Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley, #15)(74)

“Come on, come on, let’s bloody get home,” his mates would say to him. “Don’t be such a wanker, Kerne. We’re freezing our arses out here.”

But there was a hosepipe available, and he’d used it to rinse the saltwater off. Then he did the same when he got his kit home. Surfing kits were expensive and he had no intention of needing to purchase another because saltwater had corroded and rotted the one he owned. So he washed the wet suit thoroughly?its boots, gloves, and hood as well?and he washed the board. His mates hooted and called him a poofter, but he would not be moved from his intentions.

In that and in everything else, he thought now. He felt cursed by his own determination.

The board was in the cupboard as well. He eased it out and examined it. Not a ding anywhere, the deck still waxed. A real antique by the standards of today, but perfectly suitable for what he intended. Whatever that was, because he didn’t quite know. He just wanted to be out of the hotel. He scooped up boots, gloves, and hood. He tucked the surfboard under his arm.

The equipment room had a door that led to the terrace and from there to the still empty swimming pool. A concrete stairway at the far end of the pool area took one up to the promontory for which the old hotel had been named, and a path along the edge of this promontory followed the curve of St. Mevan Beach. A line of beach huts were tucked into the cliff here, not the standard huts which were generally freestanding, but rather a joined rank of them, looking like a long and low-slung stable with narrow blue doors.

Ben followed this route, breathing in the cold salt air and listening to the crash of the waves. He paused above the beach huts to don his neoprene hood, but the boots and gloves he would pull on when he got to the edge of the water.

He looked out at the sea. The tide was high, so the reefs were covered, and the reefs would keep the waves consistent. From this distance five feet seemed their size, with swells coming from the south. They were breaking right, with an offshore wind. Had it been daylight?even dawn or dusk?conditions would be considered good, even at this time of year when the water would be as cold as a witch’s heart.

No one surfed at night. There were too many dangers, from sharks to reefs to rips. But this wasn’t so much about surfing as it was about remembering, and while Ben didn’t want to remember, talking to his father was forcing him to do so. It was either that or remaining within the Promontory King George Hotel, and that he could not do.

He descended the steps to the beach. There were no lights here, but tall streetlamps that followed the path along the promontory above shed at least some illumination onto the rocks and sand. He picked his way through hunks of slate and sandstone boulders, clitter from the cliff top that now formed the base of the promontory, and he stepped at last onto the sand. This wasn’t the soft sand of a tropical isle, but rather the grit produced over eons as a frozen land of permafrost warmed till slow-moving landslides left coarse gravel in their wake, and water forever beating upon these stones reduced them to hard little grains that glittered in sunlight but shone dull otherwise, grey and dun coloured, unforgiving upon flesh and abrasive to the touch.

To his right was the Sea Pit, high tide filling it with new water now, nearly submersing it in order to do so. To his left was the tributary of the River Cas and beyond it what remained of the Casvelyn Canal. In front of him was the sea, restless and demanding. It drew him forward.

He set his board on the sand and donned his boots and gloves. He squatted for a moment?a huddled figure in black with his back to Casvelyn?and he watched the phosphorescence in the waves. He’d been to the beach at night as a youth, but those visits had not been for a surf. With their surfing done for the day, they’d make a fire ring. When embers were all that was left of the blaze, they’d pair off and if the tide was low, the great sea caves of Pengelly Cove beckoned. There they’d make love. On a blanket or not. Semiclothed or nude. Drunk, slightly tipsy, or sober.

She’d been younger then. She’d been his. She was what he wanted, all that he wanted. She had known it as well, and the trouble had come from that knowing.

He rose and approached the water with his board. He had no leash for it, but that didn’t matter. If it got away from him, it got away from him. Like so much else in his life, keeping the board close by should he fall from it was a concern beyond his control just now.

His feet and ankles felt the shock of the cold first and then his legs and thighs and upwards. It would take a few moments for his body temperature to warm the water within his wet suit, and in the meantime the bitter cold of it reminded him he was alive.

Thigh deep, he eased onto the board and began to paddle out through the white water towards the right-hand reef break. The spray hit his face and the waves washed over him. He thought?briefly?he might paddle forever, straight into morning, paddle until he was so far from shore that Cornwall itself would be only a memory. But instead, bleakly governed by love and by duty, he stopped beyond the reef at the swells, and there he straddled his board. He sat first with his back to the shore, looking out at the vast and undulating sea. Then he turned the board round and saw the lights of Casvelyn: the line of tall lamps shining whitely along the promontory and then the amber glow behind the curtained windows of the houses in town, like the gaslights of the nineteenth century, or the open fires of an earlier time.

The swells were seductive, offering him a hypnotic rhythm that was as comforting as it was false. It felt, he thought, like a return to the womb. One could stretch out on the board, bob in the sea, and sleep forever. But swells broke?the sheer volume of the water collapsing in on itself?as the landmass beneath it sloped up into the shore. There was danger here as well as seduction. One had to act or one submitted to the force of the waves.