Page 22 of Summer in Sunset Harbour
It felt like she had been lying there for hours, when she finally found the strength to sit back up and look around. The sun appeared to be in a different place, further across the sky, as though she had fallen asleep in one world and woken up in another.
Robinson was sitting beside her, shirtless, the wind ruffling his hair as he stared out to sea, hazel-brown eyes watching something on the horizon. He looked over as she sat up, took a bite out of a ham sandwich, then held up a plastic cup.
‘Coffee?’ he said.
12
Answers and More Questions
‘Grandad was a writer,’Robinson said, tipping the flask to refill Josie’s cup. Wearing her own jumper, with Robinson’s shirt covering her legs, she was slowly defrosting. Her jeans, hung up between two pieces of driftwood nearby, billowed in the breeze. Robinson, wearing only his jeans, seemed to feel no cold at all. ‘Earnest Blackthorne. You won’t have heard of him. He never published anything, just put these humongous manuscripts away in boxes in the loft. Growing up I remember him boasting about being the Cornish Charles Dickens, and that one day he’d be discovered, and he’d end up rich. He never was, though. Sadly, he died unknown to the wider world. Dad was inspired enough to name me after Robinson Crusoe, however.’
‘Which was written by Daniel Defoe.’
Robinson grinned. ‘The look on Grandad’s face must have been something. Dad was never much of a reader, except for tide tables. He got it right for my sister, though. Her name’s Scarlet, afterThe Scarlet Letter.’
‘Did that make your grandfather happy?’
Robinson shrugged. ‘Who knows? He was in the ground by the time I was ten. I barely remember him. Dad has all his stuff in a shed somewhere. I remember his legacy rather than the man himself.’
‘Perhaps that’s for the best.’
‘Any interesting characters in your family?’
Josie sighed. ‘Dad and Mum were both gone by my late teens,’ she said. ‘Cancer for one, an aneurysm for the other. Dad went first, slowly, and I think that might have triggered Mum. I waved her off to work one morning, and never saw her alive again. She dropped down dead at her desk.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
Josie shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago. I’m older than I look.’ At her attempted joke, Robinson gave a half-smile, not quite wide enough to convince Josie he saw the funny side. Feeling a little chastised, she said, ‘What about your mum? Is she up there in that shack somewhere?’
‘Oh, no,’ Robinson said, shaking his head. ‘She lives in London. My parents were never married, or anything like that. Dad was kind of a wanderer. He wandered into her life long enough to give her a couple of kids, and for a while we were a family of sorts, then he wandered back out again. He kept in touch, mostly through postcards or random phone calls in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t until he went blind and needed looking after that I really got back in touch with him.’
‘Growing up without a father, that must have been hard.’
‘If you knew my dad better, you’d probably decide it was easier without him than with him.’ He gave a chuckle and shook his head. ‘So … Hilda said you were divorced?’
Josie nearly coughed out the coffee she was sipping. ‘Ah, yes. Recently. I mean, we had been separated for several years, but he decided to make it final.’
‘That’s too bad.’
‘Yeah. He spent our time apart improving his lot in life, and when he was fully armed, he came swooping back in to take what he had left behind.’ She sighed, wishing she didn’t sound so bitter. ‘And then half of what I had, too.’
Robinson said nothing. After a long period of silence, Josie glanced up at him. He was still looking out to sea, the wind still ruffling his hair, the sun leaving shadows across the lines of his face. She wondered what he did for a living: something outdoors for sure, judging by how toned his body was, even in, she guessed, his forties. Lifeguarding, perhaps. Maybe he was a fisherman, or even a farmer. Perhaps a landscape gardener. Something honest, salt of the earth.
‘The campsite,’ she said slowly. ‘It’s too much for me. It was good of your dad to give me the opportunity, and I know Hilda thinks it’s like some kind of challenge I need to overcome in order to you know … find myself again, but it’s … too much. If it was just cutting grass, whatever, maybe….’
She began to explain about the people living in the treehouses. For a few minutes, Robinson listened without interrupting, nodding sagely from time to time but saying nothing until Josie gave a flap of her hands and said, ‘I really don’t know what to do.’
‘Let’s go and see Dad,’ Robinson said. ‘We’ll find out what those people are doing and have them moved on.’ He stood up. ‘I suppose we’d better get back.’
He reached out a hand. Josie stared at it for a moment before letting him pull her up. She held on just a little longer as she found her feet, not wanting to let go.
Nat stirreda cup of cabbage water, then sprinkled a little more pepper on the top before taking a long sip.
‘Ah.’ He grinned through his beard. ‘Tis better. Having trouble with the lads down there, are ’e? They’re harmless. Just pretend they’s not there.’
‘But they’re causing me trouble. They left a frog in my bag, they pushed the strimmer off the cliff, and they … set up the table tennis tables without … without asking. Oh, and they stole your radio.’
Nat grinned. ‘Ha, that’ll be Geoffrey, done that. Lad likes the cricket. Just give him a holler, tell him you’ll take a chainsaw to his tree if he don’t give it back.’
