Free Peacetime by Robert Edric Page B

was what had alerted Mercer to his otherwise silent approach.
    Mercer stepped out of the water and retrieved his boots. The man came to him and dropped everything he held to the ground.
    â€˜Firewood,’ he said. ‘Half of it still saturated and all of it full of salt.’
    â€˜Will it burn?’ Mercer asked him.
    â€˜Eventually.’ The man held out his hand. ‘Daniels.’
    â€˜James Mercer,’ Mercer said.
    â€˜Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you for work,’ Daniels said.
    â€˜You live in one of the houses,’ Mercer said.
    â€˜Not for much longer.’
    The remark put Mercer on his guard. ‘Are you leaving?’
    Daniels smiled. ‘You tell me,’ he said, and then, seeing the unease he had caused Mercer, added, ‘Don’t worry. I doubt there’s a single person here who hadn’t worked everything out long in advance of your arrival. Not that they’ll ever say anything to you directly. It’s that kind of place – say nothing and it might not happen.’
    â€˜You weren’t born here, then?’
    â€˜Copenhagen. My father was a sailor. Thirty years ago his ship docked at King’s Lynn and sank there. He was stranded. He met my mother, who lived in the town, and took her home with him. I was born; she didn’t settle. She brought me back here with her. He was killed two years later in Cape Town. I came and went between Denmark and here. Not here, specifically, but this part of the coast.’
    â€˜Were you in the Army?’
    â€˜Merchant Marine.’
    â€˜The Atlantic?’
    â€˜And the Arctic. My marrow is frozen. Hence all this gathering of firewood at the height of summer. To listen to some of them, you might imagine that winter was never going to come back.’
    Mercer saw how he set himself apart from the others by these remarks. He remembered seeing the man with the men at the boats; he had seldom come out to be in the company of the women. It was then that Mercer remembered that this was the man he had seen withElizabeth Lynch during his first few days there, the man he had mistaken for her husband.
    â€˜You know Elizabeth Lynch,’ he said.
    â€˜Elizabeth? Of course I know her.’
    â€˜I met her daughter,’ Mercer said.
    â€˜I daresay.’
    â€˜It can’t be easy for her.’
    â€˜Being without her husband, you mean? Don’t fool yourself.’
    â€˜Did you know him?’
    Daniels turned to look out over the horizon. ‘Everyone knows Lynch,’ he said, as though to say more would be betraying a confidence.
    â€˜I shouldn’t have asked,’ Mercer said. ‘So how did you end up here?’ It was a clumsy change of direction and he thought for a moment that their conversation was at an end.
    â€˜My wife’s parents lived here. They both died and she took over their house. We had nowhere else, especially once the war started. Like my own father, I was away more than I was at home with her. We lived in Peterborough before coming here. She hated every minute of it. Here, I mean; not there. We, too, had a son. When the war started and they came to put in the guns, everyone was evacuated for three months. She went to stay with friends in London and our son died there. He was seven.’
    â€˜I’m sorry. In a raid?’
    â€˜Cerebral meningitis. A week after they arrived. I was away at sea when it happened and unable to return for almost two months. When I finally got back to her she was a changed woman. Everyone else had come back here by then, and she had come with them. She stayed here for a further year. Everyone spoke about her grief and about the balance of her mindbeing affected. I came home as often as was possible, but it was too little. After the death of our son, nothing was ever the same. She blamed herself for having taken him to London, and she blamed me for having forced her into making that decision because of my absence.