Page 4 of New Beginnings At Pencarrow Bay
Peggy eyed him. ‘You okay?’
He nodded, head down. ‘Yeah, fine.’
She remembered being asked the same question earlier by Lindy– giving the same response– and her surprise that Lindy seemed to have detected some emotion in her face that Peggy wasn’t even aware of feeling. She wondered now if something similar was happening with Ted. She wanted to ask more, delve deeper, to find out what wasbothering him– what had been bothering him generally in recent weeks. But he got up, grabbed his plate and hers– they’d barely finished eating– and walked over to the sink.
To his back, she said, ‘I think Lindy could be a friend, you know– it’s great to have someone to share novels with. I never even did that with Annie.’ Her lifelong best friend in London preferred stodgy biographies. Although they spoke regularly, not having Annie round the corner was another element of her past life she was struggling to come to terms with. She felt the connection between them loosening with every passing week as they missed their regular coffee-and-bun catch-ups and their lives diverged.
Ted stared at her, but his gaze lacked focus, as if he didn’t see her. Then his expression cleared. ‘That’s fantastic, sweetheart. Lindy will look after you. And she knows everyone.’
Peggy laughed. ‘Like you!’
But she seemed to have lost Ted again. He didn’t respond, falling silent as he loaded the dishwasher, clearing the table of the supper things.
‘I’ll take Bolt out,’ Ted said, when he’d finished. He came over to drop a quick kiss on her forehead. ‘Love you,’ he said absently, as he made for the front door.
Peggy was left alone… and bewildered.
3
The next morning, Peggy woke with a groggy head. She hadn’t slept well. Ted had been more his usual self when he’d come back from the walk with the dog, but she hadn’t been able to shake off the sense that something was going on in his life that he wasn’t sharing with her. So, uncharacteristically, she’d had one too many glasses of wine in an attempt to ignore her instincts.
For a while she sat on the edge of the bed and watched the rhododendron bush to the side of the terrace waving in the sea breeze. The soft pink blooms of a month ago had shrivelled brown and dropped.I’ll go for a swim, clear my head, she thought. She knew herself well, her tendency for over-thinking legendary, according to Annie, whose eyes would sometimes widen in disbelief at the scenarios Peggy cooked up.Ted’s always telling me that cold water stimulates endorphins, she muttered inwardly, changing the focus of her thoughts with effort. Some feel-good hormones were exactly what she needed to sweep away the cobwebs.
Swallowing a cup of coffee, eager, suddenly, to get out into the beautiful spring morning, she pulled on her swimming costume under her jeans and sweatshirt and packed a towel in her green-striped elephant-grass basket. Strolling down the hill on the shore road that ran through the village, she stopped at the donkey field. Tina and her daughter Mina– who were pretty much alike– were munchinghappily on the grass, but came over to her when Peggy called. She’d brought carrots and now she handed them to the animals over the gate, stroking Tina’s soft grey muzzle as she watched their large yellow teeth loudly crunching the vegetables. Then she continued down the hill, passing Ted’s truck in the castle car park– she waved but he didn’t see her– and on until she reached the beach. You could swim in Mermaid Cove at the other end of the village, but it was rockier, with less open water.
Today the sea, retreated halfway across the sand, was sparkling with welcome, the square blue pontoon– recently put back in the water after winter– bobbing a comfortable distance from the shore. She wasn’t a strong swimmer, more of a pootler, but she loved to kick lazily back and forth or lie on her back in the salt water and contemplate the sky. She would do a circuit of the pontoon today, she decided, pulling off her outer clothes and tying her shoulder-length hair into a ponytail on top of her head. She had the beach almost to herself, apart from an older man sitting on a rock and gazing out to sea with a beige bucket hat pulled low over his eyes, and two women walking back and forth across the sand, deep in earnest conversation. She didn’t recognize any of them–although Ted could probably tell me the colour of their grandmother’s eyes, she thought, with a wry smile.
Now she crept gingerly across the band of spiky shells and pebbles to the sand and the water’s edge, hovering ankle deep in the ice cold sea, her toes already numb. But as she was steeling herself to go further, she heard a sudden loud noise behind her. It was a cross between a bark and a shout. Turning, she saw the man from the rockfrantically waving his hat and pointing out to sea as he yelled a warning.
Peggy, taken aback, quickly scanned the water where he indicated, but failed to spot anything that might cause such a kerfuffle. She watched as the man leaped up and began a frantic, lopsided hobble over the sand, seeming much older than his looks suggested. As he reached her, she held out her hand to steady him. Now he’d taken his hat off, she recognized him as someone she’d seen around the harbour, usually walking very slowly, supported by a dark-haired younger man.
‘Sorry, didn’t mean to alarm you,’ he said breathlessly, leaning heavily on Peggy’s hand. ‘I’m absolutely sure I saw a dark fin poking out of the water.’
‘Afin? Like attached to a… shark?’
He nodded gravely. ‘It’s just that Toby, our local fisherman, spotted a shark in the bay yesterday morning when he was doing whatever he does with his crab pots. He posted a video on the village website.’
‘Oh, my God.’ Peggy stared at him, hastily backing out of the sea. ‘A real one? As in, eat you if you get too close?’
The man looked a little embarrassed. ‘Well, no. This was a friendly type, not the munching variety, apparently. Toby claimed it was a basking shark. He described it as “beautiful”. And completely harmless to humans. But I reckoned you might be freaked out if you swam into it– I’m sure you’ve seen the movie.’
Peggy shuddered. ‘I would literally have died on the spot,’ she said, with feeling.
He looked relieved and gave her a shy grin. ‘Me too. Rory, my husband, says I’m an old hysteric, catastrophizingabout everything. And he’s probably right. But I thought it best to warn you.’ Letting go of her arm, her new friend shuffled awkwardly to a nearby rock and lowered himself onto it with a grunt and a sigh, shifting about until he found a comfortable perch. ‘Bloody back,’ he muttered. Then his face cleared and he held up his hand to her. ‘Quentin Dorris, by the way.’
She shook it. ‘Peggy Gilbert. Good to meet you.’
‘Likewise.’ He thought for a moment, then went on, ‘You must be the fair Ted’s wife, then. He’s mentioned you. Can’t be that many Peggys around here… good old-fashioned name.’
Surprised, as usual, to be so readily identified by someone she’d never spoken to, Peggy nodded as she corrected him: ‘Partner, not wife.’
Quentin pulled a face. ‘Ooh, can’t be doing with that word “partner”. Not fond of “significant other” either. So coy. Would you consider “consort” perhaps? Or why not just plain “lover”?’
She laughed. Quentin had a very engaging smile, his weather-beaten face craggy and lived-in, surrounded by a shock of untidy greying hair to his light-blue shirt collar, his previously anxious brown eyes now alive with amusement.
‘Best coffee for miles around, Ted’s, it has to be said,’ he added, when she didn’t answer.
‘He’ll be very happy to hear that.’
