Read Online Caedmon’s Song by Peter Robinson - Free Book Online Page A

you’re working on a book.’
    ‘Well, I’m not famous or anything. It’s my first one. You won’t have heard of me.’
    ‘Maybe one day, who knows?’
    ‘Who knows? It’s a historical book, though, more of an academic study, really. I mean, it’s not fiction or anything.’
    ‘What’s it about?’
    ‘That’s hard to say. It’s partly about early Christianity, especially on the east coast here. You know, Bede, Caedmon, St Hilda, the Synod of Whitby.’
    Keith shook his head slowly. ‘’Fraid you’ve lost me. I’m just a simple Aussie law student. Sounds fascinating, though.’
    ‘It is,’ Martha said, glad to have lost him. With luck, there would be no more questions about what she was doing. She finished her cigarette, then drained her glass. Keith
immediately went for refills.
    ‘Do you know anything about the fishing industry here?’ Martha asked when he came back.
    He squinted at her. His eyes really were a sharp blue, as if he had spent so much time staring into blue skies and oceans that they had taken their colour from the water and air. ‘Fishing
industry? That’s a funny question. No, I can’t really say I do.’
    ‘I just wanted to see them bring in the catch, that’s all,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s supposed to be very interesting. They take them to that long shed down by the
harbour and auction them off.’
    ‘That’ll be on Friday,’ Keith said.
    ‘Fish on Friday? Is that a joke?’
    Keith laughed. ‘No. What I mean is, I heard they go out on a Sunday and come back Friday, so that’s when the catch comes in. That’s the big boats. Little boats, like keel boats
and cobles, come and go every day, but they’ve so little to sell it’s all over before the sun comes up.’
    Martha thought for a moment, making mental calculations, trying to remember what happened on which day. The person she was looking for must have a small boat of his own, she concluded. That
might be easy to trace if she knew where to look. There should be a register of some kind . . .
    ‘It’s only a couple of days,’ Keith said. ‘Pity I won’t be here. You’ll have to get up early in the morning to see the boats come in, but the auctions go on
for quite a while.’
    ‘What? Sorry.’
    ‘To see the boats come in. I said you’ll have to get up early. They come in before dawn.’
    ‘Oh, well, I’m sure the seagulls will wake me.’
    Keith laughed. ‘Noisy little blighters, aren’t they? Tell me, do you come from this part of the country?’
    ‘Yorkshire? No.’
    ‘I thought your accent was different. Where you from, then?’
    ‘Exeter,’ Martha lied.
    ‘Never been there.’
    ‘You’ve not missed much. It’s just a city, like all the rest. Tell me about Australia.’
    And Keith told her. It seemed to suit both of them. Keith could find suitable expression for his homesickness in talking about Sydney life, and Martha could pretend to be interested. The whole
evening was beginning to seem like a farce to her, and she wondered why she had bothered to agree to meet him at all. It brought back disturbing memories, too, mostly of her years as a teenager,
pretending to be interested in what the boys said as they showed off, and then, later, fending off their wandering hands for as long as it seemed proper to do so. Would Keith turn out to be just
like the rest, too? She put that last thought right out of her head.
    ‘. . . as flash as a rat with a gold tooth,’ Keith was saying. ‘But that’s just what people from Melbourne say. It’s hardly surprising Sydney’s like a flashy
whore to them. Melbourne’s more like an old maid in surgical stockings . . .’
    The place was filling up. Already most of the tables were taken, and three men had just started to play darts. Martha nodded in all the right places. She soon found that she’d finished her
second half-pint.
    ‘Another?’ Keith asked.
    ‘Are you trying to get me drunk?’
    ‘Why would I want to do that?’
    ‘To take