I didn’t need Finn.
So the next time we ran down to the causeway, an afternoon in mid-November, with the trees bare and the days only a few hours long, I didn’t slow down, didn’t look left or right, didn’t acknowledge that anyone (much less anyone I knew) lived in the little hut. And yet… physiology had its own imperative, and there was no point pretending that my racing pulse and flushed face had everything to do with exertion.
Reese panted along at my side. He hung around in my vicinity with such persistence these days that we were halfway to becoming a comedy act – Kipper and Reese, the two stooges – and I tolerated his presence because it made me look less friendless. When we rounded the rat’s nose, I slowed, and stopped. Reese hesitated, but after a moment glancing hesitantly from me to the disappearing pack, he ran on.
Such a courageous boy I was. To act brazenly under such scrutiny and risk further injury to my wounded heart. Ah, the resilience, the blind, dumb persistence of youth.
There was smoke coming from the chimney. Driven by anger and a degree of fatalism, I opened the door without knocking. I’m back, I said silently, boldly. Take it or leave it.
And here’s the miracle. Finn’s expression (unless I have rewritten history, unless I was unable to read it at the time, unless wishing has the capacity to pervert truth), his expression was not shocked, but relieved.
‘Hello,’ I said, my mouth curled into a little satirical grimace, my spirit cautiously elated.
He actually smiled. At my foolish runner’s kit, perhaps, or my brazen expression, my vulnerable legs. At my idiot’s audacity. My barefaced cheek. I didn’t care why.
He smiled.
Then he took a saucepan down from above the stove and left the hut. When he returned, it was sloshing with water and smelled of brine. Placing it on the iron stove he dumped in half a dozen potatoes, scooped some lard into a heavy frying pan and waited for it to melt. With infinite care, he placed a flat brown fish in the sizzling fat and as it cooked, put two plates on the wooden table beside the stove, pulled two forks and two knives out of a drawer in the table, and turned to me. Paused. Spoke softly.
‘I’m no good at company.’
Did the words carry a hint of explanation? Not that it mattered. I’d already forgiven him.
‘Sit,’ he said.
I sat. No more good at being company than he was at having it.
And suddenly I was starving. Starving despite the silence, the absence of the sweaty wool and foot smell of ninety other boys. I forced myself to eat slowly, not to bolt my food like a dog in case someone arrived mid-bite to take it away. I still finished before him.
Finn made tea and we sipped it and listened to the sea while this thing I didn’t dare name glowed between us. And then all of a sudden I couldn’t stand the silence so I began to tell him about my family, and my first two schools, and Reese and Barrett and Gibbon, and whatever else popped into my head.
He listened politely, without comment, head turned slightly away from the sound of my voice. There were none of the usual listening comments you expect from normal people, or the hilarious cracks I might have received from my schoolmates. Instead he just sat, face composed, dark hair hiding his expression – if he had one. He might have been asleep for all I knew, so complete was his lack of response. And yet, I thought I could feel him listening, I could almost see my words wandering in long trails around his head, circling, searching, until he sighed and yielded and granted them entry. My face flamed with the joy and the shame of exposure, while Finn sat silent and safe behind his fringe of hair, behind the long black lashes that guarded his eyes and his thoughts and the entrance to his soul.
After a while I ran out of words and fell silent, stubbornly awaiting a response. Perhaps no one had ever explained the concept of a conversation to him. As the minutes ticked by and he said nothing, I felt an irresistible urge to laugh, conceding game set and match to his talent for silence. I gave up and asked how he’d ended up living here.
He appeared not to have heard the question, but just as I was about to repeat it, he started speaking, slowly, feeling his way step by step in case the words contained a trap. ‘The hut belonged to my gran.’ He paused. ‘She taught me history and reading. And how to handle a boat. I cooked for her because her eyes weren’t much good towards the end.’
This sudden disclosure caught me entirely off guard and I scrabbled in my brain for an appropriate comeback, anything to keep him going. Her name, what she looked like, how she ended up living in a half-ruined hut on the beach?
‘She grew up in Ipswich.’ He turned to me, head tilted slightly. ‘In a big house in town. She wanted to be a teacher, but her father didn’t believe in educating girls. She eloped at eighteen and he left everything to her brothers when he died.’ Finn paused and looked at me gravely. ‘Though he might have done that in any case.’
I concentrated hard, trying to produce a clear picture from these fragments of family tree.
‘She moved to the hut when her husband died. Other people lived here then – fishermen, families.’ He paused. ‘People were poor then. It didn’t cost much.’
I searched the shadows of his face for marks of his past. Surely the preceding generations had crept into the colour of his eyes, the curve of his brow, the shape of his cheekbones. I wondered if his ancestors had survived to the present day in a way mine hadn’t. Our family photographs showed respectable bankers and lawyers in sober Edwardian clothes. They stared at the camera, expressionless, and never seemed related to anyone in particular. Neither of my parents would have been able to imbue the previous generations with life, in the unlikely event that they might try. My history had evaporated before I was born.
I sat motionless. When Finn finally looked up, remembering me, he yawned and indicated the bench. ‘It’s late. You can sleep there. The privy’s out back, I’ll show you.’
The tide would be high. There was no way I could get back to school. Terror and resignation swept over me at once, and as I met Finn’s steady gaze – a little puzzled, a little impatient – I realized the decision had somehow been made. Heart pounding, I followed him out to the old-fashioned camp toilet. OK, I thought, I’ll think about it tomorrow. I’ll get away with it somehow. I’ll…
The wind whipped the heat from my clothes, the reason from my brain. Gazing up at the sky, I sought the two constellations I knew, as if somehow I could spin an astronomy lesson from so vast a transgression.
When I returned, there was a lumpy pillow on the bench and a pile of blankets – the thick striped ones, faded with age. I didn’t want him to go yet.
‘Your gran… when did she die?’
‘Four years ago. The solicitors located her youngest brother. He came up from Cornwall to pay for the funeral. They hadn’t spoken in years.’
‘Didn’t anyone ask what would happen to you?’
‘I told him I’d arranged to live with my mother. He didn’t check.’
More holes in the net. I tried to imagine fending for myself at – at what? Twelve?
‘But didn’t your mum…’
He waited.
‘Didn’t she… does she know you live here?’
His expression was mild. ‘She was sixteen when she had me, nineteen when she left.’ Finn leant down and picked up the little cat. ‘I don’t remember what she looks like.’
I thought of my own mother, reliable as the furniture.
There was so much more to ask, but the conversation was over. A complex contract was in the process of being forged, whereby Finn agreed to tolerate my presence and I agreed to worship him – totally, but carefully, so as not to destroy the fragile equilibrium of his life.
The cat leapt from his arms and Finn crossed over to the kitchen to close the vent on the stove. Without saying goodnight, he handed me a lamp and disappeared up the stairs. I unfolded the blankets and crawled between them, lying for a long time wrapped up warm against the night, listening to the wind and looking at the pictures on the walls and the trembling shadows cast by the little flame.
I can be there again now, huddled in a private pocket of warmth as the fire dies and the hut cools, snug against the roar of wind and sea, wrapped in blankets permeated with Finn’s smoky-wood smell, and always aware of the other presence in the loft above me, mysterious and powerful as an angel. After all these years, I can barely think back to that night without succumbing to emotions both wonderful and terrible, to a feeling as deep as the sea and as wide as the night sky. It was love, of course, though I didn’t know it then, and Finn was both its subject and object. He accepted love instinctively, without responsibility or conditions, like a wild thing glimpsed through trees.
At last I extinguished the lamp, though according to my watch it was still early. And then, divided from the night by nothing more than four flimsy walls and an idea of a friend, I fell asleep.