Up until Thursday, we’d been planning to spend the weekend at home, as we usually did. By the time the working week had ended we were too tired to consider packing bags, checking tyre pressures and hauling ourselves out of town. Perversely, the very fact that the car had packed up again on Friday evening had probably provided the impetus for us to make the trip. It had just been one thing too many, one additional pebble of grief on a beach that seemed to stretch off in all directions.
“Fuck it,” Susan had snarled, when we finally made it back home. “Let’s get out of town.” The next morning we arose, brows furrowed, each grabbed a change of clothes, a toothbrush and a book, and stomped off to the tube station. And now, after brief periods on most of the trains that British Rail had to offer, we were there. Or nearly there, anyway.
As the bus clattered its elderly way down the coast, it passed a sign for Dawton, now allegedly only eight miles away. Judging by the state of the signpost, the village’s whereabouts were of only cursory interest to the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside. The name was printed in black on an arrow that must once have been white, but was now grey and streaked with old rain tracks. It looked as though no one had bothered to clean it for a while.
Virtually all of the minor annoyances which had been plaguing our every day were trivial in themselves. It was simply their volume and relentlessness which was getting us down. The result was a state of constant flinching, in which neither of us were fully ourselves. The paradoxical advantage of this was that we were getting to know each other very quickly, seeing sides of each other that would normally sit in obeisance for years. We found ourselves opening up to each other, blurting secrets as we struggled to find a new equilibrium.
One of these secrets, divulged very late one night when we were both rather tired and emotional, had involved Susan’s mother. I already knew that her mother had carved her name in Susan’s psyche by leaving her father when Susan was five, and by never bothering to get in touch again. A need for security was amongst the reasons that Susan had fallen into the clutches of her ridiculous ex-boyfriend. Before her mother had gone, however, it transpired that she had managed to instil a different kind of fear in her daughter.
In 1955, ten years before Susan was born and five before she married, Geraldine Stanbury went on a holiday. She was gone three weeks, touring around European ports with a couple of friends from college. On their return, the ship, which was called the Aldwinkle, was hugging the coast of England against a storm when a disaster occurred. The underside of the ship’s hull was punctured and then ripped apart by an unexpected rock formation, and the boat went down. By an enormous stroke of good fortune an area within the ship remained airtight, and all three hundred and ten passengers and crew were able to hole up there until help arrived the next morning. In the end, not a single person was lost, which perhaps accounts for the fact that the wreck of the Aldwinkle has failed to become a well-known part of English disaster lore.
Susan’s mother told her this story often when she was a child, laying great stress on what it had been like to be trapped under the water, not knowing whether help would come. As Susan told me this, sitting tensely on the rug in our flat, I was temporarily shocked out of drunkenness, and sat up to hold her hand. A couple of weeks previously we had come close to a small argument over where to take the holiday we had been looking forward to. Having been raised in a coastal town I love the sea, and had suggested St. Augustine, on the Florida coast. Susan had demurred, in an evasive way, and suggested somewhere more inland. The reasons for this now seemed more clear.
After Mrs. Stanbury had left, the story of her near death continued to prey on her daughter’s mind, though in different ways. As she’d grown up, questions had occurred to her. Like why, for example, there had not been a light showing at that point in the coast, when dangerous rocks were under the water. And why no one in the nearby village had raised an alarm until the following morning. The ship had gone down within easy view of the shore: was it really possible that no one had seen its distress? And if someone had seen, what on earth could have compelled them to keep silent until it should have been too late?
The village in question was that of Dawton, a negligible hamlet on the west coast of England. As I held Susan that night, trying to keep her warm against the bewilderment which years of asking the same questions had formed, I suggested that we should visit the village some time, to exorcise the ghosts it held for her. For of course no one could have seen the ship in distress, or an alarm would have been raised. And lighthouses sometimes fail.
When we got up for work the next morning, both more than a little hungover, such a trip seemed less important. In the next couple of weeks, however, during which we had two further nights on which the hardships of the day drove us to spend the evening in the pub, where we could not be contacted, the idea was mentioned again. It was a time for clearing out, in both our lives. One of the ways in which we were battling against the avalanche of trivia which still sometimes threatened to engulf us was by sorting out the things we could, by seeking to tidy away elements of our past which might have detrimental effects on our future together.
And so on the Friday when Susan finally demanded we get out of town, I suggested a pilgrimage to Dawton, and she agreed.
***
As the archaic bus drew closer to the village I noticed that Susan grew a little more tense. I was about to make a joke, about something, I’m not sure what, when she spoke.
“It’s very quiet out here.”
It was. We hadn’t passed a car in the last ten or fifteen minutes. That was no great surprise: as the afternoon grew darker the weather looked set to change for the worse, and judging from its size on the map, there would be little to draw people to Dawton unless they happened to live there. I said as much.
“Yes, but still.”
I was about to ask her what she meant when I noticed a disused farm building by the side of the road. On its one remaining wall someone had painted a large swastika in black paint. Wincing, I pointed it out to Susan, and we shook our heads as middle-class liberals will when confronted with the forces of unreason.
“Hang on though,” she said, after a moment. “Isn’t it the wrong way round?” She was right, and I laughed. “Christ,” she said. “To be that stupid, to do something so mindless, and still to get it wrong...”
Then a flock of seagulls wheeling just outside the window attracted our attention. They were scraggy and unattractive birds, and fluttered close to the window in a disorganised but vaguely threatening way. As we watched, however, I was trying to work out what the swastika reminded me of, and trying to puzzle out why someone should have come all this way to paint it. We were still two miles from Dawton. It seemed a long way to come to daub on a disused wall, and unlikely that such a small coastal town should be racked with racial tension.
Ten minutes later the bus rounded a final bend, and the village of Dawton was in sight. I turned and raised my eyebrows at Susan. She was staring intently ahead. Sighing, I started to extricate our bag from beneath the seat. I hoped Susan wasn’t building too much on this sleepy village. I don’t know what I was expecting the weekend to bring: a night at a drab bed and breakfast, probably, with a quiet stroll down the front before dinner. I imagined that Susan would want to look out across the sea, to try to imagine the place where her mother had nearly lost her life, and that would be it. The next day we would return to London. To hope for anything more, for a kiss that would heal all childhood wounds, would be asking a little too much.