The Dedication

She read the four chapters at the kitchen table, over a cold cup of tea and the creeping suspicion that she was reading her own diary. The journalist in the story was called Ida Calder. She was thirty-five and stubborn, and she carried a notebook she never quite trusted herself to use. By the end of the fourth chapter, Ida had just noticed a typewriter on a windowsill.

It was uncanny, and it was also good, far better than anything on the guest-room shelves. There was a sentence about the sea that made Iris stop and read it aloud. When she looked up, Rhys was sitting opposite her with his head tilted in her direction, listening with the stillness of a man who has spent his life waiting for a single reader. “Well?” “It’s the best thing you have written since The Salt Road,” she said. “And you can’t publish it as Tern.”

“You have known all week,” she said slowly. “That’s why you let me find page 87. That’s why you told me everything. You wanted someone to tell you it was time.” “I wanted someone to tell me it was good,” Rhys said. “Time is a different matter. Mrs Pryor has been telling me it was time for ten years, but she is family. She is obliged to say so.” From the stove, without turning round, Mrs Pryor said, “I am obliged to nothing. I just happen to be right.”

On Monday morning the ferry came back, and the sea was so calm that it seemed embarrassed about the weekend. Iris stood on the quay with her bag while Davy loaded crates behind her. Rhys had walked down the hill on Mrs Pryor’s arm, which he permitted for exactly the length of the road. “Will you write about Tern?” he asked. “Not a word,” she said. “But I shall tell my editor something true: that I spent three days on an island with the best-kept secret in publishing, and that it is not mine to tell.”

“She will sack you.” “Probably,” Iris admitted, and to her own surprise she smiled. “But for years I have wondered what I would do if I had nothing to lose, and it turns out that I would wait for the next chapter.”

Fourteen months later, a parcel arrived at her flat. Inside was a hardback with a lighthouse on the cover and a name she had never expected to see there: The Last Ferry, by Edmund Rhys. She opened it at the dedication page. “For I. C., who read page 87 and kept her word.” Underneath, in a hand she did not recognise, but which she thought she understood, someone had added in pencil: “Chapter ten is the best yet.”