Stephanie struggled to sit up, her right hand and forearm tangled in the net. The boat wobbled about and made her queasy. How foolish, she said to herself. Then the boat surged forward, the net tightening, the nylon cutting into her arm.
She felt the dinghy being dragged by the net. She was unable to sit up properly, so she threw herself over on to her front to try to loosen the fibres with her free hand. The boat wallowed heavily and took on some water. Pulling at the mesh awkwardly with her left hand, Stephanie wondered what was tautening the swathes of it in the deep water under the boat. The dinghy was shunting the incoming waves, bludgeoning itself against them, raising white spumes over the prow. Spray cascaded over her, soaking her blouse, chilling her skin.
The moon gleamed on the water as she grappled with the raw nylon, and overboard she saw silver filaments dapple the swell. Like little silver fish, she thought, their fins skipping to the surface.
The danger she was in did not make itself apparent until that moment. She saw the erratic movements of the silver fish and the looming presence of the cliffs at either side of the bay. The open sea was very close. She struggled frantically with the mesh, tearing at it with her lacerated free hand.
Briefly, she stopped her labours to take on reserves of air, her chest heaving in panic. Out to sea the fish were gaining ground, leaving her and the boat behind. Yet still the tangled net pulled the craft against the tide. And there now, she saw. A hump of water, breaking over… a shape so sinuous in the swell that it might have been made out of the ocean water itself.
Stephanie was overcome with a strange composure, as if some nymph of the sea were hypnotizing her. The dinghy was awash and might stay afloat only a few minutes longer. Her knees and lower legs were submerged in the chill brine. Time was pausing for her to ready herself, and she felt she was ready. She was calm, waiting.
Out on the flowing water was the thing she had seen before. No, not a dolphin. Nor was it Gilbert's wife, she was long gone. Wavering arms surfaced, seeming to beckon. Was this what the old man had really been fishing for? Was it from this that he sought revenge for his loss? The boat's prow dipped into a trough and did not recover. Not far away, Stephanie watched the sea creature dip too and she knew that she was next.
He had to wade in chest-deep and swim, then catch hold of the stern. He howled Stephanie's name and the word fell flat across the ice cool water. Hauling himself up, the boat's stern went down although the resistance was still firm.
"Fucking stupid old man!" Rod's shout was swallowed by the waves. He hauled on the boat. "It's me, Steph, it's me!" The greedy water lugged the boat as Rod lugged back. Unexpectedly, the remnants of the net untangled themselves from within the dinghy and fishtailed over the side. "Got you now…" He began to make headway towards the shore, turning the craft around so that he could drag it by the prow.
Stephanie rolled over and sat up. She turned to look out to sea. Gilbert's net was swirling, billowing as if it had become a jellyfish. And farther out, a silvery-black shape spread its arms and dived into the deeps.
The boat scraping on pebbles brought her back, alone, from the arms of St Bride's Bay.
She did not pretend to know what had happened. She felt sure she had heard Rod call out to her from the water. Sure it had been his hands that had righted the dinghy and saved her. But, of course, she could never be sure.
She saw Gilbert alive the next day, walking on the beach, so at least he had not drowned from his foolish wading into the sea. She walked past him, still numb from the police questions and a sleepless night. Stephanie wanted to thrash an explanation out of his senile face but thought, whatever he said, she would not have been able to piece together the facts.
All she could think was that something, some being, had surfaced out of the sea off Nolton Haven. A malign apparition. The old man went fishing there, married to the waves as much as he had been married to his wife. Perhaps he had drowned her, or perhaps one stormy night she had taken the boat and saw something… never to return.
Pondering this, the hard ball of pain in her belly intensified. She cupped her hands around her abdomen, held her breath, wondered why the sense of loss was centred there. A heavy stone of hurt, curled up inside her. An anguish that might, in the end, reach her mind and end the numbness.
Gilbert searched endlessly for an answer. Stephanie felt that she would not. Perhaps he came close enough the other night. He nearly netted whatever it was that wallowed and hissed amongst the swell of the deep sea along the beach. And Stephanie felt that if she had been in his position, and had seen what the old man knew was there, she too would set a nightly tryst with the night dark sea. Peering into the kingdom of underwater moonlight and racing surf. An insane and possibly futile pursuit for a lost love, or something that might replace it. Casting her net, trying to catch that elusive dream.
REGGIE OLIVER
The Children of Monte Rosa
IT was my mother who first noticed Mr and Mrs de Walter as they strolled along the promenade. She had a talent for picking out unusual and interesting looking people in the passing crowd and often exercised this gift for my amusement, though mainly for my father. He was a journalist who was always going to write a novel when he could find the time.
My parents and I had been sitting in a little cafe on the front at Estoril where we were on holiday that year. In 1964 it was still unusual to see English people in Portugal, particularly in the north, and the couple my mother pointed out to us were so obviously English. "They're probably expatriates," she said. As I was only eleven at the time I had to have the term explained to me.
They must have been in their late sixties, though to me at the time they simply looked ancient. They were of a similar height but, while she was skeletally thin, he was flabby and shapeless in an immaculate but crumpled white linen suit. He wore a «Guards» tie — this observation supplied by my father — and a white straw Panama with a hatband in the bacon-and-egg colours of the MCC, which I, a cricket enthusiast, identified myself. A monocle on a ribbon of black watered silk hung from his neck. He had a clipped white moustache and white tufted eyebrows that stood out from the pink of his face. His cheeks were suffused with broken veins that were capable of changing the colour of his complexion with alarming rapidity.
His wife was also decked out in the regalia of antique gentility. Her garments were cream-coloured, softly graduating to yellow age at their edges. Their general formlessness seemed to date them to the flapper era of the 1920s, an impression accentuated by her shingled Eton Crop which was dyed a disconcerting shade of blue. Her most eccentric item of dress was a curious pair of long-sleeved crocheted mittens from which her withered and ringed fingers seemed to claw their way to freedom. The crochet work, executed in a pearl coloured silky material, was elaborate but irregular, evidently the work of an amateur, making them resemble a pair of badly mended fishermen's nets.
My mother, who was immediately fascinated, was seized by an embarrassing determination that we should somehow get to know them. I have a feeling she thought they would make "good copy" for my father's long-projected novel, or a short story at least. My father and I went along with her plans, not because we approved them but because we knew that resistance was useless.
We were staying at the Grande, one of the big old Edwardian hotels on the seafront, but my mother noticed that "the ex-pats", as she was now calling them, often took a pre-dinner aperitif on the terrace of the Excelsior, a similar establishment adjacent to ours. Accordingly, one evening we went for a drink at the Excelsior, positioning ourselves at a table near to where my mother had seen the expatriates drinking.