Driftwood Read Online Free Page A

actions since his return had tended to his own isolation—he wanted, needed, had to be alone.
    â€œNo,” he said, almost sharply. “I mean, no thank you. Just take care of yourself.”
    Briskly he turned and closed up the Land Rover, making sure a window was cracked down for Belle. He helped Flynn lift his board. It was a pro’s eight-footer, and not a lightweight. They were always much heavier than they looked on the water, being used for purposes of flight by talented, graceful, intriguing lunatics like… He was suddenly acutely aware that, when he turned his back to follow Victor’s wife down the street, that would be the last he would ever see of Flynn Summers. There was no reason to suppose otherwise. He felt a strange pang, almost like homesickness, a kind of resonant ache beneath his breastbone. And Flynn was watching him intently, as if he too had something more he wished to say.
    But he only nodded, and lifted a hand, and set off barefoot across the car park. Thomas looked back—once, helplessly, as Florence seized his hand, and then again a minute later while she was tapping anxiously on the boathouse doors. The second time he saw Flynn up near the top of the pitching Porth Bay high street, thumb out to flag down a ride. The first few vehicles went past him. He’d be lucky, Thomas thought, wondering why he’d lied about having his car with him, wondering how he’d got down here in the first place. He needed a ride big enough to take him and the surfboard too. Then air brakes hissed, and a truck with RNAS livery pulled up beside him, and he was gone.

Chapter Two: Sea Glass
    By the time he finished work that night, Thomas could think only of the watchtower and the uninterrupted silences that awaited him there. He got into the battered Land Rover and drove, up into the hills to the north of Sankerris, higher and higher through the narrow single tracks. Like most West Countrymen born, he could drive as adroitly backwards as forwards, but this time met no oncoming tractors or tourists and was glad of it. It could be a matter of reversing a mile or more down the spiralling lanes, whose banks were beginning to heap up with wildflowers at this turn of the season. He just wanted to get home. He broached the horizon, where farmland flattened out to moor, and the north coast of the peninsula spread itself out for him, bare, wild and clean. Rolling the Rover’s window down, he drew a deep breath of the sweet air.
    There was the quoit. This was one of Thomas’s commuting runs and he saw it every day, often twice, but it never failed to seize him. Placed here by unknown hands five thousand years before, knocked down in a storm and badly reconstructed in the 1800s, it was a stupendous thing, as breathtaking today as it must have been when its Neolithic builders had somehow raised its ten-ton flying capstone onto its four granite supports—three, now, after its clumsy rebuild—and set it to dominate the Morvah moor. West Penwith natives were blasé about it, calling it the tourist’s quoit—set a bare hundred yards back from the road, it was easily visible for miles and, unlike most of the county’s megalithic attractions, did not require a hike through gorse-tangled moorland to get to. For Thomas, the accessibility never diminished its magic. He was not even sure, on his daily drives past it, that it always lifted into view at the same place on his horizon, an effect he would put down to his own weariness.
    Which, today, was extreme. Belle, who had lapsed into silence again, only changed the angle of her ears as they bypassed the quoit, but Thomas could read her disappointment. They often stopped here for a walk, and she’d had a long day of it, patiently waiting out his shift in the back room of the pharmacy. “Sorry, sweetheart. Not today.” He saw her resume her queenly position in the passenger seat, watching the road ahead.
    He drove until