Chapter 15 The Kestrel Comes In

The Kestrel came into Selkie Cove at twenty to seven on the morning of the fourteenth with a gearbox that was making a noise like a bucket being dropped down a stairwell, and Piet saw her from the library window through a pair of binoculars he had taken down off the wall without asking, which Iona Pratt let him have because she was already on the telephone to a solicitor and did not have the attention to spare. "She's flying the wrong pennant." "What does that mean?" "It means nobody is paying her to fish." He put the binoculars down on the sill. "When my father wants the boat to stop for four days he takes the masthead pennant down and hoists the courtesy flag, which means he is ashore and cannot be reached. He has done it eleven times in my lifetime. I have counted them off the back of this house since I was eleven." "Then how many times has he been in this town?" "That is what I am going to find out." He was already at the door, and Tove was not going to let him go down to a quay alone, so she put her coat on over her jeans, and Mrs. Ostler from the Co-op looked up from the till with the specific expression of a woman who has been looking at the harbour through a net curtain for forty years and has seen a great many things arrive. They watched from the wall at the end of the chandlery yard at five in the afternoon, when the tide was in and the water was flat and the whole town had come out for no reason at all, the way a town does when something is happening that it has not got a name for. The Kestrel was tied second out from the fish quay with her crew ashore and her hatch off and a smell of diesel coming over the roof of the car park. She was bigger than Tove had imagined boats were. There was a man standing on her stern with a coil of rope in his hands who was sixty-one years old and sunburnt through the shirt and had a grey beard trimmed short and the hands of somebody who has pulled a net since he was nine. "He does not look like anybody in here," Tove said. "He does not look like anybody in here because he has not been here for twenty-nine years and the town has had time to get used to him being somebody else." Piet was gripping the yard wall with both hands. "He has a face I know from about eleven Christmases and he has a face that four people in this bay have been staring at for two days, and he has not looked up once. He is looking at the wall." "Piet—" "I am going over." "I know." "Stay where you are." "Eleven minutes," Tove said. "You will give me eleven minutes and then I am coming down there whatever you have decided, and if you have decided something you do not want a witness for, then you should not be doing it on a quay in daylight in front of an entire town." He went down the yard and out onto the fish quay and stood four feet off the stern of the Kestrel, and Tove counted to sixty and then walked down the yard after him, because she had decided in the car park of a school in another town in September that she was not going to be the one who looked away, and she was not going to start now over a wall. She got as far as the corner of the ice house. From there she could hear them both, and see them both, and the sound of the harbour going in and out was very good at carrying a voice across forty metres of water, which she had not expected and which turned out to be the entire reason she was standing there. "My name is Piet Beaulieu," he said. "I am sixteen. My father is on a piece of paper in a box under the floor of the library and I have been reading it since the ninth of September, and I am going to read it to you now, out loud, on this quay, because I would rather you heard it here than somewhere you can arrange." He read the four offices off the leaf. Harbourmaster's clerk, 1994. Trustee of the fund, 1995. Owner of the Arawak, 1996. Co-signatory, 1996. Then he said, "The third one is you. And the fourth one is a man called Elmer Doak, and it is in his own name, and it was written by somebody else, because his hands had gone." Yannick Beaulieu put the coil of rope down on the deck and did not come down to the quay. He stood at the rail with his hands hanging, and for about four seconds he did not move at all, and then he said, in a voice that carried perfectly and was almost conversational, "Who put you up to this?" "Nobody put me up to it. A woman called Iona Pratt handed me the key to a room in 1996 when she was a schoolgirl and she has not said one word about it since until Tuesday." Piet did not move back. "Write to me yourself if you want to check." "I am not going to check whether my own son is my own son." The older man's hands came up and gripped the rail. "Say the rest of it, then, whatever it is, and then go and do whatever it is you are going to do." "You were there in March 1990." "I was at sea. I was three hundred and forty miles north of here on a stern trawler called the Ardent on the fourth of March 1990 and the skipper was a man called Neve and he is dead, and I have the pay slip in my wallet because I have been carrying that pay slip since I was twenty-five years old for reasons I could not explain to you if I tried." He took it out and held it up so that the whole quay could see a small folded paper. "That is a document. I have waited thirty-six years for somebody to want one from me. Take it to your teacher. She can ring the harbour office in Port Kelvin and a man there will read it out and he will not have the slightest idea what he is doing." Tove came out from behind the ice house. "Do you want it in writing," she said, "or would you like me to say it so that the whole fish quay has it?" He looked at her for the first time and his face did something that Tove did not expect at all, which was go soft. "No," he said. "You have got the ticket already. Take the ticket." "Then you will not mind me saying that the man who came to your grandmother's house in 2010 has been writing to you for nine years without a stamp, and you have answered him eleven times." The quay had gone very quiet. A gull landed on a bollard four feet away and took off again immediately, which is the thing gulls do. "You have been in this town two days," Yannick Beaulieu said. "Three." "Three days, and you have a solicitor's letter on a school and a newspaper with your name at the top of it, and you have read a leaf that has been under a floor for thirty years." He bent and picked the rope up again. "In August 1996 I sat in the harbour office in this town with the door shut and a man asked me to write his name on a page. I did it in nine seconds. He gave me a drink of tea and I would not have it, and he noticed that I would not have it, and neither of us has ever said one word about it, and I have been living in a different country from that afternoon for thirty years." "You could have said." "Whose?" Piet did not have an answer ready, and Tove watched him fail to have one, and it was the only time all afternoon that he looked sixteen. "Because you signed it," Tove said. "Because somebody asked me to write a name," he said, "and a man of thirty-one who does not have to carry it does not say no to a man who is frightened, and that is the entire of my life as far as that page is concerned. I did not cut anything. I did not type anything. I did not know there was a boy." "You have known about the boat," Piet said. "I have known about the boat since 1990." "And you never came." "I came twice." Yannick Beaulieu looked at his own hands and put them flat on the rail, the way a man puts them down when they have started to shake and he has decided they will stop. "Four days in the spring of 1990 and one afternoon in 1996. And I have been back nine times to a wall at the end of a slipway where I can see the top of a church spire over a set of chimneys, because there is a woman who was seventeen who held a door for a man with a razor in his hand, and she would not look at me, and I stood on that wall in October and in April and in June for thirty years and she would not look at me, and I am not going to tell my son why on a quay." Tove looked at Piet, and Piet looked at the water. "Your mother," Tove said, and then wished she had not. "My wife died in February," he said. "She knew about the boat. She knew about the child. She is the one who made me put my name nowhere, and I have obeyed that instruction every day for sixteen years including the day I put you on a bus with a duffel bag and four hundred euros, and if you want to take a view on that then take it on paper and not on a quay, because I am sixty-one and I am not doing it here." He went in through the fish dock office and the door shut, and the harbour went on going in and out for a while, and nobody on the fish quay said anything, and Mrs. Ostler from the Co-op put her net curtain down for the first time since 1996. Piet walked back up the yard with Tove and did not say one word until they were through the ice house. "Twenty-sixth of February," he said. "That is your mother's—" "That is the twenty-sixth of February." He stopped walking. "A girl of nineteen comes back to this town in April with nothing, and goes to a room over a shop, and does not see her aunt, and does not see the town, and says she was seventeen in 1996, and gets put on a bus." He put his hands in his coat pockets. "There is one thing that has been wrong with that story since September and I have not been able to say it out loud." "Say it." "Nineteen-year-old girls do not get put on buses. Nineteen-year-old women get put in taxis." He started walking again. "She has been here longer than she has told us. She has been here for years." --- ---