“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.
“Is it just for looking or are we going down there?” I asked pointing at the little rocky outcrop to our right that seemed like the easiest way down and into the thicket of old sea rubbish. I could be adventurous for an afternoon even if it was just to charm my interviewee.
I walked ahead, clung to rocks and carefully felt for the outcrop in Paul Archer’s oversized Wellingtons. It was easier than I had feared and my heart leaped when he looked down at me with a satisfied grin before he followed.
“It’s the biggest treasure trove around,” he explained now that we were picking a path between upturned rowboats in various states of decay. Differently colored nets were still the most prominent of sights but on closer inspection, they were intricately interwoven with rough rope that snaked along the ground, sometimes vanishing into the sand, never to emerge again. We saw rusty anchors, cans of all descriptions, gloves and boots and windbreakers, buoys in different sizes and colors like so many beach balls lining the sand. Over, under and between everything was the ever present sight of driftwood—some new and jarring, some old, sanded down and beautiful.
“What is this place?” I managed to ask, a little afraid of stepping into something sharp, even as it all started to exude a certain unexpected charm.
“What used to be a small fishing community,” he replied with a shrug and squatted down to pull on a particularly impressive knotted and frayed rope. The beach clung to it harder than he could pull and he gave up. “Stopped being profitable years and years ago. Most left, others kept it up until retirement, nobody cared what they left behind. The rest was done by high tides, storms, a fire here and there,” still on the ground, he pointed to the blackened ruins of a small cabin in the distance, “and, of course, people like me: scavengers. Some of us are less respectful than others.”
Emerging from the ground with a flat, almost circular shell, Paul Archer smiled again. “It’s where I get most of the raw materials I need—for stories and anything else I like to do.”
“Like your furniture and all the decorations?” I remembered the knotted driftwood coat hanger, the strange wood and sea-glass lampshade and all the other things I’d seen in his cottage. He nodded and gave me a revealing smile.
“I like ravaged things. Things with history—and I don’t mean a history of standing in someone’s house for years before some antiques dealer snatched them at an estate sale.”
“A history a little... darker?” I asked with a half-smile, wishing he’d let me take the tape recorder.
“Something like that.”
Trying not to grin, I picked my way through the rubble towards a small ship lying half on its side in the rubble. Her name had faded into a sunset of rust, a color-spectrum from white to deep, dried-blood brown. My hand found its way into the rough surface and a little rust came off with my touch. In a hundred years, it would be covered in it, in a thousand the decay would have scattered all these little atoms around the beach, into the ocean, around the world in a gargantuan circle of entropy.
“That’s why I picked you,” he went on and I turned around. I rubbed my fingers on my blazer and frowned. “For the interview, and why I brought you here.”
I nodded, confused, and aware that my face likely betrayed it. Of course. The interview.
“It is quite clear from your reviews and the way you write about characters that you have that same appreciation.”
There was a sudden impulse to deny it. I hadn’t seen anything, had just forged ahead down onto the beach to prove him right about me. But then I looked back at the ship and then down at my feet and shrugged. On the ground, just in front of my clownishly huge boot, lay something shiny, just distracting enough to spare me an answer when I bent down to pick it up. It was a piece of glittering metal, light, thin and about the length of my thumb. Fixed to its base was a three-pronged hook, curving upwards in still wickedly sharp looking, barbed points.
“Careful with that,” Paul said quietly, “they can give you nasty infections.”
With a little rubbing, dry sand and earth came off revealing the makeshift fish-eye on the side. It proved all too easy to turn me into a fellow treasure hunter on no-man’s-land beach.
III
Back in his cottage, he served more tea and led me into the small living room. It smelled like wood and leather and the ocean. I couldn’t see any of the living room features or furniture I had come to expect in post-student living arrangements, though. There was no couch and no television, no game console hidden away in some IKEA sideboard. There were more stacks of books instead, a small fireplace and art on the walls, none of which was framed or really went together—more inspiration board than comfortable living room walls. In the center stood a low coffee table on a threadbare oriental rug, around it were placed a couple of leather ottomans to sit on. Paul Archer pulled one out for me, I slipped out of his boots and two layers of socks and then lowered myself down, careful to keep my skirt over my thighs and not to open my legs too wide. When I looked down on the table, I could see through the glass surface into an array of beach treasures he kept in the metal box below. There was more sea glass like the pieces in my pocket we had found between the rubble, but these had special shapes or colors; there were old coins and shells, corral and shark teeth.
“I would have brought you a cookie too, but they turned out a little too soggy to serve.” He grinned as he sat the simple mug down on the glass table in front of me.
“I’ll survive,” I said, still trying to rearrange my legs in a way that would be both comfortable and not altogether too exposing. “Thank you.”
I inhaled the tea and allowed myself to enjoy the feeling of my legs resting. After the train ride and the long walk, I felt comfortably tired, just woozy enough to shake the veneer I trained onto my face and into my voice for business conversations. Instead, I breathed in the smell of the place and took careful sips of tea while he watched me, sitting on his ottoman with a cool ease that made me not only jealous but also incapable of not watching him in return.
“So you think I like broken things?” I asked after a long time, voice warm and tinged in this quiet, restful moment. Paul Archer looked at me over the rim of his cup, which he held in both hands as though it was an Asian bowl.
“I think you understand them, notice them,” he corrected, then tilted his head, put the cup down and pulled his glasses from his face. It made him look strangely characterless while he wiped the hot water condensation from the lenses before resetting the glasses on his nose in that charming gesture. “And maybe, you feel drawn to them, too.”
There was something in his eyes, a shadow maybe or a sense of foreboding, and I looked away. I realized too late that my heart was thrumming in my chest with the speed of a runaway train. I cleared my throat and looked at the table. My eyes focused on a small collection of shark teeth, small and gray around a single huge one: a tooth that might lodge itself in a limb with the strength of an industrial claw. He seemed to understand my need for retreat; and didn’t speak again for a long time. I, in turn, didn’t look at him until I could control my senses. And maybe that was just what he wanted, to let me feel safe just for a few minutes.
“Can I call you Iris?” he asked out of the blue and my eyes were dragged back up to his face. He was smiling—possibly with an apology edged into his features.
For as long as it took me to inhale far too much air for a simple answer, I wondered what would happen if I said no. I could have fetched my tape recorder and my notebook and we could have done this interview. There was still time, and afterwards I’d have called a late taxi to that B&B and in the morning, I would have taken the first train home.
But I didn’t say no. I nodded.
“Iris,” he repeated and the old-fashioned name I hardly ever had any true emotional bond with, suddenly sounded warm and colorful.
“I did not ask you here because I wanted to sleep with you, but I do now.”
I had time to appreciate the cliché of my reaction when my jaw dropped. His words traveled through my entire body at the speed of lightning, leaving it sore and tingling, fearing and longing for the fire to come back. I couldn’t take credit for not stuttering something in return though. He didn’t give me much time to collect myself before he pulled his glasses off again in a deprecating gesture and continued. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to shock you. I just believe it’s best to be honest about these things. I know that puts you in a difficult position but I wouldn’t have said anything if I didn’t think there might be a possibility you’d feel the same.”
A pause. I still didn’t know what to say.
“I am not an asshole, Iris and I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I don’t want you to wonder what will happen to your career if you tell me off. I won’t hold it against you, Iris, not in any way. You don’t even have to say no, if you’re too nice or polite or...
British
.”
I can’t claim much memory of these moments past his words and his eyes that were gentle and kind and yet, at the same time, seemed to bore themselves deeply into my head, stirring secret centers of pleasure where I’d never even thought to look for any. Warm shivers ran down my spine and it was as though every hair follicle was turning into a raw nerve that tingled in the open air.
“I will excuse myself into the kitchen,” he went on, still smiling a non-threatening smile. “And if, when I come back, you are sitting here with a notepad or a laptop, I will give you an interview that your editor won’t find any less than deeply insightful.” He gave me a crooked grin at that, before his face grew surprisingly earnest again. “But if you sit here, like you are, with your palms on the table, then we will go on with our evening as two people who just met and want to know more about one another without an audience in mind.” He paused and raised his eyebrows.
I realized that I hadn’t said anything and he was looking for a sign that I had understood. I nodded; he smiled and walked out of the room. It came as a relief and an aching lack at the same time. I could breathe again, deeply into that calming region in my lower stomach, and I could move and brush a strand of hair out of my face.
He had been right. I did feel a sense of hesitation against saying no—but the same fear of saying yes. Maybe a greater one and that was the fear he hadn’t alleviated—the fear that made no sense at all. Because if he’d think badly of me for wanting to sleep with him too, what exactly would that make him?
I took a deep, shaking breath and got to my feet—just to see if I still could. It wasn’t difficult at all, they felt a bit tired from the walk but the socks were soft and giving and I could easily have walked down the hallway, made narrow by book cases, and fetched my bag. I even saw it through the door he had left open, lying there at the bottom of his driftwood coat-rack.