I wonder what the man with sideburns is reading about. Perhaps he’s learning about how different the coast was in the 1100s. Every year chunks of land fall into the sea. The coast is crumbling away, shored up by sea walls and defences. Strangers are surprised when they follow roads that go nowhere, stopping in mid-air. There are houses built too close to the sea that have slid down into the water, bricks and beds and washing lines scattering behind. Further up the coast, whole villages have been lost to the sea, church bells ringing under water.

  The tourist is leaning on the battlements gazing out to sea. He looks wistful, or perhaps bored. I’m sure he’d be interested in the story of the Wild Man, how he was caught in fishing nets just after the castle was built, but Mum made me promise never to talk to strangers. So I won’t tell about the morning that fishermen hauled in their nets, muscles hard inside sun-scorched arms, and discovered something strange.

  The net would have been heavy, the fishermen smiling at such a big catch. They heaved it onto the boat, small fish slithering free and large ones struggling inside. I like to imagine their surprise, when they saw caught in the middle, limbs entangled, not a fish, but a naked man with webbed feet. He was covered in dark hair. His pale skin had a blue sheen like someone kept away from sunlight, dark eyes staring. When they kicked him, wrestling him out of the nets, he opened his mouth and made strange guttural sounds, speaking a language none of them had heard before, blunted as if he was missing his tongue.

  In the guidebook it says that he was marched to the castle, put in an iron cage and beaten to make him talk. They kept him for six months. He never spoke a word they could understand. In the end, he escaped back to the river. The last that was seen of him was his dark head in the distance bobbing out to sea. Dad points out carvings of Wild Men on the font in the church. He says there are lots of other ones carved into baptismal fonts in churches across the area. It’s in the guidebook, so it’s real history.

  ‘Perhaps there was a Wild Woman waiting,’ Granny said, ‘a lonely mermaid, pining away for him, swimming close to the shore and looking at the castle, unable to climb the hill to find him.’

  A couple of years ago, coming back from a sailing trip, I saw something in the water. At first I thought it was a seal. But the texture wasn’t right: long hair tangled around a man’s half-submerged head. I’d leant over the side, and looked into his hairy face before he sank under the surface. I told Eva, but she said he’d have to be hundreds of years old and how did that make sense? But the Wild Man isn’t properly human, and if other creatures, like tortoises, can live for hundreds of years, then he could too. I try to remember his features, but they merge into a blur.

  The tourist with the sideburns gives me a quick smile before he leaves the roof, dipping his head to avoid banging it on the low lintel. I wait for a moment, to give him time to get to the ground. The thick walls of the castle hold a chill even in the summer. Inside the narrow curving staircase my skin prickles with cold. Eva and I used to roll down the steep hill surrounding the castle, turning over and over in the long grasses, the sky flashing in and out of our vision, ending at the bottom in a heap, dizzy and wanting to do it again. Eva would sit up, grinning, grass seeds peppering her dark hair. I know without asking that Sophie won’t want to roll down the hill. She’s still with the boys, perched on the moped, smoking and talking.

  There isn’t much to do on my own in the grounds. Long shadows fall across my back. The sun is lower, the afternoon ticking away. The land around the escarpment is worn thin and dry, faded to a brownish shade. Bare patches show like scabs. The allotments next to the grounds are different, full of curling leaves and healthy green plants. The small gardens have been lovingly watered and protected from the sun. Granny Gale had an allotment. Last summer, she had a party there.

  ‘Look.’ Eva broke into a run across the castle grounds. ‘Fairy lights!’

  Tea lights flickered around Granny’s allotment. Small flames inside glass, bright sparks of yellow with blue hearts. The lush tendrils of bean plants and sweet peas were alive with flickering shadows. The allotment smelt of green things pushing through earth, damp soil and drifting scents of flowers. Gnats gathered in wispy clouds, hovering without sound.

  I thought there’d be other people at the party. Everyone at the allotments knew each other, borrowing tools, united in their complaints about the man who did no gardening, only sat in a deckchair drinking wine on sunny days. ‘Waste of an allotment,’ they shook their heads as they leant over fences to comment, ‘ground frosts early this year,’ or ‘badgers been at the courgettes again.’ But there was only one other person, a white-haired man stepping out of the shed, holding out a hand to shake. I didn’t recognise him. His fingers were crooked, knuckles swollen purple. In his grasp, my fingers disappeared. His skin felt warm and rough.

  ‘This is Jack,’ Granny said. ‘Jack Train. He’s taken over Nancy’s allotment. Jack, meet my lovely granddaughters.’

  Lilting strains of strings and piano floated up from Jack’s paint-splattered transistor. ‘Cheek to Cheek’ and ‘Face the Music and Dance’. We sat on the bench outside Granny’s shed and listened, drinking sweet tea out of a flask and munching on slices of sticky lemon cake. Granny made the best cakes and luckily she’d taught Dad. Mum’s baking efforts always sank in the middle or came out of the tin fossilised.

  The old couple got up and danced. ‘I’ve got you under my skin,’ Granny Gale sang in her flat, reedy tones. They turned and stepped, dancing along the gravel paths around the vegetable beds, both of them with straight backs and smiling faces. Jack had a good voice, deep and honeyed.

  ‘Sang in the choir when I was a lad,’ he told us. ‘Dance with me?’ Jack held out his arms to me.

  I shook my head. ‘Don’t know how.’

  ‘Time to start, then.’ He held me as if he were a proper dancer from the television–one of those men in tailcoats on Come Dancing, shoulders back and spine straight. He showed me some steps. ‘A foxtrot,’ he said. The candles flickered and moths fluttered, wings brushing the halos of light. Beyond us the sky had turned purple, the rest of the allotments a jumble of black shapes. I should have been wearing a puffy net skirt covered with sequins.

  My feet scraped over the gravel, stumbling. Jack held me up, and kept on dancing. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow. I stared at the ground and he stopped to raise my chin with his hand. My feet began to follow his and I felt the pattern of the dance, how we moved to the music. He turned me under his arm.

  ‘Like flying, isn’t it?’ His hand felt leathery, and I smelt tobacco and mildew on his clothes.

  Eva wouldn’t dance. She said it wasn’t her kind of music. I liked it. It made me feel safe, and happy. You could hear the lyrics too. Jack had taken Granny in his arms again. Granny floated like a scarf over Jack’s chest. He held her as if she was made of something delicate that could tear.

  ‘Aren’t you too old to have a boyfriend?’ I asked Granny, and Eva kicked my ankle.

  ‘You’re never too old to fall in love.’ Jack laughed and the laugh turned into a cough, rumbling inside his chest like an old car. He didn’t have a Suffolk accent. He said he was from Yorkshire originally. Said it had taken him a time to get used to the lack of hills. ‘Twenty years before it felt like home,’ he added.

  ‘His allotment is next to mine,’ Granny explained. ‘He asked if he could borrow a trowel.’

  ‘And I told you what pretty sweet peas you had!’ Jack reminded her.

  They laughed and leaned towards each other. Jack swept a short grey curl away from Granny’s forehead with a blunt finger.

  Eva rolled her eyes at me. ‘It’s unsavoury,’ she hissed.

  ‘And what about you?’ Granny saw everything. ‘Any love in your life, Eva? Any of those young men taken your fancy?’

  Eva scowled and dug the toe of her shoe into the gravel of the path. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,’ Granny said. ‘I’m only teasing.’

  I could see that Eva was longing to tell about Marco and his goth clothes and all the music he listened to and the places he’d been. I knew that she’d got bored of telling me. I watched her struggle for a moment. But she resisted. She shook her head and looked away, tearing off a long strip of bean plant instead and chewing at the pods.

  Jack had a stroke and went into hospital a week after Granny died. When Mum told me about the stroke I remembered Jack’s finger on Granny’s cheek, the sweep of it across her thin skin. But that’s not what Mum meant. She said that he’d had a blood clot, and it had stopped blood from getting into his brain. Someone else has taken over Granny’s allotment. They’ve hung silver milk bottle tops along the tops of fruit canes. Granny would approve. I wish I could talk to her about Eva and the Wild Man. Because she’d understand that it’s him that’s taken her. And that he must be keeping her on the island.

  ‘I told you not to go anywhere!’ Sophie is beside me, panting. She looks hot. She puts out her hand and touches my bare arm.

  I step away from her. ‘I’ve been here all the time!’

  ‘I couldn’t find you.’ She tilts her head to one side, begins to walk away. ‘I was worried. Come along. Come home now.’

  6

  Max sits on an upright chair, an unread, out-of-date Sunday magazine drooping across his lap. He breathes through his mouth, sipping stuffy air, filtering it through his teeth as if he could stop himself swallowing the bugs and germs he imagines floating around him like dust motes. He hates doctors’ waiting rooms.

  ‘Max Gale?’ The receptionist leans across the desk, smiling at him. ‘Doctor will see you now.’

  As he gets to his feet, turning to leave the magazine on a low table, he knocks into an empty pram. It judders, rolling forward, and he puts a hand on the silver handle to still it. People glance up and he feels their interest following him, their looks of sympathy or mistrust, or just plain curiosity. Since the accident the whole village knows the story. The tragedy is already a kind of local myth: the father found alive with his sinking boat, his daughter lost to the waves.

  John McGee has treated their whole family since they moved to the village. He and his wife have been to supper. Their daughter was a school friend of Eva’s. Max used to like the familiarity of it; now it feels oppressive. He longs for anonymity.

  ‘How are things?’ John leans over to inspect Max’s scalp. The hair is newly grown back, softer textured, the skin knitted in a lumpy line across the back of his head. Max feels fingers prodding lightly. ‘Healed up nicely,’ John says. ‘Any more luck with memories?’

  ‘No.’ Max places his hands carefully on his knees. His hands and feet are too big. He never knows what to do with them. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Give it some more time.’ John settles at his desk. ‘You don’t have amnesia, but the brain is a complicated beast. Has its own ways of protecting us against trauma.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. It’s just… frustrating.’

  John tilts his head quizzically. He’s a small, portly man and Max has a sudden image of a robin in the garden, alert eyes like black beads. ‘How are you sleeping? Would you like me to prescribe something?’

  Max moves his hands, tightening his fingers around the large bones of his knees. ‘That’s not a problem.’

  ‘And what about Clara?’

  ‘She’s not.’ Max rubs his temple. ‘Not sleeping. At first she couldn’t get out of bed and now she’s restless all night and then up at the crack of dawn every day. I’m worried about her.’

  ‘Of course you are.’ John looks away, down at his note pad. ‘Tell her to come and see me. Just for a chat if she wants.’

  As Max shuts the door of the surgery he is struck by the certainty that he must take Clara and Faith away from here. They can’t stay in Holt House, can’t stay in the village. They’ll never be free of the accident if they remain. He worries about Faith. She seems lost in an imaginary world much of the time. She’s found an answer to the tragedy of her sister’s death. She’s invented a mythical creature, her own Wild Man, that’s kidnapped Eva and is holding her captive on the island. He’d mentioned it to John, who reassured him that it wasn’t an unusual reaction from a girl with an imagination like Faith’s. ‘It’s her own form of protection,’ John explained, ‘as memory loss is yours.’

  Since Eva’s drowning the dynamics of their family have changed. Passion and energy have been extinguished. The centre has been cut out. Faith is in denial, and he and Clara are failing to deal with it. A courteous, strained formality has seeped into the spaces between them, and it’s solidified, trapping them in a glassy, airless place. He needs to find a way to shift things, to break out of the suffocating lethargy they’re stuck in, bring them all together again. Moving will help. He is certain of it. But equally certain that Clara won’t want to sell up. She’ll see it as running away or being disloyal. Max walks quickly through the village, hands in his pockets, rehearsing things that he can say to convince her. He misses his mother. Grace would have had her own ideas about whether they should leave or stay. Sometimes he finds himself trying to second-guess her, hears her voice in his head.

  Suffolk, 1963

  Meeting Clara had been entirely due to his mother. Grace always went to the theatre for her birthday. And, despite the difficult travelling conditions in what was turning out to be one of the longest, hardest winters on record, Max managed to get back to Ipswich to take her to a Friday-night performance at the Regent Theatre.

  The darkened theatre was half-empty. Outside the streets were caked in fresh snow. It was almost February and there was no sign of a thaw. The audience must have had an average age of about sixty. The programme in his hand said The Importance Of Being Earnest. He’d never heard of the small touring repertory outfit. Max sighed. He’d tried to persuade his mother to come up to London and see a real show–Me and My Girl was on in the West End–but she’d laughed at the idea. ‘Waste of good money. The plays at the Regent are always worth seeing.’ Back in his flat in Hammersmith, he had a stack of work to do. And now he was worrying that, with fresh snowfall since he’d got to Suffolk, he might not be able to get back at all. Snow had been banked up by the road in drifts several feet high as he’d driven his mother slowly into town, her ancient Austin 7 sliding around corners.

  Lady Bracknell turned out to be a crowd-pleaser: a solid, middle-aged woman who played her part with just the right amount of exasperation and snobbishness. Sweet wrappers rustled. There were bursts of laughter. But it was when Jack was proposing to Gwendolyn Fairfax that Max leant forward in his seat, heart beating faster. The actress playing Gwendolyn was slender, her skin and hair almost the same shade. The colour reminded him of something: caramels he decided, those creamy toffees he’d stolen from his mother’s handbag when he was little, his hand rustling inside a white paper bag, mouth already watering.

  The actress stood awkwardly, as if she’d wandered onto the stage by mistake, reciting her lines with pauses in the wrong places. At one point it seemed as though she’d completely forgotten her words and he heard a desperate prompting whisper coming from the wing. The elderly audience was split between tittering and sighing. He held his breath. There was a tense moment of silence and Gwendolyn or, he checked the programme feverishly, Clara Allen, stared furiously out into the footlights. He looked at her scowling face and his heart contracted.

  The prompt came again, this time clearly audible to the audience. Gwendolyn/Clara had taken her cue and recited her words in a breathless rush as she pushed past the actor playing Jack, tossing her hair, before she disappeared off-stage.

  ‘I have to meet her,’ Max thought, glancing around to find the nearest door that would take him backstage.

  His mother turned and glared at him. ‘What on earth is the matter with you? You’re jumping around as if you’ve got ants in your pants.’

  He waited until the final curtain fell and the smattering of applause died down and people began to shuffle slowly along the aisles, buttoning up coats and pulling on hats. ‘Just give me a moment,’ he whispered to his mother. ‘I’ll see you in the foyer.’

  He’d been expecting bouncers and disapproving officials to block his way as he stalked the narrow corridors. But there was nobody to stop him pushing open the dressing-room door to find her sitting with her back to him in front of a huge mirror. She’d been rubbing cold cream over her face. The girl who played Cecily sat on the table next to her wearing a dressing gown, swinging her legs and smoking. They both stopped talking and stared. Looking at him in the mirror’s reflection, Clara’s eyes were huge inside her mask of glutinous white.

  A crackling transistor radio was playing the Beatles’ ‘Please Please Me’. Max swallowed and cleared his throat. ‘Clara Allen?’

  ‘Yes?’ She turned her luminous, sticky face towards him and frowned.

  He’d persuaded her to have coffee with him the next day and risked icy roads to get back into town. They met in the Ponderosa Café just round the corner from her boarding house. She’d been walking with a book held open before her nose when he spotted her across the road. ‘Don’t you bump into things?’ he’d asked. And she smiled as if he’d said something ridiculous.

  She was smaller and more fragile sitting opposite him in the morning light than she’d appeared on stage. She seemed tired, with dark smudges under her lashes. It had made him want to take care of her. He sat back, taking deep breaths, telling himself to relax. She won’t run away, he reasoned silently, not if I don’t frighten her off. Although the way she perched on the edge of her chair suggested otherwise.

  They had slices of fruit cake and strong tea out of green china cups. She nibbled at sections of her cake, eating it almost crumb by crumb.