Whitstable Read Free

drew unavoidably closer. His chest tightened with dread.
    “Mr Cushing?”
    He had no alternative but to stop. He blinked like a lark, feigning surprise. Incomprehensibly, he found himself smiling.
    “Sorry.” The man had a local accent. “Bob. Bob and Margaret? Nelson Road? I just wanted to say we were really sorry to hear about your wife.”
    He took Bob’s hand in both of his and squeezed it warmly. He had no idea who Bob was, or Margaret for that matter.
    “Bless you.”
    The man and woman went on their way in the direction of West Beach and Seasalter and he walked on towards the Harbour, still smiling. Still wearing the mask.
    He was an actor. He would act.

    Act as if he were alive.
    ***
    The sky had turned silver grey and the wind had begun whipping the surface of the water. After passing the hull of the Favourite , that familiar old oyster yawl beached like a whale between Island Wall and the sea, he sat in his usual spot near Keam’s Yard facing the wooden groynes that divided the beach, where he was wont to paint his watercolours of the coast. But there was no paint box or easel with him today. No such activity could inspire, activate or relax him and he wondered if that affliction, that restless hopelessness, might pass. If it meant forgetting Helen, even for an instant, he hoped it would not.
    Usually the music of the boats, the flag-rustling and chiming of the rigging, was a comfort. Today it was not. How could it be? How could anything be? When there was nothing left in life but to endure it?
    He took off his sunglasses and pulled a white cotton glove from his pocket onto the fingers of his right hand, momentarily resembling a magician, then lit a John Player unfiltered. It had become a habit during filming: he said, often, he didn’t want to play some ‘Nineteenth Century Professor of the Nicotine Stains’. As he smoked he looked down at his bare left hand which rested on his knee, lined with a route-map of pronounced blue veins. He traced them with his finger tips, not realising that he was enacting the gentle touch of another.
    He closed his eyes, resting them from the sun and took into his smoker’s lungs the age-old aroma of the sea. Of all the senses, that of smell more than any other is the evoker of memories: and so it was. He remembered with uncanny clarity the last time he and Helen had watched children building ‘grotters’—sand or mud sculptures embellished imaginatively with myriads of oyster shells—only to see the waves come in and destroy them at the end of a warm and joyful Saint James’s Day. Clutching his arm, Helen had said, “Such a shame for the sea to wash away something so beautiful.” He’d laughed. His laughter was so distant now. “Don’t worry, my dear. They’ll make more beautiful ones next year.” “But that one was special,” she’d said, “I wanted that one to stay.”
    The fresh salt air smarted in his eyes.
    “I know who you are,” said a disembodied young voice.
    Startled, he looked up and saw a boy about ten years old standing at an inquisitive distance, head tilted to one side with slats of cloud behind him and a book under his arm. He and Helen had no children of their own, or pets for that matter, but felt all the children and animals in the town were their friends. He remembered talking to the twins next door and asking what they wanted to be when they grew up—clergyman, sailor—and them innocently turning the question back at him, albeit that he was already in his fifties: What do you want to be when you grow up? Good question, for an actor. But this one, this boy, he didn’t recognise at all.
    “You’re Doctor Van Helsing.”
    The man’s pale blue eyes did not waver from the sea ahead of him.
    “So I am.”
    The boy threw a quick glance over his shoulder, then took a tentative step nearer. He wore short trousers, had one grey sock held up by elastic and the other at half-mast. Perhaps the other piece of elastic had snapped, or was