Amagansett

‘This is my favorite spot in the world,’ she said.

They never finished the drinks.

A little while later, she placed her hand on his, the charge of her touch shorting out all other thoughts, smiling at him with a mixture of tenderness and certainty that left no room for doubt or maneuver. Not that he was considering either. He leaned across to meet her lips, and she drew him down on to the ground.

Later, when it was over and they were lying entwined in the grass, she pressed her face to his neck and inhaled.

‘You have a very particular smell.’

‘It goes with the job.’

‘I like it,’ she said. ‘Eau de fish.’

Conrad laughed.

Lillian’s fingers sought out the long ridge of scar tissue in his side, tracing its smooth contours.

Maybe she felt him tense under her touch, or maybe she just knew him well enough already, but she didn’t give voice to her curiosity.

The Montauk fishing fleet was back in, and Fort Pond Bay was a hive of activity. Sloops and draggers were making for the docks where others were already packing out, unloading their catches, separating, boxing and icing the fish, hammering the tags of their favored dealers to the sides of the cedar crates.

Conrad ranged alongside Duryea’s Dock and made fast. He checked that the Demeter was good there till the morning, pushed his way through the crowd and set off along the great scythe of beach.

Waves lapped at the pebbly sand. Out on the water two boys were floundering away in a little craft cobbled together from fish boxes and corrugated iron. The caulking at the seams had failed and they were shipping water fast, bailing furiously with their hands. As the gunwales dipped below the waves, they saluted, going down with their stricken vessel. Their shrieks of laughter carried clear across the water as they kicked for the shore.

Just back from the beach some young kids were playing baseball on the same sandy lot where Conrad had once swung a bat with their fathers. The crude baseball diamond hadn’t changed, but Trail’s End restaurant and the Post Office which had once sandwiched the lot were gone, moved away on skids at the outbreak of the war.

The Navy had decided that the broad, clean sweep of Fort Pond Bay offered the perfect location for a torpedo- testing range, and had duly slapped a compulsory relocation order on every family in the fishing village. Some had rolled their houses down to vacant lots on Edgemere Road and Flamingo Avenue. Others had simply abandoned them, taking the $300 compensation on offer and buying or building anew.

The Navy succeeded where the hurricane of ‘38 had failed, delivering a blow from which the fishing village looked unlikely ever to recover. What buildings remained trailed around the shore like a broken line of walking wounded returning from battle, and only a handful of people had returned to the homes they’d been forced to leave.

Hendrik Morgan was one of them.

He was sitting out front of the two-room shack his father had first built, knitting a funnel for a lobster pot. More pots were stacked around him. Straggly shrubs demarcated the small patch of shingle that was the front garden, and a weather-beaten vine clung precariously to the side of the building. These few plaintive stabs at adornment were undermined by the rancid stench of bait fish setting in a barrel nearby.

‘Goddag.’

Hendrik looked up and smiled. ‘Hej.’

‘How’s it going, Hendrik?’

‘Good,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Good.’

He took Conrad’s hand warmly, clamping his other hand on top. He stood at least as tall, his lank blond hair flopping in front of his blue eyes.

‘You got time for a cold one?’ asked Hendrik.

‘Sure.’

Hendrik headed inside, returning a few moments later with another chair and a couple of bottles of beer. He popped the tops and they settled down in the sunshine, looking out over the

bay.

‘How’s the lobstering?’ asked Conrad.

‘Easier now I got me a new boat.’

‘Yeah?’

‘The Alice T, a thirty-foot western-rig out of Stonington. Got a fair few miles on her keel, and trims a little heavy by the stern when loaded, but she’s a real beauty.’

‘How many pots you fishing?’

‘Hundred and fifty, more on the way.’ He nodded at the oak laths and other lobster-pot stock piled up nearby. ‘Two hundred and fifty should do it.’

‘And some.’

‘Yeah, first year back’s been good to me.’

‘You deserve it.’

Hendrik smiled. ‘Wish it worked like that, but we both know it don’t.’