The Man on the Cliff Path

She began, as she had always begun a difficult lesson, with what she already knew, and what she already knew about the Pascoes she could fit in a thimble. There was Jory Pascoe, who crewed the lifeboat and mended other people's roofs and was, by common agreement, the kindest dull man in the parish. There was his mother, Hessa Pascoe, who was eighty-some and kept to her cottage on Chapel Steep and had not, in living memory, said an interesting word to anyone. And there had been a father, gone now, and before that — Edith reached, and the reach came up short — before that the family thinned into the sort of history that a village keeps in its bones and not its mouths. She did not know whether Hessa had had a brother. She did not know who Stephen Pascoe had been. So she did the sensible thing, which was to walk to the churchyard, and she spent a damp Thursday morning going stone by stone along the Pascoe row, and she found the father, and a grandfather, and two infants the nineteen-thirties had taken, and she did not find Stephen. That, she told herself, walking back, was simply the absence of a stone. It proved nothing. People were buried elsewhere. People were lost at sea and never given a stone at all, which was rather the entire point of what she was chasing. She was constructing the dull explanation again, building it carefully, brick by brick, the way she had taught children to build them — and she was halfway up the cliff path, where it ran above the harbour with the gorse thick on the seaward side, when the dull explanation fell down all at once. There was a man ahead of her on the path. He was old, older than Edith, walking slowly with a stick into the wind, and there was nothing strange about an old man on the cliff path on a Thursday except that Edith Crewe knew every old man in Pol Treven by his gait at fifty yards, and she did not know this one. He stopped where the path bent, at the bench the council had put in for the view, and he did not sit. He stood with both hands on the stick and looked down at the harbour — at the boats, at the grey water, at the long stone arm of the breakwater — and he looked at it the way you look at a face you have not seen in a very long time and are not certain wants to see you. Edith slowed. She was not a fanciful woman. She told herself he was a walker, a visitor, a relative come for a funeral she had not heard of. But she had spent the morning among the Pascoe stones, and her eye had grown used to the family — to the long jaw of them, the heavy brow, the particular set of Jory's shoulders that she had been watching across the chapel for thirty years — and this old man on the cliff path had all of it. He had the Pascoe face, weathered down to its frame. She might have said nothing. A wiser woman, a less curious one, would have wished him good morning and walked on and let Pol Treven keep whatever it was keeping. But Edith Crewe had a name in her kitchen with no line through it, and she had just spent three hours failing to find that name on a stone, and she was seventy-three and the wind was cold and she had never in her life been able to leave a sum half-worked. "Good morning," she said, drawing level, and then, because the cliff path was the last place on earth one could pretend to be casual, she simply asked it. "Forgive me. You have a great look of the Pascoes about you. Are you family?" The old man turned from the harbour. He studied her without alarm and without warmth, the way the sea studies the shore, and when he answered his voice had the village in it, the real old village, the accent the schools had nearly finished sanding away. "I was," he said. "Once. A long time before your time, I should think." "I've been here forty-one years," said Edith. Something moved across the weathered face — not quite a smile. "Then no," he said. "Not before your time at all. Only before anyone thought to mention it." He looked back down at the water, at the uncrossed grey of it. "You'll be the schoolteacher. The one going through the harbour trunk." Edith felt the cold of the path go up through her shoes and into something older than her feet. She had told the committee she needed good light. She had told no one else anything at all.