Other boat owners in Heanor paid eager young men to scrub out and stock up with supplies, but Rosco preferred to do the work himself. He had sacrificed too much for the Jessie Ellen to entrust her to some lad who skipped school because he thought the sea meant adventure or a fortune from the fishing.

As Rosco carried boxes of beer aboard, he thought with gratitude that birdwatchers did not have such strong stomachs as the divers who usually chartered the boat, and he need not take so much booze. The seawatching trips were a relatively new venture, and he was grateful to Rose Pengelly for having put him onto it. He started to think about Rose Pengelly but stopped himself. It would not do to brood.

When his work was finished, he went to the Blue Anchor for a drink. It was in a side street just up the hill from the harbour, so grimy and unwelcoming that most holidaymakers ignored it, and the locals who patronised it were spared the loud voices, pink thighs, and smell of suntan oil which pervaded the other pubs near the quay. When he went through the door, there was a sudden silence, and he knew they were all looking at him. They still wondered how he had come back to Heanor with a flash boat and no bank loan. Let them wonder, he thought. He ordered a drink and sat alone in a corner with his back to the room. The buzz of conversation resumed.

Louis Rosco had been one of a big family who lived hand-to-mouth in an almost derelict cottage on the shore by Porthkennan. The mother had been feckless and easy. She’d do anything, they said, for a rum and shrub. Louis remembered her with affection as laughing and generous. His father had been a thin, sickly man, a grafter who took any work that was going—potato picking, casual shifts in the fish factory, and washing dishes in the big hotels in Penzance in the summer. Everyone said he would work himself into the grave, but it was Ellen Rosco who went first. She died quite suddenly in her early forties, when she was walking with a sailor from Falmouth down Harbour Street. She had a massive heart attack and frightened the sailor so much that he almost fell into the water. People talked of nothing else for months.