Marram

The low arrived overnight and by Friday morning the forecast had stopped being a forecast and started being a problem.

Elias put it on the table in Bea’s back room at eight o’clock with a mug on the corner to stop it curling.

“Nine hundred and ninety-one millibars over the Dogger by midnight,” he said. “North-north-east six, gusting seven, easing through tomorrow morning. That’s a surge.”

“How much?”

“Models say twenty-five to forty-five centimetres. Call it forty, because it’s always more than they say on this bit of coast.”

“On top of four ninety.”

“On top of four ninety.” He tapped it. “Five thirty. That’s water over the quay from about twenty to twelve, and the track’s out from five past eleven till about twenty past two, and you don’t get a car up Staithe Lane while it’s happening because the bottom fifty yards is the quay.”

“Cleo’s making-up-her-face people are booked for half ten.”

“Then they can walk down from the top, the same as everybody else.”

“Have you told her?”

“I’m telling her at nine with a piece of paper,” said Elias, “because if I tell her without a piece of paper she’ll think I’m managing her.”

Which is, in fact, a remarkable sentence for a man to produce at eight in the morning, and I thought so at the time, and I have thought so a great deal since.

He did tell her at nine, with a piece of paper, and Cleo swore for about fifteen seconds, and then said, “Fine, it’s a story, everybody loves a story, get me a dry route,” and went off to be shouted at by a florist.

I spent the morning on the rise doing the exclusion zone: posts and a run of rope and forty metres of hedging stakes, so that on Saturday nobody’s uncle could wander under the south-west side for a better photograph. It is not a glamorous job. It is a man’s-work job and it takes four hours and you do it on your knees.

I got a text from Priti at four minutes past twelve.

Hi Greer, is Roy with you up the hill? He’s not in his room. P

I have read that text perhaps a hundred times since and it is such a mild, reasonable, well-punctuated little thing.

I rang Elias. He was at the yard, four hundred metres away, and he was on the quay in about ninety seconds, and I came down the hill at a run.

Here is the situation as it stood at ten past twelve on Friday the twenty-fifth of September.

Roy Tarrant, seventy-one, had last been seen at five past eleven asleep in a chair in the Curlew room. Priti had gone to the shop, which is a hundred and forty metres away, and to Bea’s kitchen for a tray, and she had been gone, at the outside, eighteen minutes, and this is a woman who has looked after him for nineteen months and is extremely good at it and I will not have a word said.

High water was at 11:58. The marsh track had been under water since five to nine. The quay was wet but clear. It was blowing about a five, and gusting, and the whole creek was full to the top of the mud with grey water going nowhere, because at the top of the tide the water in that creek does not move at all for about twenty minutes and then starts the other way.

He had no coat.

“Right,” said Elias.

And what he did then was the fastest, calmest, most frightening thing I have ever watched anybody do.

He did not run. He stood on the quay for perhaps four seconds, turning his head, and then he said: “Bea, ring Derek and get him on the top road. Priti, the church and the churchyard, then the bus shelter, then back here. Tomasz — the yard, the sheds, behind the sheds, the shipping container, then Wilf’s. Greer, the rise, all of it, both sides of the wall, and the seat by the gate.”

“Where are you going?”

“Marsh.”

“Elias, the marsh is under—“

“I know what the marsh is,” he said. “That’s why I’m going.”

I went up the rise. I did it properly and in a pattern, because I have done searches on estates and there is a way, and I found nothing at the seat by the gate and nothing in the churchyard extension and nothing in the lee of the wall.

And then I came up the last bit onto the flat, and he was sitting on the ground with his back against my tree.

He was perfectly dry. He was wearing slippers, a cardigan and a pair of suit trousers, and he was sitting in the grass on the seaward side of the trunk with his legs out in front of him and his hands in his lap, looking at the marsh.

“Roy,” I said.

“Hello,” said Roy Tarrant.

I got my phone out with one hand and typed four letters to Elias without looking at it, and sat down on the grass about three feet away.

“Blowing up,” he said.

“It is.”

“They’ll not get the barges in tonight.” He said it comfortably, like a man saying something everybody knew. “Not in this. Vic’ll wait for Monday.”

“Probably.”

“He always waits for Monday and then he complains.” Roy laughed — a proper laugh, two notes, exactly his son’s. “Forty years I’ve been telling him. Book the Tuesday.”

I sat with him.

I had met this man perhaps nine times, between 2015 and 2021, as Cleo’s friend, in kitchens. I had never once been alone with him. He had, in those nine times, given me a total of about four sentences and one very good bit of advice about a rusted bolt.

“You want to get that limb off her,” he said.

I turned my head.

“That one.” He lifted his chin at the south-west side, where the stub of it was, three hundred and ninety millimetres across and still bleeding a bit of sap. “She’s carrying too much on the one side. Wind gets under it. You’ll have her over.”

“Roy,” I said carefully, “when do you think that limb wants taking off?”

“Now,” said Roy Tarrant. “Wants doing now. Wants doing ten year ago.” He frowned at the tree. “Who’s had a go at it?”

“I have.”

“Have you?”

“Yesterday. Took about a third off it. Put a rope across the fork as well, in the top there.”

Roy looked up into the crown for a long time.

“That’ll do,” he said.

And then, without any change at all in his voice: “Where’s the wall gone?”

“Which wall?”

“There’s a wall along there.” He was pointing at the line of the creek, at a place where there has been nothing but a bank and a fence for as long as there have been photographs. “Concrete. Nineteen sixty-something. There’s a gate in it and the gate wants a chain on it, I’ve told them, and it’s my name on it.”

“Roy—“

“Where’s it gone?”

“I don’t know,” I said, because he was frightened, suddenly and completely, the way you would be, and because it was demolished in 1994 is not a sentence you say to a frightened man in a field.

“It’s my name on it,” he said again.

“I know it is.”

“Angela’ll know,” he said, and started to get up, and then Elias came over the rise.

I will not put all of it down. It took about twenty minutes and it is his father’s and not mine.

But I will say this: he did not hurry it, and he did not lie, and he did not once use the voice people use. He got down on his heels in front of his father in the grass and said, “Hello, Dad,” and let him be pleased about that for a bit, and then said, “You’re at Bea’s this week. You’ve got the Curlew room. Cleo’s getting married tomorrow up here and you’re coming.” And Roy said, “Is she,” twice, and then, “That’s good,” and then asked where the wall had gone, and Elias said, “They took it out, Dad. Ninety-four. We fought it and we lost it,” which was the truth, and was apparently the right truth, because Roy said, “Bloody council,” and was entirely content.

And then he said, “Where’s your mother?”

And Elias said, “She’s not here today,” which is not the truth, and which is the answer they have arrived at over two and a half years, and which I did not say one word about then or ever.

We got him down the hill at ten to one, on two arms and very slowly. He was chatty. He told me about a boat that went down off Blakeney in 1971 and about a man called Titch.

Priti met us at the door and said “Oh, Roy” and had the kettle on before he was in the hall.

Elias did not go in.

I found him at four o’clock at the yard, sitting on the tailgate of the truck with his phone in his hand, not using it.

“Have you rung Cleo?”

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

“No.”

I sat down on the tailgate next to him. Not close. Close enough.

“How long was he gone?” I said.

“Hour and fifty-five minutes.”

“Has it happened before?”

A pause.

“Fourth time,” said Elias. “First time outside Marram. He got out of the day room in June and they found him in the car park, and he got to the end of Church Street in February and a woman brought him back, and there was one in 2024 I’m not going to tell you about.”

“Does Cleo know about any of them?”

He did not answer, which is an answer.

“Tomasz says you drive to Wells four nights a week.”

“Tomasz talks too much.”

“Tomasz talks exactly the right amount,” I said. “How much is Marram?”

“Fourteen hundred and ten a week.”

“And the house money?”

“Burnham went in November 2024 for four hundred and twelve,” said Elias, in a completely flat voice, “and at fourteen ten a week and the fees going up six per cent a year, that runs out some time in 2029, and after that it’s me and Cleo and the business, and the business is five people and a mortgage on a yard.” He turned his phone over. “So that’s the arithmetic. I do it about twice a week. It comes out the same.”

“And your sister has never seen a single one of those numbers.”

“My sister is getting married tomorrow.”

“Your sister has been getting married tomorrow for nine months,” I said, “and before that it was, she’s got her exams, and before that it was, she’s just moved in with Dev, and there will be a reason in November and a reason in March, Elias. There is always a reason. That’s what a reason is for.”

The wind came across the yard and rattled something on the roof of the shed.

“I’d like to stay,” I said.

He looked at me.

“Here. This afternoon. I’ve got the exclusion zone to finish and it’ll take me two hours and I can do it on my own and I would rather not.” I made myself say the whole of it. “That’s me asking. I’m not offering to get out of your way and I’m not saying shall I leave you to it. I’d like to stay, and I’d like you to say yes.”

“Yes,” said Elias.

“Right.”

“Greer.”

“Mm.”

“Ask me for things more often,” he said. “I’m extremely easy.”

So I stayed, and we finished the exclusion zone in the rain at half five with forty stakes and a hundred and twenty metres of blue rope, and it was not romantic in the smallest degree, and I do not think I have ever been happier to be soaked through.

At six o’clock, at the gate, with the light going and the wind getting up and his hair flat to his head, I said it.

“You have to tell her today.”

“Greer—“

“Today. Before the wedding, not after it.” I had my hands in my pockets and I was shaking, and not from the cold. “I know exactly what I’m asking you and I know exactly what happened the last three times somebody asked you to tell Cleo Tarrant something. I have thought about it all afternoon. And I’m still asking, because if you tell her on Sunday she will spend the rest of her life knowing you sat on it through her wedding so she could have a nice day, and she will never forgive you for the management, Elias. Not the money. The management.”

He stood in the gateway for a long moment with the rain coming across.

“I’ll tell her tonight,” he said.