Had Eve been slagging off lazy Maxwell to Ben as well? They’d obviously got to know each other much better than she’d been aware during their curry and quiz Friday nights at the Rising Sun. The very thought of them sneaking about behind her back made her stomach pinch painfully and her eyes burn.
The charts and weather-watching should have had her full attention as she sailed, but instead her brain wanted to replay the moment she’d discovered them, the cushions scattered everywhere and Ben fastening his shirt with shaky fingers.
‘It’s not how it looks,’ Ben had dared to say. At least he’d had the decency to look immediately ashamed.
The betrayal was the worst bit. It was like something you’d read in the gossip mags.
Take a Breakwould love it. She could picture it now. The headline would read,My Best Mate Stole My Man, and there’d be a large picture of Alex looking all forlorn and stoic staring down the camera lens. She had zero plans to ring the magazines, though. For as long as she could remember she’d craved peace and privacy.
She had, nonetheless, considered phoning Ben’s parents, just to let them know what he’d been up to. After all, she’d been part of the Thomas family for ages. How much had he told them, she wondered? Probably not enough to tarnish his apple-of-their-eye status. Soon, Eve would replace her in the Thomas family. This sent sadness blooming through her chest.
Actually,thathurt more than the betrayal. The affair, or whatever it was, had ousted Alex from her spot at their table. Now she had nobody.
Everyone in Port Kernou knew she had no parents of her own, no siblings or aunts and uncles, not even a spare grandparent or a second cousin of any kind, and the village had flocked around her back when her lovely dad died, but seeing how quickly she’d accepted her new line of work and how well she’d managed her independence, they’d soon left her to it. Then, after years going it alone, she’d met Ben and life seemed to begin again. She’d enjoyed being part of a family.
She’d even called Mr and Mrs Thomas ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ and while those words had never quite brought back the feeling of being with her own parents in her own family home, it had been the closest she was ever going to get, and she’d felt part of something happy and cosy. The Thomas family was massive, with cousins in every nearby village, and there was always someone around to have a cup of tea with when she popped in to Ben’s parents’ place. She wasn’t at all ready to admit that she’d loved that family feeling a tiny bit more than she’d loved Ben.
Finding herself crying at the helm yet again she gave herself a sharp talking to about needing to keep her wits about her, out here all by herself. Everyone in Cornwall knew the dangers and there wasn’t one of them untouched by a loss at sea at some point in their family history.
She kept her eyes on the horizon, avoiding the deeper water that she was afraid of, while navigating sandbars, rocks and wrecks, and dropping anchor to rest or to cry whenever she felt like it, always making sure the solar panels that helped power some of the dashboard instruments and the equipment in the tiny kitchenette were wiped clean.
There’d been a few hairy moments around Land’s End where she’d been afraid to sail after sundown, but somewhere around day three she’d settled into a fine routine of sailing a little, turning in wide aimless circles just to slow her journey, stopping to watch the seals or racing the dolphins whenever they appeared alongside her, and drinking endless cups of black tea, huddled inside her father’s long leather ferryman’s coat from decades ago and still somehow smelling of him; Paco Rabanne, sea salt, tobacco, and pure love like only a good dad can give.
She tried not to think of what he’d have to say about all this, the absolutetalking tohe’d give her about needing to head straight for shore and a nice B&B with a bar stocked with brandy where she could get her head straight and have a long, hot bath.
That had been his cure for almost everything. ‘You’ll feel better after a nice long bath,’ he’d tell her in those early days when she was desperately missing her mum and couldn’t get to sleep, or when she had a tummy ache or a cold.
After she’d had a long soak he’d sing her fisherfolk songs and tell stories about mermaids and kelpies in his soft Cornish accent and, even when she was a young teen, he’d rock her in his arms like theDagalienwas rocking her now.
What was she doing? Maybe she should head for land? It was only a week until Christmas. Surely she couldn’t spend it alone at sea?
She’d been looking forward to a family dinner round Ben’s mum and dad’s and a few days in front of the telly with the ferry moored up, but that had gone out the window along with her three-and-a-half-year-long relationship and a million promises that he’d move in to her dad’s place with her one day. It was always maybe next year, or maybe once his car was paid off – or maybe never, with Ben.
All that was over now, along with her striving to be settled like a normal couple looking to the future and hoping that one day it would come back to her – that feeling of contented homeliness that she could just about remember from when she was little. She’d been willing to overlook how much hard work Ben was, and how – it was beginning to strike her now – indifferent he could be.
Her plans for a cosy, easy future with no more shocks and no more losses were shot to bits now. She’d lost Ben, his family, Eve, and now Christmas: all gone. Life had snatched every last bit of comfort away from her and she simply could not face her empty house reminding her of that fact, like a great big ‘I told you so’.
The silence there would be hideous, especially at this time of year, and she’d have nothing to do but sit there thinking about how she’d let herself get comfy with Ben and the Thomases even when deep, deep down she’d worried she was on the wrong path with the wrong person. It was just that, when she was passing the veggies around his mum’s dinner table or going to Thomas family weddings and parties, her vague misgivings about Ben were so very easy to ignore. She’d been as close to happy with him as she knew how to be since her dad died.
She knew too that if she hadn’t got in her boat and bolted, if she’d stayed at home over the holidays, everyone would have come knocking at her door.
Eve would have been there, crying and apologetic – or maybe smug and triumphant? Either way, Alex couldn’t bear the thought of seeing her. Mrs Thomas woulddefinitelyhave been crying and saying how she didn’t want the break-up to change things between them, even though nothing could possibly remain the same now.
Then there’d have been the whispers going round Port Kernou. It was that kind of place. She’d have given it to four o’clock the next day for the first of the lasagnes to arrive. Well-wishers and nosey parkers, the whiskery harbourside old timers and her school pals, they’d know all about it by now and it would be ‘Poor Alex!’ all over again, just like when her mum died; just like after Dad.
For months of her twenty-six years she’d lived off donated lasagnes and ‘let me know if there’s anything you need’ (always said with the same pinch-browed concern). It was only people being kind, of course, but she couldn’t help feeling bitter now. Everyone is always ‘sosorry’ until they’re spotted later that same day on Facebook grinning in selfies out and about, forgetting all about how ‘heartbroken’ they’d said they were on her doorstep.
Alex had had enough of that kind of attention, and Ben’s cheating risked bringing it all back to her doorstep once more. There was no way she was sticking around to find out if she was at the eye of another pity storm.
She wanted solitude and to be where nobody knew her, and she wanted to be alone on her dad’s boat, where she felt his presence the most. The feeling of going somewhere in theDagalienwas certainly better than going home and facing December’s brutal emptiness head on.
She’d have kept sailing too, if it hadn’t been for that great tower of cumulonimbus just offshore.
When she set off from Port Kernou it had been a calm and misty winter’s day; now the clouds claimed half the sky and reached up so far it hurt her neck to contemplate them; a mass of grey the likes of which she’d never seen before. It turned the water around her a deep, foreboding black like ink in a pot.
Perhaps she’d have made it all the way to Scotland, or Bergen, or Iceland maybe, if it hadn’t been for the one-hundred-year storms intent on playing havoc with mellow old Clove Lore and her own little boat which today, on December the nineteenth, just so happened to be approaching the village’s harbour mouth, where on brighter days the sunfish flap their fins over blue shallows. Alex had no idea her journey was about to end in Devon.
Meanwhile, in spite of the clouds gathering and the early weather warnings that foretold of storms expected to break over land in the coming days, nobody in Clove Lore yet knew how monumental, how life-altering, they would be. Everyone was simply going about their days, waiting in for Amazon deliveries, wrapping gifts, baking and buying, lighting hearth fires and getting ready to settle in for a well-earned holiday rest.
