Authors: F.G. Cottam
Brodmaw Bay had been home to two illustrious sons. One had been an early nineteenth-century prizefighter called Gregory Abraham. After beating all comers in Cornwall, he had beaten the Devon and Somerset champions too. He had boxed a champion from Ireland at a sporting club on the Strand. They had fought one another to a standstill over seventy-five rounds. His fame growing, Abraham had boxed an exhibition with Lord Byron, an enthusiastic amateur pugilist. He had retired, prosperous, to run a tavern in his home village.
Then there had been Adam Gleason, a soldier-poet in the Great War who had been killed in
1916
. His one volume of verse was still on the West Country A-level curriculum. James thought that Gleason fitted the flower of youth stereotype of Western Front sacrifice very neatly. He had been brave, good-looking and only twenty-nine years old when he met his death on a night patrol in no-man’s-land.
Abraham’s tavern was still open, a pub now renowned for its seafood and run by one of Gregory’s direct descendants. A marble statue of the bare-fisted battler stood outside it, his bare torso mighty above his britches, his hands raised in a guard. It had been built after his death, the money to pay for it raised by generous public subscription.
Not far from the pub there was a high street monument to the Great War dead and, beside it, a bust of Adam Gleason on a plinth. A plaque was screwed to the plinth and into its brass face had been engraved a stanza from one of his sonnets.
In the photograph of this commemorative sculpture James found, fresh flowers sat in a bronze vase before it. They seemed symbolic of a place that cared for its own and its heritage; a place that was confident in its identity, a settlement guided by tradition and continuity in which such contemporary blights as vandalism and graffiti simply did not exist.
Nowhere was perfect. From Brigadoon to Balamory, the perfect place to live was no more than a seductive fiction. But Brodmaw Bay was picturesque of itself and occupied a quite beautiful piece of coastline. It seemed genuinely unspoiled. It was quiet and prosperous. It fitted perfectly their family dream of living somewhere serene and lovely at the edge of the sea. Over the next couple of days, he would discover whether it was also welcoming.
After spending the morning researching Brodmaw, James had lunch with his wife and son. Then he spent an hour invoicing clients and dealing with admin generally, before leaving the house for the fifteen-minute stroll to go and pick up Olivia from school.
It was a hot day. Pollution lay in a shimmer from the road surface to the height of the roofs of the cars gridlocked on the route. Monday traffic throbbing at an angry standstill was so much a part of Bermondsey life he barely gave it a thought, usually. But in the heat he could taste the exhaust fumes, inhaling them as he knew his daughter would have to on the walk back home. He thought of clean sea air and a salt breeze teasing the tresses of Olivia’s lovely auburn hair. It seemed a seductive alternative to their present reality.
Lillian Greer had made the decision to end the affair the moment she had entered the hospital room with her daughter and seen the expression on James’s face as he looked down at their stricken son. She had known at that second that her family was the most precious thing in the world to her and the thing above all else in the world she would fight most desperately to preserve.
She knew that she had come very close to throwing it all away. She had been recklessly indiscreet with a man she could not count upon to behave predictably. Robert was capable, in rejection, of knocking on the door of their home and pleading his case in front of her husband. He was young and headstrong and completely selfish. The youth had seemed a quality attractive at the outset: vital and flattering. But he was too immature to accept the rebuff gracefully. He would plead for another chance. And when it was not given, could easily respond to the fact of defeat with self-destructive spite.
That was why she had agreed to give serious consideration to the Brodmaw Bay proposal so readily. In a more sedate frame of mind she might have taken issue with the Little Englander reaction the assault on Jack had provoked in James. But this was not the time to be philosophical and she was in no position to claim any kind of moral high ground when it came to principles or politics.
She had betrayed her husband and by extension her children too. She wanted to flee the problem, in Robert, she had inflicted upon herself. She wanted to escape to a fresh start somewhere that wasn’t characterised by claustrophobia and deceit and guilt. She thought that the Cornish coast would do very well. It was beautiful and, even better, it was remote. It removed her physically not just from the threat of Robert’s exposure of her adultery, but from the temptation of his company.
She thought about this while she was not lavishing TLC on Jack because he had dozed off on the sofa next to her, halfway through something entertainingly puerile on his favourite television channel. The channel was called Dave. It had been new to her until today. She thought its output a bit pathetic, but not unendurable. It was mostly a very male cocktail of slapstick and testosterone.
Ads for personal injury solicitors and lenders offering unsecured loans between the programmes were a strong clue as to the channel’s intended demographic. But Jack was only a child and had a very good reason for occupying his temporary couch potato role. His resting head had slid on to her lap. She twisted a lock of his hair between her fingers as his father researched a potential new life in the study behind them and she pondered on the affair from which she had yet formally to extricate herself.
She had met Robert three months earlier. He was a successful children’s author. They had an agent in common. He had written the first of a proposed series of books about a solitary, slightly scary young girl who secretly – and sometimes not so secretly – possessed telekinetic powers. In the first story the heroine, a twelve-year-old Irish girl, lived with her parents in the county town of Ennis in Clare in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the second book, she would relocate, in domestic service, to Edwardian Dublin. The third book proposed to take her, still in the service of her wealthy employers, to New York.
Lillian had not known much about Robert O’Brien as an author but she had read the manuscript of the first story and thought it would be a very enjoyable project to illustrate. She had been told that he was thirty, eight years younger than she was. This had not been an issue either way. If anything, she was the more successful name in children’s fiction. She had not known anything about him at their first meeting because, beyond the obvious, she had not needed to.
He came to her studio. He arrived on a motorcycle and when he took off his helmet, a dark mane of hair tumbled about his head and shoulders. He was half-Irish, with a Spanish mother, and the most exotically beautiful man she could ever remember having met.
She had never been unfaithful to James before. And she had not lied, in telling him that she loved him. But he had been difficult over the past couple of years. She thought that he suffered from depression. It was not so bad that it debilitated him totally. It was not so bad that he was forced to seek medical help. But there was this air of melancholy about him most of the time. And she had come to think it contagious. It afflicted her and it afflicted the children too. She had not realised the extent of the damage it had done to their relationship, how far they had drifted apart because of it, until Robert rode with his dark good looks and humorous dynamism into a life he made her suddenly aware had become more solitary than it should have.
In retrospect, she wished she had considered matters dispassionately at the outset. Had she thought it through, she would not have committed the betrayal. Had she calmly inventoried what she stood to gain from the affair against what it stood to cost her, she would not have gone to bed with Robert. Desire, mingled with a sort of loneliness, had combined to make the temptation strong. But it had not been irresistible and in surrendering to it she had let herself down.
Had she thought about it, she would not have become involved with someone so volatile and needy. The problem was, though, that she had not started the affair thinking about how she would end it. She had started it intrigued, aroused and somewhat intoxicated by the flattering attentions of a beautiful man.
Robert’s flaws only manifested themselves once you were intimate with him. They were partly instinctive, but partly also, she thought, a consequence of things having come so easily to him. He had actually qualified as a doctor. But he had never practised medicine. His first children’s story had been accepted for publication when he was still a student at the School of Medicine at Edinburgh. He had found a popular following straight away. His stories had inspired two successful television series and a feature film that had been a box-office sleeper hit in America.
When a man achieved this sort of success, without much effort, before getting out of his twenties, Lillian discovered in Robert that it did two things. It made him feel he had attributes out of the ordinary. And it led him to believe that he deserved to be treated as someone special. All her instinct and experience with him told her that he was a man who would have difficulty taking no for an answer, because in his adult life rejection was something he had simply never experienced.
Lillian stroked her sleeping son’s head on her lap and twisted his hair into silky ringlets between her fingers, wondering how Jack would react to exposure to his mother’s sexual betrayal of his father. He loved his dad. Both of the children did. James was a kind and attentive and generous father. He was generous in the way a child most valued in a parent: not with money to buy capricious gifts but with his time and his attention. She thought this sort of generosity not all that common in fathers simply because they were men. Men competed. Most competed to such an extent it left little time for anything else. James chose not to compete. He had all the time in the world for fatherhood.
Adulteress was an archaic word, seldom used. But it had a brute honesty about it she thought her son might find it hard to comprehend and difficult, once he did so, to forgive. James might forgive her. She thought that he probably would. The children never would. She had to think of a way of extricating herself from Robert without any of them finding out about her involvement.
James waited outside the school gate feeling slightly guilty. He nodded to a couple of familiar parental faces to whom he could not have put names or occupations. If all went according to plan, Olivia would be leaving St Paul’s at the start of the summer holidays for a new life in Cornwall. She would be leaving an excellent educational establishment when she did so. But it was one with which he had never properly engaged. He had never joined the school parents’ committee. He had never helped with the theatre programme they ran. He had never even helped out as a volunteer on a stall at the Christmas and summer fêtes held to raise funds for books for the school library or a new bicycle shed.
It was not that he was apathetic about his daughter’s education, he reflected. Both he and Lillian always attended the parents’ evenings and any theatrical production that Olivia was actually in. It was just that neither he nor his wife really had any appetite for community involvement. They were wrapped up in their own lives. They were rather insular as people and as a family.
Where he was concerned as an individual, James thought this probably an extension of the antipathy he had felt towards team sports in his own childhood. He had not been interested in football or rugby or cricket. He had been a strong swimmer and had represented the school and the county at crawl and freestyle. But swimming was an individual sport. You were isolated by your lane and you swam against the stopwatch, even in the relay events. He had never really understood the team ethos. Team spirit was something he had never experienced, let alone enjoyed. He was not by inclination a joiner-in.
He thought Lillian’s lack of interaction with Olivia’s school even more straightforward to explain. She was a loving and devoted mother but obliged to ration her time. Professional success meant a great deal to her both financially and in terms of her self-esteem. To sustain it, she naturally had to put in the hours.
The children were trailing out now across the playground from the single-storey main entrance in twos and threes. There was no sign of Olivia yet. This was unusual, he thought, looking at his watch, because she was characteristically out of school as soon as the bell sounded to maximise what leisure time she had between completing homework and eating dinner and going to bed. But it was not a cause for concern. Security at the school was vigilant.
He saw Olivia’s form mistress, Mrs Chale, scanning the waiting parents beyond the gate and railings, looking, he realised with surprise, for him. She spotted him and came striding over and gestured for him to breach the normal protocol and enter the school grounds through the gate.
‘Is anything the matter?’ It was a stupid question. Of course something was the matter.
‘Olivia is absolutely fine,’ she said, ‘there’s no problem whatsoever. She is with her class teacher Miss Davenport and we can collect her together in a moment. But there is something Jenny Davenport thinks that you should look at first. And I agree with her.’