The Love of My Life(20)

I was late to the funeral service – I barely made it through the door in front of her grandmother’s casket – so I didn’t get to talk to Emma until the reception at the Greenbank Hotel, where I engineered a meeting by the sandwich buffet.

‘Hello. I’m Emma Bigelow,’ Emma said, sticking out her hand. Somehow, I managed to introduce myself as Gloria.

‘Really?’ Her hand had paused above the egg mayonnaises. ‘I felt you must be Leo.’

‘Oh fuck. Yes. Leo.’

She laughed. ‘I wouldn’t put it past my grandmother to fake her own death and then turn up in disguise at the funeral.’

‘Really?’

‘Absolutely. It would be just her cup of tea.’

I picked up a bottle of red and topped up her glass, determined to make her stay.

She did, but a lot of other people wanted to talk to her. For a long time I stood next to her by the sandwiches, watching her talk to politicians, friends, even, to my surprise, an ex-prime minister.

‘Granny had it off with him a few times,’ Emma said, as the man walked away. I stared at her. ‘Hated him, hated his politics, but he was an animal in bed; she couldn’t resist him.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ I said, eventually. ‘No, you’re pulling my leg.’

After a while, she laughed. ‘OK. As you like it.’

A man with a sumptuous beard came over to talk to Emma about his days conducting the amateur orchestra Gloria had played in for more than twenty years. ‘She was terrible,’ he said, fondly. ‘Quite literally never stopped talking. Never practised. But she played beautifully; I couldn’t throw her out even if I’d wanted to.’

Emma nodded, proudly. ‘My grandmother was terrible in so many ways.’

I leaned against the wall, listening to them talk, compiling a mental list of the adjectives I’d use if I were writing Emma’s obituary. Formidable and mesmeric, I chose, eventually. She was a force of nature.

I went to the gents at some point, and saw in the mirror that my tongue was stained purple. I tried to scrape it clean. ‘Emma,’ I said to my reflection. ‘Emma, I would like to take you out for a drink.’

Of course I said no such thing, but we talked for hours, long past the point at which the other guests had left. The hotel staff laid up for dinner around us, and the winter sun shot flames through the estuary water.

She told me she lived in Plymouth but was going to be down here for another week: she was a marine ecologist, and had agreed to help with an estuarine creek study one of her colleagues ran. Something involving suspended particulate matter and biogeochemical compounds in the Fal River creeks.

I did not know what this meant, but I liked the idea of her in a hazmat suit, taking perilous samples from a deadly river and storing them in cryogenically sealed containers.

When I shared this with her, she roared with laughter and said she would most likely be wearing wellies and fingerless gloves – ‘But I’ll track down a space suit if you prefer.’

She was flirting with me, I realised.

I displayed such an insatiable interest in coastal ecology as the evening wore on that Emma invited me to join a creek-side walk she’d been asked to lead the following morning. It was in Devoran, a nearby village with an old quay and ‘fascinating wildlife’.

Around us the boat masts clanked under a darkening sky. I had a ticket for the train back to London that night, and nowhere to stay in Cornwall, but I said yes.

‘I’m staying in a yurt while I’m down here,’ Emma announced, as the hotel staff finally flushed us out with bright lights. I had no idea what, if anything, she was trying to convey. (In fact, I had no idea what a yurt even was. I was unaware of the middle-class predilection for glamping, and I’d never been to Central Asia.) ‘My dog’s staying with me, too. His name’s Frogman.’

We walked the length of the hotel’s little pier. The air was painfully cold now, and the water a deep black story. I tried to imagine a dog called Frogman.

‘I’ve loved talking to you,’ she said, suddenly, and I heard a bashfulness in her voice that made me wonder if ‘formidable’ had been an unfair descriptor.

‘I’ve mildly enjoyed it,’ I shrugged.

She smiled.

I smiled.

She pulled the yellow coat tightly around herself. ‘I’ll see you at Devoran Quay, ten a.m.,’ she said, and left.

I booked into the Greenbank, which was beyond my pay grade at the time, and lay in bed, replaying Emma’s stories about her work, and about her grandmother. The next day, I called in sick and went on the nature walk. Nobody else turned up; it was just Emma, me and Frogman, an overwrought terrier.

Emma strode along the edge of silvered mudflats in a long skirt and wellies, damp seaweed bladders crackling underfoot, her commentary gilded by the cry of wader birds. She picked samples of pennywort and sea spinach for me to eat, humming tunelessly under her breath. She taught me about mud worms and slime tubes, pollutants and litter, weeds and waders, and she had brought soup in a flask, which was lucky, because I hadn’t thought as far ahead as lunch. (This sort of thing still annoys her now.)

It took me hours to register that she’d only brought two soup cups. That there was no ‘Nature Walk’ poster on the tree at the top of the quay, even though there were posters for just about everything else. Even then, I couldn’t quite believe she might have made the whole thing up to engineer another meeting.