Driftwood Deeds(2)
“I was wondering, Miss Ellis, whether you might want to come out for a walk with me,” he said after a while and if he’d noticed my moment of uncertainty, he didn’t show it. I looked at my shoes. He chuckled. “I can lend you something more suitable. But we don’t get much sun this time of year. Would be a shame to miss it.”
He hadn’t mentioned the interview, had not so much as alluded to it. He had taken my bag and left it with my coat in the hall and for the moment, I was not a journalist, but a guest without the trappings of my trade. I wasn’t sure how to respond. I touched the base of my neck where my skin was warm and soft, and then pulled my shoulders up in a slow gesture.
“Of course,” I said, “in fact, I can’t remember the last time I walked by the seaside. I could take a recorder with me if you prefer the open surroundings.”
He waved off my heavy-handed attempt at efficiency with a casual gesture as if the idea was utterly baffling to him.
“Oh no, there’s time for that later. No reason to rush.”
He had to have read the slightly bemused expression on my face all too perfectly, because he smiled his disarming smile and reset his glasses.
“I don’t believe in interviews with strangers, Miss Ellis,” he explained. “That’s why I take time to choose the magazine and the writer before inviting them here.”
“And then you take them for walks on the beach?” I asked and he laughed. It was a pleasant sound.
“Something like that.”
He winked with both eyes and then left me to finish my tea. When he returned, he was carrying a pair of Wellingtons and some socks.
“They might be a bit big but I brought you these for padding.”
I slipped out of my high-street pumps, and before I could reach for them myself, he had drawn up the low drum of a small tree-trunk, sat down on it and pulled my foot onto his knees. I must have stared but his hands moved with confidence and without hesitation as he pulled a thick pair of woolen socks over my tights.
“Try that,” he instructed.
A little tongue-tied, I slipped my foot into the rubber boot.
“Still too big?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, I thought so, that’s why I brought all these. We’ll cheat your feet into fitting the prince’s boots, don’t worry.”
It took three pairs until I could walk comfortably, and I wanted to laugh when I saw myself in the dusty hallway mirror on the way out. My hair had come loose from the chignon that now more resembled a simple, messy bun. Together with the coat and Wellingtons under a skirt like over-sized puppy paws, I looked like a gilded picture from yonder times: a countryside maid going out to work in a field or deliver groceries. Just as if I’d travelled in time rather than space into this sleepy village by the coast.
II
The walk to the ocean took mere minutes. It was the smell of the air that hit me first—painfully fresh in my city lungs. It smelled of salt, fish and algae but together they formed a bouquet that almost blew me off my feet. I took in deep gulps of air like a tonic, like I was a mermaid on dry land and my lungs needed to learn how to breathe again.
I showed appropriate awe for the savage green-blue masses, swirling and rolling towards us, but Paul Archer just smiled and promised there were more treasures to be seen ahead. The sand and pebbles crunched under our feet and despite my reason for visiting, it was he who asked most of the questions, seeming as interested in my mundane little life as the magazine’s subscribers would be in his.
I don’t know what I had expected, but for a famous hermit, he seemed to be rather gregarious in his way. If he was aware of how much he differed from the reputation floating around the industry, he didn’t show it, however, and continued to speak knowledgeably about contemporary cinema. We laughed at industry jokes and exchanged titles of perfect but obscure little festival movies.
He appeared to have read most of my recent reviews and interviews, referenced them easily, and had me laughing at his inside knowledge about the people I talked to and who had made me so nervous at the time.
Where the beach had been relatively clean at first, the scenery changed the further we got away from the last seaside B&B and the quaint English pebble beach gave way to ruins of tiny huts here and there, to eternally land-locked boats rotting and rusting in the wind. Blue and red nets covered the ground like moss, an amalgamation of color that did not belong. The overarching sea motif of the rubbish created a certain sense of nostalgia, but the place was a dump, no man’s land nobody was willing to expend energy or money on to clean it up.
I must have looked confused because when I looked up at him, he was smirking. It felt like a test of some description, the kind of test that slams into you unexpectedly and makes your chest contract—the dream of returning to high school to repeat an exam you didn’t know was scheduled. Aware that there was a right way to react in his eyes and a wrong one, but with only a vague idea as to what he might have been waiting for, I turned away from him.