The Long Way Back

Gerald left the town on a Tuesday morning in September with a bag, forty pounds and no explanation, and the ferry he caught had been running the same route for a hundred years. He was nineteen. It seemed at the time like the only door in the building.

For thirty years he told the story in a way that improved slowly, as stories do when they are handled often. In the later versions there was always a reason, and the reason was always somebody else's.

What he had actually done was walk out of a sailmaker's workshop without working his notice, three years into an apprenticeship, leaving half a mainsail on the bench and Nell Harrow to finish it alone before the Friday.

He came back in June, driving the last thirty miles slowly, and found that the harbour had been tidied. The chandlery was a café. The crane that had frightened him at sixteen had been taken down and replaced with a sign explaining what had once stood there.

The workshop was still there, under a faded board, with the same broken gutter above the door. Somebody had painted the frames green. Through the window he could see rolls of canvas stacked exactly where rolls of canvas had always been stacked.

He had rehearsed the apology in the car, out loud, more than once. It was four sentences long. The second sentence contained the word "unforgivable", which he had put in and taken out roughly forty times between the motorway and the coast road.

Nell was seventy-four and still in the terrace behind the church, and she opened the door with a tea towel over her shoulder and looked at him for perhaps two seconds before she said his name. He had not expected to be recognised. He had planned an entire paragraph for not being recognised.

"You've got taller," she said, "or I've got shorter. Come in, the kettle's on anyway."

He said his four sentences in her kitchen, standing up, and they came out worse than they had in the car. When he had finished, Nell dried a cup, put it down and gave a small shrug that he would think about for the rest of the year.

"Gerald," she said, "the sail went out on the Friday. Two of the lads came in on the Thursday night and we finished it between us. I was cross for about a fortnight. Then the season started."

He had carried the resentment for thirty years on her behalf, and now he was being told, politely, over tea, that it had never weighed anything like as much at her end. Had he written once, even badly, even from a distance, he would have known that decades ago.

What she did remember, and what she mentioned twice, was that he had left owing her nothing and had told nobody where he was going, so that his mother had come to the workshop on the Wednesday to ask her. Nell had not been able to answer.

That was the bill, then: not the mainsail, not the notice, not the forty pounds. He sat down after all, and the tea got cold, and at some point she offered him the spare room, which he refused twice and accepted on the third asking.

In the morning he walked down to the harbour before the café opened and stood where the crane had been. He was going to drive back that afternoon. Whether he did is not something the town has any way of knowing; nobody there has been given his address either.