Zach followed a lane so narrow that dusty lengths of cow parsley whipped his mirrors on either side. On the backseat were a hastily packed suitcase and a cardboard box containing all the notes he had accumulated for his book on Charles Aubrey. There were more than he remembered. The box’s handles had sagged dangerously when he’d heaved it out from under his bed. His laptop was zipped up in its bag next to the box, full of pictures of Elise and ways of contacting her; and that was all he had with him. No, he corrected himself ruefully. That’s all I have. He came to the village around the next bend, but the road carried on south, towards where the land dipped and then disappeared into the sea, and Zach was suddenly unwilling to arrive. He had so little idea of what he would do when he did that he felt uneasy, almost afraid. He accelerated again, and carried on through the village, another mile or so, till the lane ended at a small, weed-strewn parking area. There was a faded orange-and-white life buoy, an abrupt sign warning of tides and submerged rocks, and a crumbling lip of land beneath which the gray sea rolled in, choppy and restless.
Zach considered his next move. He knew for a fact that the house Charles Aubrey had rented as his summer house was no more-other people had tried to visit it, but it had burned down at some point in the 1950s, and not even the foundations were visible anymore. The exact spot had been built over in the 1960s, by the council road that formed a large loop to the southwest of the village. He watched the white froth of the sea for a few minutes. The water looked cold and hostile as it broke over the rocky shore, constantly moving, seething. He could hear it grumbling beneath the higher sound the wind made, parting around his car. This sound, and the flat gray light, suddenly seemed desolate, seemed to echo around the emptiness inside him, magnifying it unbearably. He felt as though he barely existed, and he fought the feeling, thinking hard.
Blacknowle was where it had all started. The rift between his grandparents, the distance between his father and his grandpa that had hurt his father so. This was where Aubrey had cast his spell over Zach’s family, and this was where the man’s memory still held thrall. Where pictures that both had to be and couldn’t be by Aubrey were quietly emerging for sale from some hiding place. Zach opened the car door. He’d thought it would be cold; had pulled his shoulders up in anticipation, ready to shiver. Tensed against an onslaught that didn’t come. The breeze was warm and moist, and now it was in his ears it sounded excited, enthusiastic. An ebullient, thrumming sound, not a moan at all. Minute speckles of water landed on his skin and seemed to rouse him, waking him from a trance he hadn’t known he was in. He took a deep breath. Locking the car behind him, Zach walked to the edge of the low cliff. A narrow path ran unevenly through tan-colored earth and rocks to the beach, and without a second thought he began to pick his way down it, skidding on loose scree until he reached the bottom. He made his way across the rocks to the shoreline, crouched down on one large, flat boulder, and dipped his fingers into the water. It was shockingly cold. As a child, he’d have been in, regardless. He’d never seemed to feel the cold, although there were pictures of him, skinny in saggy wet trunks, grinning over a bucket of prawns, with his lips quite blue.
Beneath the water the dull rocks came alive in shades of gray and brown, black and white. Some of the clots of foam floating nearby were an unhealthy yellow, but the water was glassily clear. Sometimes things were too big, Zach suddenly thought. They were too big to step back and look at them all at once. Doing so was overwhelming, frightening. You had to get up close, look at each constituent part, and tackle something of a manageable size first. Start small. Build up to the bigger picture. He put his fingers back into the water and touched a flat rock that had a bright white stripe running across its exact center. He thought about painting it, sifting through colors in his mind to find the exact blend he would need to re-create the cold water, the immaculate stone. He wasn’t sure if he still could, but it had been many, many months since he’d even felt the urge to try. Calmer, Zach stood up and dried his fingers on the seat of his jeans. His stomach rumbled hotly, so he went back to the car and back to Blacknowle, where he’d passed a promising-looking pub.
The Spout Lantern was a crooked building, with walls of Portland stone beneath an undulating tiled roof. The hanging baskets outside were dry and leggy at the end of the season, with strings of brown lobelia trailing from them; the sign showed a curious-looking metal lamp with a handle on top and a long, tapering tube sticking out from one side-it looked more like a misshapen watering can than anything else. The pub sat in the center of the village, where the buildings clustered around a tiny green and crossroads. The pub was the only amenity he could see; a faded Hovis sign painted on the wall of one cottage spoke of a long-gone shop; a letterbox in the wall of another told of a vanished post office. Inside, the pub was cool and shady with that familiar, sour background smell of beer and people that was no longer masked by cigarette smoke. An elderly couple were eating fish and chips at a small table near the fireplace, even though the fireplace was empty and swept clean for the summer. Their whippet eyed Zach dolefully as he crossed to the bar and ordered half a pint and some ham sandwiches. The barman was friendly and highly vocal. He spoke too loudly in the quiet room and made the whippet wince.
A few other people were scattered farther along the room, eating lunch and talking in hushed voices. Zach suddenly felt too conspicuous to take a table by himself, so he stayed at the bar, sliding onto a stool and peeling off his sweater.
“Looks cold but it isn’t, is it? Funny sort of day,” the barman said cheerfully, passing Zach his drink and taking his money.
“You don’t know how right you are,” Zach agreed. The barman smiled curiously. He spoke with a home-counties accent at odds with his rustic appearance-a battered flannel shirt and canvas trousers that were frayed and thready around the pockets and hems. He looked about fifty, and had curls of gray hair reaching down to his collar, growing in a ring around a bald pate.
“So what brings you to Blacknowle? Holiday? Looking for a second home?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. I’m actually… doing some research.” Zach felt suddenly uneasy about saying so, as if once this was known he would have to act differently. Act as if he knew what he was doing. “Into an artist who used to live near here,” he pressed on. In the mirror behind the bar, he saw the elderly couple by the fire pause when they heard this, a gradual slowing of movement, then a halt. They stopped fiddling with the food on their plates, stopped chewing. Exchanged a look between them that Zach couldn’t read but that made the back of his neck prickle. The barman had cast a glance in their direction, too, but he quickly looked back at Zach and smiled.
“Charles Aubrey, I’ll bet.”
“Yes-you’ve heard of him,” Zach said. The barman shrugged amiably.
“Of course. Bit of a claim to fame, he is. Local celeb. He used to come in here all the time, back before the war. Not that I was here then, but I’ve been told; and there’s a photo of him over there-sitting outside this very establishment with drink in hand.”
Zach put down his drink and crossed to the far wall, where the framed photograph was hanging in a foxed mount speckled with dead thrips. The picture had been enlarged and was grainy as a result. It was a photo Zach had seen before, reprinted in an old biography of the man. He felt a peculiar frisson, thinking that he was standing in the same pub that Charles Aubrey had visited. Zach studied the picture closely. The light of an evening sun lit Aubrey’s face from the side. He was a tall man, lean and angular. He was sitting on a wooden bench with his long legs crossed, one hand cupped over the upper knee, the other holding a glass of beer. He was squinting against the light, his face turned partly away from it, which threw his bony nose into relief; his high cheekbones and broad brow. His jaw was hard and square. Thick, dark hair, the light gathering in its kinks and waves. It wasn’t a classically handsome face, but it was striking. His eyes, staring right into the camera, were steady and intense; his mood impossible to read. It was a face you had to look twice at-compelling, perhaps unsettling; as if it might be terrifying in rage but infectious in mirth. Zach couldn’t see what it was that women had seen in him, that apparently all women had seen in him, but even he could sense the power of the man, the strange magnetism. The picture was dated 1939-the summer his grandparents had met the man. Later that year, war would break out. Later that year, torn apart by grief and loss, Charles Aubrey would join the Royal Hampshire Regiment, which would form part of the British Expeditionary Force that set out into mainland Europe to meet Hitler. The year after, he would be caught up in the chaos of Dunkirk and killed; his body buried hastily in an Allied cemetery, his tags brought home by comrades.