recognises real treasure when you see it. Where you from?’
‘The UK. Just here on holiday, three weeks of escape.’ She laughed, aware that she sounded slightly giggly.
‘What are you trying to escape from?’ He looked at her earnestly.
‘Oh, I don’t know really.’
Kate chewed her bottom lip. Her tears threatened to fall despite her best efforts to control her emotions. The memories of her kids on the beach were so strong, it was agonising. She missed them so badly that it had become a physical ache and now that someone was being nice to her, it made it all the more unbearable somehow.
‘I’m so sorry. Seeing you here with your daughter… I haven’t seen my own daughter or my son in quite some while and it’s the little things that remind me.’
He slumped down next to her on the sand.
‘I’m sorry to hear that. Matilda isn’t my daughter, but I do get to look after her and twenty-five like her.’
He stretched out his hand. ‘I run the youth mission up at Dennery. My name is Simon.’
Kate shook his hand.
‘It’s lovely to meet you, Simon. I’m Kate Gavier, just Kate.’
She sniffed the creep of tears back to their source.
‘Wow! Twenty-six kids? That takes some doing! Is it like day-care, a nursery?’
Simon smiled. ‘It’s a bit more than that. Day and night care, three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. It’s their home.’
‘Are they all little like Matilda?’ Kate was fascinated, picturing rows and rows of cots and cribs.
‘Well they were once! But, no, a mixture of ages; sometimes they come to us as newborns, but more often it’s when they get a little older, when things get too tough for Mum or Dad, various circumstances. We get teenagers too, in need of guidance and a place to stay.’
‘I think the mission sounds amazing.’
Simon nodded, quietly. Kate felt her cheeks blush, aware that she could have easily substituted ‘you’ for ‘the mission’. It disconcerted her that there were calm, good men like Simon, with such capacity for kindness, whether to a child in need or a stranger on a beach, and yet men like Mark also had a place in the world, men who were the exact opposite.
‘Your accent is hard to place, where is it from?’
Simon laughed, a low, deep chortle. This obviously wasn’t the first time he had been asked that.
‘Ah, therein lays a tale. I shall give you the twenty-second version; are you sitting comfortably?’
Kate nodded.
‘I was born in south London, Battersea to be precise, illegitimate, mixed race and in those days, this did not bode well. I was put up for adoption as soon as I was born and someone was smiling down on me! I was adopted by a Canadian couple who were living in the UK at the time. We then lived in Canada from when I was eight until my thirties, until I was called home. My birth father is St Lucian and here I have been ever since.’
‘That’s quite a twenty-second tale!’ Kate smiled, thinking that her own could match it in terms of intrigue and adventure. ‘“Called home”, that’s a nice phrase. Nice to be needed.’
‘Oh yes, and needed I was, although I didn’t know quite what my purpose was when I first arrived.’
Kate found his slow speech and warm tone quite hypnotic.
‘Did you come back because of your father?’
Simon laughed again loudly and open-mouthed. ‘Yes, yes I did, Kate. That is exactly why I came home – because of my Father, but not in the sense that I am sure you intend it. I was called here by God. You can call me Simon, but on the island I am known mostly as Reverend Dubois.’
‘Jesus!’
‘Exactly. Amen.’
‘No, I mean, I would never have guessed. You don’t look like a man of God!’
His ready laugh again boomed into the surf.
‘I see. And what are we supposed to look like?’
‘I don’t know really.’
Kate pictured the bald, sober chaplain at Mountbriers and the ancient decrepit vicar of her youth with his faint aroma of formaldehyde, his hand shaking against her mother’s best china teacup and the spit gathered at the corner of his mouth. He had elivered each word, sermon or not, as if he was bestowing the gift of insight. Whether the phrase being uttered was, ‘Yes, Mrs Gavier, I would indeed like another biscuit,’ or ‘You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and all the powers of hell will not conquer it,’ his voice and tone had been unchanging.
Kate