Alan Hunter: Gently in the Sun

One thing alone was certain: he had faced the consequence unmoved. In the fearless court of his spirit he had first condemned himself to die. And he would have Gently understand him, he wanted the circumstance known in full: this was not the petty violence of a Hawks, a Maurice, or a Mixer.

Yesterday, on the hedge bank, he had sat waiting for Gently to arrest him.

‘What do you make of that church business? Dyson told me all about it.’

‘At the time it occurred to me…’

How could he explain his tangled ideas? There Esau had made his restitution, he had given Simmonds back his life. Also he had provided Gently with a token which the latter was too dense to perceive. This is not the man, it had said, this is not the one who is to die. The inference was crystal clear… now, as one looked back on it!

‘At the time Hawks thought that Simmonds had done it and he was possessed with a desire for revenge. When the rescue took place he couldn’t contain his anger. It was then, I think… after Esau struck him.’

‘He guessed, do you mean?’

‘It’s impossible to say.’

‘He’ll be able to guess some more after the inquest on Mrs Dawes!’

The thing you had to remember about this was the sea: in sum, that was Gently’s grand conclusion. He’d begun to take it in as he lay on the bunk, as he shrank by the cox’n in the wave-swept cockpit. The sea that was not the land — but more than this, too! The sea that was a life, a separate cosmos on its own. For it possessed a reality that irradiated men’s souls: it blinded their understanding to the sobriety of the shore. There they refuelled, restocked, rested up: that could be ugly, penurious, wretched. Their lives only began again when the keel left the beach, when the bows started to rise over the intoxicating waves.

And ashore they watched the sea with vacant, far-searching eyes. Each day they went down to gaze at the element that had bewitched them. To these, what were the shanties and villas of Hiverton, or the ghostly shore people who quarrelled and scolded there?

If one of them offended you, why, you put a stop to it. They were too little real to trouble one’s conscience. And if they gathered together and rattled their gallows, to the boat! to the sea! — let them follow if they dared.

Yes, it was the sea that one had to acknowledge, the sea that derided the values of landsmen. Wherever a man went down to it in a boat, there began an allegiance beyond the kenning of cities. The sea had its children and they belonged not to the shore.

‘Seriously, do you think the old man would have made Holland?’

He could have made the Celebes or far-distant Cathay.

‘Well, it’s saved a lot of money, the way it’s turned out.’

And perhaps something else, even more precious than that.

By a vagary of chance he was to hear some more of Simmonds. The young man went to live in a village in Wiltshire. A relative of his mother’s took him in for a time, and it so happened that Gently’s married sister lived in the vicinity. The artist had changed his name from Simmonds to Symons. He had given up insurance and was devoting his time to his brush. During the autumn he had held an exhibition in Salisbury, and though he didn’t sell many pictures, was at least making an income.

‘But he looks a nervous wreck.’

Bridgit’s phrase was twice underlined.

‘He slinks about the village as though someone was going to bite him. By all accounts he isn’t so terribly popular with his aunt — she only puts up with him because of the time he’s had.’

In the spring he went off to Cornwall and Gently lost sight of him.

Hiverton, however, he saw again a year later. He had been called out to Crowlake to give evidence of identification. His way was on the coast road which passed within a mile of the place, and indulging a mild curiosity, he made a detour to take it in. It was just as nondescript as he had remembered it. There was little that was fresh to be discovered. A new sunblind was being sported over the steps to the Beach Stores, another council house or two had been erected down the lane.

He had a pint in the bar of The Longshoreman, where only the publican seemed to recognize him. At their tables the old men still shuffled their dominoes and the fishermen still huddled together in a conclave. There was only one change in the established order. Until he was going out, he failed to notice it. Now it was Hawks who was sitting in Esau’s corner, and drinking, from the evidence, one pint after another…

He looked in also on the vicar, who kept open house for everyone, and he found him in his garden tying up some gladioli. He had lately, he said, married off his youngest daughter; now, excepting for his housekeeper, he was living there alone.