Driftwood (3 page)

Flynn Summers was smiling at him. Distantly, reluctantly, Thomas noted his beauty, like a half-remembered echo from another world. “Well,” he said hoarsely. “If you're really okay…”

Summers got stiffly to his feet. “Yes.” He shook the sand out of the rug, folded it and handed it back. “I mustn't take up more of your time. Thank you, Dr. Penrose.”

Thomas considered letting him hold on to the formality. He felt, unreasonably, that he needed the distance. But that would leave him stuck with
Lieutenant Summers
, and he'd given and received enough military titles to last him a lifetime. He put out a hand, remembering with shame that he hadn't been gracious enough to accept the other man's gesture before. “It's Thomas.”

“Flynn. And I'll bear in mind what you said, about risking other people's lives.”

“Oh.” Detaching his hand from the strong grip enclosing it, Thomas flickered him an uneasy smile. “I tore your head off, didn't I? Sorry. I was going to say, if you're all right, can I give you a lift back to your car? Where are you parked?”

“No need. I'm just round the back of the café.” Summers looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, then smiled, and said suddenly, startling them both a little, “Penrose, eh? Proper Cornish.”

Thomas smiled too, for the first time broadly. “Born and bred. You?”

Before Flynn could answer, pattering footsteps on the seafront pavement beyond the car park made both of them look up. A plump, pink-faced woman in her late forties was jogging up the slope towards them, progress impeded by oversized carpet slippers. “Thomas!” she cried, waving frantically. “Oh, Tom. I thought I saw your car.
Please
will you come and talk to Victor? He's been in that damn boathouse for three days. He won't come out.” Halting a few yards away, she looked the doctor up and down, her broad, kind face folding up in concern. “Oh my God, Tom. Has there been an accident?”

“Er… No. At least…we're all right. I'll come straight down.” He turned to Flynn. “Sorry. I have to go.”

“Course. Is there anything I can do?”

Thomas surveyed him. Flynn looked subtly different, for all he was still damp and bleeding. Thomas wondered if this was his professional mask, the one his rescued fishermen and capsized tourists saw. He was impressed with how thoroughly he had assumed it, erasing all trace of the slightly gauche young man who had just needed rescue himself. Ready for action. Just for an instant, Thomas let himself imagine how it would be to avail himself of the offer. Flynn looked solid, capable. What would it be like, not to have to go in and face poor Victor alone?

But Victor was wreckage from Thomas's own old war, not Flynn's. And all of Thomas's actions since his return had tended to his own isolation—he wanted, needed, had to be alone.

“No,” he said, almost sharply. “I mean, no thank you. Just take care of yourself.”

Briskly he turned and closed up the Land Rover, making sure a window was cracked down for Belle. He helped Flynn lift his board. It was a pro's eight-footer, and not a lightweight. They were always much heavier than they looked on the water, being used for purposes of flight by talented, graceful, intriguing lunatics like… He was suddenly acutely aware that, when he turned his back to follow Victor's wife down the street, that would be the last he would ever see of Flynn Summers. There was no reason to suppose otherwise. He felt a strange pang, almost like homesickness, a kind of resonant ache beneath his breastbone. And Flynn was watching him intently, as if he too had something more he wished to say.

But he only nodded, and lifted a hand, and set off barefoot across the car park. Thomas looked back—once, helplessly, as Florence seized his hand, and then again a minute later while she was tapping anxiously on the boathouse doors. The second time he saw Flynn up near the top of the pitching Porth Bay high street, thumb out to flag down a ride. The first few vehicles went past him. He'd be lucky, Thomas thought, wondering why he'd lied about having his car with him, wondering how he'd got down here in the first place. He needed a ride big enough to take him and the surfboard too. Then air brakes hissed, and a truck with RNAS livery pulled up beside him, and he was gone.

Chapter Two: Sea Glass

By the time he finished work that night, Thomas could think only of the watchtower and the uninterrupted silences that awaited him there. He got into the battered Land Rover and drove, up into the hills to the north of Sankerris, higher and higher through the narrow single tracks. Like most West Countrymen born, he could drive as adroitly backwards as forwards, but this time met no oncoming tractors or tourists and was glad of it. It could be a matter of reversing a mile or more down the spiralling lanes, whose banks were beginning to heap up with wildflowers at this turn of the season. He just wanted to get home. He broached the horizon, where farmland flattened out to moor, and the north coast of the peninsula spread itself out for him, bare, wild and clean. Rolling the Rover's window down, he drew a deep breath of the sweet air.

There was the quoit. This was one of Thomas's commuting runs and he saw it every day, often twice, but it never failed to seize him. Placed here by unknown hands five thousand years before, knocked down in a storm and badly reconstructed in the 1800s, it was a stupendous thing, as breathtaking today as it must have been when its Neolithic builders had somehow raised its ten-ton flying capstone onto its four granite supports—three, now, after its clumsy rebuild—and set it to dominate the Morvah moor. West Penwith natives were blasé about it, calling it the tourist's quoit—set a bare hundred yards back from the road, it was easily visible for miles and, unlike most of the county's megalithic attractions, did not require a hike through gorse-tangled moorland to get to. For Thomas, the accessibility never diminished its magic. He was not even sure, on his daily drives past it, that it always lifted into view at the same place on his horizon, an effect he would put down to his own weariness.

Which, today, was extreme. Belle, who had lapsed into silence again, only changed the angle of her ears as they bypassed the quoit, but Thomas could read her disappointment. They often stopped here for a walk, and she'd had a long day of it, patiently waiting out his shift in the back room of the pharmacy. “Sorry, sweetheart. Not today.” He saw her resume her queenly position in the passenger seat, watching the road ahead.

He drove until the Atlantic appeared, silver-glitter indigo, beyond the north coast's pitching cliffs, then took an unmarked side track and bounced the Rover across half a mile of moorland, the track fading out to turf and scattered stones beneath her tyres. He opened a farm gate, drove through and shut it behind him, then let Belle out of the passenger side. Restrained and polite, she seldom indulged in undignified racing around, but she did love her run home, and Thomas liked the sight, her full-power streak across the last tract of moor to the solitary white-painted building near the edge of the cliff.

He followed her in the Rover and pulled up outside the tower, ratcheting the handbrake up with a sigh of relief. By the time he had finished with poor Victor today, there'd been no time to come home for a change of clothes, and he'd had to start his surgery round as he was. Mrs. Vic had offered him a shirt, but none of her husband's mighty garments would have been less conspicuous on Thomas than his own wet ones, which by that time had started to dry on his skin. In his office, he resorted to his seldom-used white coat to hide the damage and had got away with it. Now, though, the cotton and denim, stiff with salt, were scraping on his skin, and he thought with longing of a shower. The bathroom was the only part of the watchtower he had bothered to have professionally refurbished—worth it, for a man who still hallucinated desert dust in the crevices of his body, whose dreams left his muscles so rigid with resistance he could often barely walk until he'd immersed himself in a bath.

The tower had its original black-oak door, the wood rock solid and satiny with time. Belle, still wild, was describing high-speed circles round the building, always clockwise, as if she shared the many local witches' aversion to a widdershins manoeuvre. Smiling, Thomas took the vast key from under its stone and began to let himself in.

He noticed the package at the same time the dog did, and both of them froze, Belle skidding to a halt on the turf. She trotted across to the door and sniffed the box over as if it had been an unexploded bomb, and Thomas reflected with a touch of shame that they were, after all, a pair of suspicious bastards. Then she sat down and looked up at him with an expression he could only interpret as a smile.

He carried the box into the house, wondering at its weight. He hadn't ordered anything. Placing it on the plain deal table in the kitchen, he noted from its labels that it had been sent up by parcel post from Marazion just that afternoon, and presumably at some expense—it was about eighteen inches all round and heavy as a rock. Thomas pulled out a kitchen chair, turned it round so he could straddle it and folded his arms along the back.

He wasn't in the mood for surprises. After seeing to poor Victor, he hadn't been in much of a mood for anything, except perhaps drinking himself to oblivion. That thought sparked another in his mind, one connected with the gleam of a rarely touched supply of vodka in a crate under the stairs. Breaking his own rules of seldom-on-weekdays and never-before-eight, Thomas dismounted from the chair and went to pour himself a generous double.

It was good, very smooth—his thinking had been that, if he spared no expense, he would go easy on it—but his throat was still raw with salt and unaccustomed shouting, and he choked faintly, pressing a hand to his mouth. What was in the damn box? He had an uneasy feeling in his gut about it. He was unsettled anyway. Having managed all day not to think about Flynn Summers, now that he was alone and unoccupied once more, he was finding he could think of little else. And people like Flynn did not belong in Thomas's life. He was no longer fit to associate with the young and the reckless, with men who were—Thomas felt it, even on shortest acquaintance—absolutely, essentially sweet-natured. Not innocent perhaps but not spoiled, not tainted as Thomas was.

No, Thomas's world was populated by the likes of Victor Travers, or their ghosts. Vic had served with him in Afghanistan. They had grown up together in Sankerris. Then Thomas had gone off to university, medical school, and Vic had stayed at home, apprenticed to his father's boat-building trade in the Porth Bay harbour. Thomas had next seen him at Bastion, a shell-shocked squaddie brought to him on a stretcher. Boredom had set in, Vic had explained to him, when he could talk. Boredom and lack of challenge. He had not needed to tell his old friend with what fervour he now wished himself back in the sweet, sleepy nowhere of the west. Thomas had patched him up and seen him sent back out.

And again. And again. When, after a leave of absence, Victor's sergeant called round to pick him up for the airbase and his third tour of duty, he found him in his dad's boathouse, staring blankly into space, his kit packed and ready, his service pistol held to his brow.

The sergeant had talked him out of that attempt, but there had been others, in the army psychiatric hospital and afterwards at home, where his distraught wife had tried to take care of him. Thomas, returning from his own third tour honourably discharged, had tried to help. He became Victor's GP, once the poor sod had worked through his allotted portion of army assistance and been turned loose on the world. He helped him with his compensation claim, a battle still ongoing as the government and upper military echelons conspired to prove that Gulf War syndrome and PTSD were only a specialised form of malingering, best cured by another spell on the front line.

Thomas supposed that if Vic had had his legs blown off in the service of his country, things might have been different. He helped him sign on for state incapacity benefit, persuading him that this was not an admission of weakness or failure. But what Victor needed from him most was his presence while he talked. Thomas had shared enough of his combat experiences to make him a good audience. Victor had lost all sense that his friend might reenact the dreadful scenes too, as he spoke, and not therapeutically. Once the kindest and most loving of men, Victor had come back from war clad in a brazen selfishness that made him blind to the pain of his wife, children, even a fellow soldier.

Thomas poured himself another drink, a treble this time. He had spent two hours in the boathouse this morning. By the time he had emerged into the light, Victor shambling at his side, he could scarcely feel the sun's warmth on his skin. He knew that it was there, but his capacity to feel it, to feel anything good, had been
unplugged
, was the closest term he could find. He felt unplugged, unhitched from his surroundings. On the rare but significant occasions when he drank, it was simply in order to make his body and brain match up. If he'd downed half a bottle of Stolichnaya Elit, he could expect to feel numb. It would be normal, and the next day he would have a normal hangover, recover and get back to work.

He reached for his glass. Before he could lift it, Belle came and laid her great long head upon the table beside it.

He hadn't fed her. Sighing, Thomas pushed to his feet. He knew what she was up to, of course. By the time he had shovelled out enough dog food to satisfy her, he would be more in need of a shower than ever, and would probably go and do that, leaving the drink on the table. The shower would clear his head, and when he came down he would see the thick file of paperwork Florence Travers had pushed into his hands before he left—the latest stage of Vic's appeal, to which Thomas was adducing medical evidence. It needed to be done tonight, and done sober.

He would write his letters and statements, maybe notice after that that he was hungry, maybe go and cook. These days he would live on ready meals happily enough, did not some distant sense that he was a doctor and should practise what he preached still prompt him to buy fresh meat and veg and prepare them in some vaguely becoming fashion.