A Good Catch: The perfect Cornish escape full of secrets

The fat girl bum-shuffled her way towards them.

‘All right, Jesse?’ she smiled.

‘Yeah.’

‘What’s your name?’ the girl asked Greer.

‘Greer. I am named after a famous film star who was very beautiful.’ Greer couldn’t help herself.

‘Oh,’ said Loveday, her smile pushing her fat freckled cheeks up towards her eyes. ‘That’s nice. I’m called Loveday after my dad’s granny.’

Jesse’s eyes were darting around the gathering faces. ‘Seen Mickey?’ he asked Loveday.

‘He’s there.’ Loveday pointed at an open-faced, tall and very skinny boy standing on the other side of the hall.

‘Mickey,’ Jesse called. ‘Mickey, come ’ere, you beggar.’

‘Who’s he?’ Greer asked Loveday.

‘Jesse’s best friend. Do you want to be my best friend?’

Greer had never had a friend and thought that she might as well start with this poor fat girl. ‘Yes.’

‘Can I tell you a secret then?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m goin’ to marry Jesse.’

Greer frowned. ‘Has he asked you?’

‘No. But I am going to marry him.’ Loveday smiled, then had a thought. ‘You can marry Mickey! That way we’ll all be best friends for ever.’ Greer looked at Mickey, who winked at her. She frowned back. Loveday was tugging at her sleeve and saying something. ‘Do you like Abba?’

It was a long day. The new children were introduced to their teacher, Mrs Bond, who took them to their classroom. Loveday grabbed two desks next to each other for her and Greer. Jesse and Mickey were a row in front. Mrs Bond called the register, explained a few school rules – spitting and swearing were not to be tolerated, hard work was to be rewarded – and lessons began.

Greer already knew her numbers and most of her letters. She wrote her name quite clearly on her new exercise book.

Loveday was impressed. ‘What you written there?’

‘My name.’

‘Really?’ She leant forward and poked Jesse in the back.

‘Ow.’ He turned round. ‘What did you do that for?’

‘Greer can write. Look.’ She showed him Greer’s book.

He looked at Greer, ‘Did you write that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Clever.’

With that one word, Jesse’s fate was sealed. Greer decided it was she who was going to marry Jesse. Not Loveday.

2 (#ua1629851-8146-5fc8-8ac7-cc02047107f9)

Spring 1987

‘You’d do a lot worse than to marry that girl,’ Edward Behenna told his son.

‘Shuttup, Dad.’ Jesse Behenna ducked out of reach of his father’s hand as he tried to ruffle his son’s hair.

‘It would be a dream come true for your granddad,’ continued Edward as he pulled out an ancient wooden chair, scraping its legs across the worn red tiles before seating himself at the kitchen table opposite his younger son.

‘If he were still alive,’ murmured Jesse.

Jesse’s mother, Jan, slid the tray of pasties she’d been making into the top oven of the Aga; she banged the door shut and swung round. ‘Edward, don’t start all this again,’ she warned him, irritated.

But Edward hardly seemed to hear her. ‘I promised my dad, as he promised ’is father afore ’im, that I’d do all I could to build the business and make Behenna’s Boats the biggest fleet in Trevay.’

‘And you have, Dad,’ Jesse assured him. ‘Behenna’s is the biggest fishing fleet on the north coast of Cornwall.’

Edward nodded, but a frown marred his lined face. The pressures of running the business were very different from those of his father’s day. This year, the European Union had really become involved and laws were being passed governing fishing quotas for member states. Cornwall and Devon MPs had tabled questions in the Commons about their impact on their fishing industry. How could they all hope to keep going in this climate, when the government was impounding vessels and fining their owners? This interference, along with upstarts like Bryn Clovelly screwing them for every penny down at the fish market, were driving some fishermen to the wall.

The old ways were dying. Small fleets were struggling to remain at sea and Edward knew that it was the likes of Clovelly who represented the future. Edward’s father had fished these waters for fifty years, man and boy. Sometimes his fish would be bought by a fishmonger from somewhere as exotic as Plymouth, but Clovelly saw the swollen wallets of the flash London City boys as rich pickings; he was buying monkfish for restaurants in Chelsea and exporting scallops to New York.

‘Aye, it is. I’ve been working the boats since I was fourteen and left school. I didn’t have your education.’

Edward knew he was a good fisherman, one of the best, but being an entrepreneur, like Bryn Clovelly, was beyond him. Behenna’s Boats had provided a good living for many families up to now, but carrying on as a lone operation was looking like an increasingly risky option. Clovelly would love nothing more than to add a big share in the Behenna fleet to his portfolio and Edward was finding his offer harder and harder to resist. He knew there were men with fewer scruples than he who would bite Clovelly’s hand off for a deal such as the one he was offering.

‘I’m only staying on to do O levels,’ Jesse reminded Edward. ‘Then I’m full time working at sea on the fleet. But when I’m a bit older and I’ve saved up a bit, I’m off travelling.’

His father looked at him as if he’d just said he was off to buy a Ferrari. ‘Go travelling? Travelling? There’s more to find in your own home town than you’d ever find travelling.’

‘Oh, that’s right. I’d forgotten. There’re the Hanging Gardens of Bodmin, The Pyramids of Porthleven, The Colossus of St Columb … Cleopatra’s Needle up Wadebridge. Silly me.’

Edward scowled at his son. ‘That’s enough of yorn lip, boy. You’re the next generation. Greer Clovelly is a lovely girl and the only child Bryn and his lah-di-dah wife ever managed. Poor sod, never ’ad a son. Poor me, I got two and neither of them any bleddy good.’

‘Leave off mithering the poor lad. He’s only sixteen. He’s got ideas of his own,’ Jan said.

‘I knew by his age that you were the one for me,’ Edward told her, and Jan groaned inwardly as Edward played his familiar riff. ‘As soon as I saw you, twelve and lookin’ like an angel, I said to my mate, “There’s the girl I’m gonna marry”.’

‘Yeah and, more fool me, I did marry you.’

Edward caught Jan’s hand as she walked from the Aga to the sink. ‘No regrets though, maid? No regrets?’

Jan felt the warmth of her husband’s rough and calloused hand on hers and wondered. She’d had plans to travel to the Greek Islands and sleep on the beach under the stars, like the character she’d read about in a book once. The last book she’d read. Must be more than twenty years ago. But Edward had wooed her into submission and she never did send off the passport application form that had sat on her mother’s dresser for two years after she’d married. For their honeymoon, Edward had taken her to Exeter and they’d seen a rep production of The Mousetrap. Edward had promised her that the next show they’d see would be in Paris. Almost twenty years on and they still hadn’t made that trip.