The Village by the Sea

Tomas arrived in Kelvey on a Thursday in April, with one photograph in the inside pocket of his jacket. It showed a narrow cottage with a blue door, and behind the roof a piece of water. His mother had lived in that house until she was nine. She had never told him where it stood.

The village was smaller than he had imagined. One lane ran down to the harbour and stopped. The tide was out, and four boats lay on their sides in the mud, which smelled of salt and old rope. Two gulls sat on a post and watched him the whole way down.

He started at the shop, which was also the post office and sold three kinds of bread. The woman behind the counter looked at the photograph for a long time. "That's not a house I know," she said. "And I've been here since I was married."

She sent him to a man mending nets on the quay. The man held the photograph at arm's length, turned it towards the light and said that the wall behind the door had been built with the wrong stone, which meant the house had not been built by anyone local.

Tomas walked up to the cliff path in the afternoon. From above, the village looked like something spilled: twenty roofs, a church, a car park that had been added later and didn't fit. He held the photograph up and tried to match the line of the water behind the roof. Nothing matched.

He was about to give up when an older woman came along the path with a dog. She said her name was Nesta and asked him, quite directly, what he was doing standing on a cliff holding a picture. He explained. She put on her glasses.

"Ah," Nesta said. "That's not in the village. That's Low Row. There were six cottages down there, below the church, right on the water. They were taken down after the storm in 1974, because the council decided that nobody should live that close to the sea again."

She took him down a set of steps he hadn't noticed, which ran behind the churchyard and came out on a flat piece of grass above the stones. There was nothing there now except a low line of foundations and a single doorframe, standing on its own, with the sea straight through it.

"Third one from the end was blue," Nesta said. "I remember, because my mother said blue paint was a waste of money in that wind." Tomas stood in the doorframe. If the cottages had not been pulled down, he thought, he would have knocked on that door instead of standing in it.

It was Nesta who found the initials. They were carved into the wood about a metre from the ground, on the inside edge, where a child would reach: E. M., and under them a row of five short lines, the way children count something they are proud of.

His mother's name was Elin Morrow. Tomas took out his phone and photographed the letters twice, once with the sea behind and once without. Then he turned his own old photograph over. On the back, in pencil, in handwriting he didn't recognise, it said: Low Row, five summers.

"You had that all along," Nesta said, not unkindly. "You only had to look at the other side." They walked back up the steps together. The tide had turned while they were down there and was already covering the stones where the front gardens had been.

That evening Tomas rang his mother from the harbour wall. He told her he had found the doorframe, and that her initials were still in it. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Five summers. We only had five. Nobody ever believed me about the blue door."