Zach followed her, cursing under his breath when he felt the cold grip of the sea around his ankles. It seemed to bite, but then Hannah surfaced nearby, skin shining and hair smoothed back, as slick as a seal’s, and the sight of her urged him on. He took a huge breath and dived in, feeling every muscle contract as the water closed over him. He surfaced with a gasp.
“Jesus wept! It’s freezing!” But even as he spoke, the water seemed less shocking, more bearable. He stopped flailing and swam in a small circle till he caught sight of Hannah.
“There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” she said. It had been a long time since he’d swum in a British sea, so very different from a warm holiday sea where the water was as clear as a swimming pool, the bottom sandy and featureless. No possible threats, nothing unseen. He put his feet down gingerly, felt rocks and the leathery touch of seaweed, imagined crabs and spiked urchins, things with stinging tentacles. He snatched his feet back up, peering down, but could see his own legs only as a blurry paleness, no more detailed than that. “Swim out a bit more. It gets sandy. Do you see where the water’s breaking over there? Avoid that if you can. Some sharp rocks under there. Come on.” Hannah floated on her back, issuing this steady stream of instructions, and Zach took a breath, ducked under the surface, and kicked hard towards her.
They swam side by side for a while, away from the shore, and the rhythm of it was calming, meditative. Hannah dipped beneath the surface every few strokes, and Zach watched the cloud of her hair, following her down into the heavy water. He swam on, and at one point she surfaced too close to him, with salt in her eyes, blinding her. They collided, and Hannah twisted onto her back, the hard length of her torso touching his as it passed, skin sliding, a lithe and fleeting caress. “Won’t Ilir swim with you?” said Zach.
“No, he’s a big wimp. Scared of the currents.”
“There are currents?”
“Too late to worry about that now! Just stick with me-you’ll be fine. The tide hasn’t turned yet. The chances of you being sucked out to sea are really… not that high.” Hannah smiled, and Zach decided that she was joking. “Here. Watch out-we can climb onto the jetty. Great spot for diving off, sunbathing, and making tourists think you can walk on water.” She scrambled carefully upwards, to stand as Zach had seen her before, on a spar of flat rock about a foot beneath the water, jutting out into the bay. “Even at low tide, the far end of this jetty stays covered, and the water off the end is deep enough for a small boat,” she said. “A couple of hundred years ago, smugglers used it all the time.”
“What did they smuggle?”
“Oh, anything. Wine, brandy, tobacco. Spices. Cloth. Anything easy to carry that they knew they could shift once they got it here. Why do you think Dimity’s cottage is called The Watch?”
“I see.” Zach searched with his toes for footholds in the rock, feeling the bite of barnacle shells as he climbed.
They sat side by side on the edge of the rock platform, and the breeze felt colder where it dried them. The sea flickered reflections in their eyes, under their chins.
“So, is that what you’re doing here in Blacknowle, really? Trying to start over again?” said Hannah. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.
“Not exactly. I mean, I have Elise now. I wish I had her in my everyday life, like before. I wish she wasn’t thousands of miles away, but I’m her dad, and I wouldn’t want to be anybody else. And she is in my everyday life, in a way. I think about her all the time. I suppose I came here because… I needed to know more about who I am. And my family has been connected to this place for generations.”
“Has it?” said Hannah. Zach smiled at her dubious expression.
“Yes. There’s a strong possibility that Charles Aubrey was my grandfather, you see.” Hannah blinked, and a tiny frown appeared between her eyebrows.
“Your grandfather?” she echoed.
“My grandma always claimed to be one of Aubrey’s women. They came here on holiday in 1939, and met Aubrey here. He even put her in a painting. And you know what they say about Charles Aubrey-that he was one of those men who patted the head of every child he passed in the street, just in case it was his.”
“Charles Aubrey’s grandson.” Hannah shook her head slightly, then tipped back her chin and laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Oh, nothing. Just the way things work out sometimes,” she said, offering no further explanation. She thought for a while, resting her chin on her crossed arms. Goose pimples spread up along her narrow thighs. “Do you still love Ali?” she asked eventually.
“No. I love… the memory of her. I love the way things were, in the beginning. Do you still love Toby?”
“Of course.” She shrugged. “But it’s different now.” She pressed her lips together and turned her head to look at him. “Very different.” She shook her head. “God, I’m so used to avoiding any mention of him in front of Ilir that I even find it hard to say his name!”
“Right,” said Zach heavily. “Does it make him uncomfortable, then?”
“Yes, but not in the way you’re thinking.”
“What way am I thinking?”
“Ilir always says-his people say-that it’s not right to speak of the dead. That you shouldn’t. It’s like some rigid social code where he’s from.”
“His people?” said Zach. Hannah paused, as though unsure whether to go on.
“Ilir is Roma,” she said.
“You mean he’s a Gypsy?”
“If you like,” she said neutrally. “They don’t have a great name in this country.”
“Where is he from? I’ve been trying to place his accent,” said Zach. Hannah narrowed her amber eyes, and again seemed oddly reluctant to answer.
“Kosovo,” she said shortly. “Ilir was a childhood friend of Toby’s. Well, not really childhood, I guess. Teenage. They met in Mitrovica when Toby’s father was in business over there, before the war started. When the boys were about thirteen, I think. Twelve or thirteen. He came over to help me when he heard Toby had died.”
“And never left?”
“As you see. Not yet, anyway. Ironic, really-the one person in my life who could share memories of Toby with me, and he refuses to.” She gazed away towards the farm for a while, and Zach thought he could see the bond between them, like strands in the air mirroring the currents in the water beneath them. It gave him a sinking feeling.
“Shall we swim? It’s too cold out here,” he said.
“I told you the water was warmer than it looked, didn’t I?” said Hannah, standing up. “Let’s dive.”
“Is it deep enough here?”
“Such a worrier!” She looked down, and gave him a smile. Zach stood up next to her, a full head and shoulders taller, so that she had to tilt her head. She studied him for a moment, in that appraising way he was getting used to. “Come back to the house afterwards, if you want,” she said, watching him steadily.