Free The Memory of Trees by F. G. Cottam Page A

need much. He wanted a couple of pairs of boots and his climbing cleats, abseil gear and some foul weather clothing.
    He wanted too the bag of sea shells he had collected with Charlotte during their week in Swanage of the previous summer. She had presented them to him almost ceremonially at the end of their little holiday. He had come to regard them in the period since, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, as his hoard of lucky charms.
    Swanage had all the charm a coastal resort on the Dorset coast should properly possess. That’s why he’d picked it. There was a tiny fairground and a crazy golf course on its pretty, banked promenade. There was a seafront museum. Fishermen caught crabs from its short wooden pier. Out over the shimmering July sea, the Needles announced the presence of the Isle of Wight in pillars rising as pale and distant as a mirage. Charlotte had built her sandcastles and collected her shells against their distant backdrop.
    And there had been nothing at all sinister about it, he thought, staring now at the Thames in the rain, remembering his encounter of the previous day with whatever had lurked in the Welsh mist at the edge of Saul Abercrombie’s ancient domain.
    Wales wasn’t England. It had a bloodier history in which oppression figured fairly large. But the seaside was a British tradition and there were Welsh Coastal towns sharing the wholesome charms that Swanage possessed in such happy abundance. They had whitewashed cottages, welcoming quayside pubs, lettered rock and shrimp fleets crewed by men with smiling, ruddy faces.
    The Welsh Poet Dylan Thomas had written his verse masterpiece about just such a Welsh port. Curtis remembered studying
Under Milkwood
at school. Maybe it was people. You needed the presence of people to humanize a place, to give it compassion and humour and a soul.
    It wasn’t just that Abercrombie’s Pembrokeshire tract was wilderness though, was it? There was more to it than its barrenness and the absence of a resident population. He had to admit to himself that it was genuinely sinister. He had the strong feeling it was, in some shiftless way, unsafe. And he had no choice but to go back there, if he was to gain the means to alter the awful domestic situation it was presently in his power to do nothing at all about.
    Tom Curtis craved a friendly face and a bit of human warmth after his glacial encounter with the mother of his child. He decided he’d walk along the bank under Kingston Bridge and on the half mile or so to the Riverside Café. Customers would be few this early on such a rainy morning. He liked the café’s proprietor and as he walked he hoped that he’d be the one doing the serving behind the counter, whistling as he always did when he worked.
    After a cup of coffee, he’d walk on to Surbiton and take the fast train to Waterloo. It was a good idea to avoid Kingston Station, where he’d often stood with Charlotte on their way to her ballet class or Forest Club meetings, trips going back to the days when she still thought trains had the names he’d had to make up for her as they waited for theirs on the platform. He hadn’t known until after the split the previous autumn that memories could bring pleasure and pain simultaneously.
    John was there behind his counter with a greeting quite out of keeping with the grey, lightless morning. Curtis had often brought Charlotte to the café in the past, but John would be too tactful to mention his daughter unless he did. He was a man who fished and did a bit of bird watching during his downtime, and had a deep love and respect for nature. He wasn’t pompous or precious about it; it was there in his smile when he saw a heron or kingfisher out over the water. He was fascinated by the mechanics and science of Curtis’s craft and by the impact it could have on the character of the land.
    Curtis was his only customer. The café’s glass door and walls were steamed with condensation, adding to the sense of