Lantern market
The square can’t decide whether it’s winter or a damp reprise of October: drizzle so fine it seems baked into the air, cobbles shining like wet slate, the smell of chip oil and cinnamon vying for the same lungful. Fairy-light ropes sag between pollarded plane trees; the tannoy leaks Sinatra through a speaker already half-drowned in condensation. I squeeze Emma’s glove, Murphy trotting a polite half-pace behind, head perilously close to swinging toddler lanterns.
No voices from the Roberts radio for weeks now. No ledger or trawler anomalies, no new initials. Just silence, if silence can be counted as a development. I tell myself we’re just here for mulled something and a walk that dodges home-improvement clutter.
A stall selling second-hand books has colonised the steps of the old insurance office. Dog-eared Penguins, regional ghost stories, a laminated tray of commemorative teaspoons. Leaning against a crate, half forgotten, is a framed pencil sketch: steam trawler at quarter angle, bowsprit lost in fog. No name on the hull, just the artist’s tiny monogram in the corner — too smudged to read. The shading is wrong in a way I recognise: rigging half-erased, horizon tilting as though the paper warped while still wet. Emma follows my pause, but I shake my head. The stallholder’s busy haggling over Agatha Christies, so we drift on.
Crowd thickenings split us near the coffee van. I queue; Emma is already drawn to a ceramics table where mugs shaped like acorns are selling faster than the potter can bag them. Someone jostles me, murmurs sorry, the word frosting in the air. Another shoulder brushes mine — man carrying bundles of dried rosemary bound with coarse fishing twine. The steam from the espresso machine hisses against the drizzle, becomes cloud. A woman beside me remarks to no one that “it used to be louder here — now it just fogs and goes,” then laughs like she’s apologised to the weather.
I drink the Americano too fast; cardboard stitches heat across my fingers.
I found Emma on the low wall that skirts the churchyard, bell tower lost in mist. She’d taken a seat while I queued, sketchbook already on her knee when I returned. It was open on a drawing of my old workshop and yard, graphite on cream: the harbour mesh fence, the Landy parked skewed behind it, horizon slipping like a wonky picture frame. No shading on the sky, just blank. Space.
“It’s good,” I say, meaning more than that. “Didn’t know the fence made the shortlist.”
“Not sure it’s art,” she answers, tucking a strand of hair that’s found the damp. “Just what my hand wanted to do.”
We sit long enough for the stone to steal warmth from our coats. Behind us a brass quartet attempts In the Bleak Midwinter, the mist turning every note to vellum.
Children pass in flotilla, paper boats on bamboo poles glowing from battery tea-lights. One totters close — lantern daubed ice-blue, initials H.T. scrawled near the prow in a child’s uncertain hand. The letters register. Familiar. A flick of static, then gone. Still no voice on the Roberts. But here, in a child’s hand — another pulse.
I inhale sharply, then let it go. The boy’s cape of black bin-liner snaps wetly as he skips to rejoin the tide.
We leave before the final carol. Murphy splashes through a puddle wide as a flagstone, detonates droplets up my trouser leg. Emma laughs, links her arm through mine. The market recedes into a blur of colour — string lights, brass frost, drift of fryer steam. Somewhere a tannoy voice mis-pronounces Wassail and the mist erases the punch-line.
Halfway home the drizzle thickens; porch lights halo in the damp. I keep her hand in mine, a lantern of another sort, and the silence that’s followed us since September feels, tonight, less like omission and more like breath — held, yes, but steady.