A Place of Hiding

But this? He could do nothing about this. From this that his sister suffered now, there would be no fishing boat in the night. So if he had betrayed, confused, and disappointed the others, it was nothing in light of losing Ruth.

Swimming was his morning release from the overwhelming anxiety of these considerations. Without his daily swim in the bay, Guy knew that the thought of his sister, not to mention his absolute impotence to change what was happening to his sister, would consume him.

The road he was on was steep and narrow, thickly wooded on this east side of the island. The rarity of any harsh wind from France had long allowed the trees to prosper here. Where Guy walked beneath them, the sycamores and chestnuts, ash and beech, made a skeletal arc that was grey etched on pewter in the pre-dawn sky.

The trees rose on sheer hillsides held back by stone walls. At the base of these, water flowed eagerly from an inland spring, chirping against stones as it raced to the sea. The way switched back and forth on itself, past a shadowy water mill and a misplaced Swiss chalet hotel that was closed for the season. It ended in a minuscule car park, where a snack bar the size of a misanthrope’s heart was boarded and locked, and the granite slipway once used to give horses and carts access to the vraic that was the island’s fertiliser was slick with seaweed.

The air was still, the gulls unroused from their nighttime cliff-top resting places. In the bay the water was tranquil, an ashen mirror reflecting the colour of the lightening sky. There were no waves in this deeply sheltered place, just a gentle slapping of water on pebbles, a touch that seemed to release from the seaweed the constrasting sharp odours of burgeoning life and decay.

Near the life ring that hung from a spike long ago driven into the cliffside, Guy set down his towel and placed his tea on a flat-surfaced stone. He kicked off his shoes and removed his track suit’s trousers. He reached into his jacket pocket for his swimming goggles.

His hand came into contact with more than just the goggles, however. Inside his pocket was an object that he took out and held in the palm of his hand.

It was wrapped in white linen. He unfolded this and brought forth a circular stone. It was pierced in the middle in the fashion of a wheel, for a wheel was what it was supposed to be: énne rouelle dé fa?tot. A fairy’s wheel.

Guy smiled at the charm, at the memory it evoked. The island was a place of folklore. To those born and bred here, of parents and grandparents born and bred here, carrying the occasional talisman against witches and their familiars was something that might be scoffed at publicly but not so lightly dismissed privately. You ought to carry one of these, you know. Protection’s important, Guy.

Yet the stone—fairy wheel or not—had not been nearly enough to protect him in the single way he’d thought he was protected. The unexpected still occurred in everyone’s life, so he could not rightfully call himself surprised when the unexpected had occurred in his. He wrapped the stone back in its linen and returned it to his pocket. Shrugging out of his jacket, he removed his knitted cap and stretched the goggles round his head. He picked his way across the narrow beach and without hesitation, he entered the water.

It came at him like a knife’s blade. In the midst of summer the Channel was no tropical bath. In the tenebrous morning of fast-approaching winter, it felt glacial, dangerous, and forbidding. But he didn’t think of that. Instead, he moved resolutely forward and as soon as he had enough depth to make it safe to do so, he pushed off from the bottom and began to swim.

He dodged patches of seaweed in the water, moving fast. In this manner, he swam a hundred yards out, to the toad-shaped granite outcropping that marked the point where the bay met the English Channel. Here he stopped, right at the toad’s eye, a creation of guano collected in a shallow recess of the stone. He turned back to the beach and began to tread water, the best way he knew to keep in shape for the coming ski season in Austria. As was his habit, he removed his goggles to clear his view for a few minutes. He idly inspected the cliffs in the distance and the heavy foliage that covered them. Through this means, his gaze traveled downward on an uneven, boulder-strewn journey to the beach. He lost count of his kicks.