‘You don’t have to tell me this,’ I say.
He drops his hands and turns to me. He looks exhausted.
‘I do,’ he says. ‘I should have told you this weeks ago. I should have told you when you first told me about your mum but I’ve never…’ He stops, his breath hitching. ‘I’ve never really known how to talk to anyone about any of this.’
I watch him take a breath and I wait for him to continue, a knot already forming in my stomach. I already know what he’s going to tell me – that night changed Sanderson Bay forever. Even those of us who didn’t live here then know that much.
‘I’d wanted to go to this party,’ Ben begins. ‘A friend of mine had an older sister – only a couple of years older but that means a lot when you’re fifteen – and she was having a pre-Christmas party, but my dad didn’t want me to go, said I was too young. It was just an ordinary argument really, typical of teenagers and their parents when the kids are trying to push boundaries. A normal argument on a normal day. Except it wasn’t a normal day…’ He breaks off, pausing for a moment.
‘It had been a beautiful morning,’ he goes on. ‘Cold and clear and still and lots of people were here practising for that ridiculous Brass Monkeys race. The storm hadn’t been forecast to come this far south. All of the boats that had been out practising got back before the storm got really bad, all except one anyway. Apparently they were just kids, not very experienced. They probably didn’t even see the storm coming until it was too late.’
He stops and leans forward, his elbows on his knees.
‘The last words I said to him were “you needn’t think I’m staying at home, spending another evening in with you”.’ Ben squeezes his eyes shut as though he’s trying not to cry. ‘And I never got to spend any time with him again.’
The knot in my stomach has moved up to my throat. The feelings Ben is talking about are so familiar to me – our stories so similar. Perhaps I’d always known that.
I know what it feels like when the last thing you said to somebody before they died was something you wish beyond all else that you could take back.
‘That’s why you got so upset at those customers in the café and why you went out and got drunk that evening,’ I say.
He nods.
‘And why you gave Eric so much money at the carol singing. They had record takings this year.’
‘I had to do something,’ he replies. ‘It’s all I could think of.’
‘The local RNLI will be beyond grateful. You must know better than anyone how strapped for cash they can be.’
‘I’m so sorry, Ellie.’
‘You don’t need to be,’ I say. ‘I understand.’
He turns to me. ‘I thought you might.’
‘My mum died of a brain aneurysm,’ I say. ‘It was totally out of the blue. One minute she was alive and writing her ground-breaking book on Mary Shelley and the next she was gone. When my father found her she was just sitting at her desk. At first he thought she was just thinking…’ I break off at the thought, the lump in my throat making it hard for me to speak at all. ‘It was a few days before her birthday and I hadn’t seen her since I’d come back to England at the end of the summer. I’d never understood why my parents had abandoned me at boarding school and I’d tried to talk to my mother about it that summer but it had been so hard to get the truth out of her. When she took me to Marseilles airport on the last morning I saw her I asked her a question I wish I had never asked.’
Ben sits up and turns towards me.
‘Ellie,’ he says. ‘It’s OK.’
I shake my head. ‘It’s not though, is it? You know that as well as I do. We say these awful things to the people we love – horrible throwaway comments and then we never see them again and…’ The tears that have been burning the backs of my eyes start to fall down my cheeks. I feel Ben shift in the seat next to me.
‘I asked her if she had ever really loved me,’ I say. ‘She said that of course she loved me and I told her she had a funny way of showing it. That was the last time I ever saw her. We spoke on the phone every week of course but neither of us ever acknowledged that conversation again and for the last ten years I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.’
Ben doesn’t say anything, but I’m very aware of his leg against mine, very aware of the proximity of him.
‘Have you ever spoken to your mum about what happened?’ I ask. ‘You said you didn’t tell her that you were coming to the Bay at first but have you ever talked about it?’
‘Not really,’ he replies. ‘Not in any sort of meaningful way. She still gets so upset and when I told her that I’d come back here she was furious with me at first. We had this awful row. She seems to have come around a bit now but…’ He trails off, shrugs.
‘I found some stuff out about my mum at Christmas,’ I say quietly. ‘Some things about my parents that helped me understand what happened over the years.’ I want to tell him everything but I know now isn’t the time. Perhaps there will be another time in the future when I can tell him everything, perhaps there won’t be. I know that finally talking to my dad has helped. Perhaps if Ben talks to his mum he’ll feel the same. ‘I had a proper talk to my father on Christmas Day – it was the first time we’d had a real conversation in years, perhaps since my mother died.’
‘You think I should try to talk to Mum?’ Ben asks.
‘It might help,’ I reply. ‘You might be surprised.’
‘Maybe,’ he says quietly.
We sit staring at the lifeboat memorial for a while, neither of us speaking.
‘Thank you for telling me about your dad,’ I say eventually. ‘I get it, I really do.’
‘I should have told you right from the start.’
‘You don’t owe me any sort of explanation about your father or your grief,’ I reply. ‘But you should have told me about Moby’s.’
‘I thought I could fix it without you ever being the wiser, which was stupid of me. But when I saw you in the café on that first night, when I saw what you’d done to it, what you’d created, I knew you’d never sell and the more I got to know you, the more I realised what the café meant to both you and the community around you. I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you that Moby’s were still interested. So when I went back to London I tried to persuade the acquisitions department that it wasn’t the right place for Moby’s to open up, that it wasn’t somewhere that liked chains or franchises. I spent days trying to find other places in the area that they might be more interested in, hours in meetings trying to tell them they were barking up the wrong tree with you.’
‘Is that what you were working on?’ I ask. ‘Is that why you were so busy?’
‘Yes, and by the time I took you out to dinner I thought I’d manged to convince them. I’d found somewhere else further up the coast.’
‘Why did they send the plans then?’ I ask. ‘And why did they send them to the café?’
He rubs a hand over his face. ‘Because I’m an idiot,’ he says. ‘I naively thought they’d actually listened to me. But instead they upped the offer. They knew I was coming back to the Bay so they sent the whole sales pack again. I asked why they sent it to the café and they told me it was an oversight, a mistake but—’