Secrets

‘Come on, Em. Wolf – you can stay here.’

She took the buggy though Em toddled alongside for part of the way. This time, they stuck to the pavement on the opposite side to the valley gardens, passing by the magnificent Victorian buildings, trying to sneak a look through the beautifully proportioned windows.

‘See sigh!’ the baby's pudgy hand waved excitedly.

‘Not today, baby,’ Tess said, skimming wary eyes along the beach. There was a pebbly area where the river-mouth met the beach, everywhere else the sand was a perfect blond. Today the wind whipped the surface sending sand whispering over the beach like smoke.

‘See sigh,’ Em repeated as if indignant that enunciating the words hadn't led to the reward of the real thing. They were standing at the railings again, from where they'd watched Joe and Wolf cavorting the day before yesterday.

‘Sorry,’ said Tess, ‘Mummy doesn't like the beach.’ Then she looked around her and said, but Mummy does like the pier.

Tess pushed the buggy along the lower promenade, passing the old beach chalets in red and white all battened down against the spring squalls; on past a closed café, an open surf shop. She walked around the small amusement centre at the entrance to the pier, went through the ornamental gateway and walked out onto the boardwalk. The tide was out leaving the sand with a mirrored surface on which a string of horses was being ridden. They were passing right under the trestles and Tess and Em looked down on them from one side of the pier to the other, like large living Poohsticks. For all its impressive length, the pier was plain, austere almost, with none of the lurid jollity of Brighton or the tasteful and innovative renovation of Southwold. But when Tess looked around her, up and down the coast, inland, out to sea, to the sky, she thought how the point of this pier was perfectly realized – to serve the views.

Along the length were occasional benches, sat upon by elderly couples in a huddle to watch time pass while allowing the bracing sea air to do them the power of good. They cooed over Em who smiled on cue. Tess looked down to the shore line as she continued to walk along the pier; the spray from the wave crests was being blasted back to sea – nature breaking the rules. At the end of the pier, a snuggle of men fishing. Tess ventured up to them, gingerly – it was windy and the pier was high. Their buckets were empty but that didn't seem to be the point, rather eating sandwiches and sharing their flasks of tea did. Plenty more fish in the sea, one man called after Tess. She laughed though she said to herself, yeah right. Been there. Done that. Got the baby.

Tess shivered. She wanted to scrub out the kitchen before having to prepare supper. She picked up her pace which allowed for only a cursory glance at the cliff lift Joe had pointed out, now rising steeply right in front of her. Gaily painted in similar shades to the chalets and the promenade buildings, it appeared to be a near-vertical funicular. Another day. No rush. She wasn't going anywhere, after all. Hadn't Joe said he wanted her to stay long-term? Leaning the top of her head into the wind, she retraced her steps briskly.

‘Easy!’

She looked up, just in time to avoid a slippery mound of neoprene, which appeared to have been just stripped off and flung in the middle of the walkway outside the surf store; like some felled mutant creature from the deep. The voice belonged to a young wet man saronging himself in a towel. His hair, in long shaggy blond ringlets, held drips of water at each tip and they flew off in a sprinkle as his head moved. He was pale-skinned but brawny. Briny too by the look of his slightly bloodshot eyes and soggy hands and feet. With his chiselled features, he looked rather exotic for his surroundings.

‘In the water I don't feel the cold,’ he said, in a light Australian accent, ‘but as I walk back across the beach I start fantasizing about my towel.’

By the look of his nipples, the shiver of his torso and the blue tinge to his lips, Tess reckoned he could do with another towel around his top half. She didn't say so, she just nodded and walked on.

‘Do you surf?’

‘No fear,’ she said as she walked.

‘Well – if you've no fear, as you say, then come by one day and I'll teach you.’

‘Not likely,’ Tess laughed.

‘Can't swim?’

She stopped and turned. ‘I can. I just don't do sand,’ she said.

‘I'm Seb. I work here.’

She called over her shoulder as she walked away again. ‘I'm Tess. I work up there.’

Not rude, Seb reckoned. Just shy.

Chapter Six (#ulink_32b39584-209d-540e-a321-81cb44879807)

And work up there she did.

The kitchen was to take her two days, during which time fresh air for herself, her child and the dog was restricted to the garden and one excursion down to the small everything shop for milk, bread and fish fingers. She'd been through Joe's chest freezer which occupied an entire room off the utility room, with only a couple of mops for company. She'd chucked out much of what was in it, having to defrost it enough to release the hunk of meat and packet of peas and something that looked like a bag of soil that were entombed in ice at the bottom. The work was hard on her back and tough on her hands, but it was energizing and satisfying and preoccupying because it gave her no time to dwell. But when the hard labour was done and she could immerse herself in the smaller details, she freed up thinking time and in doing so, gave anxiety an opening to vex her. She'd had no contact with those close to her since her absconding. Because she'd cut up her SIM card, she'd made herself uncontactable but had inadvertently severed many links too. Initially, it had all felt liberating. Now it felt hasty and stupid. There had been no need, over recent years, to commit phone numbers to her own memory when the wonder of the SIM card could take its place and store more. She reckoned she might just be able to recall Tamsin and her sister's numbers – but she couldn't face phoning either just yet.

Stop thinking about it.

It doesn't matter at the moment.

Concentrate on Joe's spice jars. They're filled with little wriggling things burrowing amongst the flakes of herbs.

She chucked out the contents then disinfected the glass containers with boiling water. They looked pretty; dazzling clean with their scruffy labels washed off.

Stickers. She wrote the word on a new shopping list.

Parsley.

Sage.

Rosemary.

Thyme.

Scarborough is around here somewhere, she thought, singing Simon and Garfunkle during which Wolf left the room and Em woke up. With the baby and the dog snaffling rusks, Tess put the empty jars away in their new position in the slim wall cupboard nearest the cooker. Seven of them. She racked her brains but was pretty sure Paul Simon had specified only four. She returned to her list.

Basil.

Coriander.

Etc.

From the hallway, Wolf suddenly started barking. I'm only humming, Tess protested but the dog skittered over the stone floors from kitchen to front door and back again, turning circles while yowling at the top of his voice.

‘Hush.’

But he wouldn't so Tess went over to him and looked through the spyhole. ‘No one there, Wolf,’ she said and she went out into the drive to prove it. She looked down the street too but apart from an elderly lady walking downhill, the road was empty of cars and pedestrians.

‘Some guard dog you are,’ Tess laughed at the sight of Wolf simultaneously barking but cowering on the front doorstep. ‘There's no one there, Wolf. In you go, you daft dog. There's only us here.’

But two days later, Wolf started again. And a split second beforehand, Tess did think she caught a glimpse of someone passing by the living-room window (she was busy alphabetizing the books). But when she ventured outside, there was no one and she felt an idiot. She scolded Wolf for – well, for crying wolf.

‘When the real baddies come – I won't believe you.’

But she did quietly wonder to herself whether she was imagining things; perhaps conjuring people to populate her world that currently had in it only a dog and a child for company. One week in, she thought again of Tamsin, of her sister; she needed both for very different reasons. But she didn't know what she needed to say to the former and she didn't want to have to say what she needed to the latter.

She'd been here just short of two weeks. Joe was expected back, briefly, in a couple of days. She'd quite like to finish the larger living room in that time – to beat the hell out of the rug and pummel life back into the cushions, to complete her work on the books, to dust them down and put them back up from A to Z. The kitchen was now spotless but forlornly bereft of supplies. For all she knew, Joe liked to cook up a storm on his short returns. She decided she ought to put the living-room books on hold and complete the herb section in the kitchen instead. Stock up on a few basics, too. Ensure there was fresh produce in the fridge for him, as requested. She looked in her wallet as if she expected it to have spontaneously filled since she last opened it, but discovered less than she remembered. Might Joe pay her when he was back? She knew she'd be too shy to ask. She really should phone her sister, swallow her pride and just dial. She folded her sole banknote and slipped it into her back pocket. She told herself she should have cut up her bank card, rather than her SIM card, because it was the former that was really of no use any more. But she wanted to hang on to it, as if it was a talisman – like a pair of jeans that used to fit and that might fit once again if a few pounds could be lost. But Tess knew her bank account needed to gain a lot of pounds before she could use that card again. She would have to phone Claire. But perhaps it could wait until Joe had been and gone again.

For the first time since her arrival, Tess took her time around town. She'd been in to buy essentials, of course, but had made her visits quick. However, her days during this first fortnight had designed themselves into a series of concentric rings whose diameter had increased with time. Initially, Tess had needed to constrict her surroundings to feel she could cope – just a few feet in front of her, or a few minutes in any direction. As time passed and she unwound and slept better and enjoyed her days more, so she found her energy and her confidence and discovered a new urge to increase her field of vision – what she saw, how far she'd go and how long she'd be gone from the house. Almost daily, she'd increased these elements, stepping onto a larger ring each time, keener to discover what lay along its length.

Venturing up and down the shopping streets on recent days, she'd been surprised at the diversity. From the iron awnings and dusty glass along Milton Street and Dundas Street harking back a little forlornly to their Victorian heyday, to the price-promos plastering the windows of the small supermarket near the station; from old-fashioned boutiques promoting a proliferation of drip-dry beigeness modelled by oddly posed mannequins in slipped wigs, to a hippy-chic kids’ clothing store; from the chippy, to the small but sumptuously stocked deli; from a shop selling a knot of fishing tackle to a high-class chocolatiers. It appeared there was even the demand for gluten-free pizza, right here in Saltburn – but that didn't mean that the Chinese takeaway would be going out of business any time soon. She learned as much from the small cartographic gallery as she did from Tourist Information, buying two postcards of local paintings from the former and taking all the leaflets or papers that were free from the latter. She passed by the library and jotted down details of a playgroup at the church two mornings a week and saw that the one-act drama festival had completely passed her by. She read the signs and flyers in shop windows. She took a calendar of events and saw that in May there'd be a film festival, in June a food festival, in July a comedy festival, in August a folk festival as well as Victorian Week.

A friendly woman much her own age, with a child Em's age, struck up a conversation with Tess in the queue inside the bakery. She was Lisa, she said. Born and bred here, she said. You're coming to Musical Minis, she told Tess – your daughter will love it and we mums need someone new amongst us. We go for lunch afterwards, Lisa said, then on to the playground. She even waited for Tess to be served and then said, goodbye, see you soon – great to meet you, pet. To Tess it all sounded as intriguing as it sounded exhausting and she told herself she ought to do it. It would be good for her, and Em.

She walked on, meandering down towards the pier and half wondering if there'd be a flung pile of wetsuits and a semi-naked Seb today. The surf shop was open; there was a rail of sale clothes outside but there was no one tending the shop and no one browsing the wares. No Seb today, at least not on shore. She walked along the pier and watched the surfers but they were indistinguishable in their wetsuits from that distance. The tide was in, lapping greedily around the trestles of the pier, the swirling sea visible through the gaps in the boardwalk. The fishermen at the end of the pier had yet to catch anything.