Michael Russell - The City of Strangers

Botwood was a village in the north of Newfoundland, almost as far east in North America as you could go. The whole of Canada lay to the west, but to the north the nearest piece of earth was Greenland, and to the east it was the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland. The town sat in a sheltered bay, shaped by bare, treeless mountains, pretty much on the edge of nowhere; not very different from a thousand villages scattered along the western coast of Ireland on the other side of the Atlantic. Its buildings were of wood and corrugated iron sheets; most of its roads were dirt; an empty place in the great empty island of Newfoundland, which hadn’t even got round to calling itself part of Canada yet.

But Botwood had suddenly become important. By the time the flying boats of Pan American and Imperial Airways got there they were at the end of their range; they had to refuel. And the great and the good of Europe and America, the bankers and film stars, the heirs and heiresses and politicians, the makers and shakers, at least in their own eyes, now trailed regularly along the pier in the early hours of the morning, to drink coffee, eat a breakfast they didn’t need and talk about themselves.

Stefan drank the coffee too and spent some time talking idly with his fellow passengers. The conversation of the group, now all sitting together, had taken the turn every conversation did sooner or later, even at the edge of the world: war and the rumour of war. It wasn’t a conversation he wanted. He walked back to the sea along the dirt road from the pier and watched the fishermen unloading their catch. The lights of their boats marked one end of the harbour; the lights of the Yankee Clipper marked the other; the Atlantic water was very still in the darkness, full of the lights playing on its surface.

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