CHAPTER 15

Making Polite Conversation

 

 

‘That was a bad idea. I’m really sorry, I should have realised.’

Cass was falling over herself to apologise. ‘No, we won’t talk about Rob, No, why don’t you tell me about the Christmas Festival; that’s only a couple of weeks away. Yes, tell me about that. Are you performing at all?’

Some invisible barrier had clattered down in between them, and although Hal answered her, they were making polite conversation rather than talking to each other. He told her about the concert for the Christmas Festival. She told him about Evensong by Candlelight. He told her about the menu in the pub and she told him about the Rural Dean. He spoke about his mother’s recipe for mince pies, she told him about her own inability to make mince pies at all without burning them.

It grew dark as they talked. They needed to save all the lights they had for the walk back across the beach, so they sat in the darkness, listening, as outside rain began to fall - it sounded like sleet as it hit the windows and corrugated iron roof of the beach hut. Cass grew colder and colder, she tried not to let her voice shiver, to keep it sounding more cheerful than she felt. She couldn’t see his face clearly in the darkness, but she could still see it in her mind, the moment of utter despair that had flashed across it when she had mentioned his brother. She was used to dealing with grieving parishioners, she was used to watching them struggle with the raw emotion that gradually numbed and subdued into something more bearable, but something about Hal’s grief remained raw and twisted, something that stopped him moving on. She had seen it in his face and it was more than just grief. It was guilt clearly written there; she recognised it because she knew for herself what guilt was like.

‘You’re punishing yourself for something, Hal. I don’t know what it is – and I’m not asking - but I’d like to help if I can,’ she said at last. There was silence for what felt like a long while.

‘Have you lost anyone close to you, Vicar?’ he said at last, quietly. She paused for a moment.

‘When I was seven, my father was killed. After that, there was just mum and me; she died when I was twenty. I was an only child; they were all I had, so you could say I’ve lost everyone close to me.’

‘What happened to your father?’ No “if you don’t mind my asking” or anything like that. This wasn’t small talk any more. In the darkness it was possible to speak.

‘There was an accident with a drunk driver when he was coming home from Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. His car ended up in a tree; he was killed.’

‘That’s why you don’t like Christmas.’

She nodded, mutely, but that was no good in the darkness.

‘It is,’ she added, quietly, her voice betraying her with an unaccustomed tremor.

‘Rob was drowned, you know,’ he said at last slowly and softly. ‘The summer he was seventeen. I could have saved him, but I didn’t.’ She could hear in his voice that same twist of darkness that she had seen in his face.

‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ she asked, wanting, but at the same time not wanting him to tell her.

He sighed; she felt the movement of the bed as he turned away from her and she could see his silhouette against the last faint light from the window behind him.

‘It was a beautiful summer day. Some stupid tourists had got an inflatable, and a mother and her little girl were on it. The wind was coming off the shore, and it started to blow the inflatable out to sea. He was out in the bay checking crab pots; him and another lad in a boat. It should have been simple, easy for him to go and get them. I …’ there was a pause. Cass couldn’t see his face and she was almost glad that she couldn’t. It gave him some privacy, this space between them and the darkness – if he had been able to see her he might not be telling her this at all.

‘… I didn’t call the lifeboat. I was here, at the beach hut all the time. I was … well, you know …’

He seemed unwilling to tell her what he was doing, but his meaning was clear.

‘You were with a woman?’ she suggested.

‘I was here with my wife,’ he replied with a sigh. ‘We’d only been married a few months … you know … I saw everything; just out there.’ She sensed movement; perhaps he was pointing out of the window, Cass couldn’t see. ‘She told me to go and help; she would call for the lifeboat, but I said no, Rob knows what he’s doing; Rob’ll get them. I wanted to stay here with her, I didn’t want to have to leave her even for a minute to go and help my brother. I was selfish and I was a coward.’

She was glad she couldn’t see his face right now, and that he couldn’t see her expression either.

‘Rob got the toddler into the boat, no bother. His mate was steering; Rob had been checking the pots. The woman panicked and couldn’t get herself into the boat, so Rob went into the sea to help her. She grabbed onto him and she … she pushed him under. He went under the boat and he never came up again. That’s when I called the lifeboat, that’s when I went into the water, but it was already too late. It took me too long to get there.’ He stood up and looked out of the window towards where the accident must have happened, even though in the dark he could see nothing. His back was still to her as he continued speaking.

‘He had been hit by the propeller, and then he had drowned. So close to me that I could have shouted across the water to him. I went in after him, swam across to the boat. The woman was clinging to the side now, she was safe, but I couldn’t find him. I went down again, and again, and again, under the water, in the darkness. The lifeboat came, but I wouldn’t stop. I was sure I could find him, but I didn’t. They didn’t find him until the next morning, the current had taken him down the coast a way.’

She stood up and went to him; in the darkness she reached out and found his hand. He grasped it tightly and she felt his body shaking with emotion.

‘His head was smashed in; his body was broken …  If I had gone to help; if I had called the lifeboat earlier, if I had swum faster …’ His grip on her hand was beginning to hurt. ‘If I had put my brother, my own family, before my own pathetic desires …’

‘Hal, you mustn’t blame yourself,’ she said.

‘Why mustn’t I? I could have saved him but I didn’t. It’s my fault he’s dead.’

‘It was an accident. It was nobody’s fault. Not your fault.’

‘An act of God, eh, Vicar?’ He sounded angry, but she was used to the bereaved and suffering blaming God - what she wasn’t used to was the sudden nagging feeling that maybe he had a point. Maybe God had forsaken Hal’s brother just as he appeared to have forsaken her right now.

‘No, just an accident. A terrible, tragic accident,’ she said softly, as she had said to so many different parishioners in the past.

‘But I might have saved him. Shit, I’ve lived with this for years. That I could have saved him, that I could have done something different.’

‘I understand.’ She took both his hands in hers; making him turn to face her though in the dark she couldn’t see his eyes.

‘That’s where it all went wrong. I was so in love with Katie that day, but I couldn’t love her the same way after that and every time we went to …’

‘To be intimate?’ Cass suggested as he struggled to find a polite way of putting the obvious.

‘Yes, to be intimate, I felt guilty. It was easier to push her away and move on.  Now I feel all the time that I need to make up for Rob - I have to help Mam and Dad because he isn’t here to do it, and he was always the one who was going to stay. He loved this place like I never did. I couldn’t wait to get away. But now Dad needs me to stay; keep the family name alive in the village and run the businesses but I hate it. I hate the pub, and the holiday cottages and the village and the sea … the sodding sea that just … tears everything apart … always the sea -’

‘Hal, I’m -’

‘Do you know why we couldn’t walk back across the beach?’

‘No, I -’

‘Because I can’t go in the water. I came out that day, when I couldn’t find him, and I have never been able to go back in. I can’t get on a boat, I can’t swim – I can’t even bear to walk in the water. It makes me sick. I feel it tug at me when I’m asleep, and I’m afraid that if I go into the sea, I’ll just keep walking and never come out again.’

‘Hal -’ her voice caught in her throat.

‘And some days, when things feel hopeless and I know what a worthless piece of shit I am, some days I think I’ll do it. I haven’t, yet, but the sea’ll get me one day.’

‘Hal … don’t  … I didn’t know …’ her voice was shaking as she replied, her hands frozen in his. Anything she could say right now seemed futile.

‘But you wanted to know, Vicar. You asked! You thought you could help me.’ He shook off her hands and walked away to the window. ‘You wanted to know about Rob; you wanted to hear my confession. And now you know. I’m not a good man and I sleep around because I don’t deserve anything any better.’

Cass waited as he took a moment to pull himself together. She wasn’t shocked by what he had said; she had heard much worse from other people, and she knew the anger in his voice was not directed at her. After a while he continued, more calmly.

‘Now I’m stuck here because I have to make up for what I did to Mam and Dad when I let Rob go that day. God, I don’t even know why I’m telling you any of this. It’s not something I ever talk about.’

She wanted to take him in her arms and hold him to her in the darkness; to comfort him. She wanted him to know just how much she understood. She paused for a moment, thinking, as she looked beyond him out over the bay to the lights of Old Rawscar, the only things visible in the darkness.

‘You’re telling me because I know all about that guilt too. I know what it feels like.’

Oh Lord, there was something about the darkness and the cold and the sound of the waves and the rain on the windows, something about the lonely isolation of this place. There was something that she felt she should tell him too; the secret that had haunted her. She had been so ashamed of it that she had never mentioned it to a soul, not even James, but now, here in the darkness, it fought its way out from the prison of her memory where she kept it locked away.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Shall I tell you something?’ she said, quietly, but it wasn’t a question. She was going to confess her sins to him whether he wanted to hear or not. ‘Shall I tell you about why I am guilty too?’

She paused, but Hal did not reply and she went ahead anyway.

‘When my father died, it was a huge loss. He was the best of everything, my kind, loving daddy …’ she found herself filling up, which was wrong; she should be the one offering comfort, not the one needing it. ‘Then my mother … she never got over it. She got the idea that he had been taken because she wasn’t good enough, that we weren’t good enough for him. She tortured herself, and she drank, Hal. I could have helped her to stop, but I didn’t. I pretended not to see. I ran away to university and while I was away, she took some pills and she drank some vodka and she didn’t wake up again.’ She stopped talking for a moment to catch her breath, smelling the salty tang in the air, which matched the salty tang of her tears.

‘I’ll never know if she meant to do it or if it was an accident – but if I had been there, she wouldn’t have died. I ran away and I left her. So, I know exactly what it feels like, Hal, I understand. I’m guilty too. The only thing I could think of to do to put it right was to try and be like my Dad, to finish his ministry, to be strong and good like him because it was what my mother would have wanted. But all the time, I know I can never be like him, never be as good, as noble, as devout as he was. I failed my mother and every day I’m still failing my father. I can never be as good as him, because I let my own mother die and I wasn’t there.’

She heard the floorboards creak in the darkness, and then he was beside her and his arms were around her, holding her as she wept, saying nothing at all, only holding her close as they sat down his hand gently stroking her hair, just as he had held Anna that day. She could feel the roughness of his stubble against her hair, the comforting warmth of his body against hers. It was a long time since a man had held her like that. James had preferred the gentle benediction of a cool kiss on the forehead.

And then suddenly she knew she wanted more. She wanted to pull his face down to hers and kiss him. She wanted to feel the weight of his body pressing down above her in the darkness of the beach hut, and she wanted to feel …

‘I think we should try to get home now,’ she said, quickly.

 

That night Cass had a dream. She was in the sea, walking into the water, long, heavy skirts dragging at her, weighing her down. She couldn’t see and she couldn’t breathe, but she knew her mother and father were there, lost below the waves. Just as she was about to go to them, a hand grasped hers, and she turned to find herself pulled from the water. She lay, cold, wet and exhausted, on the beach beside the man who had rescued her, but Hal’s head was covered in blood and he was cold and unmoving. She woke Anna up with her scream.