But this one could have been an emmet from the moon. She'd a good mind to turn the notice round on the door, she says, but his looks stopped her. Also his shoes, which were the same as her Tom's used to be, polished like conkers and wiped carefully on the mat as he came in, not what you expected from a motorcyclist at all.
So she went on with her totals while he drifted round the shelves without bothering to take a basket, which is men all over whether they're Paul Newman or plain as mud: come in for a packet of razor blades, end up with their arms full, anything but take a basket. And very quiet on his feet, soundless almost, him being so light. You don't think of motorbike people being quiet as a rule.
"You from up-country then, are you, my dove?" she asked him.
"Oh, well, yes, I'm afraid I am."
"There's no need to be afraid, my darling. There's plenty of nice people come from up-country, and there's plenty down here I wish would go up-country." No answer. Too busy with the biscuits. And his hands, she noticed, now he'd pulled his gloves off: groomed to a turn. She always liked well-kept hands. "What part are you from, then? Somewhere nice, I hope."
"Well, nowhere, really," he confessed, pert as may be, taking down two packets of digestives and a plain crackers and reading the labels as if he'd never seen them.
"You can't be from Nowhere Really, my robin," Mrs, Trethewey retorted, following him along the racks with her eyes. "You may not be Cornish, but you can't be just air. Where you from, now?"
But where the villagers tended to come smartly to attention when Mrs. Trethewey put on her stern voice, Jonathan merely smiled. "I've been living abroad," he explained, as if humouring her. "I'm a case of the wanderer returned."
And his voice the same as his hands and shoes, she recounts: polished like glass.
"What part of abroad, then, my bird?" she demanded. "There's more than one abroad, even down here. We're not that primitive, though there's a lot may think we are, I daresay."
But she couldn't get past him, she says. He just stood there and smiled and helped himself to tea and tuna and oat cakes, calm as a juggler, and every time she asked a question he made her feel cheeky.
"Well, I'm the one who's taken the cottage at the Lanyon, you see," he said.
"That means you're barking mad, then, my darling," said Ruth Trethewey comfortably. "Nobody who wasn't mad would want to live out on the Lanyon, sitting in the middle of a rock all day."
And this farawayness in him, she says. Well, he was a sailor, of course, we know that now even if he put it to a bad use. This fixed grin he had while he studied the tinned fruits like he was learning them by heart. Elusive, that's what he was. Like soap in the bath. You thought you had him, then he'd slipped through your fingers. There was something about him, that's all she knows.
"Well, I suppose you have a name at least, if you've decided to join us." said Mrs. Trethewey in a kind of indignant despair. "Or did you leave that abroad when you come home?"
"Linden," he said, getting out his money. "Jack Linden. With an i and an e," he added helpfully. "Not to be confused with Lyndon with a y."
She remembers how carefully he loaded everything into his saddlebags, one for this side, one for that side, like trimming his boat. Then kick-started his bike, with his arm up to say goodbye. You're Linden of the Lanyon, she decided, as she watched him ride up to the crossroads and tilt neatly to the left. From Nowhere Really.
"I've had a Mr.-Linden-of-the-Lanyon-with-an-i-and-an-e in the shop," she told Marilyn when she went upstairs. "And he's got a motorbike bigger than a horse."
"Married, I suppose," said Marilyn, who had a baby girl but would never talk about the father.
And that was who Jonathan became, from his first day until the news broke: Linden of the Lanyon, another of those migrant English souls who seem almost by gravity to sink further and further westward down the peninsula, trying to escape their secrets and themselves.
The rest of the village's intelligence about him was gathered piecemeal by those near-supernatural methods that are the pride of any good network. How he was rich, which was to say he paid cash and paid it almost before it was owed ― in new fives and tens counted like playing cards onto the lid of Mrs. Trethewey's deep-freeze. Well, we know where he got that from, don't we? No wonder it was cash!
"Say when, please, Mrs. Trethewey," Jonathan would call as he went on dealing out the bank notes. Shocking really to think they weren't his. But money has no smell, they say.
"Now, that's not my job, Mr. Linden," Mrs. Trethewey would protest. "That's your job. I can take all you've got of those and more." In the country, jokes fare best by repetition.
How he spoke all the foreign languages in the world, leastways German. Because when Dora Harris at the Count House had a lady German hiker go poorly on her, Jack Linden got to hear about it somehow and rode down to the Count House and talked to her, with Mrs. Harris sitting on the bed for respectability. Then stayed till Dr. Maddern came, so he could translate the girl's symptoms to him, some of them very intimate, said Dora, but Jack Linden knew all the words. Dr. Maddern said he must have special knowledge to know words like that at all.
How he strode the cliff path in the early mornings like a man who couldn't sleep; so that Pete Hosken and his brother out at sea, lifting their lobster pots off Lanyon Head at dawn, would glimpse him on the cliff top, striding out like a trooper, most often with a pack on his shoulders: and what the hell would he put in a pack at that hour of the day? Drugs, I suppose. Well, they must have been. We know that too.
And how he worked the cliff meadows, up and down with his pick, till you'd think he was punishing the earth that bore him: that fellow could have made an honest living as a workman any day. Vegetables he was tilling, so he said, but didn't never stay long enough to eat them.
And cooked all his own food, said Dora Harris; gourmet by the smell of it, because when the southwesterly was mild enough he could make her mouth water from half a mile off, same with Pete and his brother out to sea.
And how he was sweet on Marilyn Trethewey, or more likely she was sweet on him ― well, Linden, he was sweet on everybody, to a point, but Marilyn hadn't smiled for three winters, not till Jack Linden gave her reason.
And how he fetched old Bessie Jago's groceries for her twice a week on his motorbike from Mrs. Trethewey's ― Bessie living on the corner to Lanyon Lane ― arranging everything tidy on her shelves, not dumping the tins and packets on the table for her to sort out afterwards. And chattered to her all about his cottage, how he was slurrying his roof with cement and fitting new sashes to his windows and laying a new path to his front door.
But that was all he talked about, not a word about himself at all, where he'd lived or what he'd lived off, so that it was quite by accident they learned he had an interest in a boat business in Falmouth, a firm called Sea Pony, specialists in chartering and leasing sailing yachts. But not very highly regarded at all, said Pete Pengelly, more a hangout for water cowboys and druggies from up-country, Pete spotted him sitting in their front office one day when he took his van up to fetch a reconditioned outboard from Sparrow's boatyard next door: Linden was sat at a table, said Pete, talking to a big, fat, sweating, bearded bugger with curly hair and a gold chain round his neck, who seemed to run the place. So that when Pete got to Sparrow's he asked old Jason Sparrow outright: What's up with Sea Pony next door, then, Jason? Looks like they've been taken over by the Mafia.