Nine Summers

The first summer she came to Culver because it was as far as the money went and because there was a lease on a beach hut café that had failed twice and was therefore cheap, and because a woman at the letting agency had said, in a tone that was meant to put her off, that nobody stays at Culver past September.

She was thirty-five and she had been a secondary school teacher for eleven years and had stopped being one in April in circumstances she does not discuss, and she was married to a man who was not cruel and was not kind and who had, over about four years, become a set of rooms she moved carefully through.

She swam because a doctor had said exercise and because the sea was free. She swam badly for the first fortnight. On the ninth morning she went out past the second marker on a slack tide without knowing what a slack tide was and got herself into water she could not get out of, and was not in danger, quite, and did not know that, and had four extremely bad minutes.

What she remembers is a voice from the slip, not shouting, entirely level, saying: "You are fine. Come in on the diagonal. Aim at the yellow house, not at me." And she did that, and it worked, and she came up the weed at the bottom of the slip on her hands and knees with her chest going like a bird, and a man of about her own age handed her a towel that was not hers and said nothing about it at all.

He made her tea. He did not tell her she had been stupid, which she had been, and which four other people would have told her within the hour if he had mentioned it to anybody, and he never did mention it to anybody, and she found that out eight years later when Mo said something that made it clear Mo did not know.

On the fourth morning after that he asked her name. And she said Nell, and he said Nell what, and she looked at a man who had watched her nearly get into trouble and had said aim at the yellow house, not at me, and she thought about a house eleven miles inland with a man in it who would want to know who this was, and she made the rule.

She has said that she does not regret it and that she is not being brave when she says so. The rule got her nine summers of a friendship with no expectations in it in a decade when she could not have survived expectations, and if the cost of that was nine years, then that was the cost, and she would like people to stop calling it a tragedy in her hearing.

The marriage ended in the January of the third summer and she did not tell him, because there was no mechanism for telling him. There is no way to say my marriage has ended to a man whose surname you do not know, at six in the morning, on a slipway, holding tea.

She tried four times that summer. The nearest she got was a morning in early August when she said, "I have moved," and he said, "Anywhere good," and she said, "The flat over the chandlery," and he said, "That is a good flat, the window in the back room is a nightmare in a southwesterly," and that was the whole of it, and she went home and shouted at a cupboard.

He met Sinead in the October of that year. Nell found out on the second morning of the fourth summer because he mentioned her in a sentence about a car, entirely naturally, the way you do, and Nell said, "Sinead?" and he said, "Yes, since October," and Nell said, "That is lovely," and it was, and she meant it, and she also swam to the third marker that morning for the first time in her life.

Sinead came to the boathouse four or five times a summer and was excellent: funny, quick, entirely unthreatened, and she and Nell got on so well that it became one of the private jokes of the station. She asked Nell's advice about a coat once. Nell has said that this is the single worst afternoon of the entire nine years and that she would not go through it again for money.

The fifth summer was the shoulder. There was a shout on a Sunday in July, a family cut off on the sandbar, four adults and three children, in weather that came in from nothing in about eleven minutes, and it went badly in the way that these things go badly, which is that everybody came home and one of the crew did not come back the next season.

Roo tore his rotator cuff getting a nine-year-old over the sponson and did not know he had done it for two days. He was out of the boat for four months. And Nell stood in the boathouse at half past ten at night with a hundred and forty cups of tea in her, watching a man she had known for five years being helped out of a drysuit, and understood the thing she had been not-understanding since the first summer, completely, all at once, in about four seconds.

She did nothing about it. He had Sinead. That is the whole of the reason and she has never dressed it up: he had Sinead, Sinead was lovely, and Nell Bardsley was not going to be the woman who did that, and so she went home and made a decision she stuck to for four years and has described, in the only interview she ever gave about any of this, as the least difficult and most expensive thing she has ever done.

Sinead and Roo ended in the March of the seventh year, quietly, over a house, which is how a great many four-year relationships end and which nobody in the station discussed once.

Nell was in Trenwick by then. She had met Douglas in the November, and Douglas had a business and a house and a way of arranging a weekend that she found restful after eleven years of arranging everything herself, and she had given the café lease to a couple from Bristol for two seasons with an option, and she has said that every single one of those decisions was correct on the day she made it.

She came down to Culver four times in those two years. Twice in winter, which does not count, because at six in the morning in February there is nobody on the slipway. Once in August with Douglas, for the day, and they had chips on the harbour wall and she looked at the boathouse doors from a hundred and forty metres and did not go over.

And once, in the second September, on her own, on a Tuesday, for no reason she gave Douglas or herself, and she got there at ten past six and the slipway was empty because the season had ended eleven days earlier, and she sat on the third bollard for an hour and a half and then drove home and cried at a junction outside Trenwick.

What she did not know, and what Mo's successor at the harbour office told her in 2029 with the appalling casualness of a woman recounting an anecdote, was that Roo had come down at six every morning of that first summer she was away and made two mugs of tea, out of habit, for four days, and had then stopped making the second one, and had gone on coming down at six for the whole of both summers anyway.

"He never said anything," the woman said. "He is not a man who says anything. He just came down and sat on the sill and drank his tea and went and did the engine checks. I only noticed because I do the accounts and I could see the boathouse door from the office and I thought, that man has been sat there for two years."

Nell asked, because she could not not, whether he had known she was with somebody. And the woman said, "Everyone knew, love, it is Culver," and then, seeing Nell's face, more gently: "And he never once asked anybody about you. Not once, in two years. And I think that is the same thing, isn't it, only the other way up."

She came back for the ninth summer because the couple from Bristol did not take the option and because Douglas had said, in April, in a kitchen, entirely reasonably, that she talked about a beach hut café more than she talked about anything else including him.

He was not being cruel. He was being observant, which is worse and which she has always given him credit for. They ended it over about six weeks with no shouting at all, and he helped her move the freezer, and they still exchange a message at Christmas, and Nell has said that Douglas deserves a better part in this story than the one he gets.

She opened the hatch on the last Friday in May. She went down to the slip at six the following morning with a towel and no expectation whatsoever, on the grounds that two years is two years and that a man is entitled to have changed his morning.

He was sitting on the sill with his boots off and two mugs of tea beside him.

She has been asked about that moment more than about anything else and gives the same four sentences every time, flatly, because she says any other version of it is a lie. She said "Morning." He said "Morning." She swam to the second marker and back, nineteen minutes, and came up the slip, and he handed her a mug, and they sat with their backs against opposite jambs and their feet not touching and said nothing for eleven minutes.

Then he said, "Second marker. You used to do the third." And she said, "I am out of practice." And he said, "You will get it back by July." And that was the entire acknowledgement, in either direction, that two years had happened, and it was, both of them agree, completely sufficient at the time and completely insufficient in every way that mattered.

That was the ninth summer. They did four months of mornings. He did not ask about Douglas. She did not ask about Sinead. Nobody said a surname. And in the June of the tenth summer a letter went up on a noticeboard with the word review in it nine times, and the architecture that nine years of scrupulous care had built came down in about four days.