Around midday, we took the children up to the stone we’d laid in the dunes for Stivvy and looked out across the sea. Home is the sailor … But Stivvy—he was not home, was he. Magnus was right: whatever was the point? But then I looked across at Clementina, looked for bitterness in her face, and it wasn’t there any more; it had not been there for a long time now. While Hal and Jessie ran barefoot, chasing wavelets back to the ocean, she brushed her fingers across the words we’d scratched and what I saw was a kind of soothing I didn’t understand. But I was glad for it, aye, so glad.

That was the point, the only point, and I wished Magnus could have seen it too.

~

Magnus Tulloch did not get home until the Beaconsfield Hotel shut its doors and sent them on their way, all those men with nightmares in their eyes and stories they’d been told to bury, for their own good. And then he and Paulie Garrioch sat outside on the verandah, drinking from bottles in brown paper bags.

Clementina kissed me on the cheek wearily and said goodnight. Just let it be, quinie. It will all turn out.

Shameful, but I listened by the kitchen door. And all I heard, for my trouble? An occasional rustle of paper, the sound of boots shifting on the verandah boards. Perhaps they had run out of words. Perhaps they had told each other what had to be said and there was nothing left now.

I made tea. And waited.

When Paulie left, Magnus came inside, stumbling a little. He said nothing and went to bed.

It will all turn out, I told Steven when he began to cry.

~

By the time winter came round, Magnus Tulloch was spending more time at the hotel than at home, and every night his dinner sat drying on a saucepan on top of the Metters. Sometimes he ate it, most times it was there on the plate in the morning. Congealed gravy, hardened lumps of dripping. What it was he did eat, I didn’t know.

We were only just managing, only just getting by. A storeman’s earnings were less than a cooper’s, and to get a war pension a man had to be incapacitated. That meant damaged in some visible, obvious way. What’s more, a man had to ask, and that was something Magnus would never do. I wonder—did any of them, the men from the far north? They were not ones to show their pain easily. Clementina had her widow’s pension, small though it was, and between us we managed the washing for the hotels, but the sum of it all was no great amount. Not enough for us and the Beaconsfield Hotel too.