‘Granny had it off with him a few times,’ Emma said, as the man walked away. I stared at her. ‘Hated him, hated his politics, but he was an animal in bed; she couldn’t resist him.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said, eventually. ‘No, you’re pulling my leg.’
After a while, she laughed. ‘OK. As you like it.’
A man with a sumptuous beard came over to talk to Emma about his days conducting the amateur orchestra Gloria had played in for more than twenty years. ‘She was terrible,’ he said, fondly. ‘Quite literally never stopped talking. Never practised. But she played beautifully; I couldn’t throw her out even if I’d wanted to.’
Emma nodded, proudly. ‘My grandmother was terrible in so many ways.’
I leaned against the wall, listening to them talk, compiling a mental list of the adjectives I’d use if I were writing Emma’s obituary. Formidable and mesmeric, I chose, eventually. She was a force of nature.
I went to the gents at some point, and saw in the mirror that my tongue was stained purple. I tried to scrape it clean. ‘Emma,’ I said to my reflection. ‘Emma, I would like to take you out for a drink.’
Of course I said no such thing, but we talked for hours, long past the point at which the other guests had left. The hotel staff laid up for dinner around us, and the winter sun shot flames through the estuary water.
She told me she lived in Plymouth but was going to be down here for another week: she was a marine ecologist, and had agreed to help with an estuarine creek study one of her colleagues ran. Something involving suspended particulate matter and biogeochemical compounds in the Fal River creeks.
I did not know what this meant, but I liked the idea of her in a hazmat suit, taking perilous samples from a deadly river and storing them in cryogenically sealed containers.
When I shared this with her, she roared with laughter and said she would most likely be wearing wellies and fingerless gloves – ‘But I’ll track down a space suit if you prefer.’
She was flirting with me, I realised.
I displayed such an insatiable interest in coastal ecology as the evening wore on that Emma invited me to join a creek-side walk she’d been asked to lead the following morning. It was in Devoran, a nearby village with an old quay and ‘fascinating wildlife’。
Around us the boat masts clanked under a darkening sky. I had a ticket for the train back to London that night, and nowhere to stay in Cornwall, but I said yes.
‘I’m staying in a yurt while I’m down here,’ Emma announced, as the hotel staff finally flushed us out with bright lights. I had no idea what, if anything, she was trying to convey. （In fact, I had no idea what a yurt even was. I was unaware of the middle-class predilection for glamping, and I’d never been to Central Asia.） ‘My dog’s staying with me, too. His name’s Frogman.’
We walked the length of the hotel’s little pier. The air was painfully cold now, and the water a deep black story. I tried to imagine a dog called Frogman.
‘I’ve loved talking to you,’ she said, suddenly, and I heard a bashfulness in her voice that made me wonder if ‘formidable’ had been an unfair descriptor.
‘I’ve mildly enjoyed it,’ I shrugged.
She smiled.
I smiled.
She pulled the yellow coat tightly around herself. ‘I’ll see you at Devoran Quay, ten a.m.,’ she said, and left.
I booked into the Greenbank, which was beyond my pay grade at the time, and lay in bed, replaying Emma’s stories about her work, and about her grandmother. The next day, I called in sick and went on the nature walk. Nobody else turned up; it was just Emma, me and Frogman, an overwrought terrier.