On the first day of their third week, Aleksey returned from his early morning swim with two decisions made. The first was that he was going to buy a bed. He’d sleep with Ben Rider-Mikkelsen anywhere, anytime (had slept with him in very many odd places over the years), but he was getting a bit tired of a mat on the floor. Even with their nightly fun severely curtailed by the presence of the family, what they had achieved had been done with mutterings about hardness which had been entirely unrelated to the activity.
The second resolution he decided to put into motion whilst he was doing the first.
He consequently told the family that he was heading back home for the day. They’d all been to St Mary’s a number of times during the weeks for food, or a bit of variety, so this wasn’t a big deal anymore. Squeezy would take him across to Hugh Town so he could catch the plane to Exeter.
Ben was torn and clearly wanted to go with him, but also didn’t want to leave Molly to anyone else’s care. She was nippy and adventurous, and required a great deal of watching. He was her father—it was his job to keep her safe. Also, he was in the middle of building a tree house, which Miles, getting into the spirit of the island, had immediately named Molly’s Drey.
Aleksey merely gave Ben’s hair a knuckle rub, as they were being observed by small and curious eyes, and left him to it.
He felt a mounting excitement when he got on the plane.
He’d requested a window seat on the correct side this time.
As they rose over the sparkling blue sea, he pressed his face to the little perspex oval, waiting.
Then he saw it. It took his breath away. So tiny, so perfect, and so fragile, Light Island had nevertheless withstood everything that had been thrown at it, and now it kept secure all that he held precious. He pictured Enid relaxing in the sun on the veranda, reading; Babushka sorting out Kittiwake, making lists of things to buy for both houses; Emilia sitting cross-legged on the headland, sketching the lighthouse for her journal; and Miles and Molly assisting the great tree house project (no blue paint allowed), and Ben. Even after fifteen years together, the frisson of lust he felt prickle down his spine just picturing Ben shirtless, sawing wood, made him smile.
The car was still parked at Peter’s flight hangers, but the school was shut down for the summer, this scheduled break being the main reason why Ben had not wanted to delay his solo check.
Aleksey detoured Exeter, deciding to buy a bed as his second task. He felt a time imperative against him, some sense of losing his opportunity if he delayed longer.
He headed for Topsham.
If he believed in such things, he’d have maintained that he’d had a premonition, for it appeared that he’d been too slow after all.
As he walked down towards the abbey, he could see immediately that its faded serenity was ruined. Chain-link building site fences had been erected at the entrance to the plot, and some formidable diggers were knocking down the old walls and clearing the rubble. Men in hard hats and orange fluorescent vests were consulting together around a theodolite, so Aleksey slipped unseen between a gap in the fence panels and made his way down to the river. He walked along the bank until he came to the familiar wooden door and dragged it open.
The scene of devastation that greeted him made his heart sink. The wall at the back of the garden had been demolished. The diggers had been in. Where there had been raised beds with carefully tended produce, now there was only bare earth and deep tyre tracks. The small lean-to was gone. The shed, entirely collapsed flat, looked as if it had fainted. Aleksey knew how it felt.
He walked slowly over the ruts, listening to the distant sound of heavy plant vehicles manoeuvring in the distance.
‘Well, hello there, son. Bit of a sorry state we’re in today.’
Aleksey turned sharply at the familiar voice.
Harry was tying his dinghy to the small wooden post and shooing Snodgrass away from something he was carrying wrapped in newspaper. Aleksey could smell the vinegar on the fish and chips from where he stood. Instead of coming into the walled garden, Harry skirted away from it further down the towpath, and when Aleksey found him again, he was sitting on his upturned bucket by the river, blowing on and then feeding the little dog bites of battered cod.
Aleksey sat down on the riverbank and threw a pebble into the water.
Harry politely offered Aleksey a chip, which he declined. ‘Ah, before I forget, I have something for you.’ He rummaged with his free hand in an aged canvas knapsack by his feet and produced a brown bag. Aleksey recognised it immediately: his books.
He huffed. ‘Did you enjoy them?’
Harry pursed his lips as if highly offended as he passed them over. ‘Never read another man’s books without asking first, son.’ Then he chuckled at his own joke and added a little abashed, ‘I didn’t need to: I wrote the forward for Chichester in the one about his flying exploits.’
Incredulous, Aleksey pulled it out and flicked the cover open: forward by Captain Henry Staveley-Bathurst RN, Captain of Dartmouth Naval College.
What could he say to that? Spirals within spirals. It brought him back to the reason for his visit. As he turned the books over in his hands, he offered succinctly, ‘I wanted to thank you. You saved my family’s life.’
Harry was now intent on checking there were no bones in Snodgrass’s snippets and didn’t respond.
‘I don’t think the mor—Michael could have done that sail by himself.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, son, he’s a pretty handy lad—when you get past all that bluff and bluster.’
Aleksey took a small breath and decided there was no time like the present—that there might not be another opportunity—and if he did not say what he had come to say then Harry might fade from his life as mysteriously as he had arrived in it. ‘You know him better than most, of course—being his father.’
For the first time, Harry looked directly at him, and a slither of his habitual vague calmness vanished. His gaze was now sharply enquiring. ‘Did he tell you? I’m surprised. He forbade me ever speaking of it—to anyone, but particularly to you.’
