Marcia Talley: All Things Undying

At home in Maryland, there are no surprises at the breakfast table, just Paul hunched over a bowl of Cheerios with the New York Times folded open to the OpEd section and propped up against the salt and pepper grinders. At a B &B, though, every morning stars a new cast of characters and some days can surprise you, like tuning in to Good Morning America without checking the program guide first.

At Horn Hill House on Tuesday morning there were eight around the breakfast table, including a family of four from Nantes, and a rough-hewn Yorkshire man and his florid-faced wife who appeared to be huffing and puffing their way from Starcross to Salcombe along the coastal path. By Wednesday, the couple from Yorkshire had hiked on, to be replaced by an American who, if the noise on the stairway the previous night was any indication, had arrived late and out of sorts. It was well past eleven when she woke me with her grumbling as she bump-bump-bumped her roller bag up the staircase and along the landing just outside our room.

‘Good morning,’ the American chirped as she slid an expanse of Madras plaid into the chair next to Paul, grabbed her napkin, snapped it open and smoothed it over her bare knees. She leaned forward. ‘OK, so who are the other Americans here?’ Before anyone could answer, she held up a cautionary hand. ‘No, wait a minute. Let me guess.’

Through slitted eyes, she considered each of us in turn, as if we were in a police line-up and she were a victim intent on making a positive ID. ‘You,’ she said, jabbing her finger at the mother of two from Nantes who had been ignoring the whole production while helping her daughter carve up some sausage. ‘You from the States?’

The woman looked up. ‘ Mais , non . I am Nicole. My family and I, we are from France.’

‘Well, can’t win ’em all.’ The new arrival snorted daintily, then turned to lavish a smile on my husband. She stuck out a pudgy hand. ‘So, you must be the Americans. I’m Cathy Yates, Cathy with a “C” from Pittsburgh, PA.’

Paul laid down his fork. ‘I’m Paul Ives, and this is my wife, Hannah. We’re from Annapolis.’

‘Indianapolis?’ Cathy inquired lazily, toying with her spoon.

‘Annapolis. As in Maryland.’

‘Holey moley! My brother went to the Naval Academy in Annapolis!’

After we compared notes and determined that Paul and her brother had overlapped, but he hadn’t been enrolled in any of the classes my husband taught, Paul and I got down to the serious business of tucking into the full English breakfast Janet set down in front of us: two eggs – I prefer mine soft-boiled, toast, baked beans, fried tomatoes, sautéed mushrooms and a nicely browned American-style sausage, not the fat, white tube of sausage-like substance one usually encountered in British B &Bs.

‘Gosh, that looks good,’ Cathy said. A strand of long, blond, stick-straight hair slipped over her shoulder and hovered dangerously over Paul’s plate as she leaned over to inspect his breakfast. ‘I’ll have what they’re having, Janet.’

When a woman reaches a certain age, the hairstyle that saw you through the peace marches of the 1960s has got to go. Get a haircut, Cathy , I wanted to tell her, or put a bag over your head . But I held my tongue.

While we ate, the newcomer entertained us with a stream-of-consciousness account of her harrowing trip to Dartmouth from Heathrow. ‘Jeeze laweeze,’ she began, ‘I thought I’d never get here. How on earth do you drive in this flipping country? I mean, cheese and crackers! It’s bad enough that you’re sitting on the wrong side of the car driving on the wrong side of the road, but you can’t see a flipping thing over the gee-dee bushes. Please pass the O.J.?’

When the French couple simply looked confused, I translated for them – jus d’orange, s’il vous plaît . Nicole passed the pitcher to Paul who poured some orange juice into a glass and handed it to Cathy.

A sip of the juice had remarkable restorative powers, giving Cathy the energy to barrel on. ‘Coming around this corner? Ran smack dab into a herd of sheep! And they kept moseying along, moseying along, all the time in the world, calm as you please. Baaa, baaa, baaa. Honestly, you think the fellow in charge would do something, wouldn’t you, but noooo.’ She set her glass down, selected a slice of wholewheat toast from the toast rack and slathered it with strawberry jam, wielding the table knife like a palette knife, covering every square centimeter of bread evenly with the jam, working right up to the edges of the crust, as if it were an art project she’d be graded on.

‘I left that rental in the parking lot down by the Tourist Center and there it’s going to stay until Europcar comes to pick the sucker up,’ she continued, aiming the toast at her mouth and taking a semi-circular bite. ‘Swear to God, I’m not setting foot inside it again. It is a miracle I got here at all.’

‘Driving in the UK can be a challenge,’ I agreed. ‘We lived in Dartmouth for almost a year, but when we first arrived, I thought I’d never get the hang of it. Once you master it, however, it’s like riding a bike. The skill is yours for life.’

‘And you have recent experience, too, Hannah, don’t forget about that.’

At first I couldn’t imagine what Paul was talking about. And then I remembered. ‘We drove on the left in the Bahamas, too,’ I added with a grin. ‘But that was usually in an island golf cart. I’m not sure that qualifies.’

Cathy’s breakfast had arrived, and she dug in, beginning with the baked beans. ‘Can’t trust a GPS, either,’ she grumbled. ‘Dang thing led me down a flipping dirt road, not that I’d dignify two ruts by calling it an actual road. Where the Sam Hill are you supposed to go when you meet somebody coming the other way?’ she asked the table at large between forkfuls. ‘I faced off grill to grill with this garbage truck, and I thought we were going to sit there all day, glaring at each other through our windshields. I honked and honked, and the guy finally backed up so I could get by. That was enough for me!’ She picked up her knife and began sawing on her sausage. ‘What I’m going to do for transportation the rest of the week I have no idea.’

‘Public transportation is pretty good here,’ I told her. ‘Plenty of trains and buses. Where do you want to go?’

‘A town called Torcross,’ she said. ‘Somewhere south of here.’ She leaned over, retrieved her bag from the floor, and pulled out a paperback: The Forgotten Dead , by Ken Small. ‘Do you know this book?’ she asked my husband, correctly pegging him as the historian in the group.

‘I do,’ Paul said. ‘It’s the story of how one man raised a Sherman tank from the ocean floor and set it up on shore as a memorial to the Americans who died near here during training exercises in the Second World War.’

‘During Operation Tiger,’ Cathy added, her face grave. ‘Nine hundred and forty-six men. My father was one of them.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

‘So am I. I hadn’t been born yet when it happened, but do you want to know the incredible thing?’ She shook the book under Paul’s nose. ‘Nobody told us! Mom always believed that Dad had died on Utah Beach in the Normandy invasion. Until Uncle Charlie sent her this book. To find out Daddy actually died in England during a dress rehearsal for D-Day was quite a shock, I can tell you.’

Cathy opened to the back of the small, well-read paperback and smoothed open a page. ‘There,’ she said, sliding the book along the tablecloth in our direction and pointing to what was clearly a long casualty list. ‘MM2 Curtis Yates. He was on LST531 when it was torpedoed by the Germans. We never got his body back.’