Anne could see the lights of her own house were now on, including the outside lights, and that Gerry was making his way towards her, shining the torch from his phone in front of him. She narrowed her eyes and peered into the gloom. At least she hoped it was Gerry. Then she told herself off for letting her imagination run away with her. Of course it was Gerry, and he was just in time. Anne feared her knees were going to buckle. It was not just the weight of stocky little Jo which was making it difficult for her to remain standing. She felt as if all her strength had left her.
Gerry noticed at once that she was struggling, and took the child from her. She leaned against her husband, desperately glad of his physical as well as his emotional support.
‘What on earth has happened?’ asked Gerry.
‘Just help me get these children away from here,’ said Anne, in a voice so curiously high pitched she barely recognized it as her own.
‘Anne. What is it?’
‘Let’s get these children away from here,’ Anne repeated. ‘Then I will tell you.’
One
Just under three weeks earlier the lives of Felix and Jane Ferguson had finally and irrevocably changed for ever. They had both been forced to accept the unacceptable, and to embrace a terrible stark reality which they had previously continued to deny the very existence of.
For Felix, the day, which they both came to refer to as Black Monday, had begun like any other. He ran a café, the long established Cleverdon’s, in Bideford, the historic little market town a couple of miles up-river from Instow. He had been given it, and control of one of the family property businesses, by his father.
People who knew Felix were inclined to remark on his extreme good fortune. Everything Felix had seemed to have fallen into his lap with very little effort required, including his marriage, his children, and his beautiful home.
He certainly had no great love of hard work, whenever possible escaping to sail his boat, the twenty-one-foot drop keel shrimper he kept at the North Devon Yacht Club, ten-minute’s walk down the hill from his home.
He made an appearance most days at Cleverdon’s, but employed a chef to cook the assorted cakes, scones and pasties for which the establishment was well known. On leaving school, Felix had undertaken a catering course at college. He’d learned to cook professionally and also studied for a diploma in business studies, and had managed to successively achieve the minimum acceptable grades with the minimum possible work.
On the insistence of his father, after leaving college Felix had become the principle chef at Cleverdon’s. This had involved rising at five a.m. six days a week. Felix had not been at all keen, and only reluctantly agreed when his father promised that his taking the job would be an experiment for both of them, and that they would re-examine the situation after a year.
Perhaps unsurprisingly Felix proved unable to make those early starts on a regular basis. And although he was actually a talented cook, he was also an absent-minded one who bored easily. Felix’s attention, both physical and mental, was all too often diverted onto matters he found more interesting and consuming. The Fastnet yacht race on the TV in the office, or a major golf tournament, a quick pint in The Heavitree Arms, a coffee front of house with a passing chum. The result was that he burnt the cakes. And the pasties. Literally. And failed to achieve risen scones with any consistency at all.
His father’s experiment lasted a scant six months.
However Sam Ferguson made it clear that he still wanted his only son to assume his rightful place in the family business. The otherwise unfortunate experiment at least allowed Sam to become aware of his son’s strengths as well as his weaknesses. Felix brought in the customers to Cleverdon’s, enticed by his smiling demeanour and gentle humour. He had a certain natural charm, and every so often even proved himself able to negotiate better business deals than Sam was able to.
And so Sam Ferguson had embarked on a new course of action, that of playing to his son’s strengths. Instead of falling out with Felix and demoting him, he promoted him, making him managing director of Cleverdon’s and a director of the family property business.
Felix promptly brought in his mother, always besotted with him, to manage the café, and a distant cousin — one trait he had inherited was that of keeping everything possible in the family — to manage the nitty gritty of the property business. Meanwhile Felix himself concentrated on what he called ‘the frilly bits’ — in the main the wooing of customers of the café and of the various business associates involved in the property business, over long lunches, and days out sailing, or playing golf at the Royal North Devon Golf Club on the burrows at Westward Ho!.
The arrangement, seeming somewhat bizarrely to suit all involved, had continued with perhaps surprising success through Felix’s bachelorhood, withstanding his preference for boats and golf and fast cars over any form of work, and into and beyond his marriage to Jane. The café did better than ever before, and when Felix realized that his mother was beginning to struggle with the workload, he found another distant cousin to manage that too.
Nowadays Felix, using the need to look after, indeed to watch over, Jane, as his excuse should he ever need one, rarely arrived at any of his workplaces before eleven. Sometimes midday. And sometimes not at all. Particularly on a good sailing day.
Jane did not know that Felix used her as his excuse in that way. And Felix knew that she wouldn’t like it. He was genuinely a kind and caring man who wanted nothing more than to be able to help his wife through the difficulties which they were both finding harder and harder to deal with, but one of his less endearing traits was that he did like to be seen to be doing good, and indeed to be admired for it.
This particular fateful day, the day that became Black Monday, began, as usual, with Jane preparing a family breakfast. Then she cleared the breakfast things away and washed up whilst Felix completed the morning school run, also as usual. After Felix returned, she continued to clean and tidy the house whilst he sat with his papers and his coffee.
One good thing about Jane was that she had never required him to do anything much in the house. He did occasionally put the rubbish out. Men did, didn’t they? And every so often he would cook a special meal, if only to show off his professional skills. Albeit not nearly as often as when they were first married.
All of this suited Felix’s indolent nature down to the ground.
However, although Felix was not by nature a worrier, he was becoming more and more concerned by Jane’s ‘little problem’. She was all right during the day, he told himself for the umpteenth time. Indeed, perfectly all right. She didn’t really need his supervision.
The sun was shining, and a moderate easterly breeze was blowing. The tides were right too. Felix thought he might treat himself to an entire day off and take the Stevie-Jo, named, of course, after his children, out for a blow around the estuary. They’d put her on her river mooring ready for the season just a couple of days previously, and this really was an exceptionally good day for mid-April. To be comfortable, and Felix wasn’t big on discomfort, he needed one crew. He glanced towards his wife and considered asking her if she would like to go sailing with him on this glorious morning.
But no, that would never do. He would be able to pick up somebody at a loose end at the yacht club, for sure. After all, he didn’t entirely trust Jane on a boat, did he? Indeed, who would? She was no natural sailor.