Room at the Anchorage

The last room in Pellow Quay came with a sloping ceiling, a window that rattled in a south-westerly, and three men who had very plainly already chosen each other.

The board outside the ferry office said NO CROSSINGS in capitals, in chalk, and somebody had underlined it twice.

Maddie stood in front of it with a suitcase in each hand and her knife roll strapped across her back, and read it again as though it might have a second line she had missed. It did not. Below it, in smaller writing that had already started to run in the wet, somebody had added until further notice, which was the phrase people used when they did not want to be asked.

The wind came along the quay in one long shove and she leaned into it without thinking. Her coat flattened against her front and billowed out behind, and the plait she had pinned up at six that morning in a Travelodge outside Exeter gave up on one side and began to unpin itself against her neck. Out past the harbour wall the sea was not a colour so much as a texture, grey and white and moving the wrong way, and the island she was meant to be standing on by five o'clock was nowhere. There was simply a place on the horizon where the weather got thicker.

She went into the office because the office was dry.

The man behind the counter had the look of someone who had said the same sentence forty times since lunch. He said it a forty-first time, kindly. No boats today, no boats tomorrow, the harbourmaster would review it every morning at eight, and he could not honestly tell her any more than that because nobody could. The coaster in the outer harbour had come in to shelter at dawn, he added, as if that settled the matter, and when a coaster came in to shelter it generally meant the sea had made its mind up.

"Right," Maddie said. "Thank you."

She stood under the porch afterwards and did the sums, because the sums were the part she could do.

Six weeks at the island hotel, starting tonight with a staff supper she was supposed to be cooking to show them what they had hired. Eight hundred and fifty a week. Accommodation included, which was the reason she had taken it over a better-paid job in a hotel in the Lakes, because accommodation included meant she could let the room in Bristol go and stop paying for a bed she slept in eleven nights a year. Which she had done. On Friday. So there was nowhere behind her to go back to, and nothing in front of her until the sea changed its mind, and in between there was a quay in a gale and two suitcases that had wheels meant for airport floors and not for cobbles.

Her phone went in her pocket. The agency.

It was Kerry, who managed her bookings and had never once in eight years sounded surprised by anything. Kerry had seen the forecast. Kerry had spoken to the hotel. The hotel wanted her, still, very much, the moment a boat could get her across, and in the meantime they would pay her standby: seventy pounds a day to wait on the mainland and be ready.

"Seventy," Maddie said.

"It's standard."

"It's standard for a hotel that isn't in the middle of the sea. I have to sleep somewhere, Kerry."

"Then sleep somewhere cheap," said Kerry, not unkindly, and told her to keep her receipts.

Maddie put the phone away and looked along the harbour front at the somewhere cheap. Pellow Quay was one long curve of painted houses facing the water, with a chandlery at one end, a fish market at the other that was shuttered and streaming, and a line of guest houses in between with little signs in their front windows. She could see from where she stood that most of those signs said NO VACANCIES. A group of men in orange oilskins was going in at the door of the nearest one, laughing, shouldering each other, bags over their shoulders and the particular loud cheerfulness of people who have been told they cannot work and are being paid anyway.

She tried four doors in forty minutes. The first was full of a trawler crew from Newlyn. The second was full of the coaster, whose crew had apparently come ashore in a body and taken every room with a kettle in it. The third did not answer. The fourth was a woman in a quilted gilet who looked at the suitcases, looked at the knife roll, and said with real regret that she had a family in the attic who'd been meant to cross yesterday and had been sleeping on her landing, and did Maddie know how many people were stuck on this side, because she did not.

"Try the Anchorage," the woman said. "Aubrey sometimes keeps one back."

The Anchorage was the pub on the corner where the quay bent round towards the lifeboat station, a squat whitewashed building with small deep windows and a slate roof that had clearly been fighting weather for two hundred years and did not intend to lose to this one. A sign swung over the door with a painted anchor on it, creaking on its bracket. The windows were lit yellow. Somebody inside was laughing loudly enough to be heard through the glass.

She shoved the door with her shoulder and hauled both cases in after her, and the noise and the warmth closed over her head.

It was full. That was the first thing, and the second thing was that it was full in the way a kitchen is full at the start of service when it has been planned properly, which was to say busy but not chaotic. Low beams. A fire in a wide stone hearth, going well. Oilskins dripping from every hook along the wall and a pile of them on a settle by the door that nobody had claimed. Men at every table, and a few women, crew and locals mixed together, and the smell of beer and wet wool and woodsmoke, and under that, from somewhere at the back, the smell of stock that had been on since morning and knew what it was doing. Onion, bones, bay. Her stomach noted it with interest before the rest of her had finished arriving.

An old black Labrador was lying across the hearth in front of the fire with his grey muzzle on his paws. He opened one eye at her, assessed the suitcases, and closed it again.

"Rooms?" said someone at her elbow.

He had come round the end of the bar with a laptop under one arm, and he was tall and narrow, long in the leg and the forearm, with the build of a man who went up hills on purpose at weekends. Fair-skinned, a little pink along the cheekbones from the heat of the room. His hair was dark blond and straight and came to his jaw, tucked behind both ears, and a pair of reading glasses was pushed up into it, sitting on top of his head where he had plainly forgotten them. His eyes were very blue and very awake.

"If you've got one," she said. "I've been told you sometimes keep one back."

"Who told you that?"

"A woman in a gilet."

"Jen." He sounded resigned. "Jen tells everybody that." He looked at the cases, then at the knife roll, and his gaze stayed on the knife roll slightly longer than on the cases. "You were meant to be on the island."

"I was meant to be on the island two hours ago."

"The hotel," he said, not quite a question. "They've been advertising for a chef since August. They've been through two." He opened the laptop on the end of the bar, one-handed, and brought up a grid of dates and room numbers that she could read upside down. Most of it was blocked out in solid colour. "There's one," he said. "At the top. It's small, the ceiling slopes, and the window rattles when it's from the south-west, which it will be all week. It's the last one I have and I was keeping it for an emergency."

"Is this an emergency?"

He looked at her properly then, over the top of the laptop. It was a quick, complete look and she had the odd sense of being totted up. "Probably," he said. "The harbourmaster will tell you it's day by day. I'd say pack for longer than that." He named a price for the room. She did the division in her head against seventy a day and came out a little ahead, which was more than she had expected to come out anywhere today.

"I'll take it."

"Aubrey," he said, and put out a hand across the bar. His grip was dry and brief. "Stannard. I do the rooms and the books."

"Maddie Lewin."

"Chef," said Aubrey, glancing again at the roll on her back.

"Relief chef. Agency. I go where I'm sent."

"And they sent you here."

"They sent me there," she said, and nodded vaguely at the wall, beyond which was the harbour, beyond which was the sea, beyond which was an island and a kitchen and six weeks of a plan. "Here is just where I've landed."

He typed her name in. He typed accurately and quickly, without looking at the keys, and while he did it the biggest man she had ever seen behind a bar came along it towards them with a tray of clean glasses.

He was well over six foot and broad with it, big through the chest and the shoulders, carrying weight that looked as though it had been earned on something heavy. His skin was ruddy and weathered, the skin of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors in wind, and his hair was red-gold and cropped close to his skull. He had a full red beard trimmed very neatly, and he moved behind the bar with the tray at shoulder height through a gap that should not have admitted him. Nobody got jostled. It was, Maddie thought, like watching a good sous chef on the pass. You did not notice the traffic because he was managing it.

He put the tray down. On his way back past he laid his free hand on the back of Aubrey's neck, under the fall of his hair, and left it there for as long as it took to say, "Has somebody found the Kellow boy's bag?" and for Aubrey to answer, "Under the stairs." Then the hand went, and he went, and Aubrey went on typing without having broken rhythm at all.

Maddie filed it. It was not a hard thing to file.

"Ned," said Aubrey, without looking up, because he had evidently felt her looking. "He's the landlord. Cellar, bar, everything that's heavy. If the beer's off, tell him. If the room's cold, tell me."

"And if the food's good?"

That made him look up. "Tell Piran," he said. "He'll pretend it doesn't matter to him, and it will."

Right on cue, as if someone had said his name loudly in a kitchen, a man leaned out of a doorway at the far end of the bar.

He was not tall. He was compact and solid, broad across the shoulders, and he had his sleeves pushed above the elbows so that she could see forearms thick from lifting and marked with the shiny pale stripes of old burns, the kind you got from an oven door rather than from any one bad day. He was pale in the way cooks are pale in winter. A dark red bandana was knotted over his hair, and black curls came out from under it at the front and stuck to his forehead with the heat. He had a tea towel over one shoulder and a face that looked as though it smiled easily and was not smiling now.

"Ned," he said, down the length of the bar. "The range has gone out again."

"You lit it an hour ago."

"I know I lit it an hour ago. I was there." He caught sight of Aubrey and something in his face eased, the way a person's shoulders drop when they come in out of the rain. "Tell him I was there."

"He was there," said Aubrey mildly, still typing.

Ned said something to the man he was serving and went down the bar, and Maddie watched him reach the kitchen door and put a hand flat on the cook's chest, at the collarbone, and push him very gently back through it. The cook went. He was laughing now. The door swung shut behind the pair of them and she heard, through it, the dull clang of an iron firebox being opened, and a word she did not catch, and then the cook's voice again, lower.

She stood there with her hand on the handle of one suitcase and made the list, because the list was what she did in a new kitchen before anybody had told her anything.

Three of them. One on the bar and the cellar, one on the kitchen, one on the rooms and the money. Nobody treading on anybody. The big one moved the traffic; the cook had the heat; the one in front of her had the figures and the keys. They touched one another the way people touched who had stopped keeping count of it. They answered one another's questions before they were finished. It was a brigade that had been working together so long it no longer needed to call its orders out loud, and she had worked in enough kitchens to know what that looked like, and to know that you did not walk into one of those and expect a station. You were agency. You covered a gap, you were polite, you left the walk-in tidier than you found it, and you went.

That was fine. She was not here to be anything. She was here for a bed and a window that rattled and seventy pounds a day, until the sea let her go and do the job she was actually for.

"Key," said Aubrey, and put it on the bar. It was an old brass mortice key on a wooden fob with the number seven burnt into it. "Top of the stairs, keep going, then keep going again. Breakfast is from half seven when the kitchen's had a chance to wake up. Supper's on now, if the range agrees to it." He paused. "Do you need a hand with the cases?"

"No. Thank you. I've carried worse."

"I don't doubt it," he said, and reached up absently, found the glasses in his hair, looked surprised to find them, and put them on.

The stairs were narrow and turned twice and the second flight was steeper than the first. At the top, under the eaves, room seven was exactly what he had said it was: small, clean, the ceiling sloping down on the window side so that she would need to remember not to sit up quickly in bed. A double bed with a white cotton cover, a chest of drawers, a chair, a sink in the corner and a radiator that ticked. The window looked out over the harbour, and it rattled.

She put the cases against the wall, laid the knife roll on the chest of drawers where she could see it, and took her coat off. Her jumper had ridden up under it, and her jeans had soaked through at the knee on the quay, and she was, all of a sudden, very tired and very hungry, and did not want to go down into that bar and sit at a table on her own among three hundred oilskins.

She pulled the rest of the pins out of her hair instead and let the plait down her back, and sat on the end of the bed, and made a new list.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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