Weather

She went out through the loading-door end and down the outside steps and along the quay to the lee of the harbourmaster’s hut, where there is about six feet of dry wall out of the wind, and she stood there with her arms folded and waited for me to catch up.

The tide was half out and moving. Rain going sideways under the lamp. Somewhere behind us in the granary somebody laughed, because a room of nineteen people cannot stay quiet for more than ninety seconds and should not be expected to.

“Right,” said Cleo. “Say it. All of it. Don’t manage me.”

“September 2019 to June 2021,” I said. “Twenty-one months.”

“Twenty-one months.”

“It started that September weekend you had everybody down here, the year after your mum. You went to bed at half one and I said I’d walk down to the quay and get some air, and he was sat on the wall, and we talked till about four.” I had my hands in my coat pockets and I made myself take them out. “And then I came back in the October and stayed at the cottage at Burnham and it wasn’t a one-off any more, and by the Christmas it was the thing, and I didn’t tell you.”

“Why?”

“Because it was soft,” I said. “Because you’d have had an opinion, and you’d have been kind about it, and I’d have had to hear it. Because I’d have had to say out loud that I wanted it, in front of somebody, and then if it went wrong I’d have had two things to lose instead of one.”

“And him?”

“He said, let’s have one thing that’s ours.” I laughed, badly. “He liked it. He liked it because a secret is a thing you never have to stand up and declare. Neither of us worked that out for about two years.”

“And I’m — what, in that? I’m what?” She wiped the rain off her face with the flat of her hand. “Because I’ve been doing the maths since Dad opened his mouth and I keep landing in the same place. I’m the weather, Greer. I’m a forecast. I’m a thing the two of you sat in a van and planned around.”

“Yes,” I said.

She had not been expecting that.

“Yes,” I said again. “That’s exactly what you were. You were the reason it was difficult and the reason it was exciting and you were never once a person we could have actually talked to about it. I have thought about that a great deal in the last four days and it is the single worst thing I have ever done to anybody, and I did it for twenty-one months, in your house, at your table.”

“Do you know what I keep—“ She stopped and started again. “Christmas 2019. My mum’s first Christmas gone. You came for the whole week. You and me got the tree out of the loft and we did that thing with the kitchen roll and we were both in bits about Mum, and then at some point you went out to get milk for forty minutes.”

“Yes.”

“You went out to get milk.”

“Yes.”

“Was that—“

“He was in the lay-by past the church,” I said. “For about half an hour. And then I came back with milk.”

“God,” said Cleo. She said it quietly, to the water. “God.”

Rain went across the lamp.

“Right, here’s the bit that matters, so don’t get it wrong,” she said, turning round. “I don’t care that you slept with my brother.”

“Cleo—“

“Listen to me, because I’m only saying it once and I’ve had it ready since about half eight. I do not care. I’d have been delighted. I’d have been unbearable about it, and I’d have got it wrong, and I’d have said something stupid and clumsy in the first week the way I always do, and then I’d have been the happiest person in three counties. You two.” She shook her head. “Honestly, you two.

“And I don’t even really care that you hid it for two years. It’s shabby, and it’s a bit insulting, and if that was all of it we’d have had a row in 2022 and I’d have been fine by the spring.

“What I can’t get past is the twelfth of August 2022.”

“I know.”

“Do you, though?” She pulled her cardigan round her. “I was on my own in that house. Elias’d gone back for a trailer. I had four bin bags and Dad’s tide tables, thirty years of them, and I’m going through them because he’s written the weather in them and I couldn’t bear to just — and there’s your handwriting in the 2020 one. Yours. Your stupid little capitals. And there’s a photo of the two of you on the Point in the back of it, and you’re laughing, and he’s got his hand on your neck.

“And I sat on the stairs for an hour and a half working out what to say. An hour and a half. And I thought, don’t make it a big thing, she’ll tell you, and I rang you, and I said, right, I’ve found something, were you and Elias ever—“

“And I said it was a few months.”

“You said it was a few months, it wasn’t serious, and you laughed.” She was crying, which she does furiously and without stopping talking. “And I said all right! I said, all right, sorry, I’m being an idiot, and I apologised to you, Greer, and I put the phone down and I spent the next two years thinking there was something wrong with me. Because I could see it. I’d seen it in the photo and I’d seen it at Christmas and I’d half seen it about nine times, and you told me I hadn’t, and I believed you over myself.

“That’s what I can’t get past. Not the two years of you two. The two years after it, where I made myself stupid on purpose because my best friend told me to.”

There is no answer to that, and I did not try to make one.

“I’m not a gate,” said Cleo.

“What?”

“You two. Both of you, all week, doing this — “ she did something with her hands “ — standing outside me waiting to be let through. Is Cleo all right, don’t upset Cleo, tell Cleo after the wedding, tell Cleo when she’s not busy. He’s just done it with Dad for two years and you’ve done it with this for seven and neither of you can see that it’s the same thing.” Her voice went. “I’m not a gate. I’m not weather. I’m a grown woman with a job where people die, occasionally, in front of me, and I can carry things. I’ve been carrying things since I was twenty-two. You could have let me help.”

“I know.”

“Don’t just say I know.”

“I’m not just saying it.” I put my back against the wall of the hut because my legs had gone. “Cleo, I’m going to tell you something now that nobody on this earth knows except your brother, and he’s known it for about twenty-four hours, and I’d rather have my teeth out.”

She waited.

So I told her. On a quay, in the rain, at ten past nine on the night before her wedding. The whole of June 2021. That I had turned Rotterdam down on the Tuesday and told nobody. That I had wanted to stay and could not say so. That I had driven to her brother’s kitchen on the Thursday and given him an ultimatum with a four-hour fuse that I had built, deliberately, in the full knowledge of what he was like, so that it would fail. That when it failed I had gone home and written at four in the morning to beg for a job back that I had already refused, and gone to Holland for three years, and let everybody — including her, on the phone, at Christmas, with real warmth — congratulate me on it.

“So when you ask me why I lied to you in 2022,” I said, “that’s why. Not to protect him. Because if I’d told you the truth about us, you’d have said, God, what happened, and I would have had to tell you what I actually am.”

Cleo did not say anything for a long time.

“That’s really bad,” she said, at last.

“Yes.”

“No — Greer, that’s really bad. That’s not a shabby thing. That’s a person doing something horrible to two people at once and one of them was herself.” She wiped her face. “Does he know what you did to him? Does he actually know?”

“He knows all of it. I told him last night at Deepdale.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said he couldn’t get angry about it, because he’d done the same thing in a different shape.”

“He would say that,” said Cleo, with enormous venom and enormous love. “He would absolutely say that. God, the pair of you. You’re perfect for each other and it’s the worst news I’ve had all year.”

And then she laughed, horribly, with her hand over her mouth, and I laughed too, and we stood in the rain outside a harbourmaster’s hut like a pair of idiots for about fifteen seconds, and then she stopped.

“I’m not forgiving you tonight,” she said.

“No.”

“I mean it. I’m not doing the thing where I cry and hug you and we say it’s all fine, because that’s how we got here.” She said it very deliberately, and I realised she had thought about this in advance too, possibly since February. “You’d like that. You’d love it. You’d like to have it all settled by bedtime with a nice number at the bottom, because you’re you, and I’m not giving it to you.”

“All right.”

“Here’s what we’re doing.” She counted it on her fingers, in the rain, the way she does a handover. “One. Tomorrow you’ll stand where I’ve put you and you’ll hold my flowers and you’ll sign the thing, and you will not spend one single minute of my wedding day looking at me with a face on. I have waited eleven months and paid for a marquee I’m not even using and my dad’s going to be there and I want all of it. You don’t get to take any of it off me. Not one minute.

“Two. Neither of you says another word about any of this until Sunday afternoon at the earliest, and preferably Monday, and if my brother tries to apologise to me again tonight I’ll put him in the creek.

“Three. In October you come to Lynn. Not for a weekend. Not for a nice lunch where we sort it out. You come, and we do it properly, and it’s going to take more than one evening and it’s going to be horrible and I’m going to say things I’ve been saving.”

“Yes.”

“Four.” She stopped counting. Her chin went. “Don’t do it again. That’s — that’s the whole of it, actually. That’s the only thing I want. Whatever you two do from here, whether it’s Sunday or Christmas or never, I don’t care, it’s not my business and I’m not a gate. Just don’t ever again decide in a van what I can cope with.”

“I won’t.”

“Say it properly.”

“I will never again decide what you can carry,” I said. “I’ll ask you.”

Cleo nodded about four times, fast, and then said, “Right,” and blew out a breath, and looked out at the water going down the creek in the dark.

“My dad knew,” she said. “The whole time. Didn’t he.”

“Apparently.”

“He’s had that in his head since 2020 and now it’s the bit that’s left.” She laughed and it came apart in the middle. “That’s the bit that’s left, Greer. Two hundred things gone and you two in a van at six in the morning is what’s left.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t. Honestly. Don’t.” She pushed her hair back. “Do you know what I’ve been most frightened of, all year? That he wouldn’t know me tomorrow. That’s it. That’s the whole fear. And I’ve just watched him look at a woman he’s met nine times and get her exactly right.”

She stood there in the rain, thirty-four hours from her wedding, with her mascara ruined and her cardigan soaked through.

“So that’s something,” said Cleo Tarrant. “Isn’t it. That’s actually something.”

Then she wiped her face, and said, “Go to bed. Both of you. I mean it. Tell him I’ve not finished and tell him I’m glad he said it tonight and don’t you dare let him put those two in the same sentence.”

And she went back up the outside steps into the noise.