Even Money - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,47
a fifteen-month-old toddler? Indeed, was I here when she’d died?
There was nothing much to see. I hadn’t expected there to be. Perhaps I was foolish to have come, and the image of where my mother had met her grisly end would haunt me forever. But something in me had needed to visit this place.
I pulled my wallet out of my trouser pocket and extracted the creased picture of my parents taken at Blackpool. All my life I had looked at that picture and longed to be able to be with my father. It was his image that had dominated my existence rather than that of my mother. The grandparents who had raised me had been my father’s family, not my mother’s, and somehow my paternal loss had always been the greater for me.
Now I studied her image as if I hadn’t really looked at it closely before. I stood there and cried for her loss and for the violent fate that had befallen my teenage mother in this place.
“You all right, boy?” said a voice behind me.
I turned around.A man with white hair and tanned skin, wearing a faded blue sweatshirt and baggy fawn shorts, was leaning on one of the pier supports.
“Fine,” I croaked, wiping tears from my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt.
“We could see you from my place,” said the man, pointing at a cream-painted refreshments hut standing close to the pier. “We’re setting up. Do you fancy a cuppa?”
“Yes, please,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Come on, then,” he said. “On the house.”
“Thank you,” I said again, and we walked together over to his hut.
“He’s all right, Mum,” the man shouted as we approached. He turned to me. “My missus thought you looked like you were going to do yourself in,” he said. “You know, wade out to sea and never come back.”
“Nothing like that,” I said, giving him a smile. “I assure you.”
He handed me a large white cup of milky tea and took another for himself from the cheerful-looking little lady behind the counter.
“Sugar?” he asked.
“No thanks,” I said, taking a welcome sip of the steaming brown liquid. “It’s a beautiful day.”
“We need it to last, though,” he said. “July and August are our really busy times. That’s when the families come. Mostly just a bunch of old-age pensioners, OAPs, in June. Lots of pots of tea and the occasional ice cream, but very few burgers. We need the sun to shine all summer if we’re going to survive.”
“Are you open all year round?” I asked.
“No chance,” he said. “May to September, if we’re lucky. I’m usually a builder’s laborer in the winter. If there’s any work, that is. Not looking good this year with the economy going down the bloody tubes. At least most folk aren’t going abroad for their holidays, eh? Not with the pound so low. Too expensive.”
We stood together for a moment silently drinking our tea.
“I must get on,” said the man. “Can’t stand here all day. I also run the pedalos and the windsurfers, and they won’t get themselves out, now will they?”
“Can I give you a hand?” I asked.
He looked at my dark trousers and my white shirt.
“They’ll clean,” I said to him.
He looked up at my face and smiled. “Let’s get on, then.”
“Ned Talbot,” I said, holding out my hand.
“Hugh Hanson,” he said, shaking it.
“Right, then, Hugh,” I said. “Where are these pedalos?”
I spent most of the next hour helping to pull pedal boats and windsurfers out of two great big steel ship’s containers, lining them up on the beach ready for rent.
My trousers had a few oily marks on them from the pedal mechanisms and my white shirt had long ago lost its sharp creases by the time Hugh and I went back to the cream-painted hut for another cup of tea.
“Proper job,” he said, grinning broadly. “Thank you.”