Broken Ground

The walk took twelve minutes, and he'd done it so often he could have managed it blindfolded, which was as well, because most of his attention was usually out ahead of him. This was the thing about Môrlan that Sara, who left it every morning and came home to it every night, had never quite caught: the town told you things, if you stopped here long enough to listen. The recycling out early. A van that didn't belong. A shopfront painted over a weekend. A face in the post office queue you'd last seen across a courtroom in Haverfordwest. He'd been gathering the town this way since they’d moved back from Carmarthen, and the truth of it was he loved it — loved being a man who knew his patch by heart, the way some men loved a garden.

He came out of the lane onto the high street, and the morning met him. The air already soft at half eight, the sky that deep, improbable blue Pembrokeshire managed three weeks a year and denied the rest. The street was busy without being tourist-busy yet — John sluicing the butcher's step with the same bucket and the same resigned focus he'd worn since Tomas was in school; the charity shop's pavement offerings out: summer frocks and faded paperbacks; a woman he didn't know photographing the view down to the water from the bench by the chemist, which meant the caravan parks had started emptying their early risers into town.

He walked. Nodded to John. Lifted a hand to Bryn at the farm shop, loading something into a Land Rover with the unhurried certainty of a man who had all day and meant to use most of it.

"Morning, Tomas." Alun was outside the post office, propped against the wall with a paper cup of something not from Torth and the look of a man who'd cleared his morning for conversation.

"Quiet night?"

"Quiet enough."

"Only I heard there was a bit of a to-do at the caravan park. Shouting. Half two."

"There's always shouting at the caravan park in July, Alun."

"Different shouting, this. Aggressive. Megan's girl's in the cottage on the lane, said it went on twenty minutes." Alun sipped, the air of a man passing on intelligence. "Might be worth a look."

"I'll bear it in mind."

"Because it's not the usual crowd, see. Families, normally, aren't they. This lot—"

"I'll bear it in mind, Alun. Diolch." Alun took no offence; he'd been moved gently along before. Sixty per cent accurate, forty per cent editorial, was Alun — but twenty minutes of aggression was worth a corner of Tomas's attention, and he gave it one as he walked on.

The hill dropped, the street curved, and Torth came up on the left, sea-green and lit, the smell of it reaching him before the building did — yeast and butter, drifting up the hill like a summons. Through the glass Haf was conducting her morning, counter to machine to counter, and Sam at the end of it with a coffee, leaning rather than sitting, not in her way, never in her way, just there.

She wouldn't have called it happiness, if you'd asked her — she'd have said she was rushed off her feet, which to Haf was much the same thing and a great deal safer to admit. But she knew to the minute now when his van came down the hill, and she'd given up pretending the mornings it didn't were as good as the mornings it did. She slid a flat white across the counter toward him without being asked and without comment, and went back to the queue, warm to the roots of her, and said nothing, because there were things you kept best by leaving them unnamed.

Tomas didn't stop — he had his coffee, or the last of it — but the sight of the two of them warmed his way past as surely as the bread did. He'd clocked it back in spring, when Sam's van started turning up before the bakery opened and Haf's humming acquired a register that said her mornings had improved. He'd mentioned it to no one but Sara, because he told Sara everything, and Sara had said good and gone back to her case file, which was about as much blessing as the pair of them were ever likely to get from that quarter.

Below the shopfronts the harbour opened out, and the works came up on the old goods lane behind the quay — Lôn y Cei, the narrow run between the harbour businesses and the backs of the town. Structural repairs to the retaining wall that held the lane above the lower quay, the kind of job put off for a decade through three rounds of council money that never quite came until Cate made enough noise to shake it loose. Scaffolding now, a fortnight of it, and a crew of local men. The noise carried up: angle grinders, the percussion of hammers on stone, a radio playing something he couldn't name and didn't want to. One of the contractors gave him the nod a town this size gave a man whether it knew him or not, and Tomas gave it back. They'd stripped the Victorian render off a good stretch of the wall, and even from the pavement the difference showed — rough dark stone under the smooth outer face, the bones of something much older coming up through a century of cosmetic work. Old Môrlan, under the new. Sara would want to come and look at it; he made a note to tell her, and went on down.

The high street curved and dropped, and the harbour opened below him in full.

July had made a different creature of it. He'd seen this water in every weather there was — locked in January, blazing in August, grey and sideways on a November Tuesday when the only souls on the quay were the ones who had no choice — and he knew its moods the way he knew Sara's, by long acquaintance and the simple fact of having been there for more of them than he could count. Today it was showing off: flat and brilliant, throwing the sun back in sheets that hurt to look at. The fishing boats were in, out since four and done. The visitor pontoon was half full — yachts, a motor cruiser, a catamaran under a French flag that hadn't been there yesterday. Tourists drifted along the quay with no plan yet committed to. The smell was a summer smell, salt and diesel and warm tar baking off the stones, nothing like the cold brine of March.

Sam's van sat at the boatyard, the same faded blue Ranger in the same spot it had held for a decade, though Sam himself was still up at Torth with his coffee and that kind of stillness most people took for calm. Tomas knew better, lately. He'd watched the change come over the man since spring — quieter, more careful near the edge of the quay where the water showed black between the stones — and Sara had given him as much of the why as he could hold without the edges going soft: the oath, the bargain with whatever it was that lived under the sea. He didn't pretend to understand it. He didn't need to. Sam was Sara's, which made Sam his, which meant Tomas kept half an eye on him the way he kept half an eye on everyone he'd come to love by the side door of loving Sara, and asked the water no questions it wasn't ready to answer.