"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."
TWENTY-EIGHT
Ross Aldridge stood in the empty caravan, feeling like an intruder in a place owned by strangers. In fact it was owned by strangers, a family who lived more than two hundred miles away; they used the caravan for about six weeks of the year, on and off, and they rented it out for some of the times in between. The van was an old one, and looked it compared to some of the sleeker units on the other lakeside pitches. The site owner had told him straight, he wouldn't be unhappy to see it go; it lowered the tone of the place, he reckoned, and he knew that he could easily re let the pitch a hundred times over for something bigger, something newer… he handled sales, as well, so he'd make a two way profit on the deal.
Aldridge had disliked the man on sight. And the way that he talked about lowering tone and maximising profits hadn't made Aldridge like him any better, not when a five-year-old who'd probably last slept in one of these very bunks now slept dreamlessly in a mortuary cabinet.
One of three kids, altogether. Their father a one-time shipyard welder, out of employment for nearly two years now, their mother working half days as a checkout assistant in a retail cash and carry. This had been the family's first holiday in ages; the boy's first holiday ever. Aldridge sighed, and looked around. He knew that he was taking this harder than he ought to, but he couldn't help it. The whole thing was just too personal for him.
The curtains had been drawn against the world outside. They didn't fit too well. In the half shade he could see that the caravan was spotless, as if it had been scrubbed compulsively by whoever had occupied it last. He checked it over. There was a double bedroom at one end, a kitchen in the middle, and a lounge at the other whose uncomfortable bench sofas made up into equally uncomfortable beds. There was a chemical toilet in an adjoining shed, and for showers there would be the communal block at the other end of the site. He knew the kind of thing. Timer operated, and as cold and draughty as hell; a hook for your towel, and nowhere dry to put your clothes. It had been years since he'd done anything similar, but he'd been there. There couldn't have been many people who'd need to use the block, not these days; not when most had big vans with names like Mistral and Wayfarer with their own bathrooms and WCs built in. This van belonged to another, altogether less well appointed age. When he moved, the floor creaked and at one point he felt his head brush close to the ceiling.
It was the personal touches that got to him the most. The ornaments, most of them broken and then glued together again. The home made curtains screening open shelves. Stuff that should have been in a junkshop, but instead it was here. Two weeks of this had been the best that the family had been able to afford.
They hadn't even made it to the end of the first.
It had been a night time accident. Out of a family of heavy sleepers the boy had always been an exception, but this had never caused them any serious problem before. He'd get up and wander around a little, play with his toys, and they'd find him the next morning lying wherever sleep had caught up with him. Because he was too small to reach the light switches, this had usually been on the floor in front the open refrigerator with its interior light burning and the milk slowly going sour. He'd be there with a jigsaw, his toy trucks, a storybook. But the refrigerator here was a tiny benchtop unit tucked well back alongside the sink, so Aldridge could only assume that the boy had been forced to look farther afield for some night-time entertainment.