RICHARD

The railway to Lynton was a draw for all tourists to the area and so, to Richard, it seemed the obvious place to take her. He didn’t say anything much as they descended the hill, hoping she might think him wildly mysterious. He had a momentary panic that he didn’t have enough money for the tickets, imagined himself blustering at the ticket office, feeling hot and red as she sneered at him. He never carried money on him, giving most to his dad and secreting the rest away for his plans, when that day came.

Looking over his shoulder at Abigail, he knew he would have emptied all his pockets, run back and fetched all his money to impress her. There was something about her. He’d seen it in her on that first day, leaning against the harbour wall. He’d stood and watched her, haloed in the light, the cottages and trees rising up behind her, wearing that yellow cotton dress that seemed to make her brown hair richer, her skin glow. Men had passed him, hitting him on the shins with buckets, water slopping over his shoes and the stench of salt and tangy mackerel coating him, but he’d just stayed there and watched her. She’d looked straight at him, into him. He’d never met anyone like her before, she’d really lived already, beyond the village, in a city, the likes of which he could only imagine.

He was hungry to know more, kept his eyes on her lips as she told him of the ships in the harbour, the steam train puffing alongside, the river snaking through the city, the hubbub of hundreds of people lining the walkways, looping ropes through the big iron mooring rings; the market stalls, row upon row of produce, and then the city above them, the sandstone buildings, wide tree-lined avenues in Clifton, houses in a huge crescent, manicured lawns, fancy shops.

The girl with the sad eyes but the pulsing energy fired up when she spoke of her friend Mary, the one she’d left behind, her mum. He’d watched her as she stood on that railing over the bridge on the river, her heeled shoes on the first rung, her ankles, her body bent forward, skirt billowing behind her in the breeze, shouting into the wind with such force he thought the river might stop with the shock of it.

The village seemed both more exciting to him and smaller now that she was here. He wanted to see things through her eyes, imagine how they might look, the dockers and fishermen dragging the scent of mackerel around with them, the sweat of a long day, the gossip, the falling out over prices, the greying buildings hidden amongst the trees that penned them all in.

His friend Bill, rubbing his spectacles dry on his shirt, had nudged him the day before, teasing him for mooning about on the boat in a daze. He was shocked by his reaction to her. Now here he was, tripping down the hill, wanting to show her things, to spark that smile, the wide eyes, see the dimple in her cheek. They rounded the corner, past the Rhenish tower, towards the end of the beach.

He slowed up, walking side by side with Abigail, who asked where they were headed. Then they were there, standing at the bottom of the cliff, at the ticket booth to the railway.

He pushed two threepence pieces over the counter. ‘Two tickets, return.’ He didn’t need to name the destination, this railway was unique, there was only one stop and one way back. It was a clifftop railway, carved out of the stone more than fifty years before, powered by water and gravity.

The locals didn’t use it regularly; the two villages were separate entities, each with its own butcher, baker, garages and shops. People would make their way up the path to the top, the sea on their right, stretching out, grey, patchy with colourful shadows from the clouds above – blue, cobalt, iron, jade, depending on the weather.

They waited in a short queue, watching as the green-painted carriage descended on rails above them.

‘My sister told me about this, but I had no idea…’ Abigail said, craning her neck to watch the two carriages cross in the middle of the tracks above them, a little boy waving at her from the balcony of one, the other passengers studiously ignoring her, looking through the windows across the Bristol Channel. She waved back, and he gave her a wide grin, one front tooth missing. Richard felt the urge to snatch up her hand, grip it tightly.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ she said, spinning round to look at him, breathless with the anticipation.

‘It’s the only one in the country, unique, opened on Easter Monday 1890…’ He found himself parroting an old advertisement he’d once seen.

‘Well, it’s ingenious,’ she remarked, moving aside to let the passengers off, the toothless boy hiding his face behind his mother’s skirt, less bold now that he wasn’t sailing down the side of a cliff, king of the mountain.

They piled in. An older couple carrying string bags of goods, carrot tops sticking comically from the holes, nodded at them; a couple of awkward boys in shorts and knee socks were swept on by a harried-looking mother, chins wobbling as she told them to sit down.

Abigail moved to the balcony outside the carriage so that she could stand in the open air as they moved slowly up the clifftop.

‘Nine hundred feet…’ Richard said, enjoying watching her widen her eyes and bite her bottom lip as they started to climb. They could see out across Lynmouth to the beach beyond; Countisbury Hill, a motor car moving around the curve of the coast as if about to tumble down it; the cream facade of the Tors Hotel nestled among trees on the other side of the valley. He noticed her attention had been drawn to the rooftop of a house on their left, dormer windows reflecting the light of the day.

‘That’s the house,’ she said, her voice a little changed.

Later, Richard wondered if he should have noticed more, but he was following her eye line, looking at the house between the trees, the twin brick chimney stacks and roof tiles in deep red, distracted then by her arm, slender, bare, stretched out before him as she pointed to it.

‘What a spot,’ he said, imagining her waking up each morning with the sun on her face as it streamed in dusty ribbons over the bed sheets, making her glow with a soft light. He coughed, carried away with his imaginings. At times he felt he could write poetry when he was with her.

‘Yes,’ she said, a momentary pause before she switched on her smile, as if she’d had to think about it.

They’d reached the top and people were filing out past the small ticket office and up a slight incline into Lynton. They’d left the sea far below them and began walking into the small village, its high street snaking around and down, narrow cobbled streets with shops and cafés that seemed precariously clustered on narrow pavements. Richard hadn’t been in Lynton for a while, just one or two trips to the cinema on Sinai Hill. As a child he’d come up to the village more, playing war games with friends on Holiday Hill, daring each other to climb down the cliffs to get seagulls’ eggs.

Abigail was looking about herself, over her shoulder, searching the high street as if she’d lost someone.

‘Are you alright?’

‘I was wondering if my sister…’ She trailed off, licking her lips and swallowing.

Did she not want him to meet her? The thought forced his shoulders down, made his voice heavy. ‘Is she very like you?’

She thought for a moment, a hand quickly fixing a pin in her hair at the back. ‘People say we look similar, but it’s funny, I think we were apart so many years, we sometimes forget we grew up together. She left just before the start of the war to come here and it became Mum and me, and all my memories from before then seem unreal, as if they were part of this unreal world.’

She seemed more relaxed now that they had turned back around to sit on a bench near the top of the railway. Passers-by bustled about, uninterested; pigeons edged closer, hoping for scraps.

‘I miss her. I mean, I miss what we might have been, I think, if that makes any sense.’

Richard thought about that for a moment, pictured his own brother’s face, his thick arms, the shaving cuts on his chin, the nose he’d broken when he’d fallen from a tree as a child.

‘I’m sorry I said that.’ Abigail interrupted, perhaps having seen right through him. ‘Your brother, you must think of him a lot.’

Richard nodded, shrugging both shoulders. ‘I get so tired of missing him, I’m used to the ache,’ he said, moving one hand to his stomach. ‘Mostly I miss the everyday things, talking to him, laughing about old memories: how we used to build wigwams in the forest, begging Dad to help us make a tree house, how we used to get a load of school friends to meet in the harbour at the open-air sea pool.’

‘Sounds idyllic.’

‘It changed at the start of the war. We were all so earnest. It seemed strange when the lads left, would have felt wrong.’

‘I know what you mean. We were all so worthy! I learnt to knit things and we sent lots of parcels to the Red Cross.’

‘Everyone just seemed sort of broken after the war, even here, and you couldn’t avoid it, they were always doing training exercises on Exmoor and you heard the gunfire. Everyone knew someone who had died or been taken prisoner and the stories kept coming.’ He stopped for breath, his cheeks reddening slightly as he looked at her.

‘It was the same at home,’ she said. ‘We were so sick of black-out blinds and gas masks and dried milk, but it was the awful feeling that nothing would ever be the same again, that something had gone forever.’

He nodded at her and they rested against the wood; she was picking at some flaking paint.

‘So is it nice being back here with her? You might get your sister back.’

She nodded once, slowly. ‘It’s been grand remembering the little moments from when we were younger, although I think she just remembers me as this messy, wild thing with sticking-up hair, poking my tongue out at her from behind cereal boxes, and making Mum scold me.’

‘You sound a delight.’

‘Well she was so much older, going off to dances and reading novels, and I thought she was frightfully grown-up.’

‘And your brother-in-law?’

She looked sideways at him, an expression he hadn’t seen before crossing her face. ‘What about him?’

Richard stretched out his legs, his feet sticking up in front of him. ‘Did you know him well?’

‘Oh.’ She turned back to look out at the booking office, where a couple were holding the hands of a child who was swinging between them. ‘No, I didn’t. I remember him from the wedding, he tied up one of my loose ribbons, but they left for Devon the moment they were married.’

‘That’s a shame.’

She didn’t reply, nodding once. He frowned, wondering whether she was alright. Had he said something to offend her? Was she bored? He ran a hand through his hair. She must be used to grammar-school boys and dinner parties, men puffing on cigars and regaling her with stories from their university days. He had none of that, he had stories about the boat, about Bill and him leaping overboard on sunny days, fishing from the balcony at the back of Bill’s house, fires on the beach in the summer.

‘I think I’d better get back.’

He felt his whole body slump as she said it, his shoulders sagging, his mouth turning down. Of course she did. She couldn’t meet his eyes then, cleared her throat, swallowed. He briefly considered whether she might be harbouring some great secret, but knew he was reading too much into it, hoped it wasn’t simply that she was fed up.

‘We should…’ He gestured to the railway, wanting to tell her they should do it again soon, that they should meet the next day, the day after. She looked at him, she had thick lashes and he was distracted by them, stumbled over the sentence. ‘Yes, we should get back.’

She swallowed again, a small smile, not enough to form the dimple in her cheek. He kicked himself all the way back down the clifftop railway, the carriage descending like his hopes.