Bryan Deane’s kayak – the one that bore him out to sea, never to return – was washed up at high tide on the beach at Whitley Bay the day of Erwin Faust’s funeral. It was found at around five thirty in the morning by a woman who worked as an anaesthetist at Ashington hospital, out walking her dog. The woman, who was in her fifties, stood beside her panting Jack Russell and contemplated the red P&H Quest kayak on the early morning beach, which was full of birds. It was already a beautiful day, and as she stood contemplating it, she fought to remember the significance of the kayak. Then, when she did remember – a man had gone missing in it around Easter time and Northumbria Police had launched an appeal – she fought with her conscience over whether she could be bothered to contact the police, which would involve giving a statement and being late for work. In another couple of hours, the beach would be full of people. Somebody was bound to notify the police, and anyway this kayak might not even be the kayak.
She turned and carried on walking up the beach towards St Mary’s lighthouse, listening to the quiet wash of the waves. Then, sighing, stopped and looked back at the red kayak resting on its side in the sand, no longer the magnificent intact red it had been the Easter Saturday Bryan stood holding it, next to Anna Faust on Tynemouth Longsands.
It was the kayak. She knew as soon as she saw Flo running towards it; she knew as she turned and walked back towards it now, holding her mobile.
Laviolette arrived at Whitley Bay within the hour. He sent Sergeant Chambers to the Italian café on the Promenade, and stood contemplating the kayak, which lay a lot further from the water’s edge now the tide had retreated, abandoning it to the Inspector’s gaze. Constable Wade – now DC Wade – who had been at the Deane’s house Easter Saturday, took a statement from the female dog walker and was about to join the Inspector again when she saw him look away from the kayak and out to sea in a way that made her hesitate before crossing the sand towards him.
‘All done, sir,’ she said.
‘You make it sound conclusive.’
‘Well at least we’ve found the kayak.’
‘But what about Bryan Deane?’ He turned to face her. ‘You think he’s dead don’t you?’
‘I do, sir, yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Common sense,’ she said, staring out to sea.
‘Common sense,’ he repeated, looking quickly at her, amused.
As Laviolette stood on the beach at Whitley Bay, Anna helped Mary fold away the sofa bed she’d been sleeping on in the lounge downstairs at number nineteen Parkview. Mary watched Anna fold the duvet into the box and put the pillows and linen back in their bag before taking them upstairs.
‘We just need to get through today,’ she said, taking in Mary, motionless in the middle of the lounge in her dressing gown and slippers, her hair flattened by the net she slept in, and her jaw hanging loose without the false teeth to give it shape. ‘We just need to get through it,’ she said again.
Mary nodded, distracted, and she was still standing in the same spot when Anna came back downstairs.
After breakfast, which was eaten in silence, Mary watched Anna clear up, without comment while Anna stared through the kitchenette window at the weeds flourishing in the otherwise barren garden, which in previous years had been filled with a burgeoning crop of broccoli, runner beans, summer cabbage, potatoes, spinach and sweet peas.
‘We should get dressed,’ Anna said, turning round to face Mary and when Mary didn’t respond, she took hold of her elbow and pulled her gently to her feet before leading her upstairs, into the bathroom. ‘Maybe you should wash your face.’
‘I don’t wash my face,’ Mary said, watching the sink fill with water. ‘I get those facial wipes – they’re lovely and soft on my skin.’
Anna left her in the bathroom with the door open and went to get the suit they’d chosen in Newcastle at the weekend from the wardrobe in Mary and Erwin’s room.
The bed was made, empty.
She hadn’t been sure, after Erwin died, what she was meant to do with the bed linen. It seemed to her that something ceremonial should be done with it; something to mark the fact that the linen had borne the passage between life and death, but she didn’t know who to ask because she’d never buried anybody before.
In the end she folded the bedding into a bag and left it in the wash house.
She unzipped the M&S suit bag Mary had been more pleased with than the suit itself and laid it out on the bed, suddenly aware of Mary standing in the doorway, watching her.
‘You changed the bedding.’ She paused. ‘Where’s the other set?’
‘The wash house.’
‘That’s my spare set,’ Mary commented, staring at the bed.
‘Well, your good set’s in the wash house.’
Mary nodded.
‘D’you want to get dressed in the back bedroom or –’
‘I want to get dressed in here,’ Mary said, shuffling decisively into her bedroom. ‘Erwin was always such a tidy man.’ She looked around her. ‘Hung everything up – all his clothes – never left things lying around. I never had to clear up after him.’
Anna laid the suit out on the bed. ‘If you need anything, I’m just next door,’ she said, going into her own room and shutting the door behind her.
She sat down on the end of the bed looking out the window at the cloudless sky and feeling the warmth of the midsummer sun where it fell on her knees and thighs, and could have crawled back into bed and slept the entire day away because she couldn’t imagine it ever ending, this public death.
Erwin’s private death had been unendurable enough. There were the moments they thought he’d gone then some part of him would flutter . . . quiver . . . his left eyelid or his throat, while she and Mary knelt on either side looking as if they were pinning him down; trying to prevent him from flying away.
Then the moment did come and it was as though everything in the room rushed suddenly to the foreground. From the pale green lampshade and crocheted runner on the bedside table to the Wilbur Smith book from the library, and the Casio watch laid out carefully across the cover (obscuring the man in a Safari outfit with cocked rifle).
Erwin had decided to die.
Even though there hadn’t been much of it left at the end, there had been enough for them to feel his life, stopping. They knew he’d gone even though he was lying on the bed between them still. The nurse, Susan, had said that was how it would be, but Anna hadn’t wanted to believe her, because she was jealous of Erwin’s death, and needed it to be unique. But Susan had seen it all before.
All they were left with after Erwin’s irrevocable departure were the things he no longer needed, and it was terrible: clothes, shoes, coats (with shopping lists in the pockets still) . . . the Penguin biscuits in the larder . . . the shed full of tools . . . a cassette of Westminster Cathedral Choir in the tape player . . . a newspaper that had slipped under the sideboard with his biro jottings on the sports pages from when he’d last played the pools . . . the bottle of eau de cologne with its blue and gold label, which had been the one smell from his childhood he was able to buy in England.
Through the bedroom wall she heard the coat hanger clanging against the wardrobe doors, and started to slowly get dressed herself.
Fifteen minutes before the hearse and car were due to arrive, Don and Doreen rang on the door. They were travelling with them in the car. Don gave Mary and Anna large, hard hugs then told Mary to get the sherry out and as all four of them stood drinking to Erwin, it was as if something lifted momentarily.
‘We really appreciate this, Don,’ Anna said, ‘especially given what you’re going through at the moment.’
Don shook his head. ‘We’re going to get you through this, Mary,’ he announced, ‘even if we have to do it drunk.’
It was then that the hearse and car pulled up to take them to St Cuthbert’s where Mary and Erwin had been married.
‘They’re here,’ Mary said quietly, suddenly mortified at the sight of the empty sherry glass in her hand, and aware that she wouldn’t have noticed the cars pulling up at all if it hadn’t been for the sun bouncing off the long black roofs. Looking outside, she realised suddenly that the street was full of people. There were people lining it on either side; people standing on the garden wall. People had come to say goodbye not just to a man, but to an entire generation – a generation that was leaving them and taking the world they’d lived in with them.
People had come to pay tribute to the German, and when Mary stepped out the front door into the sun the silence was thick with respect.
Laviolette walked back across the beach to the Promenade and got another coffee from the café before climbing the bank onto the headland next to the mini golf course where his car was parked.
He sat drinking his coffee, the sun brilliant on the sea to his right then, sighing, phoned Laura Deane to tell her that he thought they’d found Bryan’s kayak.
Laura, sounding pleased to hear from him – for the first time as far as he could recollect – stood at the salon’s reception desk absently stroking her neck and said lightly, ‘Inspector – I was about to call you. My doctor said I should think about taking a short break and I wasn’t sure whether or not I needed your . . . permission.’
He exhaled loudly. She was flirting with him and he was aware that, like most women, Laura Deane was probably more proficient at flirting with men she disliked than those she liked.
‘I’m not sleeping,’ Laura carried on, ‘and since the appeal I keep getting these anxiety attacks. There’s a name for them . . . I can’t remember . . . I feel like I’m about to black out then I start to fall. I fall –’ She paused.
Laviolette had the impression she was holding her breath.
‘Where were you thinking of going?’
‘The other side of the world.’
‘For a short break?’
‘No more than ten days.’ She paused again. ‘I thought coming into work and carrying on would make it better, but – I’m tired of carrying on, and I’m not coping. I’m not coping with anything.’
He drew his hand absently through the dust on the dashboard then, sighing, said, ‘I phoned to tell you that a kayak matching the description of Bryan’s kayak was washed ashore this morning at Whitley Bay.’
‘This is bad news, isn’t it?’ she said quietly. ‘Do you need me to come down to the beach?’
‘No – it’s fine.’ Laviolette hesitated. ‘Unless of course you want to?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.’ She started to cry. ‘What am I meant to do?’
‘Whatever you want to do – whatever’s best.’
‘I don’t want to see the kayak. I don’t want to come down to the beach and see the kayak.’
‘That’s fine. D’you want to have a think about it and phone me back in half an hour?’
‘No, I don’t. I want to get on a plane and pretend none of this is happening.’ She broke off. ‘Is that selfish of me?’
‘Would Martha go with you?’
‘If I can persuade her to, which I doubt.’
Laviolette was silent. He almost believed her – there wasn’t enough of a reason to disbelieve her.
‘You don’t think I should go?’ Laura prompted him when he didn’t say anything.
‘I’m thinking about Martha – there’s going to be media exposure here with the discovery of the kayak. When would you go – if you go?’
‘Tomorrow morning – it’s a cancellation. I need to confirm within the next thirty minutes.’
‘Tomorrow morning,’ Laviolette repeated, thinking. ‘Okay – go,’ he concluded heavily.
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really,’ he laughed suddenly, in spite of himself.
They both stayed on the line, unsure how to end the call.
‘Inspector? You said that the kayak matches the description of Bryan’s kayak – how sure are you?’
‘It’s Bryan’s kayak, Laura.’
As Mary walked down the aisle at St Cuthbert’s Church, holding tightly onto Anna’s arm, she glanced down at her feet, trying to comprehend the time that had passed since she’d last walked down that aisle just over fifty years ago. Her ankles, then, had been the ankles of a twenty-two-year old, and covered in a pair of nylons she had to put nail varnish on in two places to stop the ladder running any further. She’d worn a pale blue suit and brown war issue shoes, and unlike today the church had been empty because she was marrying a German POW.
She’d been waiting on tables in the café that was now Moscadini’s – where Bryan used to wait for Anna after school. Erwin had been working for a firm of painters and decorators who’d been hired to paint the café. They’d noticed each other immediately, and Mary had somehow known what was going to happen as soon as she saw him that first time, tall in overalls that didn’t belong to him. In fact, Erwin didn’t look like he belonged to himself at all after the years spent in camps.
What happened afterwards had been effortless . . . until Bettina, but then Bettina was the great tragedy of their lives.
They sat down at the front of the church, which was full. There were people standing.
Looking down the length of the pew – the scent of the lilies unbearable this close – she was sure there was somebody missing; somebody they were still waiting for, and now there wasn’t any room. She felt Anna squeezed up against her, and started to panic.
‘Move up,’ she hissed.
Don turned to her, confused, unsure what to do. ‘There’s no room for Erwin.’
Don looked at Anna, who nodded at him before taking hold tightly of Mary’s hand.
‘It’s alright, Nan.’
‘He’ll want to be here at the front with us.’
‘It’s alright.’
Then Mary saw the coffin in front of them, and remembered. ‘I forgot,’ she whispered wetly into Anna’s collarbone. ‘I forgot.’
There in front of her was the coffin containing the remains of a man who’d last been in the church as a groom, and it was at the realisation of this that Mary started to cry. She wasn’t crying at the thought of Erwin in particular, but at the terrible inevitability of growing old and how awful it was that the girl she’d once been should be trapped inside the old body she’d seen in the mirror that morning, and that there was nothing she could do about it.
They started to sing the first hymn, which wasn’t a hymn at all, but a carol – ‘Silent Night’ – and they sang it because it was Erwin’s favourite. Anna never forgot him telling her that the third Christmas he spent as a prisoner of war, they’d been given permission to walk to the small village church near the camp, and stand at the back for midnight mass. The priest giving the service allowed them to sing ‘Silent Night’ in their own language, and there wasn’t a single protest from the congregation, who turned round when the prisoners started to sing, and saw nothing but row after row of homesick boys.
*
The sunset that evening was long and vast. Winter’s solitary dog walkers and runners, who remained loyal to the beach throughout the year’s coldest days, suddenly found themselves making way for people wanting to hold onto a day that had at last felt like the first day of summer. The anaesthetist who found the kayak that morning at Whitley Bay, had to call Flo to heel three times as children – and some adults – ran wildly towards the incoming tide.
The wind was strong enough for kites, surfers and wind-surfers and at the café where Laviolette bought his coffee – run by the descendents of Italian immigrants – there were queues for ice cream. The anaesthetist stopped and looked around her, trying to remember where it was exactly that she’d found the kayak because there was no sign of it now.
As she stood on the beach, trying to remember, Laura Deane drove along the coastal road through Whitley Bay towards Seaton Sluice, a Neil Diamond CD that Bryan had bought her for her last birthday playing loudly. She had the window open and as she sang along, the wind blew strands of hair into her open mouth.
The last time she’d listened to the CD had been on the way to work the Saturday Bryan disappeared – Easter Saturday – but Laura wasn’t conscious of this fact. It was a beautiful evening, and tomorrow morning she was flying to Montevideo. She felt suddenly younger than she had in years.
An hour after Laura drove north along the coastal road, Anna, still in black – she’d exchanged her funeral suit for running clothes – ran south through the rapidly greying twilight along the last line of beach not yet covered by the tide. The wash of the waves was loud and the air felt cold now on her skin.
Mary had fallen silent around half seven, lowering herself stiffly onto one of the dining chairs that had been pushed back against the lounge wall, and staring across the room at a spot of carpet near ‘the shrine’ as Erwin used to call it – a coffee table with a collection of photographs on it chronicling the triumphs and highlights of Anna’s life and career. In most of them she was either holding an award or shaking somebody’s hand, and the photograph in pride of place – the one that came closest in Mary’s mind to compensation for the absence of snapshots of babies and husbands – was the one of Anna shaking Prince Edward’s hand.
Mary wanted to be alone.
‘Do you want me to bring the bedding down before I go?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m sleeping upstairs tonight.’
Anna hesitated then, for the first time in weeks, drove back to the Ridley Arms – glad to be alone herself. She lay along the sofa in the clothes she’d worn all day and, exhausted, fell asleep.
By the time she got to the harbour at Seaton Sluice, it was almost dark so she cut up onto the headland and ran back along the road. As she passed the Duneside development, she thought about the Deanes, and about Martha, who she hadn’t been in contact with for weeks.
She carried on running, past the bandstand and harbour sheds on the outskirts of Blyth, aware that she hadn’t eaten properly all day, that she felt lightheaded, and that her heart was pulling in a way that made her stop suddenly, worried that she was about to black out. She walked until her breathing became more regular then, when she got to Ridley Avenue, broke into a slow, even run again.
She could hear her phone ringing as she opened the street door to the apartment and, thinking it might be Mary, took the stairs two at a time, but it wasn’t Mary.
‘Is now a good time?’ Laviolette said.
‘Not really,’ she answered heavily, walking to the fridge and getting a carton of milk out. ‘My grandfather died. The funeral was today.’
‘I’ll phone another time.’
‘No – it’s fine.’ She fell onto the sofa and lay, staring out the window at the Quayside lights. ‘It’s fine,’ she said again.
‘You’re sure?’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Bryan Deane’s kayak was washed up this morning. We got a call at six from a woman out walking her dog on the beach at Whitley Bay.’
Anna felt something wet spreading across her chest. ‘Shit.’
‘You okay?’
‘I just spilt milk everywhere. Shit. Can I phone you back?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I just wanted you to know – about the kayak. And I’m sorry, really sorry, about your grandfather.’
After coming off the phone to Laviolette, Anna stood under the shower for twenty minutes before collapsing into the bed that had remained unmade for weeks.
She slept so heavily that she woke up the next morning in the same position she’d fallen asleep in.
She spent the morning cleaning the flat – something she hadn’t done properly since moving in – and putting various loads of washing through the machine, and it wasn’t until she stopped for lunch that she became aware of the fact that she’d lost her reason for staying up north.
On her way out to see Mary, she pulled a flyer out the letterbox.
‘Sorry to hear about your grandfather.’ Roy the Harbourmaster was standing smoking in the office doorway, one hand pushed in his trouser pocket. ‘My wife’s cousin was at the funeral.’
He looked away, distracted, down Quay Road towards the roundabout where a lorry was trying to reverse.
Anna screwed up the flyer and was about to throw it in the bin next to where she’d parked the Capri when her mind – which had been running ahead and drawing conclusions without her being aware of it – concluded that the paper was too good a grade for it to be a flyer. She smoothed it out on the roof of the Capri, which was hot from the sun, her heart pulling in the same way it had towards the end of her run the night before.
This was no flyer.
Somebody had drawn a butterfly, intricately executed in pen and ink, and written ‘Erwin Faust R.I.P.’ underneath.
‘You alright?’ she heard Roy’s voice, calling out.
She turned round, her hands over her eyes to shield them from the sun, and waved at him before walking over to the office.
‘Did you see anybody other than the postman put anything through my door?’
Roy thought about this. ‘There’s been nobody round here.’
She felt him watching her as she walked back to the car, putting the drawing in the glove compartment.
She should destroy the drawing, but not right now.
Right now, it gave her something to hold onto in a world that had been empty for too long.
Bryan wanted her to know he was still alive.
An hour after checking into the Hotel l’Auberge at Punte del Este, Laura Deane left her room and – despite several wrong turnings along uniform corridors that epitomised everything everybody who came here had paid for: the luxury of forgetting – eventually found what she was looking for: Suite 87. She knocked three times, her left hand and forehead pressed against the door, her eyes shut. There was no answer so she knocked again, her breath caught in her throat as she waited for the door to open – unable to hear any movement on the other side.
Then, without warning, a voice called out from inside, ‘Come in.’
She pushed the door open slowly, looking around her with scared eyes.
A man with blond hair – thinner than she remembered – was sitting by the window staring at her. He didn’t look like he was waiting for anything or anybody.
‘You’re here,’ she said, hesitant, shy and tearful.
‘You thought I wouldn’t be?’ he sounded half amused; half sad, and she knew – from the way he said it – that he’d thought about not being there.
Despite his utterly changed appearance, the man in front of her bore remarkable similarities to Bryan Deane – gestures, the voice – and her eyes would have found him immediately in a crowd, but nobody here in this hotel in Uruguay had any idea who Bryan Deane was. The name on the passport he’d handed to the Ukranian on reception gave his name as Tom Bowen, and over the next ten days – despite starting off afraid of each other – Laura found out a lot about Tom Bowen.
Unlike Bryan Deane, Tom Bowen didn’t get tired or depressed; he didn’t talk about suicide or come home on a Friday night and announce that he was spending the weekend walking in the Lake District, alone. He didn’t spend hours sitting on the edge of the bed holding a sock in his hand, staring at the wall; he didn’t scream down the phone at people in call centres thousands of miles away trying to manage his credit card debt; he didn’t sit in silence over a plate of trout and broccoli then start to quietly and inexplicably cry; he didn’t get out of his car and kick in a van’s door because it had taken his parking space; he didn’t sit in the ensuite in darkness, pretending not to be home. Tom Bowen didn’t look at her with hollow eyes or wake up sobbing or go on walks that lasted days.
Tom Bowen looked at her and held her and was there.
Tom Bowen made her feel weightless.
Tom Bowen made her laugh.
Tom Bowen made her not care about anything other than Tom Bowen.
Laura had been waiting for Tom Bowen ever since she first laid eyes on Bryan Deane at the age of thirteen.
The next morning, a Ukranian cleaner – sister to the Ukranian on reception – went into Suite 87. She’d been cleaning in hotels since she was fifteen and knew that licit and illicit love made rooms smell different. Suite 87, which she cleaned thoroughly and without expression – the lack of expression itself an expression of her experience – smelt illicit. The people who had spent the night here were not married – to each other anyway. These were her observations, made without judgement, but with a momentary wistfulness that gave her face – for less than a second – a thin brightness.