Second Driver

Joanna had come to Pellow Quay to count things, and on her first night she counted three names on a fridge, one man's hand in the small of another man's back, and the third man at the end of the table, watching the hand.

The train had been on time. Joanna had made a note of that at Exeter, and again at Plymouth, and by the time it pulled into Truro at ten past three she had started to feel faintly smug about it, as though she had arranged the whole of the Great Western main line herself. Two suitcases, three archive boxes taped at the corners, one rucksack, one camel wool coat over her arm because it was too warm for it and too good to pack. Everything she had decided to bring from ten years outside Derby was on a single trolley, and the trolley had one wheel that pulled left.

Collection was three-fifteen. The email had said so, in a line she had copied into her phone under Sunday: Euan will meet you off the train with the van, 3.15, front of the station.

At three-forty she had read the timetable for the branch line twice and worked out the taxi fare to Pellow Quay from a card on the noticeboard. At three-fifty she had decided she would give it until four. At three fifty-five a white van came round the corner from the main road, much too fast for a station forecourt, and pulled up across two of the drop-off bays with its hazard lights already going.

It was not a new van. One wing had been a different white once, and somebody had written CLEAN ME in the dust on the back doors and somebody else had written NO under it. Along the side, in green letters that had lost their shadows, it said THE FISHERMEN'S STORES, PELLOW QUAY, and under that a phone number with an old code.

The driver got out before the engine had properly stopped. He was lean and long in the leg, in a brown leather jacket worn soft at the elbows and dark jeans that fitted him rather better than anything in her old office had fitted anybody. A black knitted beanie was pulled down over his ears, and honey-brown curls had got out from under it at the back and were making a run for his collar.

"Joanna?" he said. "Tell me you're Joanna. If you're not I've just parked very badly in front of a stranger."

"I'm Joanna."

"Thank God. Euan." He shook her hand, then didn't let go of it straight away, as though he had forgotten the second half of the gesture. He had green-grey eyes and a grin that went up further on one side than the other. "I'm late. I know I'm late. There was a lorry jackknifed at Chiverton and I sat behind it for half an hour composing apologies, and I've forgotten every single one of them."

"Forty minutes," she said.

"Is that all? It felt like a week." He let go of her hand and looked at the trolley, and she watched him count it the way she would have counted it: two, three, one, coat. His face did something brief and honest. "Right. That's more than I'd cleared."

"I can get a taxi for the boxes."

"You can absolutely not. Craig would have my head on the counter." He was already opening the back doors. "Give me two minutes. It's a Sunday, so it's not as bad as it looks."

It looked fairly bad. The back of the van was lined with plastic bait trays stacked four high and strapped to the side rails, a pair of big white ice boxes with their lids latched, a coil of rope the thickness of her wrist, and, wedged in behind the bulkhead, a case of something that rattled. It smelt of salt and cold and, underneath that, very definitely of fish.

"The trays are empty," Euan said, over his shoulder. "I swear on my mother. I took a load of bait to Newlyn yesterday and I haven't had the time to hose them out. The ice boxes are clean. Ish." He unlatched one lid, then the other, and lifted them off and stood them on end against the trays like doors. Then he pulled the ice boxes forward, put one inside the other, which she would not have guessed they would do, and slid the pair of them hard up against the bulkhead. It made a gap. It made, she could see at once, exactly the gap for three archive boxes side by side, with the suitcases flat on top.

"You measured that," she said.

"I measured it with my eyes. It's a gift." He held out his hands for the first box and she gave it to him. "What's in this one?"

"Lever-arch files."

"Of course it is." He set it in. "And this?"

"More lever-arch files."

He looked at her over the top of it, and she kept her face straight a beat longer than the joke needed, and he laughed out loud on the station forecourt, a short delighted bark that turned two people at the bus stop round.

When everything was in he shut the doors on it and leant his weight against them until the catch went. Then he dug in the pocket of the leather jacket and came out with a key.

It was a single brass Yale on a split ring, and the ring went through a cork fob, the round kind they put on boat keys so they float if you drop them over the side. Someone had written FLAT on the cork in black marker and then gone over it twice to make sure.

"That's yours," Euan said. "Front door's round the side of the shop, own stair up from the back passage. Nobody else has got one. Well. Craig's got the master for the building, because insurance. But nobody's going to use it."

She took it. The cork was warm from his pocket. "I thought I'd get it when I arrived."

"You have arrived. This is Cornwall. Truro counts." He went round to the driver's side and spoke to her across the roof. "And it was always going to be yours, before you ask. Whatever you turned out like. Craig said if you were horrible we'd just have to be nice to you until you weren't."

"That's very reassuring."

"Isn't it." He grinned at her. "Get in. The door sticks, you have to lift it."

The cab was a bench seat for three and a dashboard that held, in this order: a road atlas of Cornwall with the cover gone, a packet of mints, two biros with their ends chewed, a phone holder with no phone in it, and a clipboard wedged against the windscreen, with a sheet clipped to it and a pencil tied to the clip with garden twine. Joanna read the sheet upside down while he pulled out of the station. Dates across the top. Down the side, in a loose, slanting hand: BAIT NEWLYN. ICE. MEVA (Hocking x2 pots). LOOE — rope. Some lines had ticks. One had a tick crossed out and a question mark written next to it.

"Run sheet?" she said.

"Run sheet." He took them round a roundabout with one hand. "It's mine. Nobody else can read it, which is a sort of job security."

"I can read it."

He glanced across at her. "Can you?"

"You've been to Mevagissey twice this week and once you weren't sure if you'd been."

"That was the Wednesday," he said, with dignity. "The pots were in the van and then they weren't in the van, and nobody at the other end would admit to having them."

The road went out past the cathedral spire and the industrial estates and on to the A-road, and then the land opened up and started to tip, very gently, towards the south. Hedges. Fields that looked shaved. A sky that was bigger than Derbyshire's and a different colour at the bottom edge. Euan talked. He talked the way some people hum, without seeming to need a reply, about the lorry at Chiverton and the price of bait and a crab that had got out in the van in July and been found three days later under the passenger seat, alive and furious. She let it run past her and counted things instead. Forty minutes from Truro station if nobody jackknifed. Fuel gauge just under half. One clipboard, one driver. Three runs a week that she could see, possibly four. The heater did not go off, only down.

Then the road dropped between two high banks, and the hedges fell away, and there was the sea.

It was flat and bright and very blue, and at the bottom of the hill a town sat round the curve of a harbour with its houses painted one colour after another, white and cream and pale blue and a pink she would have said nobody would choose, all the way along. There was a church tower. There was a long granite wall with boats inside it, some afloat and some sitting at angles on the mud where the tide had gone out from under them. A lifeboat station stood at the far end with a flag on a mast, standing straight out.

"That's a fair bit of wind," she said.

"That's nothing. When the flag's like that you can hang washing out." He changed down for the hill. "When it's ripping, nobody hangs anything."

The van went down the main street at a speed that suggested Euan knew where every bollard was, and along the front past a row of guest houses with little signs in their windows, VACANCIES, NO VACANCIES, VACANCIES, and a guest house with a blue door, and a pub on the corner where the quay bent round, whitewashed and low, with every window lit and a smell of roast meat coming out of it so strongly she could taste it with the windows up. At the other end of the front, behind them now, she had seen a long narrow shop with a ship's chandler's sign and a bay window full of brass.

"That's Tremayne's," Euan said, as though she had asked. "Yacht people. Lovely. We do the working boats. Different animal."

The Fishermen's Stores was at the far end, past the last of the guest houses, where the front stopped being pretty. Next door was a long concrete shed with roller shutters down at both ends, and a sign on the nearer shutter: FISH MARKET. MON–SAT. The Stores itself was a tall, square, slate-hung building with a shop window on the ground floor full of coiled rope and orange oilskins and a stack of plastic crates, and a row of three sash windows on the floor above. The upstairs ones had blinds half down.

"Yours," said Euan, pointing at them with his chin, and parked across the front of the shop as if he owned the road.

Craig was waiting on the step. He was very tall, taller than she had expected even from his voice on the phone, broad through the chest and heavy through the shoulders and middle in a way that made the doorway behind him look like a size someone had got wrong. His hair was ash-blond and swept back off a square, clean-shaven face, and he wore a fitted navy fisherman's jumper over a white collar, dark jeans and boots that had been polished on a Sunday.

"Joanna," he said, and shook her hand, and then looked past her at the van. "He was late."

"Forty minutes," she said.

"Chiverton," said Euan, from the back doors.

"I heard about Chiverton. Everyone in the county has heard about Chiverton." Craig picked up two of the archive boxes at once, stacked, as though they were empty, which she knew perfectly well they weren't. "Come and see your flat. I'll show you the shop tomorrow when it's open; it makes more sense with people in it."

The shop was dim and cold and smelt of tarred twine and diesel and new rubber. Through the back there was a passage with coat hooks and a door out to a yard, and on the left a narrow stair that went straight up, painted dark green. At the top of it a door, and her key in her hand fitted it.

The flat was three rooms over the shop. A sitting room at the front with the three sash windows on to the harbour. A kitchen at the back that looked out over a small yard to the back of a house. A bedroom with a double bed already made up in white, a chest of drawers, and a hook on the wall by the door with nothing on it.

Craig set the boxes down in the sitting room and stood in the middle of it with his hands in his pockets and told her about it the way a man reads out the shipping forecast, in an order that mattered to him. Boiler serviced in June. Immersion on a timer; the switch was in the airing cupboard. Windows sound, except the left-hand one, which stuck in the wet. Phone signal fine at the front, poor in the bedroom. Council tax was in with the building and she wasn't to worry about it.

"No rent," he said. "That's in the contract, but I'd rather say it to your face. Stock Buyer, twenty-nine thousand, the flat with it. If any of that's not what you thought you'd signed, tell me now and not in three weeks."

"That's what I signed."

"Good." He seemed to relax by a quarter of an inch. "Dennis kept it all in his head. The stock. The accounts, half of them. You'll see on Monday. It's a better shop than it looks and a worse one than it should be, and we've had five years of meaning to sort it and not sorting it." He looked out of the front window at the harbour, at the boats lying over on the mud, and for a second she thought he was going to say something else. Then he didn't. "Robin's got food on. Come over when you're ready. Across the yard, back door's never locked."

The house behind the Stores was older than the Stores and lower, with a kitchen that ran the whole width of the ground floor and a long table down the middle of it that had been scrubbed so many times the grain stood up. There was a dresser with mismatched plates. There was a radio on the windowsill, off. There was a dark-haired man at the stove with his back to her, in a grey T-shirt that was tight across the shoulders and tighter round the arms, and when he turned round he had a short, neat beard and very dark eyes, and he came straight over and kissed her on the cheek, which nobody in Derby had ever done on a first meeting.

"Robin," he said. "You'll be starving. Sit down. Not that one, it rocks. That one."

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

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