Estuary by Graham Hurley

Author:Graham Hurley [Hurley, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Published: 2012-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

The rest of the holiday passes in a haze of tumbling rivers, flower-strewn alpine meadows, circling eagles, and ever-stiffer climbs from the valley floor. The weekend comes and goes and by Tuesday morning we’re back on the ferry at Santander. The camper van is intact. We’re fit, brown, and immensely pleased with ourselves. Five days away feels like half a lifetime and we spend the afternoon sprawled on sunloungers as the Val de Loire pushes north across the Bay of Biscay.

The following morning, we close the Devon coast at eight. It’s another beautiful day, the dark, humpy rise of the cliffs shrouded in mist, the forecast promising 75 degrees by early afternoon. We drive off the ferry and take the road to Exeter. By mid-morning, we’re back in the Exmouth flat, eyeing the telephone. Neither of us wants to puncture our precious bubble and we spend the next four hours on the beach before returning to the flat.

The first call goes to Tom, my eldest son. He’s spent the weekend down at Southsea, keeping an eye on my mother, running her up to Petersfield to see dad.

“How is he?”

“Not too bad at all. Bit weepy sometimes but nothing outrageous.”

“And mum?”

“A star.”

Tom, bless him, appears to have given my mother the weekend of her dreams. He’s taken her out in the car. He’s spent the evening with her. He’s listened to her talking about the early days of her courtship. And he’s fast becoming an expert on the strange tides that wash around the upper reaches of our family.

“Did you know that there was nearly another one of you?”

I blink. The fact that I might have had a twin is news indeed. Tom puts me right.

“Not a twin. She got pregnant again. After having you. Then she miscarried.”

Did she? I’m staring out of the window at the broad sweep of the Exe estuary. One of the pleasure boats is nosing in towards the little wheeled landing stage they haul up and down the beach. A brother? A sister? After a lifetime as an only child, it seems scarcely credible.

“Are you sure she wasn’t making it up?”

“Positive. She said she always wanted a big family.”

This, I know, is true. When I was young, our house in Clacton was always full of kids. My cousin, Colin, practically became a brother. The Petersen girls - all four of them - regularly stayed for weeks on end. And in the middle of all that cheerful turmoil stood my mother - making picnics, borrowing bikes and beach huts, tugging on her trusty old bathing hat, and leading the pell-mell dash to be first in the sea. From these mental snapshots my father was always absent, a prisoner of the golf course or that day’s copy of the Daily Telegraph.

Tom is asking about the holiday. I tell him it was brilliant.

“Excellent” he says, “So don’t worry about the old boy. He was fine, just fine.”

The news comes as a kind of comfort but on the long drive back to Southsea we gradually fall silent.

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