The Needles

There was a light glaze of rain across the cobbles, and the wind was brisk enough to make the masts rattle like the bells of a doll's church.  In the darkness and the sporadic light of the hostelries, the reflections bounced across the pavement, and cut romantic reflections down the main street. It was the typical autumnal scene of an English seaside town: empty, quaint, melancholic.  There was a sense of something warm and promising, but it lived in someone else's home, or someone else's heart.

The Cutter was busy for a Wednesday night, the crew of a racing yacht having moored in the day, and a great gaggle of sailors propping up the bar, warmly dressed, rosy faced and talking and laughing at that slightly higher volume of a round or two having passed.  The Cutter was a traditional pub with an L-shaped bar, around which only the smallest of gatherings could fit comfortably.  A busy night found people seemingly overlapping, chairs awkwardly intertwined, and a natural heat and warmth generated only by bodies.  To the far right of the bar, in front of an alcoved room, stood a women of indeterminate 30 something age, her hair shoulder length and slightly bleached as is common for seaside residents of some years.  She was by herself, leaning against the wall, with a look on her face that suggested something between the contentment of a strong drink, and the resignation of the lonely trapped in a boisterous crowd.   She had entered the pub before the masses did, and had been enveloped by the sailors and the moths drawn to their light.  

It was difficult to say if she was beautiful, but she had a warm face, her lips seemed to curl into the slightest of smiles at all times, even when she was being jostled carelessly by passers by, or being marooned into the furthest corner of the bar by the revellers.  There was undoubtedly a homeliness about her hazel eyes, the plumpness of her cheeks, and the generosity of her curves and the longer she stayed in the bar, the less likely it became that she could escape the attentions of a flushed drinker, wondering how he might extend his night beyond the closing hours of the Cutter.  Perhaps that need for affection eminated from her without her knowledge, and so it was that a man, thick around the middle, warmed with beer, moved with drunken effort towards her.  He was armed with small, inane talk that was less offensive than his closeness, his breath sweet, his manner a little too jolly to be real, and she indulged him with the patience of a person who had lived through the same routine for too long.

Close by stood another man.  He recognised Sarah as the nurse who had tended to his father at home, in his final illness.  He remembered her drawing up at the house in her battered Polo, the engine so rough sounding, you could mistake it for a London taxi, and how her brusk walk up the garden path was replaced immediately by a warm smile when you opened the door.  Perhaps she did not know how he could see her through the muslins across the window, or the stern walk was simply the pragmatism of her busy working day; she could not afford to stretch her warmth to those in-between times.  The last time he had seen her, she had taken him aside in the kitchen and told him that it might be time for his father to enter the hospice.  She had kept a firm, impeccable eye contact with him, and put her hand gently on his forearm, and this solidity had prevented him breaking down or being hopeless.  She had talked him through the practicalities of death, and held his father's hand, and left with a belch of black smoke from her car.

Bing was chatting loudly in his ear, something about a prank he had played upon his brother, but Ben had stopped hearing, as he could not avert his attention from the nurse.  He could not quite make out the conversation she was having, but it was clear that it was one sided, that the broad man leaning into her, was a chancer.  Sarah looked politely uninterested, and during a glance away to assess her exit strategy, she saw Ben looking at her.  She smiled, he was not sure out of recognition, but simply with the ruefulness of a stranger having seen her unwanted entanglement.  

"Hang on Bing" he said, hardly aware whether Bing was still speaking to him.  He put his beer glass down on the bar, and moved through the crowded bodies, towards Sarah.  

"Are you okay?" he asked.  Ben was six foot three, and he knew his own physicality.

"We're fine" the drunk said, but without much confidence.  

"I am asking this lady" Ben said.  Something in him relished a challenge to his machismo, and this man, perhaps 10 years older  and several inches shorter than him, seemed like a challenge he could easily surmount.  A cloud of indignance crossed the face of the man, but somewhere in the less well oiled segments of his brain, he understood that he would and perhaps had already lost.  Ben was handsome, in that rough-hewn way that a sailor can be.  He was muscular, stubbly, his skin having seen all elements, and there was a kind of insurmountable arrogance of wealth about him.

"Let me buy you a drink" Ben said, summoning Sarah over to the gaggle of his crew.  Sarah shuffled away from the bar, but halted before she could be absorbed his grouping.

"Thank you" she said, exhibiting that warm smile he recalled from the previous June "but I think it is time for me to go".  She started to wrap her shawl around her shoulders, and turn from Ben.

"Where do you live?" Ben asked.

She did not answer immediately, as if surprised at his directness.

"Oh not far away"

"Let me walk you home, it's late"

That it was late was subjective.  The revelry would continue for a few more hours, before the bell sounded for last orders, and though it was certainly dark outside, and the streets a little empty, the potential for crime in this sleepy town seemed limited.  Sarah gave Ben a look of light cynicism, so he changed tack.

"You looked after my dad when he was ill"  he said.

She nodded.  "I remember"

"Thank you" 

"I loved looking at your dad's photos"  she said.

He knew then that she did remember, and he imagined his dad pulling out the photo albums, as he had done almost every time Ben had visited him in his final months.  All carefully edited of his mother, of course, but full of father and son sailing trips, and lurid outfits from the eighties.  A little quiver went through his stomach, and he decided that he really must take her home, and not take no for an answer.

"Let me take you home"