Fire

Fire

C APTAIN

T HOMAS

W AINRIGHT

was a wrong ’un. A violent, dangerous, volatile man. Everybody knew it. Everybody feared him. And those who didn’t quickly paid the price for their hubris. The men who survived being aboard his crew to the end of a voyage would shudder about their time on board the St Marie

and swear to God and the bright blue sky ‘Never again.’ And yet, Duchess Florentine’s arrival in the port of Cabot Cove brought about a change in the dark soul of this man, such that by their third meeting he swore to her that he could not continue to live without her as his wife and they shared an incredibly steamy kiss in the barrel store beneath the tavern. And by the time the Duchess, dressed in white lace and carrying a bouquet of tropical flowers, walks across the sanded beach to pledge the rest of her life to this rugged, chisel-jawed pirate, I find myself unable to breathe until the ring, a once-cursed emerald looted from the bottom of the ocean, is placed upon her finger.

I close the book and place it on the table beside my sun lounger. And I close my eyes against the sun, which is still dazzling, even behind my love-heart sunglasses. The warmth surrounding me, the sun on my skin and the sound of water lapping in the pool – I can’t help but surrender to it.

‘What did you think?’ Emmeline asks, her flip-flops announcing her emergence from the kitchen with a jug of iced water.

‘Hats off,’ I say, ‘and bravo. What a book!’

Bella, who has borrowed Emmeline’s giant hat and is reading a book that she assures me is fiction but is at least a thousand pages and looks like a textbook, looks up, ‘Hats?’ she asks.

Emmeline laughs. ‘Don’t worry, it is yours for the weekend. It suits you so well. You have that neck. Have you ever danced?’

‘Only when drunk.’

I hand the book back to Emmeline. ‘I love a romance, but this one truly had it all. Pirates, cursed jewellery, passion, a tarantula.’

‘You’ll love what I’m working on now, then,’ Emmeline says, sitting on the sun lounger beside me.

‘Tell me there’s a sequel,’ I implore her.

‘There might just be,’ she says with a wink. ‘Let’s just say the soothsayer wasn’t completely successful at removing the curse from that emerald …’

Beneath the huge hat, I can just see Bella’s shoulders rising and falling with the giggles. It’s how I imagine she might have laughed at the back of a maths lesson, or in a school assembly, when she wasn’t supposed to be laughing. She is so light here.

When the sun has set and we’ve eaten pizza from Emmeline’s outdoor oven and Bella and I have done the dishes (despite Emmeline’s protestations), we gather in the darkness around the fire pit. Emmeline offers us marshmallows and sticks. ‘I’ve been dying to use this thing to toast marshmallows,’ she says, ‘but it seems a little sad to toast marshmallows by oneself.’

Bella nods. ‘There are some things you just can’t do on your own.’

‘It is hard to be by oneself,’ I agree. ‘Have you ever thought about getting a pet?’

‘Oh no, I would forget to feed it. I was a bad enough mother to my son, and I have no intention to repeat the experience.’ She laughs a little too loudly. ‘Tell me,’ Emmeline asks once she has composed herself, ‘are either of you in any romantic entanglements at the moment?’

Bella fumbles with her phone to avoid the question.

‘I am actually on the look-out for love,’ I tell her. ‘I was a bit of a late bloomer, you see, and …’

‘… I was a very

late bloomer too!’ Emmeline interjects excitedly.

‘I can’t imagine that,’ Bella says.

‘Oh, I was

!’ Emmeline says, as though she is just mortified. ‘I was a little chrysalis, and it took me many years to flap, flap, flap.’ She makes butterfly wings with her hands and raises them up as her butterfly takes to the night.

‘I doubt you were as late as me,’ I tell her, taking a bite of molten marshmallow.

‘Try me,’ she says. ‘I was twenty-three

years old before I even had my first kiss.’ She says it as though the word

‘twenty-three’ is music which must be sung, emphasis on each syllable.

‘I’m ninety,’ I tell her.

And her expression changes as she comprehends my meaning and then says, ‘You win then, Eddie. You also win the best anecdote at this table thus far.’

‘I haven’t told an anecdote.’

‘No,’ Emmeline says, ‘but you are about to.’

I look at Bella for support, but she tilts her head to one side curiously. ‘To be honest, Eddie,’ she says, ‘I am curious about Bridie.’

‘If you don’t mind sharing,’ Emmeline says. She refills my wine glass with more sangria. ‘Now, where would you like to begin?’

I begin at the beginning, of course. At the University of Birmingham in the autumn of 1965.