drunk who'd just come to realise that there was something worthwhile in staying sober.

As Ted was hanging up, Pete turned to Frank Lowry. He'd just emerged from the floor in the cab of the Land Rover with a length of broken accelerator cable in his hand.

Pete indicated Ted and said, "Who's this?" And Frank Lowry shrugged.

"His face is familiar," he said. "Didn't he used to work here, once?"

"All right," Ted said with a gesture of pretended weariness, "I've got the message. I'm sorry, lads. What more can I say?"

"Forget it, Ted," Pete told him.

"No," he said. "You two have been working flat out to keep my business going, and I've just been dicking off around the house. I don't deserve it, but I'm grateful."

"He's getting sentimental," Frank Lowry muttered, glancing around like a cat looking for a way to avoid an impending bath. "I'm off." And he wandered away into the depths of the workshop; under the levity, there had been a trace of real embarrassment. Lowry, a man who didn't show his own feelings, obviously didn't like to be around when others were showing theirs.

But Ted didn't seem to be offended. He'd known Lowry for too long and, besides, there seemed to have been a rebirth of the spirit in him that wasn't going to be choked off so easily.

Pete said, "You're looking better, Ted."

But Ted sighed. "I wish I felt it. Life's finally shaping up in the best way you can hope for, and then something else just comes along and wipes the slate clean. Everything, bang. I wish it had been me, instead of Wayne. I could live with being dead, if Wayne was okay."

This made perfect sense to Pete, and the two of them pondered it for a while before Pete said, "What got you going again?"

"I'm a long way from that," Ted said. "What you're looking at now is only skin deep. But I never before spent one working day on the skive while others got on with the job, and I'm ashamed it ever came to that. I don't know how to thank you."

"Big pay rises," Pete suggested as the phone started to ring again.

"Get out of it," Ted said, "can't you see how far behind we are?" and went off to answer it.

Angelica and Adele were in the restaurant kitchen when Alina arrived, later that morning. Adele was cutting salad, and Angelica was rewriting the evening menu.

Angelica looked up from the corner of the table that she was using, and said, "Good morning, Alina. It's Wednesday."

"I know," Alina said, hanging her shoulder bag over the back of one of the chairs.

"And you know who always phones at around eleven on a Wednesday," Adele said, before the kitchen was filled with the five second roar of the blender as it swallowed a pound of carrots and extruded them as a mass of fine strands. Alina glanced at the clock. It was just after eleven thirty.

When the blender cut out, she said, "I like my admirers to be predictable. It saves me from having to worry about how to keep them interested."

Angelica, in the spirit of the running joke that they'd all been sharing for several weeks now, said, "We told him you'd taken a boat onto the lake and couldn't be reached for the rest of the day. I think perhaps he's starting to get the message. What excuse would you like us to give him next time?"

But the young Russian woman seemed to have other things on her mind.

"He's probably had enough excuses by now," she said. "Next time, I think I'd better speak to him."