The Low Water Hours

The Causeway

The tide table was wrong, or Maren was. By the time she understood which, the water was already at her ankles.

She had read it on the train from Paddington, then again on the bus out of Penzance with her thumb holding the creased page flat against the window. Low water 19:52. Causeway safe approx. two hours either side. It was a quarter to ten when she stepped off the mainland slipway. The light was going amber and then grey over Mount's Bay, and Saint Brannoc's sat half a mile out like a shoulder lifted against the cold. She had told herself there was time. She had told herself she remembered how it went.

The causeway was not the path she remembered. It was a spine of old granite setts, laid by men who were long dead, and twenty-two years of weather had made it slick with bladderwrack and a fine green slime that took the grip out of her trainers. Her suitcase was the wrong sort of luggage for it, the kind made for airport floors, and it bucked and skidded behind her. Two hundred metres out, a wheel caught in a gap between stones and sheared off with a small, final crack.

She carried it after that, hugged to her chest like a child.

The sea came from both sides at once. That was what she had forgotten. It didn't creep along the causeway from one end. It slid in over the sand flats to the left and right in thin bright sheets, and the sheets met in the middle and kept going. First there were puddles. Then the puddles joined, and then she could no longer see where the stones were.

She looked for the marker posts. They were tarred timber, one every fifty metres, each with a band of white paint near the top, and she fixed on the next one and walked towards it as if it might move away. Water filled her shoes. It was June and still the cold went straight to the bone. Halfway between the fourth and fifth posts her foot went sideways off the setts into nothing. She went down on one knee, the case slammed against her collarbone, and for a second the whole world was the roar of moving water and the pull of it against her thighs.

Don't stop, her mother used to say. If you're caught out there, you never stop. The sea is patient. It doesn't need you to panic. It only needs you to stand still.

She got up. She didn't stop.

The last fifty metres she waded, the water at her shins and then her knees. Her jeans were heavy as wet canvas. The island's slipway rose out of the dark ahead, and a figure stood at the top of it with a torch. It didn't wave or call out. It only held the light steady on the stones in front of her, so she could see where to put her feet.

When she climbed out, gasping, a man in a fisherman's smock took the suitcase from her without asking.

"You cut that fine," he said.

"The table said two hours."

"Table says a lot of things. Wind's been in the south-west three days. Pushes it up." He turned the torch on her face, briefly, as though checking something, and then away. "You'll be Delia's girl."

"Maren."

"I know." He didn't offer his own name, and after a moment she found she didn't need it. The voice had dropped and roughened, and the shoulders had thickened, but she had sat behind those shoulders in a boat once, the summer she was fourteen, while he showed her how to read the water for mackerel. Jory Treloar. He'd have been twenty then. He'd be forty-four now, with grey in his beard and a stillness that hadn't been there before.

Behind her, the causeway had gone. There was only the bay, dull pewter in the last of the light, and the lights of Marazion very far away.

Saint Brannoc's could be seen whole in the time it took to climb from the harbour to Gull House, and Maren saw it the way you look at a photograph of yourself you'd rather not keep.

There was the harbour itself, a curve of granite wall with three boats lying in it. One was Jory's, she guessed, the blue one with its nets heaped in the stern. There was the Ship, the island's only pub, its windows a low yellow, and someone stood in the doorway smoking who didn't come out. There was the chapel above the pub on the slope, squat and slate-roofed, its bell hung in an open frame and not a tower, because the island had never had the money for a tower. There were a dozen cottages, maybe fewer. Some were dark. One had a new extension of glass and cedar that looked as if it had been dropped there from somewhere richer.

"How many of you now?" she asked.

"Eleven." Jory shifted the case to his other arm. "Twelve, with Delia. Was."

She waited for him to say he was sorry. He didn't, and she found she was grateful.

Gull House stood at the top of the path where the island narrowed, with the sea on three sides of it. It was taller than she remembered and shabbier, a grey Victorian box with a widow's walk on the roof and the paint flaking off the window frames in long curls. A board hung by the door with GUESTHOUSE · VACANCIES painted on it, and below that, on a smaller board on hooks, someone had hung NO.

Someone had changed it back to VACANCIES. The NO board was propped against the wall, face in.

Inside it smelled of beeswax and damp and something sharper underneath, like the inside of a shell. A woman was waiting in the kitchen. She was sixty or so, small and quick, with reading glasses pushed up into hair dyed a colour that didn't exist in nature, and she was already crossing the room with a towel held out.

"Look at you. Look at the state of you. Jory, you let her cross on a rising tide?"

"She was already on it, Ruth."

"Ruth Pascoe," the woman said to Maren. She held her at arm's length for a moment and then let her go. "From the Ship. I've been doing for your mother. Doing for the house, I mean, since. I put the heating on. I didn't know if you'd want the heating on."

"Thank you."

"There's soup. It's only tins." Ruth hesitated, and her eyes went to the table and came back. "And that came. The agent brought it over on the morning tide. I said I'd make sure you saw it."

It was an envelope, cream and heavy, with a window showing a firm's name: Tregear & Lowe, Property Consultants, Truro. It lay on the scrubbed pine table, squared off precisely to the edge, as if whoever put it there had wanted it to be the first thing anyone noticed.

Maren didn't open it. She knew what it said. Mr. Lowe had told her twice on the phone, in the kind of voice people use to tell a child the dog has gone to live on a farm. A cash buyer. Very motivated. Given the condition of the property, and the access issues, I'd honestly say it's generous. It was not generous. She had looked up what houses on tidal islands sold for. But she had also looked at her bank balance, and at the end of her lease in Bristol, and at the grief she wasn't feeling, and generous had begun to sound like the same thing as enough.

"Who's the buyer?" she asked.

Ruth and Jory exchanged a look so brief Maren might have imagined it.

"Couldn't tell you," said Ruth. "Some company."

"Some company," said Jory.

They left her with the soup. They were polite in the way of people who have discussed beforehand how polite to be. At the door Ruth squeezed her hand and said, "She talked about you, you know," and then looked as though she wished she hadn't, and went.

Maren stood in the kitchen in her wet socks and listened to the house.

It ticked. Old houses do. A clock in the hall, the pipes, the window frames giving to the wind. Under all of that she could hear the sea, a long low breathing against the rocks, and she remembered lying in her attic bed at fifteen listening to that sound and hating it, the way you can only hate something you also need.

She was rinsing the bowl when she found the note.

It was tucked under the cream envelope. She hadn't seen it because the envelope had been placed exactly on top. It was a half-sheet torn from a notepad, the edge furry, and the handwriting on it stopped her breath in a way the causeway hadn't.

Delia Hale had written like someone carving. She used upright capitals and pressed so hard the pen went almost through the paper. Maren had last seen that handwriting on a birthday card that came when she was twenty-three. She had put it in a drawer unopened, and later, when she moved flats, thrown the drawer's contents away without sorting them.

DON'T LET THEM BUY IT CHEAP.

That was all. No Dear Maren, no love, Mum. No date. The ink was blue and slightly faded. Written weeks ago, then, or months. Before the stroke, at any rate. Before the hospital in Truro, the forms, the solicitor's letter, the will that left everything to a daughter who hadn't phoned in twenty years.

Them.

Maren turned the note over. The back was blank. She read the front again, and a third time, and then she folded it once and put it in the pocket of her jeans, which was still damp, and she stood very still with her hand flat over it.

She had forgotten there was a guest.

"Sorry," said a voice from the hallway, "I didn't mean to startle you. Ruth said you'd be arriving. I'm in number three."

He was standing at the foot of the stairs in his socks, holding a mug. He was somewhere past fifty, slight, in a grey fleece with the zip done up to his chin. He had a narrow, pleasant face, wire glasses, and the kind of soft, careful voice people use in libraries and sickrooms. A pair of binoculars hung on a strap round his neck, even indoors, even at half past ten at night.

"Tobias Venn," he said. "I was going to make tea, if that's allowed. I've been making my own. Ruth's been very kind, but I don't like to be a nuisance."

"It's fine. Of course." She heard herself become a landlady and didn't know where the voice had come from. "Kettle's there. I'm Maren."

"Yes. Delia's daughter." He filled the kettle at the tap with the ease of someone who had done it many times. "I'm sorry. About your mother. I only met her briefly, but she was very... particular. About the bookings. I liked that about her."

"How long have you been here?"

"Nine days. I'm counting terns." He smiled, a little apologetic, as though this were an eccentricity he'd long ago made peace with. "Roseate terns. There used to be a colony on the north stacks. Hardly any left now, anywhere in Britain. I'm trying to establish whether they've come back."

"Have they?"

"Not yet."

The kettle began to tick and hiss. Tobias took a second mug down from the dresser without being asked, and that was oddly intimate, a stranger who knew where her mother kept the cups.

"You grew up here," he said.

"Until I was sixteen."

"So you'd have been here in 2004."

She looked at him. He was watching the kettle.

"Some of it," she said.

"The summer of 2004, I mean. July, August." He poured the water, carefully. "I'm only asking because I'm interested in the colony records. There's a gap in them. Somebody should have been counting that year, and nobody did. Or nobody wrote it down. I wondered if you remembered anyone out on the north stacks. In August, particularly. The second week."

"I was fifteen. I wasn't paying attention to birds."

"No. Of course not." He set her tea in front of her. "Do you remember if there was a storm that summer? A bad one. Around the fourteenth?"

The house ticked. Out in the dark, the sea breathed in.

"I don't know," Maren said. "Why would a storm matter for terns?"

"It can wipe out a whole season's chicks in a night." He said it gently, like a fact he regretted. "And then the birds don't come back. They remember, you see. They remember a place where something went wrong."

He picked up his own mug and moved towards the door, and then paused with one hand on the frame.

"Did your mother keep a ledger? For the guests. I signed something when I arrived. A big green book."

"I suppose so. I haven't looked."

"I only wondered whether she kept the old ones as well." He smiled again. Soft. Unremarkable. "Goodnight, Maren. I'm glad you made it across. I watched you from the window. It looked very close."

She heard him climb the stairs and the click of the door to number three. She sat for a long time with her hands around the mug until the tea was cold. She was thinking about the second week of August 2004, and about how carefully she had arranged her life so that she never thought about it.

She slept in her mother's room, because her own attic room had boxes stacked to the ceiling, and because she was too tired to be sentimental about it. The bed was too soft. The pillows smelled of a lavender soap she didn't recognise. The tide table was pinned to the back of the door, a printed sheet for June with the times highlighted in yellow in her mother's careful hand.

High water 02:14. 5.6m.

She dreamed of the causeway. In the dream the marker posts were people, standing in a line out into the bay with the water rising up their legs, and none of them turned round.

Something woke her.

She didn't know what. She lay in the dark and listened, and there was nothing. The clock in the hall was ticking, the wind had dropped, and the sea was very loud, louder than before. It was high, she thought, or just past high. On the bedside table her phone said 03:58.

There had been a sound. A door, maybe. Or the particular groan of the third stair from the top, which had groaned the same way when she was a teenager creeping in at two in the morning with sand in her shoes.

She got up. The landing was cold under her bare feet. Number three was at the end of the corridor, and its door stood a few inches open, a thin wedge of grey where the window let in the night.

"Mr. Venn?"

Nothing.

She pushed the door. The room was small and neat in the way of rooms kept by careful men. There was a folded fleece on the chair and a notebook squared on the desk beside a pencil. A pair of walking boots stood side by side under the window with the laces tucked in. The binoculars were gone.

The bed had been slept in. The duvet was thrown back on one side, the pillow dented. Maren crossed the room and, without quite knowing why, laid her palm flat on the sheet where a body would have been.

It was cold. Not cooling. Cold, the way a sheet goes after an hour or more.

She went to the window. Number three looked north-east, back towards the mainland. Below her the island fell away to the harbour, the three boats sat high on the swell inside the wall, and beyond the harbour, where the causeway should be, there was only water. Black, moving, faintly silvered where the lights of the far shore caught it. At the top of the slipway the first marker post stood up out of the sea. It was the one with a tide gauge painted on it in white, metres in blocks, and she'd learned to read it before she could read a clock. The water stood at the line marked three.

Three metres of sea over the stones. It had been rising since dusk and would not fall low enough to walk for another four hours.

No one could have left. Not on foot, not in the dark, not in that. And the boats were all there, she counted them twice. Three of them, nets heaped and moorings taut, just as they had been when Jory carried her suitcase up the hill.

She stood at the window in her mother's nightdress, which she had found in a drawer and put on without thinking. Behind her, on the desk, the wind from the open window lifted the cover of Tobias Venn's notebook and let it fall.

Maren turned. On the first page, in small neat pencil, he had written a date.

14 August 2004.

Below it, underlined twice, was her mother's name.