The Cold Water Club Meets at Six

The thermos arrived on the rail somewhere between the turning of the tide and the first of us coming down the steps, and in four months nobody had caught the person who left it. Tartan, dented on one shoulder, the cap screwed on hard enough to need two hands — and inside, always ginger tea, always scalding, always exactly enough for seven.

There were seven of us. That was the part that kept me awake.

I had come to Ferryhead in November for a job that folded in December, which left me with a rented flat above a shut-up shop and a great deal of morning. Hesper found me on the harbour wall in the dark, wearing two coats, and said the way people here say things, as if continuing a conversation started years ago: "You'll want gloves. The hands go first and they don't tell you."

So I joined. Six o'clock, forty-one stone steps, the sea the colour of an old coin. You go in to the waist and your body files an urgent complaint. You go in to the shoulders and the complaint becomes a roar, and then, somewhere around the seventieth second, the roar stops and something very old inside you sits up and pays attention. Dai counted for us. Seventy-two seconds was the club minimum in January. Anything more was showing off.

And afterwards, shaking, laughing like idiots, we drank ginger tea from a flask no one owned.

We had theories. Dai favoured the harbourmaster, who had a soft spot for Hesper and a Thursday habit of walking his brother's dog past the steps. Nina was convinced it was the night staff at the care home on the terrace, going off shift. Bryn, who was nineteen and read too much, suggested a ghost, and Hesper said that if it was a ghost it had a good hand with root ginger and she'd not hear a word against it.

"Leave it be," Hesper told me, when I said I might come early and watch. "Some things keep better wrapped."

But I wasn't sleeping. The radiators in the flat ticked all night like a small impatient animal, and at half past four on a sleeting Tuesday in February I gave up, put on the two coats, and went down to the water in the dark.

I sat in the lee of the boat shed with my hood up and my breath going up past my eyes, and for twenty minutes there was nothing but the slap and suck of the swell against stone.

Then a light came on at the top of the steps. Not a torch — a phone, held low, pointed at the ground.

She came down the way you'd lower a piano. Stick in the right hand, left hand hooked over the rail, both feet to each step, a pause on every fourth. Forty-one steps. It took her eighteen minutes. At the bottom she stood for a long moment with her head back, and I thought she was catching her breath, and then I realised she was looking at the water.

She took a flask out of a canvas bag, set it on the rail, squared it up like a photograph on a mantelpiece, and turned to go back up.

"That's a long way to come," I said, "for somebody who doesn't stay."

She didn't jump. That was the first thing I admired about her. She simply turned her phone-light on me and said, "You're the one from the empty shop."

"Ro."

"Marged Vaughan." A pause. "Nineteen sixty-eight to two thousand and nine, every morning except the year of my hip and the week my husband died, and even then I came down on the Friday." She said it flatly, like a licence number. "I started that club. We called ourselves the Committee, because it sounded respectable when the harbourmaster complained."

I stood up too fast and my knees objected. "Then why don't you—"

"Because down takes me eighteen minutes and up takes me fifty-five," she said. "If I waited for you lot, I'd still be on the steps at seven with Dai underneath me like a scaffolding pole, and the whole terrace watching out their windows. I'd rather be a mystery." She hitched the bag up her shoulder. "A mystery is dignified. A slow old woman is a public service announcement."

The sleet came sideways off the harbour mouth and neither of us moved.

"Don't tell them," she said.

"All right." And then, because the cold makes me reckless: "But I'm coming Thursday."

Fifty-Five Minutes Up

I didn't help her. That was the arrangement, negotiated on the second morning and enforced on all the others. I wasn't to take her arm, or carry the bag, or — God forbid — go up behind her with my hands out. I was allowed to walk alongside and talk, and she was allowed to be too out of breath to answer, and neither of us was to remark on it.

So I talked. I told her about the job that folded and the interview I'd fumbled and my mother's phone calls, which always ended with and are you eating. She told me about the winter of the great sea-fog, when they'd swum by shouting; about a dog called Captain who could only be got out of the water by producing a hat; about her husband, who never swam once in forty years but stood at the top every morning holding a towel like a man waiting at an airport.

On the ninth morning, on the fourth landing, she said, without any run-up at all: "I'd like to get wet."

"Marged."

"Not swim. I know what I am." She looked out at the swell, that dull green heaving. "I would like to stand in it up to here." She put the edge of her hand at her collarbone. "Once."

"Then I have to tell them."

She was quiet for four steps. "Go on, then," she said. "Tell them."

They took it better than she feared and worse than she hoped, which is to say Hesper cried and then denied it, Dai said well obviously in a voice that suggested he had suspected for weeks, and Bryn borrowed the folding beach chair from the lifeguard shed and greased the wheels with something from his father's garage that smelled of aniseed.

We did it on the first Saturday in March, on a slack tide, in a flat grey calm. Six of us got her down the forty-one steps in eleven minutes, and she complained about every one of them. At the bottom she stood up out of the chair on her own — she insisted, and nobody argued with that voice — and we went in either side of her, Hesper on her left, me on her right, Dai in front walking backwards like a man guiding a lorry.

The water took her ankles, her knees, her waist. She made a sound I won't try to spell. And then the swell lifted and for a moment her feet were simply not on the bottom any more, and she was held between us, weightless, eighty-six years old, laughing with her mouth open at the sky.

Dai counted. Seventy-two seconds. Club minimum, no showing off.

Afterwards she sat on the third step wrapped in three towels and two coats, pink as a scald, and looked at the flask on the rail with an expression of deep suspicion.

"That's not mine," she said.

"No," I said. "I got up early."

She held out her hand for a cup, and I poured, and the steam went up between us into the cold, and there was enough — there was, at last, enough for eight.