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Alex spoke first, after a long while. ‘Going back home must have been more appealing than starting a new life there, I guess? Or it was safer or easier to head home and just do what was expected of her. Gudrid, I mean.’
Magnús glanced at her briefly before saying they should find somewhere to eat their pasties. He led the way towards the waterfall and found the water disappeared into a deep, dark cavern in the beach surrounded by jagged wet rocks.
‘There’s a cave behind the waterfall,’ he called back to Alex who seemed stuck on her spot on the pebbles. ‘But we’ll get wet trying to get in there. Here.’ He took off his waterproof and spread it on a flat boulder a little distance from the cascading water. ‘Sit down.’
They squeezed together onto the rock. ‘Won’t you be cold?’ she asked, but Magnús reminded her with a fist to his chest that he was a fierce Viking and they smiled and opened the bag.
‘Jude knew I was Cornish,’ Alex said, before taking her first bite. ‘So did Jowan.’
‘Your accent?’ Magnús offered.
‘I guess. Do you know Cornwall? It’s the next county down.’
‘Cornwall? Nei. I’ve only been to London on a school trip.’
‘You haven’t travelled much?’
‘I have. New Zealand, Canada, Rome, Sweden, a lot of places, with my parents on summer vacations.’
‘Oh.’ Alex hadn’t expected this, somehow. She waited for Magnús to ask her about her travels, but he didn’t. She’d never been anywhere anyway.
Not that she’d had any big travel plans of her own, but she had barely left Cornwall. It struck her she hadn’t made it to London when even Magnús had seen the place. Still, she was glad he wasn’t prying. In fact, he was taking big bites of the pasty and telling her how good it was while looking back at the waterfall. She got the feeling he was trying to make her feel unobserved; he was so exaggeratedly focusing his attentions on anything but her.
If he knew the truth, he’d want to know how on earth a twenty-six-year-old could be so independent and so work-worn and yet so inexperienced at the same time?
She couldn’t bear strangers knowing how she’d never left the county, never done anything special after leaving school, always living in the same home, keeping to the same old routines. It made her feel sad and sorry for herself. She bit it down, along with another mouthful of the really very good pasty. Not as good as her mum’s, of course, but good.
She was an oddity, she was realising. A young woman who’d known terrible grief as a child and who, at eighteen, had inherited a weight of responsibility that many middle-aged adults would find daunting.
She’d coped with it all by adopting a hardened, dogged spirit of determination to just keep going, getting through one day, then the next, and so on, never giving up and never breaking down, and yet for all her independence and competence, she hadn’t really grown up. Comparing herself to the worldly Magnús, brave and pioneering, she was still a kid. A kid with bills and responsibilities and chores, but not a fully fledged adult.
There were so many things she’d never experienced that most of her school friends had: girls’ holidays abroad, working under bosses, climbing career ladders, making a home of her very own, decorating, throwing house-warming parties and engagement parties, planning hen-dos. Instead, Alex had clung to the few things she’d known as a child, and the things she’d lost, she’d tried to recreate with Ben and the Thomases.
And yet, she was like the pioneering Viking Gudrid. She’d seen further than her peers at a young age, sighting new, frightening dangerous places – death and grief – no child should have to trespass in, and she’d come back a changed person, only to live a small, simple, fearful life.
Losing your mum when you were a little girl would do that to a person, she thought – convince you that the future was so risky there was no point in making plans. Life would do what it wanted to you anyway, no matter how hard you tried to forge ahead on your chosen path.
Alex sank deeper inside herself, forgetting Magnús and the waterfall and the blue sky entirely.
Why were these thoughts, so clear and so disquieting, only coming to her now that she was in Clove Lore? How long had they been forming at the back of her mind and settling in the pit of her stomach, heavy and dull? Had her break from the relentlessness of the endless estuary crossings given her time to actually think for the first time in years?
She supposed it was only natural, now that she couldn’t sail for a while, that she’d weigh up her options. On one hand, she could restore her father’s historic ferry and relaunch it, continuing the work he’d begun and carrying on his legacy, or she could… she could…
No alternatives whatsoever presented themselves to her. She’d never allowed herself to dream any bigger than that.
Magnús shifted on the rock. His movement stirred her and she found herself talking.
‘You called me a castaway earlier, but I’m not. I’m more of a runaway.’
‘Me too,’ Magnús told her, and they both turned to inspect the other.
She didn’t know what to say next but the faintest smile twitched Magnús’s lips, enough to reassure her he really wasn’t going to ask her what she was running from, and he wasn’t going to tell her about the life he was taking a break from either. Magnús scrunched the empty bag in his hands. ‘I ate the crust,’ he told her blankly.
He was so disarmingly odd and so considerate of her privacy she couldn’t help shaking her head in surprise. She held up the crimped crust of her own pasty for his inspection before throwing it onto the pebbles.
Within seconds, the gulls descended and fought noisily over it. Pulling out his phone, he snapped a picture of the birds but he didn’t turn the lens towards her, which was a relief of course, but there was a tiny part of her pride wishing he’d tried.
Didn’t he want a memento of their brunch at the beautiful waterfall? Didn’t he want a shot of her to keep? She told herself off for wanting privacy while harbouring this new sneaking desire to share herself with him. She couldn’t have it both ways. She had to decide which desire was stronger. Keeping her sorry story to herself and getting out of here scot-free when the time came, or encouraging Magnús to open up to her more.
