Silver Bay(31)
Author: Jojo Moyes

Then a few years later, I saw something else: the softening and vulnerability that comes with motherhood. There she was, proud, exhausted, just hours after giving birth, her hair stuck in sweaty fronds to her face, and later on when Hannah was a toddler, kissing her fat cheeks in some cramped passport-photograph booth. When she met Steven the pictures had stopped coming. In the only one I have from that period I have never wanted to put up, he looks smug, his arm round her shoulders, apparently proud to be a father. Nino thought I’d overreacted there, too. ‘She looks beautiful,’ he said. ‘Groomed, expensively dressed.’ But to me her eyes are veiled, saying nothing.

We have no pictures of the time when she arrived here. What would have been the point?

And now, five years on, what would a photograph of her show? A wiser, stronger woman. Someone who might not have come to terms with the past, but whose character contains a fierce determination to elude it.

A good mother. A courageous, loving person, but sadder, more guarded than I’d like her to be. That’s what her photograph would show. If she’d let us take one.

The following morning, as Hannah and Liza sat at the kitchen table eating breakfast, a delivery man arrived, his van – like all delivery vans – skidding to a halt in the grit outside. Audibly chewing gum, he handed me a box addressed to Mike, which I signed for. By the time Mike came down – he was eating with us in the kitchen most days now – Hannah was in a frenzy of curiosity about it.

‘You got a parcel!’ she announced, as he appeared. ‘It came this morning.’

He picked up the box and sat down. He was wearing the softest-looking sweater I had ever seen. I fought the urge to ask if it was cashmere. ‘Quicker than I’d thought,’ he observed. He handed it to Liza. ‘For you,’ he said.

I’m afraid the look she gave him was of deep suspicion.

‘What?’

‘For you,’ he said.

‘What’s this?’ she said, staring at it as if she didn’t want to touch it. She hadn’t yet tied back her hair, and it fell round her cheeks, obscuring her face. Or perhaps that was the point.

‘Open it, Mum,’ said Hannah. ‘I’ll open it, if you want.’ She reached over, and Liza let it slide from her fingers.

As I sliced bread, Hannah attacked the plastic security wrapping, digging at the stubborn bits with the knife. A few moments later she ripped it off and examined the cardboard box underneath.

‘It’s a mobile phone!’ she announced.

‘With a video facility,’ said Mike, pointing to the image, ‘like mine. I thought you could use it to film those boats.’

Liza stared at the little silver gadget; so exquisitely small, it seemed to me, that you couldn’t have dialled a number without a pencil point and a microscope. After an age, she said, ‘How much did it cost?’

He was buttering a slice of toast. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘I can’t accept it,’ she said. ‘It must have cost a fortune.’

‘Can you make films on it?’ Hannah was already rifling through the box for the instructions.

Mike smiled. ‘Really, it cost nothing. I did a deal a while back with the company that manufactures them. They were happy to send it to me.’ He patted his pocket. ‘That’s how I got mine.’

Hannah was impressed. ‘Do lots of people send you stuff for free?’

‘It’s called business,’ he said.

‘Can you get anything you want?’

‘You usually only get something if the person giving it thinks they might one day get something in return,’ he said, and added hurriedly, ‘In business, I mean.’

I thought about that phrase as I put down the milk in front of him, a little harder than I’d intended. I tried not to think of our meeting the previous day.

‘Look,’ he said, when Liza had still not touched the phone, ‘treat it as a loan, if you like. Take it and use it for the whale-migration season. I didn’t like what I saw the other day, and it would be nice to know that you had some more ammo against the bad guys.’

I could see that this was a persuasive argument for my niece. I suppose he had guessed that she couldn’t have afforded a piece of equipment like that if she’d had two full boats a day for the entire season.

Finally, tentatively, she took the phone from Hannah. ‘I could send pictures straight to the National Parks,’ she said, turning it over in her hand.

‘The minute you saw anyone doing anything wrong,’ he said. ‘May I have some more coffee, Kathleen?’

‘Not just the disco boats, but all sorts of things. Creatures in distress, wrapped in fishing lines. I could lend it to other boats if I wasn’t using it.’

‘I could take a film of the dolphins in the bay and show it at school. If you took me out to see them, I mean.’ Hannah looked at her mother, but Liza was still staring at the little phone.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said eventually.

‘It’s nothing,’ said Mike, dismissively. ‘Really. You don’t have to say any more about it.’ As if to underline the point he picked up the newspaper and began to read.

But just as I could tell he wasn’t taking in the printed words before him, I had a feeling about that phone, which was confirmed later in the day when, as I was making his bed, I found the receipt. It had been ordered in Australia, through some Internet site, and had cost more than this hotel takes in a week.

The day that Liza and Hannah arrived here, I drove the three hours to Sydney airport to pick them up, and when we got back to the hotel Liza lay down on my bed and didn’t get up for nine days.

I was so frightened by day three that I called the doctor. It was like she was in some kind of coma. She didn’t eat, she didn’t sleep, she took only occasional sips of the sweet tea that I placed on the bedside table and declined to answer any of my questions. Most of the time she lay on her side and stared at the wall, sweating gently in the midday heat, her pale hair lank, a cut on her face and a huge bruise down the side of her arm. Dr Armstrong spoke to her, pronounced her basically healthy and said it might be something viral, or possibly a neurosis, and that she should be left to rest.

I guess I was just relieved she hadn’t come here to die, but she had brought me enough to cope with. Hannah was only six, anxious and clingy, prone to tearful outbursts and often to be found wandering weeping through the corridors at night. It was unsurprising, considering she had travelled for a day and two nights to a place she didn’t know to be looked after by an old lady she had never met. It was high summer, and she came out in a rash from the heat, got bitten half to death by mosquitoes, couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t let her run around outside. I was afraid of the sun on her fair skin, afraid of letting her too close to the water, afraid of her not coming back.