The Wager and the Bear E-Book

John Ironmonger

• Herausgeber: Fly on the Wall Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 437

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

When young idealist Tom publicly humiliates politician Monty in a Cornish pub, it sparks a simmering feud that cascades through their intertwined lives. The consequences of their argument, and the deadly wager they strike, will cascade down the decades. Years later, they find themselves a long way from St Piran onto a colossal iceberg drifting south away from Greenland, their only companion a starving polar bear. This is a heart-stopping tale of anger, tragedy, and enduring love, cast against the long unfolding backdrop of an irreversible global crisis.

Leseprobe

Praise for ‘The Wager and the bear’ and john ironmonger

‘A small community, a chance encounter, a big story - The Wager and the Bear is a rip-roaring adventure that is both insightful and humane. Nuanced, compassionate and funny, this tale of love and revenge is one of my favourite books of the year.’ - Carys Bray, Author of ‘When the Lights Go Out’

‘Suffused with warmth and charm. This is what good storytellers do in the face of the climate crisis: choreograph a dance between the vast and the tiny, between the global and the human. I was completely invested and utterly gripped.’ - Shelley Harris, Author of ‘Jubilee’ and ‘Vigilante’

‘A novel full of warmth, wit and wisdom. John Ironmonger weaves another charm of a story’ - Essie Fox, Author of ‘The Fascination’

‘This is a tremendously enjoyable book.’

- Marianne Levy, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

on ‘The Whale at the End of the World’

‘It’s a love story of sorts and, above all, it’s about the innate goodness of people and our connections with the wider world.’

- PRESS ASSOCIATION on ‘The Whale at the End of the World’

‘A gentle and uplifting tale of warding off apocalypse in a remote corner of Cornwall . . . charming.’

- FINANCIAL TIMES on ‘The Whale at the End of the World’

‘This novel, set in Cornwall, will restore your faith in humanity.’

- ELLE UK on ‘The Whale at the End of the World’

THE WAGER AND THE BEAR

JOHN IRONMONGER

Copyright

First published 21st February 2025 by Fly on the Wall Press

Published in the UK by

Fly on the Wall Press

56 High Lea Rd

New Mills

Derbyshire

SK22 3DP

www.flyonthewallpress.co.uk

ISBN: 9781915789341

EBook: 9781915789358

Copyright John Ironmonger © 2025

The right of John Ironmonger to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover design by Edward Bettison. Typesetting by Isabelle Kenyon.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without prior written permissions of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable for criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

For Amalie and Oli and Theo

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favour fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Fire and Ice by Robert Frost

The Wager

1. What a day it was to be back

What a day it was to be back in St Piran. This was summer as God had designed it. A Cornish summer. The sun hung high in a clear blue sky with just a touch of haze upon the horizon. Boats in the bay seemed becalmed, like little islands of solitude on a flat, forgiving ocean. The hedgerows all the way along the cliff path hummed with honeybees and glittered with butterflies. Wildflowers were in blossom. Birds were about their business in song. Herring gulls in full voice soared high above everything, as if directing events below, calling down their commands from the heavens. If there was a breeze, it was a gentle one, carrying with it the salt-fresh smells of the ocean. It was the kind of day that might linger in the memory, filed away somewhere as, ‘a perfect summer day’.

Tom Horsmith, nineteen years and eleven months old, in the final hours of his teens, wearing new jeans ripped at the knee, and a t-shirt as yellow as the sunshine, arrived in the village on foot. He carried a pack on his shoulders and wore soft leather boots on his feet. He had walked the cliff paths, four miles from the bus-stop in the town of Treadangel, and every step of the way felt magical, as if the earth was struggling to contain its bounty and was forced to share every new odour, the buzz of every insect, and the musical call of every bird.

The city robs you of these pleasures, Tom thought. It sends you underground. It squeezes you into unnatural spaces, rations your air, and washes away the colours of nature. You have to watch every footstep on a cliff path. The route winds, and there are rocks, and roots, and steps to negotiate, stiles to clamber, sheer drops, and views that will take your breath away. But in the city, every footstep is the same; you just walk. You wait for the lights. You cross. You weave between people, avoiding the gaze of strangers. You glance into the windows of shops. You walk. The soundscape of the city is motor engines, and sirens, and hooters. And voices. But here, Tom thought, there are only the gulls.

How good it was to be back.

From the field gate of Corin Magwith’s farm Tom could see the village; a collection of grey, slate rooftops, some aligned this way, and some another, as if they were a child’s bricks after a tantrum, or relics of a shipwreck, scattered and abandoned at the head of the bay after a great storm. Whitewashed houses. Grey stone walls. Just three boats in the harbour. Small boats. But it was mid-tide. Other craft would be out at sea, pursuing the shoals. Tom shielded his eyes with his hand and looked out. There, beyond the headland, was Daniel Robin’s little ketch, simple to recognise with its front wheelhouse and red paintwork. And there, on the horizon, was that Peter Shaunessy’s new boat? Piranesi?‘Best boat in the water,’ Benny Shaunessy would call it. Hard to tell at this distance. Maybe, Tom pondered, he could find work with Peter and Benny. Summer on the boats didn’t feel like too much of an ordeal. Not when the weather was like this. He could catch fish. He could pull in the nets and pack the fish in ice. He could help with the winching and the winding, and the carrying.

Or maybe he would find an easier job in the village. One with less carrying. Anything would do. It was only for three months. His final year at university would start in October. He drew in a deep breath of warm Atlantic air. Perhaps he didn’t need to work at all. Not yet. Not for a while. He had some modest savings. Maybe he could enjoy the sunshine. Make his money last. He could sit on the harbour wall with a book. He could sleep in the sun. It wouldn’t be a bad way to spend the summer.

He swung the field gate closed and started down the path towards St Piran.

2. A great many legends are told…

A great many legends are told of the village of St Piran; so many, it is difficult, sometimes, to sift the truths from the fables. There are those in the village (just as an example), who say the ancient stone boulders that mark the two ends of the harbour wall are the mortal remains of the fishermen, John Brewster and Matthew Treverran, who were turned to stone (and justly so) for playing dice on a Sunday. Others will tell you that the harbour walls themselves are nothing but the open arms of a knocker – a Cornish demon from the tin mines at Botallack – who drowned in the waters of Piran Bay while fleeing from St Michael after a violent dispute at cards. These are the kinds of stories you will hear if you spend time in this village, if you have an honest face, and if you have the patience to listen. There are some in the community who still, to this day, hide the body of a cockerel in the coffin of a loved one. The fowl will be revived in the next world, and his appearance will remind St Peter of his denial of Christ, for it was as the cock crowed that Peter committed his mortal sin. The memory of this, and the attendant shame, will tempt the saint to be merciful when he judges the deceased. So goes the logic. It is not unusual for villages in Cornwall to cling to traditions like these, but St Piran, you might well think, appears to have more customs than most. Every Christmas, the children of the village parade up the hill by candlelight beneath the giant effigy of a whale. This, they will tell you, is in memory of a man who saved the village from one of the great pandemics, when he rode onto the beach on the back of a whale.

They are idle tales, the tales told in St Piran. Some, like the tale of the fishermen turned to stone, are brief events. You might have been in St Piran on the day they happened, and still have missed them. One moment John and Matthew, the dice playing fishermen, were flesh and blood. The next instant they were boulders propping up the harbour walls. No one, so far as we know, was there to witness it. Other stories unfold over weeks. Or even months. And then there is the story of the wager and the bear. Once there was a time when everyone in the world knew this story. Or part of it. They will tell you it has something to do with a bear. And it does. But this is St Piran. This is where the story started, and also where it ended. They have their own way of talking about things here. So, for them, this story is perhaps the strangest tale of all. It unfolds not over days (as the newspapers might have suggested), nor weeks, nor months, but decades. It is a story of human lifetimes. Martha Fishburne told parts of the story to the children in Piran School, and in due course some of them wrote down the episodes they could remember. Charity Limber, who cleaned at Marazion House, heard a great deal of the story from Monty Causley, and she told it all to Jeremy Melon, and Jeremy wrote some of it down, but only part of it, for he didn’t live to see it all through. There are photographs if you care to look hard enough for them, and a great many accounts in old newspapers, and even one or two older residents who perhaps remember some of it. There was even a film made once, and a stage play, and most school history books of the period and online encyclopaedias have some version or other of the events. But none of these allowed the whole story to unfold. And this, perhaps, is why the tales are still told in St Piran. It hasn’t snowed in the village for fifty years, or maybe more, but there are villagers today who still display a snowflake in their windows in June, and this, they will tell you, is to remember the wager and the bear.

It was a long time ago. Over eighty years have passed since Tom Horsmith, still just a teenager, walked into the square with a pack on his back and a smile on his face. His is the name local people remember if they remember any name at all. But every story, in a village like St Piran, will have its hero. Many also have a villain. Sometimes one gets confused with the other. If there was a villain in the story of the ice, it might be as well to meet him now. His name, after all, is the one the rest of the world remembers, and much of the world considers him the hero. He wasn’t, in truth, a villain. Not really. Neither was he a true villager. He was an incomer. An invader. His name was Monty Causley.

He was a Cornishman, but not, people will tell you, a Cornishman from St Piran. They say that he came from Lostwithiel where his family made cider, although some believe he was originally from Bodmin and his fortune came from tin. No matter. He was the man who owned Marazion House, on the sea front, and Marazion House was central to the game of dice that would play out in the story of the wager and the bear. The house was the most prepossessing dwelling in the village. It was stone-built, somehow part of the very geology of the bay, an edifice that looked as though it might have grown organically from the walls of the cliff itself, like a sort of artificial rearrangement of the rockface, not quite vertical, not quite horizontal, a building that had never seen the pencil of an architect nor the string of a plumb line, but had somehow evolved in segments and parcels, a piece here and another piece there, until, like an elderly relative, it had become a timeless feature of the harbour. Impressive. Compelling. Maybe it had been the first house in St Piran. No one really knew. Maybe there were smuggler’s caves behind it, buried deep inside the cliff, concealing long-lost troves of treasure. That is the sort of house it was. A secretive house. A house that told no tales. It seemed to occupy a dangerous hinterland between sea and land, unnaturally low for a seafront building, carved from boulders that might have been the petrified remains of dice-playing fishermen. It stood in a small bay of its own, the sole building at the top of a shingle beach scarcely wider than the house itself. To reach the front door you would need to descend a dozen steps to a stone path that ran along the top of the beach, and from there you would climb up six steps to the porch. No one would design a house like this today, but Marazion defied all principles of good architecture. The stones of the walls were black with age, and green with lichens, and pockmarked with tiny barnacles, and never truly dry. The fine spray from the waves at high tide, and the southerly winds and the ocean squalls, conspired together to give the walls a sheen.

Who would have built a house so close to the water? When the high springtides came, the sea would very nearly reach the front door. There were times, during these occasional tides, when you could not leave the house to venture into the village without getting your feet wet. The steps could be slippery after a storm; but the house must have been built by master masons, for winter storms would come and go, and the summer sun would blaze, and the ocean waves would lap at the doorstep and then retreat. Marazion would stand unchanged, unaffected, unmoved, with all of its secrets still untold. Seagulls roosted on the slates as if the house was just another cliff-face, and here was where they had evolved to be; and from the roofs, with a single leap and a dive, they could plunge into the harbour at high tide for sprats, and shrimps, and discarded potato chips. The guttering and walls of the house carried the trails of seagull excreta, all the way around, like spilled paint.

Monty Causley was the third Causley to own Marazion House. His father had owned it before him, and his grandfather before that. But this didn’t make Monty nor his parents or grandparents, true residents of St Piran. None had truly lived in Marazion House. They were absent landlords, strangers still in the village. The house had been, at best, a bolthole for occasional summer visits, a rare and remote holiday-home. Or else it had stood empty. Monty rented it out to holiday makers. Two thousand and four hundred pounds a week the house could earn in the height of summer. A thousand pounds a week off season. It could, perhaps, have earned more had it been in one of the popular holiday destinations, like St Ives maybe, or Porthcurno, or even Newquay where surfers made the season longer; but St Piran was just a bit too far off the tourist map, just a little too tricky to get to. The village sat at the end of a single-track road with no other way in and no other way out (apart from the cliff paths and the sea). Most of the winter months the house stood dark and unoccupied, locked and shuttered against the storms. And just occasionally, in the spring or autumn, there might be a fallow week where no one had booked, and these were the weeks when, from time to time, Monty Causley and his wife, Carys, would drive down from London and park on the quay.

He was mean. That was what they said about Monty in the Stormy Petrel Inn, where the locals would settle at the end of the day to make a long cider last the evening. He was mean, and that was enough to make him the villain. He was mean, and the wager was a judgement on his meanness. The fact that he only showed up when bookings were scarce was evidence. He rarely drank in the Petrel. He never took coffee in the harbourside café. He didn’t often give in to the temptation of a Cornish pasty, or haddock and chips from Kenny Kennet’s bistro. He bought very few provisions from Jessie Higgs’s shop. He wasn’t often seen. He and Carys would bring a box-load of groceries with them from a swanky store in London, and they would carry it down the stone steps, and along the short path, and up the steps to the house, and there, in Marazion House, except on the days when Monty was campaigning for election, they would shut themselves away. For the long weekend (or sometimes even for a week), they would vanish behind the big front door.

‘He makes no contribution to the economy of the village,’ Jeremy Melon would declare, to no one in particular, in the lobsterman’s bar at the Petrel.

‘Darling, he rents out his house,’ Demelza Trevarrick would say, defensively. ‘His tenants spend a fortune here.’

‘But all the rent payments go back to London,’ Jeremy would counter. ‘Not a penny to Cornwall.’

‘His wife buys cigarettes in Jessie’s shop,’ someone would say.

‘Once or twice.’

‘He does drink in here occasionally.’ This observation was from Jason Anderssen, the barman.

‘Not often enough.’

Charity Limber would see the Causleys. She was the cleaner at Marazion House. She would call in the mornings to throw open the curtains and to make the beds. Twenty-seven years old she was, newly married and bursting with life, like a new bud on a spring blossom; but Marazion House would subdue her. ‘It’s cold in there,’ she would tell the drinkers in the Petrel. ‘Unfriendly.’

‘But what do they do all day?’ people would ask.

‘He sits at his desk and never once looks out of the windows,’ she would tell them. ‘He has his computers and his phones and all manner of devices. His telephone rings at eight in the morning and from that moment on, for the rest of the day, he is talking, or on a video-conference, or shouting something to somebody down the phone.’

‘And what about her? What about Carys Causley?’

‘She sits in the window with a crossword and a cup of tea, but she barely looks at the crossword at all. She stares out at the sea.’

Of the two of them, Monty and Carys Causley, there was more empathy in the village for her. She, Carys, would at least walk out. She wore silk headscarves tied tightly around her head, even in the sunshine. She walked with her head bent as if there was always a wind, and her favoured walk would be down the right arm of the knocker demon to the shoulder, and then up the other arm, all the way along the harbour wall, to the fingertips, to the rock that some would say was John Brewster. And then back. Sometimes she would walk around the headland to Piran Sands, when the weather was fine, but her walking shoes were not well suited to the shingle and the rocks, and so there she would turn around, back to Marazion House.

How old were Monty and Carys? Well, she was younger than he. And he was somewhere in the inscrutable years between thirty and fifty. And so was she. And that was all anyone knew. Until the wager. They didn’t appear to have children. And there were no photographs in the house. This was, after all, for most of the year, a property for holiday-rental. It had been stripped of any personal touches. There were no books of special interest on the shelves. No traces of any hobbies. No artworks on the walls apart from nautical pictures that could have come from any gift shop in Cornwall. Every room was as soulless as a hotel corridor.

‘You think the man would at least possess a fishing rod,’ Jeremy Melon would say.

‘Or a yacht,’ Demelza would add.

And this perhaps, was why Monty Causley would have to be the villain of any unfolding tale in St Piran. Not because he was necessarily guilty of any villainy. Not because he was ridiculously rich. But because he seemed guilty of so little else. How can a man live so anonymously, and work so assiduously, and steer so deliberately away from the cliff paths, and the beauty spots, and the beaches, and spend so little with local business and still be innocent of any offence? This didn’t seem right. And in St Piran, as in many a small town, there is a natural suspicion of any native who has moved away. What can their motives have been?

‘Never be carelessly, or casually, critical of anyone else’s beliefs,’ the schoolteacher, Martha Fishburne would tell the children in her class at Piran School. ‘Be careful, very careful, before you judge someone because of their politics or their God.’

But this lesson of Martha Fishburne’s may have been one instruction the drinkers in the Petrel had missed or forgotten. For there was one offence, in many of their eyes, of which Monty Causley was impeachably guilty. He was a Tory. That was his crime.

Or was he perhaps, a Socialist? This was a long time ago, and although these things seemed important at the time, history can be confusing, and governments and parties did seem to swap and change a great deal during those years, and policies came and went on both sides. Whichever it was, Labour or Conservative, people did get unnaturally exercised about these things, and half of the drinkers in the Petrel bar would feel offended, and would object to Monty Causley because of his politics, and the other half would agree because, Labour or Conservative, politicians could never be trusted. ‘If there are two things a politician can do,’ Jeremy Melon would say, ‘and if one is the right thing and the other is the wrong thing, you can always rely on them to pick the wrong one.’

Monty Causley, we should understand, was not simply a Tory. He was an ass. He was a bloated, self-serving, puppet of a government nobody trusted. At least, he was in the eyes of the drinkers in the lobsterman’s bar. He was a naïve Cornishman, who had been idly seduced by power. He was a class traitor.

Truth, of course, is always more nuanced than rumour. How do any of us know, of a politician in the news, how he or she might really think, how smart or stupid they really are, what values they really hold? We make our judgements based on party loyalties, on half-remembered comments from hasty broadcast interviews, on carefully curated photographs from newspapers. We paint a picture of a person we never met. ‘You should never judge another person until you’ve spent a day with them,’ Martha Fishburne would tell the children at St Piran School. ‘And even that is not long enough. When you judge a person,’ she would say, ‘it tells us nothing about what they are; but it tells us plenty about what you are.’

But human nature is what it is. For the villagers of St Piran, there would only ever be one villain in the story of the wager and the bear. He was the Honourable Montgomery Hendrick Causley. Member of Parliament for Cornwall South. Guilty as charged.

3. It started with an altercation

We know, quite clearly, when the story of the wager and the bear started. It started with an altercation in the Stormy Petrel Inn. It was summer in Cornwall. Beaches were crowded, and restaurants bustling. The B&B in St Piran, run by Moses and Hedra Penhallow, had re-opened as a hotel, The Fin Whale Hotel, with a restaurant on the ground floor serving some customers in the garden and others outside on the harbour pavement. A bistro, The Beachcomber, had opened on the site of the old fish-packing station, and Kenny Kennet the owner, short of accommodation indoors, had found space for tables and chairs along the quay, and these were frequently full. The Petrel pub had countered this new fashion for al-fresco dining with tables of its own, and no one had yet agreed upon where the boundary line should lie between the pub’s tables and the bistro’s tables, and so hotel, pub, and bistro jostled for space and few diners were ever really clear which tables belonged to which establishment. As it was, neither the pub, the bistro, nor the hotel could afford to let any disagreement escalate into a public dispute, for fear that this might lead the county authorities to question whether tables on the quayside were even permitted at all. No one would want that. So, an easy truce prevailed, and the harbourside in summer was as busy as an Italian piazza, with coffee drinkers, beer drinkers, and hungry families, who would lurk waiting for a table when the weather was good, swooping in like seagulls onto chip paper as soon as spaces became available. The old doctor’s surgery on Fish Street was now an ice cream parlour. One of the fishermen’s houses on the quay sold pasties. There was a fish and chip shop at the top of Piran Walk. ‘Today’s catch,’ it advertised on blackboards in the square. Little St Piran, that for so many centuries had been a sleepy, forgotten hamlet on the toe of the county of Cornwall, had, in summer, become a chic destination. The natural smells of seaweed, old mud, ocean spray, and fish would now arrive accompanied by the new smells of toasting ciabattas, and cheeseburgers, and lattes. The single-track lane that wound for four miles from the Treadangel to Penzance Road would be blocked with traffic coming in and traffic going out. New passing places had been cut into the hedgerows and benevolently tarmacked by the county council, and a cheerful bonhomie generally prevailed as convoys of cars encountered each other, leading to awkward reversing manoeuvres down the lane to the nearest passing space. After all, this was Cornwall. You expect this kind of thing. Everyone was busy. Everybody was making money. The fishermen sold their fish to the restaurants. The dairy farmer sold his milk to the ice cream maker. The craft shop sold local art works and objéts-trouvés from the beaches. The tiny hamlet had discovered commerce, and now, between Easter and the first red leaves of autumn, it would hum with the activities of visitors.

Even tables in the lobsterman’s bar at the Petrel could be hard to find on a summer evening. A day or so after Tom’s arrival back in the village, he and Benny Shaunessy found themselves standing with their drinks, unable to find even a table for two.

‘We shouldn’t complain,’ Benny said. ‘It’s good for the economy.’

A middle-aged man in a faded boating-blazer was waving at them from a corner of the bar, trying to get their attention. He was with a woman with a headful of greying curls, kept in place with a red beret. The man looked like an over-dressed commentator for the Boat Race. The woman looked like an aging doyenne of the Paris catwalk.

‘Is that Jeremy Melon?’ Tom asked.

‘And Demelza. I do believe they’ve found us a table,’ Benny said. He grabbed his drink and steered through the press of evening drinkers.

‘Four seats about to become free,’ Jeremy said, nodding towards a party of young men who seemed to be getting their things together to leave.

‘Darling, it’s so wonderful to see you!’ Demelza said. She kissed Tom expansively on the cheek, and then made a point of holding him at arm’s length to survey him. ‘You’ve grown simply enormous. And utterly gorgeous.’ She slid into the seat vacated by one of the departing drinkers, barely before the man’s bottom had left it. She patted the space next to her, inviting Tom to squeeze alongside. ‘How long have you been away?’ she asked.

‘Two years. Apart from occasional visits to see my Nan.’

‘Two years, dear God!’ Demelza sighed. ‘And you have transformed from a gosling into a swan. It simply isn’t fair is it, Jeremy? Young men showing up in the village like this, reminding all the rest of us of our desperate headlong cascade into decrepitude, to say nothing of our fading libidos.’

‘Indeed,’ Jeremy said.

‘You haven’t changed a bit Demelza,’ Tom said, laughing.

‘He’s learned flattery as well,’ Demelza wailed. ‘What hope is left for the poor women of St Piran with this creature in our midst? Jeremy! Would you get us all a drink?’

Jeremy took Tom’s glass.

That was about seven o’clock. Or not long after. At seven-thirty, they had another round. At eight o’clock, Demelza bought a round. All four searched through pockets for money to put into a kitty on the table and enough was found for one more round, and then, astonishingly, another. It seemed like the right thing to do. Demelza was drinking gin with bottles of tonic and slices of cucumber. Jeremy had started on ale, but the middle-aged bladder can only take so many pints, so now he was on blended Scotch and water. The young men drank cider. It was the cloudy cider, popular at the Petrel. (The story Jacob the landlord would tell, was that a leg of mutton was thrown into every barrel, and when the meat was dissolved, the cider was ready to drink. Was this true? No one seemed to know. The young men would hold their glasses up to the light to test the hypothesis.)

It was a warm night. Some of the drinkers in the bar dispersed onto tables on the harbour side, once the early diners had vacated. Three young men from Porthcurnow, squeezed into a corner, started to sing sea shanties. A woman sitting across from them played along on a fiddle.

What was the time now?

Late. But it was summer. It wasn’t yet dark. In their corner of the lobsterman’s bar, Tom Horsmith and his companions were on their sixth, or maybe seventh round of drinks, and this time of the evening, as any barman will tell you, is perhaps the most dangerous for social drinkers. They haven’t yet drunk themselves into a stupor. But inhibitions now are paper-thin. Opinions are aired more loudly at this time. Drinkers (young men especially) believe themselves invulnerable at this hour of the night. And so it was, at just this dangerous time, when the fiddle player was taking a break, when a man, alone, came into the bar, and tried to catch the barman’s eye.

‘Well, I’m astonished,’ Tom announced, waving a hand in the direction of the newcomer, and speaking perhaps too loudly, unconcerned whether his words might be heard at the bar. ‘Look who it is.’

‘And who might it be?’

‘No one but the dishonourable purveyor of untruths and deceptions to the unwashed masses,’ Tom said. ‘Mr Marazion House himself. The Dis-Honourable Montague Causley MP.’

We have, at this point in our narrative, quite a cast of characters assembling in the backroom bar of the Petrel, and it might, perhaps, be helpful to arrange some introductions before the rest of this story develops.

At the top of our list, we have Thomas Horsmith. Tom. We have already met him. Born in St Piran and raised by his grandmother, Nan Horsmith. Brother of Morwenna and Connor. An affable young man. Not especially tall. Not especially handsome. Not wealthy. Not worldly. An ordinary young man then. But a man with fire in his belly. A man with passion, and confidence, and drive, and self-belief. His mother, Kelly, had died with depression when Tom was only six, when Morwenna was seven, and Connor was three. That was how Tom would explain it. She died with depression. It’s an illness. People die with it. In reality, she went to bed one night and swallowed a handful of ecstasy pills and who-knows-how-many over-the-counter tablets. Morwenna found her body. It was a long time ago. None of the children had been especially scarred. Not even Morwenna. Tom, now, barely remembered his mother. He didn’t remember that morning. He remembered instead the funeral at the Church of St Piran, high on the hillside overlooking the village, on a wintry morning with seagulls circling the graveside.

Tom’s father was a fisherman from Newlyn, apparently. He was no longer on the scene. All three children took their mother’s name – Horsmith. Not one of them seemed to know exactly who their father was, or whether they shared a single father, or not, and Nan was never helpful with details, and maybe she never knew either. Whatever, none of the children, not Tom, nor Morwenna, nor Connor, ever expended any effort worrying about it.

Tom was, at this stage in the story, a student at University College London. Two years of study done. One still to go. Earth Sciences. A tough subject. But Tom was, by every account we have, a bright young man. He had promise. He was doing well. London, you might think, is not so far from St Piran. Five or six hours by train to Penzance, an hour by bus to Treadangel, and another hour and twenty minutes by coastal footpath to the village. A slow journey but not a hard one. Why had Tom not stayed at home and spent university vacations in St Piran? Well, these things are often complicated, and they were for Tom. The singular truth was, he could find well-paid casual work in London. Less so in St Piran. Even in term time, a job waiting tables at a Covent Garden brasserie could earn him twice what he could earn at Kenny Kennet’s Beachcomber bistro on the quayside. And every pound he earned in London was an extra pound for his grandmother and his siblings, for Nan Horsmith was rarely well enough to work. So, Tom was a student by day, a waiter at lunchtimes and again in the evenings, a pizza-delivery-boy at weekends, and an occasional barman and washer-up of glasses when his timetable would allow. He had an early alarm that would wake him at six, and a daily agenda where every minute was accounted for and carefully budgeted. A lecture, perhaps, at nine, on deformation mechanisms in igneous rocks, and another at ten on sedimentary environments and the geological record, time for a very swift coffee with friends, and at eleven-thirty he would be racing down Charing Cross road to reach the Brasserie St George in time for the early diners at lunch. ‘For you, madam – Leicestershire blue cheese tart, roasted parsnip, apple and walnut salad, and for you, sir, the braised shin of Irish lamb with portobello mushrooms, Welsh rarebit and wilted rocket. Two glasses of Medoc and a sparkling water. Any starters?’ Then back to campus for a two-thirty practical session on mineral resource estimation that would last the rest of the afternoon, leaving less than an hour to grab something to eat in the kitchen of his flat, navigating around the half dozen students of every race and gender (and none) who seemed to hang out there, allowing fifteen minutes for small talk, five minutes to change into a clean shirt and listen to a track from a new Scandinavian band he just had to catch, then close the door to his bedroom and flip open his laptop. Twenty minutes of emails and social media, forty minutes hammering out six hundred words of an essay on volcanoes and their impacts on climate, until an alarm would tell him to move. Move! It was a thirty-four-minute walk from his flat near King’s Cross to the Brasserie St George in Covent Garden. He could catch up on text messages on his phone while he walked. Allow thirty-six minutes in case all the crossing lights were red. ‘Tom! You’re late.’ ‘No Sir, I’m exactly on time.’ And look. Here come the pre-theatre diners. ‘Good evening, I’m Tom. I’m your waiter for this evening. May I get you some menus?’

Tom, on the day of his twentieth birthday, was a work-in-progress, full of potential, and who could tell what virtues or vices might emerge?

Number two on our list of introductions for the altercation at the Petrel, is local naturalist, Dr Jeremy Melon. Jeremy was forty-nine when the altercation occurred. He wasn’t, one should surely say, a man who sought out confrontations, and so his participation in the disagreement was rather out of character. You might say it was the drink talking. Jeremy was the kind of man who would normally engineer an early exit to avoid any unpleasantness, rather than hang around and face the music. He was a man who, generally, sought an easy life. He had run away to St Piran twenty-three years earlier. He hadn’t chosen St Piran. He hadn’t picked the village out on a map. He had simply climbed into his car one night and had driven until he ran out of road. It was a complicated story. But then most stories are. He had been a teacher – a lecturer – at a university in Leeds, and well, there had been a student, a rather good-looking fellow, and Jeremy had become rather too attached, and one thing had led to another, and it all ended with Jeremy in his car, in tears, driving south. In the years since, details of the incident had thankfully been wholly forgotten, even by Jeremy himself, and the events that brought him to the village were rarely ever mentioned. ‘Never look back,’ Jeremy would say. And he never had. He had found a niche, of a sort, writing natural history books, contributing to encyclopaedias, and marking student essays for American colleges. His earnings were small, but so were his outgoings. He would paint watercolour pictures of crabs, lobsters, and the denizens of rock pools, and Kenny Kennet would sell these in his craft shop on the quay. So, he managed.

But since life rarely delivers for any of us a wholly worry-free existence, events had conspired to furnish Jeremy Melon with a copious source of worries in the form of Demelza Trevarrick. They made an odd couple. If, indeed, they were a couple at all. Jeremy had always exhibited rather fluid preferences when it came to the bedroom, and Demelza’s own predilections were equally variable in these matters, informed by the rather hippy-lifestyle to which she aspired, and by her profession as a romantic novelist. ‘I’m doing this for research you understand,’ she would purr suggestively at any man or woman who might be persuaded into anything approximating an intimate embrace. Demelza was St Piran born-and-bred, although no one was quite sure where she had spent her formative years. She had been absent from the village for most of her twenties and almost all of her thirties, and sometimes even in her forties she would be gone for a month, or two months, or a season. But she always returned. ‘This town,’ she would say, ‘it never lets you get away.’ She would laugh off questions about her past, ‘far too murky to share,’ or where she might have lived, ‘everywhere darling except Truro,’ or whether she had ever been married, ‘you can’t possibly expect me to remember every piece of paper I might have signed.’ Her novels, although primarily Cornish in their settings, would often include South of France locations, or encounters in Rome or Milan, and her plots could often drift towards what her publisher would call, ‘the pessimistic end of the romantic spectrum,’ where the central character finds love, and tragically loses it in the final act, coming to terms instead with life alone. They didn’t live together – Jeremy and Demelza – although their cottages were only a short walk apart; but they were rarely seen out of each other’s company. So, life alone may have been a choice for Demelza; or maybe not. And who knew what went on in the bedroom of either cottage in Fish Street? These things are best never enquired about.

One further character then, and we will be done with introductions. Benny Shaunessy. Tom’s friend. Much the same age. A young man as different from Tom, you might think, as it could be possible to find in this village. While Tom was almost a Londoner now, very nearly a city boy, Benny had rarely found reason to travel much further than Treadangel. He was the son of a fisherman, and the grandson of fishermen, and the sea was encoded in his very DNA. Surely, if you were to track his family back, you would find Shaunessys on boats, hauling in nets, right the way back to Noah. While Tom was lanky, Benny was stocky and square. While Tom was restless, Benny was relaxed. Serenity radiated out from him. He could stand all day at the tiller of a boat and never once feel bored. Tom, by contrast, would be itching after just ten minutes. They had been together in the same class at school, Benny and Tom, from the age of five, right the way through primary school, and then on to the comprehensive in Treadangel, and only then, once schoolwork had begun for the first time to feel serious, had any gap grown between them. But these things, when you are friends, when you are best of friends, are of very little consequence. Tom would spend longer with his books than Benny. That was the simple difference. It was the way they were. Benny would watch the world out of the classroom window. He would follow the seagulls across the sky until they were out of sight over Piran Head. ‘Benjamin Shaunessy, would you be so kind as to honour us with your presence,’ the schoolmaster would say. But it was hard. In his mind, Benny could always hear the sea. He could feel the movement of the waves beneath his hard school seat. The rise and fall of the ocean. He could smell the spray. And so, in increments so small they were hard to notice, Benny slipped behind while Tom pulled ahead. No matter. No matter at all. Learning is only one way a man might make a living. There are many others. And who ever heard of book-reading at sea? Yet brotherhood of the kind a man might have when he has a friend since childhood will survive any sort of gulf. Benny Shaunessy was as staunch and loyal a friend as any Tom might have made in the city. They could go months without seeing one another, but five minutes with a cider at Jacob Anderssen’s bar would be enough to put aside any of the unfamiliarity that can grow with separation. They were friends. That was enough. Benny would go to work on his father’s boat. Everyone knew that. Tom Horsmith would go off to university and find different ways to earn money, until one day, disaffected and disappointed, perhaps, he would come back to St Piran. Or maybe he wouldn’t. But either way the friendship would endure, and when you’re nineteen, who cares about these things anyway?

So here we are. In the lobsterman’s bar of the Stormy Petrel Inn and the hour was maybe, somewhere around ten, or eleven, or something in between. There were no clocks on the wall. The fiddle player and the singer were off somewhere, taking a break. The evening was winding down.

Benny had a new phone. He was showing it to Tom. ‘I’ll take a picture,’ he was saying.

And it was at just this point when a man walked into the bar from the outside.

‘Well, I’m astonished,’ Tom said. ‘Look who it is.’

The newcomer looked over to see who was talking.

‘And who might it be?’ asked Jeremy.

‘A dishonourable purveyor of untruths and deceptions to the unwashed masses,’ Tom said. ‘Mr Marazion House himself. Our rarely seen and never heard from member of parliament – the dis-honourable Mr Montague Causley MP.’

That was how it started. If it hadn’t been half past ten at night. If they hadn’t found money for the kitty. If there hadn’t been mutton in the cider. If Tom had been facing the other way.

Monty Causley seemed to draw himself higher with the insult, stretching out his neck like an offended goose. For a moment, he froze in this position, lips pursed, chin extended, eyes blazing.

Time slowed down. An odd silence radiated outwards from the epicentre of the bar, so that even revellers who had not even heard the insult fell suddenly quiet. A woman’s laugh from a distant corner sounded curiously like an intrusion. Causley turned and fixed Tom with a gaze; and at this point, there was no going back. Every eye in the bar was upon them. You cannot retreat from a bar-fight with your dignity intact. Not in the dying hours of the evening.

‘That is a very serious allegation,’ Causley said, coldly. ‘To call a man a liar. To his face. Do you have any evidence to substantiate your accusation? Or is this libel, pure and simple?’

Jeremy Melon broke in. ‘It’s not strictly a libel,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll find libel has to be written down. Perhaps the word you’re looking for is slander.’

‘And he didn’t actually use the word, liar,’ Demelza added.

‘Well, I think you’ll find the expression purveyor of untruths is a synonym of the word liar,’ said Causley. ‘So it amounts to the same thing. Either way he should prove it, or retract his statement, or see me in court.’

Fighting-talk, humidity, self-righteousness, and cider. A lethal combination. Tom rose out of his seat.

‘Tom, don’t…’ said Jeremy.

‘Well, I must apologise for using a synonym,’ Tom said, ‘when I should have used a much more direct word.’ He pointed a finger at the politician, and half turned so he was addressing not just Causley, but most of the drinkers in the bar. ‘This is the man who, as a councillor, promised us a daily bus service from Treadangel. Has anyone here ever seen a bus in St Piran?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘A lie, then. This is the man who, campaigning for parliament, told us he would get export tariffs lifted on Cornish fish sent to Europe. Has he done this?’ He turned back to face the MP. ‘Have you done this? No. A lie. And, Mr Causley, don’t I remember you telling us, if your party was elected, the cottage hospital at Treadangel would be saved from closure? You’ve been in power three years. The hospital closed in February. L. I. E. You promised us shorter hospital waiting lists. You promised us more tax relief for rural businesses. You promised us shore defences on the cliff paths. You promised a big new investment grant for South Cornwall. Do I hear an “L”?’

‘L,’ echoed several voices from the bar.

‘Do I hear an “I”?’

‘I!” A louder response this time, as the drinkers in the Petrel figured out what was going on.

‘Do I hear an “A”?’

‘A!’

‘R?’

‘R!’

‘What does that spell?’

‘LIAR!’ cried the voices of the drinkers.

‘There is your synonym, Mr Montgomery Causley,’ Tom said, referencing the crowd with a flourish of his hand. He looked pleased with himself. ‘Are you going to sue the whole bar?’

Causley looked flustered. ‘None of those accusations are fair,’ he protested. ‘They weren’t lies.’

‘Oh no?’ Tom was enjoying the support of the crowd. ‘Then what were they?’

‘They were aspirations,’ the MP said. ‘They were issues I promised to fight for. Issues I did fight for. If you promise your parents you’ll pass an exam, you are promising to do your best. If you fail the exam, it doesn’t make you a liar That’s the language of politics. You promise to fight for causes you support. You won’t win every fight. You know that. I know it. The voters know it.’

Tom looked unconvinced. ‘So, you promised to fight for all these things, but you lost every fight. Is that what you’re saying? Either you’re a liar, or you’re a rubbish politician then. And if you promise to pass all of your exams, and you fail every single one, doesn’t that start to look like a lie?’ He glanced at the crowd.

‘LIAR!’ came back a chant. ‘LIAR.’

Causley was bristling now. ‘And what is your special relationship with the truth that gives you the right to point the finger?’ he demanded. ‘I work hard for this constituency.’

‘You earn a fortune from your family interest in North Sea Oil,’ Tom said, ignoring Causley’s riposte. ‘You keep a house here, and a riverside apartment in London, and a villa in Italy… so three houses… and you spend what, one week a year here? Two?’

‘My work is in London.’

‘And your constituents are in Cornwall. How inconvenient for you. But you’re right. Broken promises don’t make you a liar. They just make you untrustworthy. And anyway, you know what? I don’t care about any of those things. I don’t care about your broken promises. I just care about the one big lie you tell people. The biggest lie of all.’

There was a sound in the Stormy Petrel of a collective intake of breath. A sense that this little bar-room spat was about to ramp up a level.

‘You’re a climate-denier, Mr Causley!’ Tom jabbed his finger towards the man. ‘You peddle a very dangerous lie. You deny climate change.’

At this, Causley’s expression morphed from a scowl into a wide smile. This accusation had pleased him. He gave a loud and rather awkward laugh and took two steps towards Tom, so the two men were standing face to face. ‘So that’s what this is about? All that self-righteous truth-and-lies stuff? All that drivel about bus routes and fish? I’ve hurt your precious feelings because I tell the truth about climate change?’

‘You don’t tell the truth. You tell lies.’

‘Ahh… I’m so sorry.’ Causley’s tone was sarcastic now. ‘Have I caught the poor delicate snowflake on a sensitive day? Can’t you take a little intellectual rigour applied to your cherished beliefs without descending into cheap ad-hominem insults? Or do we all have to worship the woke gods of global warming and extinction without questioning them?’

The force of this response seemed to rob Tom Horsmith of some of his energy. He appeared to gulp, and Causley used the pause to press home his advantage.

‘I don’t deny science, young man. You know what I do deny? Lack of nuance. Simplification of complex issues. That’s what I deny.’