The Broken Bridge

  “Ginny!”

  It was a stage whisper rather than a shout, and she couldn’t place the voice, but then a lazy hand went up on the slope of the dunes to her right.

  “Andy! What’re you doing back?”

  She threw herself to her knees beside him, too pleased and happy to do more than grin. Andy was two years older than she was, which was a lot, of course, and he’d left school the previous term and gone away somewhere. In the whole school, his had been the only other black face. He was mysterious, glamorous with a kind of evasive magic, half spirit, half con-man. He was much darker than Ginny, both his parents having been African; but he’d been adopted by a white couple in the town eight miles to the south, and that gave them something else in common: looking black, they’d each grown up feeling white.

  Ginny had only got to know Andy properly in the past year or so, and then he’d vanished. And now he was back, and she was so happy she didn’t know what to say.

  “How you doing, then?” he said, lying back with his hands under his head. “You got a boyfriend yet?”

  “Shut up,” she said. “I don’t want a boyfriend. Where you been?”

  “In Bristol,” he said. “Catering college. I know it all now. Mayonnaise, wine, carbonnade de boeuf, opening sardine tins—I can do anything.”

  “Has the term finished or something?”

  “No. I finished. I might go back sometime, learn a bit more, but I got a job in the Castle.”

  “The Castle?” There was a battered little ruin in the town a mile or two up the coast, but Ginny had no idea that anyone worked there.

  “The Castle Hotel. In the kitchen. It’s a right laugh. Carlos, the chef there, he’s got all kinds of scams, all kinds of rackets going on….I’m getting a trailer, how about that?”

  “A trailer? Aren’t you living at home?”

  “Well, that got a bit dodgy. They don’t know I’m back. No, me and Dafydd Lewis from the garage, we’re going to share this trailer. We’re putting it in old man Alston’s field just back there.”

  Ginny had never seen Andy’s adoptive parents, but she’d heard that they were elderly and strict. If Andy was going to be living just behind the dunes, everything was going to be wonderful, brilliant. She knew the field he meant: it belonged to the richest man in the county, who owned factories and garden centers and printing plants. Dad had done some work for him. He was having a house built in the field, but not very quickly. Every few weeks some men would drive down in a truck and unload timber or bricks or drainpipes and go away again, and by the time the workmen arrived to do something with them, half the materials would be missing. No one seemed to mind.

  “Does he know?” Ginny said.

  “What, old man Alston? He won’t know. Oh, we’ll have some good times this summer, Gin. You wait and see….Aye, aye, watch out!”

  He rolled over onto his stomach, facing away from the beach, and laid his head on his hands.

  “What?” Ginny looked around to see who he was hiding from.

  “Bloke down there with a leather jacket,” Andy muttered. “Big belly on him.”

  The man was plodding through the sand below them. He was heavy-looking, and the leather jacket he wore added to his bulk, but the most remarkable thing was his head. It seemed almost inhumanly large, the features coarse and blunt like a giant’s, and everything the same sandy color: lips, eyebrows, thin greasy hair.

  “What’s he doing?” Andy said.

  “He’s stopped—he’s looking the other way—now he’s going up to the parking lot. There, he’s gone. Who is he?”

  “Joe Chicago,” said Andy, rolling over again. “Gangster, he is. From Aberystwyth.”

  Ginny found herself giggling at the idea of a gangster called Joe Chicago coming from Aberystwyth. Andy shook his head.

  “You can laugh,” he said solemnly.

  “Where’s his gang, then?” Ginny said.

  “Oh, he hasn’t got a gang.”

  “But that’s what gangster means—having a gang!”

  “Yeah, maybe. But he’s a soloist.”

  “Why’s he after you?”

  “Oh…” He shrugged, and for the first time in Ginny’s experience, Andy looked embarrassed. The expression sat so strangely on his face that for a moment she mistook it for fear. But no, she thought, not Andy, he wouldn’t be afraid of anything, surely?

  The moment passed like a small cloud drifting over the sun, and then Andy was sitting up again as if nothing had happened.

  “Hey,” he said, flicking her knee, “you want a job?”

  “After the end of term, yeah, I wouldn’t mind. What sort of job?”

  “In the Yacht Club. Angie Lime needs someone in the kitchen and setting the tables and that. I said I might lend a hand meself, but you know, I’m a busy man, I might get overstressed. Could be fatal.”

  Anyone less likely than Andy to die of stress hadn’t been born, she thought. “Okay,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you to run the risk of that. Is it every day?”

  “Evenings. Six till eight. I’ll tell her, shall I? I’m going over there later. Doing the rounds, you know, visiting my flock, giving them their little touch of Andy for the day.”

  “Yeah. Tell her. I’ll go and see her myself. That’s great!”

  The Yacht Club in the estuary wasn’t a club at all, it was the Harbor Restaurant, but the Welsh were inventive with names. Angie Lime was only called that because her husband’s name was Harry. Consequently, he wasn’t Harry Williams, his real name, but Harry Lime, as in The Third Man, and she was Angie Lime. They’d had the Yacht Club for a year or so. Ginny and Dad had been there for a meal; it was small and friendly and bistro-like, and Angie was a good cook. It would be fun working there. It would be fun having Andy around. Everything was good suddenly, everything was fun, everything was as it should be in her mile-wide kingdom by the sea, as the last visitors trudged up through the soft sand toward their cars and the waves kept falling neatly and the sun sank toward the edge of the world in a welter of blood-red sky.

  —

  “Dad? You know Andy?”

  “Andy Evans? I saw him today. He was talking to Dafydd in the garage. Why?”

  “Well, he said they needed someone to help in the Yacht Club, in the kitchen, right, and I said I’d do it. In the evenings.”

  “What, the whole evening? Aren’t I going to see you at all?”

  It was late. Dad was lying in the hammock in the hot night, with something by Mozart playing very quietly through the open window and the underside of the leaves lit up above him by the floodlight at the base of the tree. He often lay in the hammock. Sometimes he slept out all night. Sometimes she joined him, bringing her mattress and duvet out under the stars. It was going to be hot enough for that tonight, but there was a distance between them now, after Wendy Stevens’s visit.

  Ginny reclined the deck chair to its limit and sat down, not far away, gazing up at the canopy of leaves, the lightest viridian against the velvet black.

  “Only from six till eight o’clock,” she said.

  “Well, that sounds all right. D’you want to?”

  “Yeah. That’s why I said I would.”

  “So you did. How much are they going to pay you?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t actually spoken to them yet.”

  “Counting your chickens again,” he said.

  “Well, maybe.”

  They sat companionably, without talking, for a few more minutes. The Mozart tape came to an end and clicked off.

  “You ought to have your Walkman on,” she said. “Then you wouldn’t have to keep getting up to turn the tape over.”

  “I don’t have to. I ask you nicely, and you do it for me.”

  “You reckon?” she said, getting up.

  “No worries.”

  “D’you want the other side?”

  “No. Chopin Nocturnes. The Rubinstein one.”

  She went in, found the tape, set it going.

  “I
still think it’d be easier with the Walkman,” she said, outside again.

  “I don’t want to shut the rest of the world out. I want to hear the music coming quietly from a distance, with all the night around it. As if you’re hearing it through the open windows of a great house across a lake…”

  “Yah! Pretentious twit!” she said, but the image secretly delighted her, and she pictured it to herself, composing the scene in her mind like a painting. She could see it taking shape; her imagination worked effortlessly, taking what it needed from every memory she had of classical buildings, and lawns, and light reflected off dark water. Unlike memories of people, memories of things came easily to her; she had only to think of an object or a place to find it before her, correctly textured, three-dimensional, casting shadows. There were a lot of things about herself she didn’t know, and one was how rare this gift was, though she was beginning to sense it.

  She lay back in the warm night, in the magic circle of light under the old tree, with Chopin coming faintly across the imaginary lake, with her beloved father close by, and felt unbearably rich. She loved him so much. The world was so full, so strange, and she and Dad understood each other so well; this was how it should be forever.

  ON THE FIRST afternoon of the summer holiday, Ginny’s best friend, Rhiannon, came to see her and told her something strange.

  Rhiannon lived in the town a couple of miles up the coast, where her parents ran a café called the Dragon. Ginny liked them; Mr. Calvert was a bouncy, eccentric man given to sudden enthusiasms, such as sailing or playing the guitar, which he’d take up and pursue passionately for a few months and then suddenly drop, whereas Mrs. Calvert was patient and sensible. Ginny enjoyed being at the Calverts’ because among other things they were a family, they were complete. And she liked Rhiannon, who was vain and languid and funny and kind.

  That Monday afternoon, while Dad was out at work, Ginny and Rhiannon went down to the beach and tried to swim in the chilly water, and then lay in the scorching sun before drifting back to the house and sitting in the garden.

  Rhiannon lay in the hammock, her long dark hair drifting silkily over the edge. Ginny had often tried to draw her, but she’d never succeeded in getting her sinuous lethargic grace onto the paper. You needed to be someone like Burne-Jones for that, she thought, having just read a book about the Pre-Raphaelites; for herself, she preferred Picasso or Van Gogh. Only they’d have been able to draw her too. Keep trying.

  They lay under the trees talking idly, and then Rhiannon said, “Oh! I know what I was going to tell you. My sister rang up yesterday.”

  “Your sister? I never knew you had a sister!”

  Ginny was amazed. She’d always thought of Rhiannon as an only child like herself.

  “Yeah, well, they don’t talk about her much. She’s a lot older than me—she’s twenty-six or something. She left home; I mean, they threw her out, I think. There was some kind of quarrel when I was young. A terrible row. I don’t know what it was about, but they’ve never spoken about her since….”

  “Wow, that’s incredible,” said Ginny, trying to imagine a quarrel as bitter as that. “What’s her name? Why did she ring up?”

  “She’s called Helen. She rang up to ask about you, actually.”

  Ginny sat up to see if Rhiannon was joking. She was simply lying there languidly, trailing a hand through the dry grass beneath the hammock, gazing up with half-closed eyes through the sunny leaves above her. She turned to look at Ginny.

  “It’s true,” she said. “Mam answered the phone, okay, and she didn’t recognize Helen’s voice. Well, she wouldn’t, probably. She came in the living room and said it was for me, so I went out and shut the door ’cause I thought it might be Peter; he said he’d ring. And this strange woman’s voice said, ‘Listen, don’t sound surprised, I don’t want Mam and Dad to know, this is Helen, your sister.’ Well, Duw annwyl, I didn’t know what to say, you know—it was like a voice from the grave or something. I said, ‘Where are you?’ And she said, ‘At home in Porthafon.’ ”

  Porthafon was a town about twenty miles up the coast. Ginny was sitting upright now, watching Rhiannon bright-eyed.

  “And you never knew she was living there?”

  “I told you, we never speak about her. I didn’t really know she was living at all. She gave me her address, Twelve Jubilee Terrace. She said she was married. Her husband’s called Benny something—Meredith, I think. He sells thermal windows. And she works in an architect’s office. They’ve got no children. She told me all that kind of thing; she sounded really nice, really friendly. I couldn’t believe who I was listening to, you know. She kept saying, ‘You’re sure they’re not listening? They can’t hear me?’ as if she was scared.”

  “Scared? I can’t imagine anyone being scared of your mam and dad. But what did she say about me?”

  “Oh, yes, right, I was coming to that. Well, she asked what class I was in at school, and I told her, and she said did I know a girl called Ginny Howard? I said yeah, and she said…” Rhiannon paused a moment and seemed to be adjusting her position, or avoiding Ginny’s eye, before going on: “She said were you adopted?”

  “What?”

  “That’s what she said. So I said no, of course not. I told her what, you know, what you’ve told me, about your mam and all that….”

  “But why did she want to know?” Ginny was bemused. “How did she know about me anyway?”

  “Well, I asked her that, course I did. She just said she’d met your dad, see. And she was curious about you, I suppose. She probably fancies him. Hey, if she leaves her husband and marries your dad, you’ll have to call me auntie.”

  Ginny smiled, but she wasn’t sure how she felt about this stranger asking questions about her. She supposed it might be flattering, if you felt confident about yourself. You might assume that someone was asking about you because you were attractive or interesting; she was sure Rhiannon would feel like that. But Ginny didn’t; she felt threatened.

  Then she felt that Rhiannon had something else to say. She looked up and saw the other girl blushing.

  “And then she said—” Rhiannon began. “This is crazy; you won’t believe this. She said was it true that your dad had been in prison?”

  Now Ginny felt really stupid. She knew she was gaping, she even felt her mouth open and thought: So your jaw really does drop, but she could find nothing whatever to say.

  “I told her no, course not, what a stupid idea,” Rhiannon went on, “and she said no, it didn’t seem very likely. Something like that. So I asked her where she heard that from, and she said, ‘Oh, someone in town.’ Mam came out then, and I had to say good-bye.”

  “Prison?” said Ginny. “That’s ridiculous. Why? What’s he supposed to have done?”

  “I don’t know! ’Cause she didn’t know. She only heard this rumor, and she wanted to find out more, I suppose. It must be a mistake. Oh! I knew there was something else. Dad says d’you want a job? Just in the morning, doing coffees, setting tables for lunch.”

  “Everyone’s offering me jobs,” said Ginny.

  “Who else is, then?”

  “The Yacht Club. You know Andy’s back? Andy Evans? He told me about it. I’m going to work there in the evenings.”

  “Well, don’t tell Dad. He thinks Harry Lime’s trying to pinch all our customers—you know how he gets obsessed. Mam thinks he’s crazy, because they’re different sorts of customers anyway, and everyone knows Angie Lime’s a good cook. You going to come and work in the Dragon, then? Be a laugh anyway.”

  “Yeah. Tell him I will. And thanks. When do I start?”

  “Tomorrow, if you want.”

  “Great…Rhiannon, is your sister going to ring up again?”

  “I don’t know. She might. I want to meet her, but I’m nervous, you know?”

  “So do I want to meet her,” said Ginny.

  “Oh, hey, listen, I’m not supposed to’ve told you, okay? She said, ‘Don’t tell her.’ So…”

&n
bsp; “But I want to find out what it’s about! And I can’t ask him.”

  “No, course you can’t. Forget it. It’s nothing.”

  —

  Nothing?

  Nothing of the sort. When Dad came home, after Rhiannon had gone, Ginny looked at him differently, trying to imagine him a criminal. She couldn’t; there wasn’t any crime she could think of that she could see him committing. Then, for the first time in a week, she remembered that social worker, Wendy Stevens, and what the visit had made her worry about. To hear of someone talking about prison in connection with her father wasn’t nothing, by any means.

  That Monday was her first evening at the Yacht Club, so she didn’t eat with him. She’d have something when she came in later, she told him, and set off down the lane. At the parking area by the beach, she turned left and into a field full of tussocky lumps of gorse and marram grass and little sand-filled depressions, just like bunkers on a golf course, which led along beside the estuary as far as the little harbor next to the railway station, where the Yacht Club stood. It was a hot evening, and the sun shone full on the great round hills behind the main road, and the sky above them was a bright pearly blue. Sheep, lazy tattered fat things, moved slowly aside as she wandered past. This warm marine light, this silence…they were the emblems of her kingdom. She was at home.

  Harry Lime was young and short and thickset, with long-lashed blue eyes. Both he and Angie were ambitious: they wanted to make a name for the restaurant. But that didn’t stop them from laughing or being friendly. Angie was short too, and her laughter was of a different kind. She was wittier than Harry, more cynical and shrewd. She was in charge in the kitchen and Harry was in charge in front, and there were a couple of students who waited on the tables, and an elderly lady who worked the dishwasher, and a girl called Gwen, who helped Angie in the kitchen. Ginny’s job was to set tables, fold napkins, make sure the biscuits and the cheese board were stocked up, trim spring onions and celery, top up the salt and pepper, and do any one of a dozen other jobs that Harry or Angie wanted doing. She soon found that she was going to love it. She loved the atmosphere in the kitchen, brisk and clean and hot and busy, full of temperamental cursing and sudden flurries of singing. And she loved the two dining rooms—the front one, cool and open, overlooking the yachts and the river and the little wooden railway bridge, and the smoky little back one where the bar was, with Harry darting this way and that, grinning gap-toothed and tossing olive after olive absentmindedly into his mouth and forever hitching up the trousers that kept slipping under his paunch.