He knew he shouldn’t watch, in case James Horne looked up and noticed him. It was a bad time for him to interrupt. He sped up as much as possible to get past, and tried to look as though he hadn’t noticed anything but the tarmac up ahead. James Horne was big, and he didn’t look friendly. Just then, the argument ended and the man with the lilac sweatshirt turned to watch the person hidden by the fence move away. Zach kept looking straight ahead as he walked past the house towards the track to The Watch. At a safe distance, he glanced back over his shoulder, and was startled to see Hannah stalking away in the opposite direction with her fists clenched angrily at her sides.
Zach doubled back and jogged slightly to catch up with her.
“Hannah, wait!” She spun around and Zach was shocked by the expression on her face. She looked furious, and frightened. When she saw him, she blinked, and though her mouth twitched, she couldn’t seem to smile.
“Zach! What are you doing here?”
“I was just going down to visit Dimity. Are you all right? What was all that about?”
“Yes, I’m fine. I was just… Are you going back to the pub?”
“No. To Dimity’s, like I said… But I can come back with you, if you-”
“Good. Let’s walk.”
“All right, then. That was James Horne, wasn’t it?”
“What was?”
“That man you were talking to. That was James Horne.”
“Getting to know all the locals, I see,” she muttered, striding along rapidly at his side.
“He was in the pub the other night, giving Pete a bit of stick. Well, his brother was, anyway. And I thought I saw him on that fishing boat you were watching the other day, off the end of the jetty,” said Zach. Hannah scowled, but didn’t look at him.
“You might have done. He is a fisherman, after all.”
“It looked like you were arguing, just then.” Zach had to walk quickly to keep up with Hannah’s implacable pace. She ignored his statement. “Hannah, wait.” He caught her arm and pulled her to a stop. “Are you sure you’re all right? He wasn’t… threatening you, was he? Do you owe him money or something?”
“No, I bloody don’t! And I’d hardly go knocking on his door if I did, would I?”
“All right! Sorry.”
“Just… forget about it, Zach. It’s nothing.” She started walking again.
“Clearly not nothing…” Zach said, but fell silent at the look she shot him. “All right, fine. I was just trying to help, that’s all.”
“You can help me by buying me a pint and not worrying about James Horne.”
“Okay! How did the organic audit thing go this morning?” Finally, Hannah slowed her pace. They were nearly at the Spout Lantern, and she paused to look down towards the sea, and her farm. There was color high in her cheeks, and her nostrils flared slightly as she caught her breath. For a second she seemed lost in thought, but then she smiled; a smile of genuine delight.
“It went well,” she said, and they went inside.
Over a glass of beer she told him all about the inspection, but he found himself only half listening some of the time, distracted by her connection to James Horne and why she might refuse to talk about it, speculating about what they could have been arguing about. He pictured the way she had stood at the end of the jetty while Horne’s boat-and he was sure it had been his-had swung slowly across the bay. The flash of light he’d seen, as though someone onboard had binoculars. As if she had been marking that spot, demonstrating the end of the submerged platform. These thoughts worried him, but he couldn’t shake them. They caused a deep, ugly unease to settle inside him, increasing all the while.
It wasn’t until later in the afternoon that Zach made his postponed visit to The Watch. As he’d promised, Zach didn’t ask Dimity anything about the Aubreys. They talked instead about his own past, his career and his family, and inevitably the subject of his lineage came up. Dimity’s voice turned guarded, almost surreptitious when she asked about his grandmother.
“That summer your gran was here, that was 1939, yes? Well, that was the summer Charles and I were finally together, you see. So don’t you think I’d have known if there was another woman as well?” She picked at a loose thread on her mitten with her thumb and forefinger.
“Yes, you’re probably right,” said Zach, thinking that a man like Charles Aubrey could easily charm a woman into believing she was his only one.
“What was your granddad like? Was he a strong man?”
“Yes, I suppose he was.”
“Strong enough to keep a woman at his side?”
Zach pictured his grandpa, who would sit for hours after Sunday lunch with the newspaper across his knees, and wouldn’t let anybody else look at it until he’d solved the crossword, even though his eyes were shut and his chin dropping down. He tried to remember seeing tenderness, affection, pass between him and his wife, but the more he thought back, the more he realized how rarely they were even together in the same room. When he was in the sitting room, she was in the kitchen. When he was in the garden, she went into her dressing room to look at her Aubrey picture. At dinner they sat at opposite ends of a seven-foot table. Surely it couldn’t always have been like that? Surely it had taken sixty years of marriage for such a distance to grow between them?
“Tell me this,” said Dimity, interrupting his thoughts. “If your granddad really did think she had an affair with my Charles, why on earth did he go ahead and marry her?”
“Well, because she was pregnant, I suppose. That’s why they had to bring the wedding forward.”
“So he must have thought the baby was his.”
“At first, yes. I suppose he must. Unless he was just being… honorable.”
“Was he that kind? The chivalrous type? I’ve known few enough men that are. Not really.”
“No, I suppose that doesn’t seem quite right… but he might have done it to, you know, take the moral high ground.”
“To punish her, you mean?” said Dimity.
“Well, not exactly…”
“But that’s what it would have been. If he knew, and she knew he knew. What better way to remind her of it every day of her life, and to make her suffer for it, than to marry her?”
“Well, it backfired on him, if that was his plan. She made no secret of how pleased she was about the connection. About the scandalous rumors.”
“Well, that was Charles, you see. If she…” Dimity paused, and pain splintered her expression, robbing her of words for a second. “If she loved him, she’d have been proud, never ashamed.” She hung her head for a second, and rubbed the thumb of one hand over the opposite palm. “So… perhaps she did. Perhaps she did love him, after all.”
“But I’m sure…” Zach took one of Dimity’s restless hands and squeezed it. “I’m sure that didn’t mean he loved you any less. Even if she loved him… it could have been unrequited. He may well have thought nothing of her,” he said, feeling an odd pull of loyalties to speak that way about a grandmother he loved.