It wasn’t a head-in-the-sands job — if that wasn’t a joke in bad taste. There was bad stuff. There were suicides, washed-up bodies. But he could never go to Leeds. And it was a job, by very definition, perched on the edge and looking out. It was also, by definition too, mainly stationary. A coastguard station. He thought of Johnny Dewhurst’s amazing itinerary.
Was it true? Was it really a story to be told? He patted suddenly his breast pocket, containing the flyer and the card, as if even that hard evidence might have been mysteriously whisked away from him.
Should he take Ruth to Ilfracombe? Tonight. Should he explain, and should he take her, even under protest? I think we should go. But would that risk having his roadside encounter hurled outrageously back at him — and at Ruth? Have you heard the one about the lost coastguard? On Exmoor. That’s right, missis, a coastguard on Exmoor. Would he risk discovering that he’d now become ‘material’—in Ilfracombe and all points to Skegness?
He thought of that double-act that was never going to happen. Kenny Coastguard — or Kenny Black?
No, he’d tell no one. Not even Ruth. In time even Johnny Dewhurst, like that questionable deer, might start to seem like a hallucination.
The familiar tower of the lighthouse appeared before him, its topmost, no longer functioning section nonetheless touched with pink glinting light. He sat on the edge of England, supposedly guarding it, looking outwards. He knew a bit about the Bristol Channel, its present-day shipping and its history. He knew a bit about Exmoor. But Exmoor wasn’t England — much as you might want it to be. Brand-new shiny SUVs nosed around it like exploring spacecraft. He knew what he knew about this land to which his back was largely turned, this strange expanse beyond Exmoor, but it was precious little really. He really knew, he thought, as he brought his car to a halt again, nothing about it at all.