Elsa smiled at him, her dark hair falling in her face in the wind.
“You’re such a countryman.” She pointed at a grand stone house sitting in isolation on the headland to the north. “How about that one?”
“Too severe. And you’d get bored.”
“I’d do something. Paint. Sculpt. Learn the violin.”
“You’d still get bored. Although I’m sure you’d find plenty of patients down here.”
“What would you do?”
“Fish.”
She laughed. “These two have a better record.”
“That’s true.”
Nancy turned to him. “Daddy, is this one?”
“Did you feel a tug? Let’s see.” He moved over to her side of the boat, which tipped a little with his weight, and pulled her line out of the water, looping the wet nylon in his left hand. There was nothing there. “False alarm. Do you want me to have a go?” Nancy shook her head and made to take the line back from him. He let it out again, passed it to her and moved back to sit by Elsa.
“What are you going to say then?” she said. “Tomorrow night.”
“I don’t know. I’m getting there. He’s an easy man to say nice things about.”
Elsa looked up at him and leaned against his shoulder. He put his arm around her. The breeze was beginning to gust a little and there was a trace of chill in it.
“You’ll be fine,” she said.
“I know. They’re not a tough crowd. I’ve just never had the opportunity before. I want to make the most of it.”
They all sat for a minute in silence, Nancy diligently tweaking her line, Daniel simply staring at his.
“You seem better for your swim,” said Elsa.
“Much. This place never fails.” He looked around him at the murmuring gray of the water, lighter and white-capped beyond the line between the two headlands; at the ragged tawny rocks on the shore and the secret sandy beaches that lay among them; at the hundreds of boats moored at Helford a mile or two behind. It was a complete world, the estuary. Maybe they could live here.
Nancy gave a little shriek and lifted the line above her head in her hands. “Daddy! Daddy! I think this is one!”
Webster moved forward and sat between her and Daniel, helping her reel it in. This time he could feel weight on the other end, and as he pulled he looked carefully into the water for the first silvery sign of a fish. There were a dozen or more hooks, and on the last were three plump mackerel, each about a foot long, whose shining backs squirmed in the light and dripped water as they struggled into the boat.
Webster let them drop and hugged Nancy while they thrashed at his feet.
“Well done, poppet. Three! We’ll have these for tea.”
The breeze was now a wind, and the swell beneath them choppy. They would have to go in soon. He took the first mackerel off its hook, held it firmly by the tail and raising his arm high beat its head sharply against the bench seat. The fish gave a final quiver and went still. As he bent to free the second his phone rang, an absurdly urban noise, and Elsa gave him a steady look. Distracted for a moment he let it ring out and set about his work again, killing the last two fish while Nancy and Daniel looked on with a childish lack of squeamishness.
The three mackerel lay beside him now, neatly in parallel and waiting to be gutted. As he reached into his jacket pocket for his penknife his phone rang again, its old-fashioned trill insistent.
“Just turn it off,” said Elsa.
“It’s a Friday,” he said.
It was a U.S. cell phone number that he didn’t recognize.
“Hello.”
“Ben?”
“Yes.”
“Lester. What’s up?”
“Lester? Jesus. How are you?”
“I’m good, buddy, I’m good. We miss you. How’s life with Ike?”
“It’s all right. It’s good, thanks. Listen, Lester, I’m on a boat, sitting next to three dead mackerel. Can I call you back in an hour?”
He turned to keep the phone out of the wind.
“Sure. Listen, all it was, I got a call from some guy, said he was a headhunter, his client’s thinking about giving you a job.”
“Is he real?”
“He left his name and a number, his cell. No company. Jonathan Whitehouse. A Brit. I couldn’t find any headhunter of that name. Not on this planet anyway.”
Webster knew what that meant. “You’d think they’d bother to do it properly.”
“I know. Don’t they know who we are?” Lester chuckled.
“What did he want to know?”
“What kind of a guy you are. And why you left. He tried to squeeze that in. I told him I wasn’t in the habit of talking to people I didn’t know. So who’s checking you out, Ben? You fighting someone you shouldn’t be?”
“God, I don’t know. Some Russian. Lester, I should go. But thanks. I appreciate it.”
“No problem, man. Any time.”
Webster switched his phone to silent and put it back in his pocket. “Sorry.”
Elsa nodded, clearly annoyed. There had been enough Ikertu on this trip already.
“Right,” he said with false cheerfulness. “Daniel. Let’s see what you’ve got, shall we?”
Daniel had nothing, and when Webster told him that was fine, that he never caught anything either, he protested. He didn’t want to go home now. That wasn’t fair. He wanted to stay until he’d caught as many fish as Nancy. Webster tried to exchange a glance with Elsa but she was looking out to sea, more irritated by the call than he had realized, or by something unsaid. Her mood had changed.
In the last fifteen minutes the wind, squalling now and forceful, had blown them halfway across the estuary so that they were only two hundred yards from the northern shore, and over the headland to the south rainclouds the color of wet rock were massing. The little boat danced erratically on the chop.
“Did you check the forecast?” said Elsa.
“There was nothing about this,” said Webster, sitting in the stern and dropping the engine back into the water. Daniel started to cry and Elsa comforted him as Webster started it up, turning the boat back toward the village, suddenly feeling exposed and more vulnerable than he had thought possible here. Substantial waves crossed the estuary now and Webster took them on the perpendicular, the bow rising up and crashing down, sending thick arcs of spray over the boat. Everyone was quiet, the only sounds the blustering wind and the slap of the bow on the water, and Webster, adjusting their direction and concentrating hard, watched his family huddled together and found himself praying for their safe return.
“HE MAY NOT LOOK IT, but he’s a daunting figure, my father.” Webster had stood to speak, but there was no need. They were twelve in all, squeezed around a makeshift dining table that was really two tables artfully dressed, and in the candlelight each face was bright with expectation. He could have simply raised his glass and bid them all do the same, and they would have been happy—his father, perhaps, would have preferred it—but there were things he had never said before that needed to be said.
“When we were little, Friday night was discussion night. I think it started when I was ten or eleven.” He glanced at his sister. “You must have been all of nine. After we’d eaten, Dad would ask us if there was anything we wanted to talk about that week. There never was. So he’d suggest something. Something from the papers, or something that was on his mind, or something he knew was on ours. The first one I can remember, there was a huge CND march in London, and you wanted to know,” he turned to his father, “whether we thought it was right that these weapons existed. Or what we made of the miners’ strike. Or hostages in Beirut. Or heart transplants. Or Chernobyl.” He took a breath.
“Some of this scared me, to be honest. These were things I half heard on the radio or caught scraps of on the news when we were ushered off to bed, and I wanted to block them out. But you didn’t let us do that. We had to know what the world was like, so that we wouldn’t be scared.