EBB TIDE

Ross travelled south across the Mendip Hills and into Somerset. He journeyed by small stages, putting up at quiet inns, not knowing what his ultimate destination would be. He talked to no one.

The May weather was fine and clear. In the ditches beside the quiet roads he was gladdened to notice an abundance of daisies, oxlips and violets. Like his brother, he’d always been moved by the modesty of small flowers.

Taken by a desire to see and smell the sea, he made his way to Watchet and looked out at the deep harbour, where, he had been told, the tides would ebb by thirty feet in every twenty-four hours, leaving all the vessels beached on the red-toned mud.

When Ross arrived there, the wind was blowing from the south and it felt to him as if this was hastening the ebb, as the water slapped around the hulls of the colliers and ketches and then, inch by inch, crept away from them, as though some mistake had been made and the sea was repenting of its earlier rush towards a man-made haven.

He watched the sea for a long time, waiting for the moment when it would be quite gone from the harbour and the boats would lie stranded, showing an ugly infestation of barnacles on their hulls and a tangle of seaweed on their rudders. When at last this came about, very much as he’d imagined it, he found it strangely troubling.

Valentine Ross was not a man much given to self-love or self-pity, but he now yielded to the idea that his own life was in the same state as the ships abandoned by the sea. He was beached and useless. The person who would have turned the tide and brought him back to a meaningful life felt nothing for him.

In due time, the incoming flow of the water would rescue even the great iron-hulled windjammer stuck fast in the mud at the outer corner of the harbour wall. She would be loaded with iron ore from the Brendon Hills and bound for Newport and the Welsh steelworks, under mighty sail. The luggers and ketches would make their way into the Atlantic fishing grounds and return with basket-loads of mackerel and herring, and the fishwives of Watchet would sing as they carried them ashore. All would regain their appointed reason for being, but he would not.

Ross sat down on a stone bench and watched the gulls circling and landing in the mud, swooping on tiny crabs and cockles. He looked all around him and found the scene desolate, despite the pale sunshine falling upon it. Scrawny cats were fighting over a few fish-heads strewn among the stones. A horse stood silent and still, in the traces of a collapsing cart. A fire smouldered, untended, in a rusty brazier.

At his back, Ross now began to hear the sound of tuneless singing and he turned to see a posse of men approaching the harbour, carrying jars of stout, far adrift on a companionable drunken tide. They walked in zigzags, bumping against each other, interrupting their song with happy laughter. They came and stood near to the bench on which Ross was sitting and one of them raised his fisherman’s cap to him and belched and said, ‘Don’t mind us now, Sir. It’s just our sea legs making us stumble.’