Silver Bay(56)
Author: Jojo Moyes

She seemed low. She had stopped asking about the New Zealand trip and spent a lot of time in her room. When I asked if anything was the matter she told me, very politely, that she was fine, in a way that let me know my presence wasn’t wanted. I missed my daughter, though. At night, when she still crept into my room, I held on to her sleeping form as if I was making up for all the times in the day when she no longer chose to be near me. So, all in all, we were a disjointed household that winter. The whalechasers often stayed away in the evenings, as if sitting out together gave them too acute a sense of what might be lost. Yoshi, Lance told me, smoking furiously, was thinking of resuming her academic career. Greg’s ex had finally relinquished her claim on Suzanne, but he didn’t behave as if this was any great victory. I think that, having stopped scrapping with her about the boat, he had had the head space to think about what he had lost, and introspection didn’t suit him.

The demolition of the Bullen place went ahead at the end of August. Overnight, wire fencing went up round it, contractors from out of town, with their team of great yellow prehistoric machines, came and clawed it to pieces. Less than seventy-two hours later the fencing was gone and there was nothing left but a dug-out patch of disturbed earth where the old house and sheds had been. When I steered in and out of the bay it looked like a great scar on the land, a mournful O of protest.

To add to the despondent mood, the skies were unusually grey and soulless. A seaside town enveloped by grey is a place with the joy vacuumed out. Guest numbers had fallen, the local motels dropped their rates to recapture the weekend trade. We all put our heads down against the wind and tried not to think about any of it too hard. And all the while those boats kept circling. It was as if they had heard about the hotel complex and decided it was open season. Twice I was out by Break Nose Island and those triple-deckers came thudding along the coastline, full of drunks, deafening the ocean with their music. Ironically, one was describing itself in the local paper as providing ‘all the excitement of a whale-watching trip’. After I had rung the paper and told them exactly what I thought of them for carrying the advertisement, Kathleen told me baldly that if I carried on like that I’d give myself an ulcer.

She seemed oddly reconciled to our fate. Either way, since our discussion in her office that night we didn’t talk much about it. I didn’t understand why she was so willing to let Mike off the hook, and she didn’t enlighten me. Night after night Kathleen lay at her end of the house, and I lay awake in my little room at the end of the corridor, listening to the sea and wondering how long I would still be able to hear that sound before, inevitably, Hannah and I were forced to pack our bags and move on.

At the start of September the council offices announced there would be a planning inquiry and everyone would be allowed to have their say. Few in Silver Bay held out much hope that our say would make a difference: in previous years we had seen many such developments in and around the various bays, and nine times in ten they went ahead in the face of the fiercest local opposition. Given the amount of supposed benefits Mike’s company was offering, I couldn’t see that this inquiry would pay any more than lip service to our views.

And, besides, the opposition was far from straightforward. It had become an issue that divided the town: there were those who accused us whalechasers of dramatising the whales’ plight; a greater number who didn’t seem to care much one way or the other; and some pointed out that what we did was an intrusion in itself. It was hard to refute that, especially when we were faced with the fact that other boats, with less rigorous codes of behaviour, increasingly treated our waters as their own. The café owners and boutique managers had an interest in a bigger, busier town and, while it sounds unlikely, I had some sympathy for them. We all had to earn a living and I knew more than most that some seasons were harder than others.

Then there were the whalechasers, the fishermen and those who simply enjoyed the presence of the dolphins and the whales, and others who didn’t want to see our quiet bay become loud and lively, like so many places that people like us would pay good money to avoid. But it felt as if we were the quieter of the voices. It felt as if we were unlikely to be heard.

The newspapers covered the debate with what seemed unhealthy relish (it was the best story they’d had since the great pub fire of ’84). They withstood the accusations of bias that flew from both sides, and repeatedly called on the planners, developers and council officers to justify and rejustify their position until I guessed even they were sick of the sound of their own voices. Twice I saw Mike’s name mentioned and, despite myself, read what he had said. Both times he talked about compromise. Both times I heard his voice in my head as clearly as if he’d spoken and wondered how someone could say so much and mean so little, at the same time.

Let me tell you something about humpbacks. The first time I saw one I was a child of eight. I was on holiday, out fishing with my aunt Kathleen and my mother, who didn’t like fishing but didn’t want me in the boat alone with my aunt. Her big sister Kathleen, she said jokingly, was liable to forget everything if faced with the challenge of a large fish, and she didn’t want me plopping over the edge while Kathleen reeled one in. I suspect now that she had just wanted an excuse to spend time with her sister – by then they had lived on separate continents for several years, and the distance hurt them both.

I loved those holidays. I loved the sense of safety, of my own immersion within a family I had not been aware I had. I didn’t have a father in England; my mother called Ray McCullen ‘careless’, and my aunt called h im something a little spicier, until my mother shook her head, as if it were something that shouldn’t be said in front of me. It certainly wasn’t to be mentioned in front of anyone else. I was brought up by women, by my mother in England and, when we were sent the money, by Aunt Kathleen and my grandmother in Australia. Kathleen’s mother, my grandmother, was a shadowy sort, as indistinct a memory as Kathleen was a sharp one. She was the kind of woman who had no interests, who cooked and raised a family, and then, once those duties had been discharged, seemed a little lost. A woman of her time, Kathleen would say. My few memories of her stem from my two visits as a child, and are of a benign, distant presence in the back rooms of the hotel, lost to television soaps or asking me questions ill suited to my age.

Kathleen, said everyone old enough to remember, was her father’s daughter. She was always doing something, gutting fish or sneaking me into the empty Whalechasers Museum, which, to a child of eight, seemed the height of freedom. My mother, a good fifteen years younger, always seemed the more mature of the two, dressed to the nines with immaculate hair and makeup. Kathleen, with her worn trousers and unbrushed hair, her salty language and her shark tales, was a revelation to me. Her godlike status was sealed on our second visit when she took me out fishing with my mother, and we were joined by an unexpected visitor.