The Fire Child: The 2017 gripping psychological thriller from the bestselling author of The Ice Twins
S. K. Tremayne
The chilling new psychological thriller by S. K. Tremayne, author of the Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller, THE ICE TWINS.IT TOOK ONLY SIX WORDS TO SHATTER HER DREAMS…When Rachel marries handsome David and moves to a beautiful house in Cornwall, she gains wealth, love, and an affectionate stepson, Jamie.But then Jamie’s behaviour changes, and her perfect life begins to unravel. He makes disturbing predictions, claiming to be haunted by the spectre of his late mother. As September slips away and December looms, Rachel grows increasingly suspicious of her husband – and begins to suspect there might be truth in Jamie’s words:‘YOU WILL BE DEAD BY CHRISTMAS’
Copyright (#u3a7a5c6b-273f-5828-94a8-202012576fba)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is
entirely coincidental.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Copyright © S. K. Tremayne 2016
S. K. Tremayne asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Photographs 1-3, 5-8, 11, 13-16, 18-19 © S. K. Tremayne
Photographs 4, 9, 10, 17 © The Royal Cornwall Museum
Photograph 12 courtesy of the Cornish Studies Library, Redruth
(Photograph reference no. Corn02273)
Cover design by Richard Augustus © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017.
Cover photographs © Sylvia Cook / Arcangel Images (boy);
Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) (all other images).
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Source ISBN: 9780008105860
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780008105853
Version 2018-01-26
Dedication (#u3a7a5c6b-273f-5828-94a8-202012576fba)
For Danielle
Table of Contents
Cover (#u46708828-1e99-5858-b792-d7472837df6f)
Title Page (#uc6b1bdfb-44e4-5115-a193-7c1d8a1dcc91)
Copyright (#u92e2afe7-f909-569b-b78c-d79c1f962a39)
Dedication (#ud193963a-ecbd-54b3-a8f6-1a5567a77672)
Author’s Note (#ub754136b-2f0f-5c48-91f0-fdefecbd6b6a)
Acknowledgements (#u6cb6b5c7-8e8d-57af-ac6d-8c2d1e31f8ea)
178 Days Before Christmas (#ua8da24a0-20b8-5e71-97ef-81d83a114b4a)
162 Days Before Christmas (#uf14932da-54b2-5ced-b2e3-161b815e7b37)
149 Days Before Christmas (#u3034c062-127f-5917-a935-3e90530d48c3)
136 Days Before Christmas (#u76123e68-225d-57a4-b49d-04cb947edc07)
110 Days Before Christmas (#u6a15353d-3465-5b7f-8e3f-8352fdf29dbb)
109 Days Before Christmas (#u912b478d-ed49-56a0-9335-71a77b533039)
102 Days Before Christmas (#u2b16e9cc-0787-55df-a211-6e60e4af9e62)
82 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
77 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
76 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
73 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
72 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
56 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
39 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
35 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
34 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
32 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
30 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
21 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
19 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
9 Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
Three Days Before Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
Christmas Eve (#litres_trial_promo)
Christmas Eve (#litres_trial_promo)
Christmas Eve (#litres_trial_promo)
Christmas Eve (#litres_trial_promo)
Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
Christmas Day (#litres_trial_promo)
Christmas Day (#litres_trial_promo)
Summer (#litres_trial_promo)
Read on for an exclusive extract from the chilling new psychological thriller from S. K. Tremayne (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by S. K. Tremayne (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#u3a7a5c6b-273f-5828-94a8-202012576fba)
Morvellan Mine is an invention. It is, however, clearly based on the spectacular and historic mines scattered along the rugged cliffs of West Penwith, Cornwall. The tin and copper mines of Botallack, Geevor and the Levant were particular inspirations.
Tin has been extracted from Cornwall for maybe four thousand years. At the age of ten my maternal grandmother Annie Jory worked as a ‘bal maiden’ – a girl employed to crush rocks with a hammer – in the rich mines of St Agnes, North Cornwall.
This book is, therefore, written in memory of my Cornish ancestors: farmers, fishermen, smugglers and miners.
Acknowledgements (#u3a7a5c6b-273f-5828-94a8-202012576fba)
I would like to thank, as ever, Eugenie Furniss, Jane Johnson, Sarah Hodgson, Kate Elton and Anne O’Brien for their wise advice and many editorial insights. My thanks also to Sophie Hannah.
The photos in the book, of historic Cornish mining scenes, were taken by the Cornish photographer, John Charles Burrow (1852–1914). The images date from the 1890s, when Burrow was commissioned by the owners of four of Cornwall’s deepest mines, Dolcoath, East Pool, Cook’s Kitchen and Blue Hills, to capture scenes of life underground.
The original photographs are now kept at the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, England.
178 Days Before Christmas (#u3a7a5c6b-273f-5828-94a8-202012576fba)
Morning
The tunnels go under the sea. It’s a thought I can’t easily dismiss. The tunnels go under the sea. For a mile, or more.
I’m standing in the Old Dining Room, where the windows of my enormous new home face north: towards the Atlantic, and the cliffs of Penwith, and a silhouetted blackness. This dark twinned shape is Morvellan Mine: the Shaft House, and the Engine House.
Even on a cloudless June day, like today, the ruins of Morvellan look obscurely sad, or oddly reproachful. It’s like they are trying to tell me something, yet they cannot and will not. They are eloquently muted. The rough-house Atlantic makes all the noise, the booming waves riding the tides above the tunnels.
‘Rachel?’
I turn. My new husband stands in the doorway. His shirt is blinding white, his suit is immaculate, nearly as dark as his hair, and the weekend’s stubble has gone.
‘Been looking for you everywhere, darling.’
‘Sorry. I’ve been wandering. Exploring. Your amazing house!’
‘Our house, darling. Ours.’
He smiles, comes close, and we kiss. It’s a morning kiss, a going-to-work-kiss, not meant to lead anywhere – but it still thrills me, still gives me that scary and delicious feeling: that someone can have such power over me, a power I am somehow keen to accept.
David takes my hand, ‘So. Your first weekend in Carnhallow …’
‘Mmm.’
‘So tell me – I want to know you’re all right! I know it must be challenging – the remoteness, all the work that needs doing. I’ll understand if you have misgivings.’
I lift his hand, and kiss it. ‘Misgivings? Don’t be daft. I love it. I love you and I love the house. I love it all, love the challenge, love Jamie, love the way we’re hidden away, love it love it love it.’ I look into his green-grey eyes, and I do not blink. ‘David, I’ve never been happier. Never in all my life. I feel like I have found the place I was meant to be, and the man I was meant to be with.’
I sound totally gushing. What happened to the feisty feminist Rachel Daly I used to be? Where has she gone? My friends would probably tut at me. Six months ago I would have tutted at me: at the girl who gave up her freedom and her job and her supposedly exciting London life to be the bride of an older, richer, taller widower. One of my best friends, Jessica, laughed with sly delight when I told her my sudden plans. My God, darling, you’re marrying a cliché!
That hurt for a second. But I soon realized it didn’t matter what my friends think, because they are still there, back in London, sardined into Tube trains, filing into dreary offices, barely making the mortgage every month. Clinging on to London life like mountaineers halfway up a rockface.
And I am not holding on for dear life any more. I’m far away, with my new husband and his son and his mother, down here at the very end of England, in far West Cornwall, a place where England, as I am discovering, becomes something stranger and stonier, a land of dreaming hard granite that glistens after rain, aland where rivers run through woods like deep secrets, where terrible cliffs conceal shyly exquisite coves, aland where moorland valleys cradle wonderful houses. Like Carnhallow.
I even love the name of this house. Carnhallow.
My daydreaming head rests on David’s shoulder. Like we are halfway to dancing.
But his mobile rings, breaking the spell. Lifting it from his pocket he checks the screen, then kisses me again – his two fingers up-tilting my chin – and he walks away to take the call.
I might once, I guess, have found this gesture patronizing. Now it makes me want sex. But I always want sex with David. I wanted sex the moment my friend Oliver said, Come and meet someone, I think you’ll get on, at that art gallery, and I turned around and there he was, ten years older than me, ten inches taller than me.
I wanted David on our first date, three days later, I wanted him when he bought me the very first drink, I wanted him when he then told a perfectly judged, obviously flirtatious joke, I wanted him when we talked about the rainy March weather and he sipped his champagne and said, ‘Ah but where Sergeant March is skirmishing, Captain April will headquarter, and General June will follow with his mistresses,’ and I wanted something more than sex when he told me about his house and its history and he showed me the photo of his beautiful boy.
That was one of the moments I fell: when I realized how different David was to any man I had met before, and how different he is to me. Just a girl from the council flats of south-east London. A girl who escaped reality by reading. A girl who dislikes chiller cabinets in supermarkets because they remind her of the times when Mum couldn’t afford to pay for heating.
And then, David.
We were in a Soho bar. We were drunk. Nearly kissing. He showed me the photo of that enchanting boy again. I don’t know why, but I knew, immediately. I wanted a child like that. Those singular blue eyes, the dark hair from his handsome dad.
I asked David to tell me more: more about his house, about little Jamie, the family history.
He smiled.
‘There’s a wood surrounding Carnhallow House, it’s called Ladies Wood. It runs right up Carnhallow Valley, to the moors.’
‘OK. A wood. I love woods.’
‘The trees in Ladies Wood are predominantly rowans, with some ash, hazel and oak. We know that these same rowan woods date back at least to the Norman Conquest, because they are marked on Anglo Saxon charters, and continuously therefrom. That means the rowan trees have been here for a thousand years. In Carnhallow Valley.’
‘I still don’t get it.’
‘Do you know what my surname means? What “Kerthen” means, in Cornish?’
I shook my head, trying not to be distracted by his smile, the champagne, the photos of the boy, the house, the idea of it all.
‘This might amaze you, David, but I didn’t do Cornish at school.’
He chuckled. ‘Kerthen means rowan tree. Which means the Kerthens have lived in Carnhallow for a thousand years, amongst the rowans from which we took our name. Shall we have some more champagne?’
He leaned close to pour; and as he did, he kissed me full on the lips for the first time. We got in a taxi ten minutes later. That’s all it took. Just that.
The memories fall away: I am back in the present, as David finishes his call, and frowns.
‘OK, sorry, but I really do have to go. Can’t miss the one o’clock flight – they’re panicking.’
‘Nice to be indispensable.’
‘I don’t think you could ever call corporate lawyers indispensable. Viola players are more important.’ He smiles. ‘But corporate law is ludicrously overpaid. So what are you going to do today?’
‘Carry on exploring, I guess. Before I touch anything, I need to know the basics. I mean, I don’t even know how many bedrooms there are.’
‘Eighteen,’ he says. Then adds with a frown: ‘I think.’
‘David! Listen to you. Eeek. How can you not know how many bedrooms you have?’
‘We’ll try them all in time. I promise.’ Shirt cuff pulled, he checks his silver watch. ‘If you want to do some real research, Nina’s books are in the Yellow Drawing Room. The ones she was using, for her restorations.’
The name stings a little, though I hide it.
Nina Kerthen, née Valéry. David’s first wife. I don’t know much about her: I’ve seen a couple of photos,I know she was beautiful, Parisienne, young, posh, blonde. I know that she died in an accident at Morvellan Mine, eighteen months ago. I know that her husband and in particular her son – my brand-new, eight-year-old stepson Jamie – must still be grieving, even if they try not to show it.
And I know, very very clearly, that one of my jobs here in Carnhallow is to rescue things: to be the best stepmother in the world to this sad and lovely little boy.
‘I’ll have a look,’ I say brightly. ‘At the books. Maybe get some ideas. Go and catch your plane.’
He turns for a final kiss, I step back.
‘No – go! Kiss me again we’ll end up in the fourteenth bedroom, and then it will be six o’clock.’
I’m not lying. David’s laugh is dark and sexy.
‘I’ll Skype you tonight, and see you Friday.’
With that, he departs. I hear doors slam down long hallways, then the growl of his Mercedes. Then comes the silence: the special summery silence of Carnhallow, soundtracked by the whisper of the distant sea.
Picking up my phone, I open my notebook app.
Continuing Nina’s restoration of this huge house is not going to be easy. I do have some artistic talent to help: I have a degree in photography from Goldsmiths College. A degree which turned out to be utterly pointless, as I basically graduated the same afternoon that photography collapsed as a paying career, and so I ended up teaching photography to kids who would never themselves become photographers.
This was, I suppose, another reason I was happy to give up London life: the meaninglessness was getting to me. I wasn’t even taking photos any more. Just taking buses through the rain to my cramped and shared Shoreditch flat. Which I couldn’t actually afford.
But now that I have no real job, I can, ironically, apply these artistic gifts. Such as they are.
Armed with my phone I begin my explorations: trying to get a proper mental map of Carnhallow. I’ve been here one week, but we’ve spent most of that week in the bedroom, the kitchen, or on the beaches, enjoying the blissful summer weather. Much of my stuff from London is still in boxes. There’s even a suitcase left to unpack from our honeymoon: our gloriously hedonistic, sensuously expensive trip to Venice, where David bought me his favourite martini, in Harry’s Bar, by St Mark’s Square: the gin in a shot glass, chilled nearly to ice ‘and faintly poisoned with vermouth’, as David put it. I love the way David puts things.
But that is already the past, and this is my future. Carnhallow.
Striking south like an Antarctic explorer, I head down the New Hall, examining furniture and décor, taking notes as I go. The walls here are linenfold panelling, I think, decorated with engravings of the many Cornish tin and copper mines once owned by the Kerthens: the adits and tunnels of Botallack, and Morvellan, the shafts and streamworks of Wheal Chance and Wheal Rose. Elsewhere there are ancient photos of the mines in their heyday: wistful pictures of frozen labour, forgotten industry, men in waistcoats pushing wheelbarrows, chimneys smoking by the sea.
The New Hall ends at a grand double door. I know what lies beyond: the Yellow Drawing Room. Pushing the door and stepping through, I gaze around with a kind of helpless longing.
Because this room, already restored, with its leaded windows overlooking the dreaming flowery green of the south lawns, is probably the most beautiful room of all, and therefore one of the most daunting.
I need to make the rest of Carnhallow as impressive as this. It won’t be easy; Nina had excellent taste. Yet the beauty of the Yellow Drawing Room shows the potential of Carnhallow. If I can match what Nina did here, Carnhallow will be startlingly lovely. And mine.
The idea is so dazzling it makes me giddy. And happy.
I have some notes in my phone about the Yellow Drawing Room. They don’t do much, however, but show my ignorance. I’ve noted a ‘blue pig on the table’, ‘18th-century funerary urns?’ and ‘Mameluke knives’. Also ‘David’s father’s pack of cards’, ‘they played chouette’, and ‘tortoiseshell inlay in brass’.
What do I do with all this? How do I even begin? I’ve already had a quick skim through Nina’s books: books full of wise but puzzling advice on Georgian furniture and Victorian silver, books full of words that enchant, and confuse – hamstone quoining, aurora wallpaper, antique epergnes.
Everything sounds so exotic and obscure, and impossibly luxe. I grew up in a crowded little council flat. The most expensive thing we owned was an oversized TV, probably stolen. Now I am about to spend thousands on ‘Stuart silver fingerbowls’, and ‘fill them with rosewater’. Apparently.
My daydreaming – half anxious, half rapturous – leads me to the corner of the Drawing Room, and a small, polished wooden sidetable. Cassie the Thai housekeeper has set a silver vase here, replete with lilies and roses. Yet the vase doesn’t look right. So maybe I can begin here. With this. Just this. One step, then another.
Putting my phone down, I adjust the vase – centring the vessel carefully on the sidetable. Yet it’s still not correct. Perhaps it should be on the left, off centre? A good photographer never puts her subject smack-bang in the middle.
For ten minutes I try to find the best position for this vase. I imagine Nina Kerthen, behind me, shaking her head in polite dismay. And now the self-doubt returns. I am sure that Nina Kerthen would have got this right. She would have done it impeccably. With her blonde hair harping across her slanted, clever blue eyes, as she squinted, and concentrated.
Abandoning my job, I gaze down, sighing. The varnished yew wood of the table reflects my face in its darkness. A crack runs the length of the table, breaking the image in two. Which is appropriate.
People tell me I am attractive, and yet I never truly feel beautiful: not with my red hair and my peppering of freckles, and that white Celtic skin that never takes a tan. Instead I feel flawed, or broken. Cracked. And when I look very hard at myself I can’t see any beauty at all: only the deepening lines by my eyes, far too many for my age – only thirty.
A delicious breeze stirs me. It comes from the open window, carrying the scents of Carnhallow’s flower gardens, and it dispels my silliness, and reminds me of my prize. No. I am not broken, and this is enough self-doubt. I am Rachel Daly, and I have overcome greater challenges than sourcing the correct wallpaper, or working out what a tazza is.
The seventy-eight bedrooms can wait, likewise the West Wing. I need some fresh air. Pocketing my phone, I go to the East Door, push it open to the serenity of the sun, so gorgeous on my upturned face. And then the south lawns. The wondrous gardens.
The gardens at Carnhallow were the one thing, I am told, that David’s father Richard Kerthen kept going, even as he gambled away the last of the Kerthen fortune, en route to a heart attack. And Nina apparently never did much with the gardens. Therefore, out here, I can enjoy a purer possession: I can wholeheartedly admire the freshly cut green grass shaded by Cornish elms, the flowerbeds crowded with summer colours. And I can straightaway love, as my own, the deep and beautiful woods: guarding and encircling Carnhallow as if the house is a jewel-box hidden in a coil of thorns.
‘Hello.’
A little startled, I turn. It’s Juliet Kerthen: David’s mother. She lives, alone and defiant, in her own self-contained apartment converted from a corner of the otherwise crumbling and unrestored West Wing. Juliet has the first signs of Alzheimer’s, but is, as David phrases it, ‘in a state of noble denial’.
‘Lovely day,’ she says.
‘Gorgeous, isn’t it? Yes.’
I’ve met Juliet a couple of times. I like her a lot: she has a vivid spirit. I do not know if she likes me. I have been too timid to go further, to really make friends, to knock on her front door with blackberry-and-apple pie. Because Juliet Kerthen may be old and fragile, but she is also daunting. The suitably blue-eyed, properly cheekboned daughter of Lord Carlyon. Another ancient Cornish family. She makes me feel every inch the working-class girl from Plumstead. She’d probably find my pie a bit vulgar.
Yet she is perfectly friendly. The fault is mine.
Juliet shields her eyes from the glare of the sun with a visoring hand. ‘David always says that life is a perfect English summer day. Beautiful, precisely because it is so rare and transient.’
‘Yes, that sounds like David.’
‘So how are you settling yourself in, dear?’
‘Fine. Really, really well!’
‘Yes?’ Her narrowed eyes examine me, but in a companionable way. I assess her in return. She is dressed like an elderly person, yet very neatly. A frock that must be thirty years old, a maroon and cashmere cardigan, then sensible, expensive shoes, probably hand-made for her in Truro forty years ago, and now, I guess, polished by Cassie, who looks in every day to make sure the old lady is alive.
‘You don’t find it too imposing?’
‘God no, well, yes, a bit but …’
Juliet indulges me with a kind smile. ‘Don’t let it get to you. I remember when Richard first brought me home to Carnhallow. It was quite the ordeal. That last bit of the drive. Those ghastly little moorland roads from St Ives. I think Richard was rather proud of the remoteness. Added to the mythic quality. Would you like a cup of tea? I have excellent pu’er-cha. I get bored with drinking it alone. Or there is gin. I am in two minds.’
‘Yes. Tea would be brilliant. Thanks.’
I follow her around the West Wing, heading for the north side of the house. The sun is restless and silvery on the distant sea. The clifftop mines are coming into view. I am chattering away about the house, trying to reassure Juliet, and maybe myself, that I am entirely optimistic.
‘What amazes me is how hidden it is. Carnhallow, I mean. Tucked away in this sweet little valley, a total suntrap. But you’re only a couple of miles from the moors, from all that bleakness.’
She turns, and nods. ‘Indeed. Although the other side of the house is so completely different. It’s actually rather clever. Richard always said it proved that the legend was true.’
I frown. ‘Sorry?’
‘Because the other side of Carnhallow looks north, to the mines, on the cliffs.’
I shake my head, puzzled.
She asks, ‘David hasn’t told you the legend?’
‘No. I don’t think so. I mean, uhm, he told me lots of stories. The rowans. The evil Jago Kerthen …’ I don’t want to say: Maybe we got so drunk on champagne on the first date and then we had such dizzying sex, I forgot half of what he told me – which is totally possible.
Juliet turns towards the darkened shapes of the mines. ‘Well, this is the legend. The Kerthens, it is said, must have possessed a wicked gift, a sixth sense, or some kind of clairvoyance: because they kept hitting lodes of tin and copper, when other speculators went bust. There is a Cornish name for those with the gift: tus-tanyow. It means the people of fire, people with the light.’ She smiles, blithely. ‘You’ll hear locals telling the story in the Tinners – that’s a lovely pub, in Zennor. You must try it, but avoid the starry gazy pie. Anyway, Richard used to rather drone on about it, about the legend. Because the Kerthens built their house right here, on the bones of the old monastery, facing Morvellan, yet that was centuries before they discovered the tin at Morvellan. So if you are suggestible it rather implies that the legend is true. As if the Kerthens knew they were going to find tin. I know, let’s go and have some pu’er-cha and gin, perhaps they go together.’
She walks briskly around the north-west corner of Carnhallow. I follow, eager for the friendship, and the distraction. Because her story disquiets me in a way I can’t exactly explain.
It is, after all, just a silly little story about the historic family that made so much money, by sending those boys down those ancient mines. Where the tunnels run deep under the sea.
162 Days Before Christmas (#ulink_c42610db-64b6-508f-9ab6-fe729cfe9502)
Morning
David is drawing me. We’re sitting in the high summer sun on the south lawns, a jug of freshly squeezed peach-and-lemon juice on a silver tray set down on the scented grass. I’m wearing a wicker hat, at an angle. Carnhallow House – my great and beautiful house – is glowing in the sunlight. I have certainly never felt posher. I have possibly never felt happier.
‘Don’t move,’ he says. ‘Hold for a second, darling. Doing your pretty upturned nose. Noses are tricky. It’s all about the shading.’
He looks my way with a concentrated gaze then returns to the drawing paper, his pencil moving swiftly, shading and hatching. He is a very good artist, probably a much better artist – as I am realizing – than me. More naturally talented. I can draw a little but not as skilfully as this, and certainly not as fast.
Discovering David’s artistic side has been one of the unexpected pleasures of this summer. I’ve known all along he was interested in the arts: after all, I first met him at a private view in a Shoreditch gallery. And when we were in Venice he was able to show me all his favourite Venetian artworks: not just the obvious Titians, and Canelettos, but the Brancusis in the Guggenheim, the baroque ceiling of San Pantalon, or a ninth-century Madonna in Torcello, with its watchful eyes of haunted yet eternal love. A mother’s never-ending love. It was so lovely and sad it made me want to cry.
Yet I didn’t properly realize that he was good at making art until I moved here to Carnhallow. I’ve seen some of David’s youthful work on the Drawing Room wall, and in his study: semi-abstract paintings of Penwith’s carns and moors and beaches. They are so good I thought, at first, that they were expensive professional pieces, bought at a Penzance auction house by Nina. Part of her painstaking restoration, her dedication to this house.
‘There,’ he says. ‘Nose done. Now the mouth. Mouths are easy. Two seconds.’ He leans back and looks at the drawing. ‘Hah. Aced it.’
He sips some peach-and-lemon contentedly. The sun is warm on my bare and tanning shoulders. Birds are singing in Ladies Wood. I wouldn’t be surprised if they went into close harmony. This is it. The perfect moment of good luck. The man, the love, the sun, the beautiful house in a beautiful garden in a beautiful corner of England. I have an urge to say something nice, to repay the world.
‘You know you’re really good.’
‘Sorry, darling?’
He is sketching again. Deep in masculine concentration. I like the way he focuses. Frowning, but not angry. Man At Work. ‘Drawing. I know I’ve told you this before – but you’re seriously talented.’
‘Meh,’ he says, like a teenager, but smiling like an adult, his hand moving briskly across the page. ‘Perhaps.’
‘You never wanted to do it for a living?’
‘No. Yes. No.’
‘Sorry?’
‘For a moment, after Cambridge, I considered it. I would have liked to try my hand, once. But I had no choice: I had to work, to make lots and lots of boring money.’
‘Because your dad burned up all the fortune?’
‘He even sold the family silver, Rachel. To pay those imbecilic gambling debts. Sold it like some junkie fencing the TV. I had to buy it back – the Kerthen silver. And they made me pay a premium.’ David sighs, takes another taste of juice. The sun sparkles on the glass tilted in his hand. He savours the freshness and flavour and looks past me, at the sun-laced woods.
‘Of course, we were running out of money anyway: it wasn’t all my father’s fault. Carnhallow was absurdly expensive to run, but the family kept trying. Though most of the mines were making losses by 1870.’
‘Why?’
He picks up the pencil, taps it between his sharp white teeth. Thinking about the picture, answering me distractedly. ‘I really must do you nude. I’m embarrassingly good at nipples. It’s quite a gift.’
‘David!’ I laugh. ‘I want to know. Want to understand things. Why did they make losses?’
He continues sketching. ‘Because Cornish mining is hard. There’s more tin and copper lying under Cornwall than has ever been mined, in all the four thousand years of Cornish mining history, yet it’s basically impossible to extract. And certainly unprofitable.’
‘Because of the cliffs, and the sea?’
‘Exactly. You’ve seen Morvellan. That was our most profitable mine, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it’s so dangerous and inaccessible.’
‘Go on.’
‘There’s a reason Morvellan has that strange architecture – the two houses. Most Cornish mineshafts were exposed to the air, only the pumps were protected, behind stone – because machinery was deemed more important than men, perhaps. But on the cliffs, above Zawn Hanna, the Kerthens had a problem: because of the proximity of the sea, and consequent storms, we had to protect the top of the shaft in its own house, right next to the Engine House.’ He stares at me and past me, as if he is looking at the mines themselves. ‘Creating, by accident, that poignant, diagonal symmetry.’ His pencil twirls slowly in his fingers. ‘Now compare that to the open-cast mines of Australia, or Malaysia. The tin is right there, at the surface. They can simply dig it out of the ground with a plastic spade. And that’s why Cornish mining died. Four thousand years of mining, gone in a couple of generations.’
His cheerfulness has clouded over. I can sense his darkening thoughts, tending to Nina, who drowned at Morvellan. It was probably my fault, letting the conversation stray in this direction. Down the valley. Towards the mineheads on the cliffs. I must make amends. ‘You really want to do me nude?’
His smile returns. ‘Oh yes. Oh, very much, yes.’ He laughs and peels his finished drawing from the volume, and slants his handsome head, assessing his own work. ‘Hmm. Not bad. Still didn’t get the nose right. I really am better at nipples. OK’ – he tilts a wrist to check the time – ‘I promised I’d take Jamie to school—’
‘At the weekend?’
‘Soccer match, remember? He’s very excited. Can you pick him up later? I’m seeing Alex in Falmouth.’
‘Of course I will. Love to.’
‘See you for dinner. You’re a great sitter.’
He kisses me softly before striding away, around the house, heading for his car, calling out for Jamie. Like we are already a family. Safe and happy. This feeling warms me like the summer weather.
I remain sitting here in the sun, eyes half-closed, mind half-asleep. The sense of sweet purposelessness is delicious. I have things to do, but nothing particular to do right now. Voices murmur in the house, and on the drive. The car door slams in the heat. The motor-noise dwindles as it heads through those dense woods, up the valley to the moors. Birdsong replaces it.
Then I realize I haven’t looked at David’s drawing of me. Curious, maybe a little wary – I dislike being drawn, the same way I dislike being photographed: I only do it to indulge David – I lean across and pick up the sheet of paper.
It is predictably excellent. In fifteen minutes of sketching he has captured me, from the slight sadness in my eyes that never goes away, to the sincere if uncertain smile. He sees me true. And yet I am pretty in this picture, too: the shadow of the hat flatters. And there in the picture is my love for him, vivid in the happy shyness of my gaze.
He sees the love, which pleases me.
There is only one flaw. It is the nose. My nose is, I am told, cute, retroussé, upturned. But he hasn’t sketched my nose at all. This nose is sharper, aquiline, more beautiful: this bone structure is from someone else’s face, someone else he drew a thousand times, so that it became habitual. And I know who. I’ve seen the photos, and the drawings.
He’s made me look like Nina.
Afternoon
The drawing lies on the grass, fallen from my hand. I am awake, and surprised that I slept. I must have drifted off in the indulgent warmth of the sun. Gazing about me, I see nothing has changed. Shadows have lengthened. The day is still fine, the sun still bright.
I sleep a lot in Carnhallow, and I sleep well. It is like I am catching up, after twenty-five years of alarm clocks. I sometimes feel so leisured that my latent guilt kicks in, along with a hint of loneliness.
I haven’t got any proper friends down here yet, so these last solitary weeks when I haven’t been in the house I’ve been using the hours to drive and hike the wild Penwith landscape. I love photographing the silent mine stacks, the salt-bitten fishing villages and the dark and plunging coves where, on all but the calmest days, the waves throw themselves psychotically at the cliffs. Though my favourite place so far is Zawn Hanna, the cove at the end of our own valley. Morvellan Mine stands above it, but I ignore its black shapes and instead gaze out at the sea.
When occasional summer rain has sent me indoors I’ve tried completing my mental map of Carnhallow. I’ve finally counted the seventy-eight bedrooms and it turns out that there are, in fact, eighteen, depending on how you categorize the tiny, sad, echoing box rooms on the top floor, which were probably servants’ quarters, though they have an odd echo of the monastic cells which must once, I presume, have stood on this ground, in this lush little valley.
Some days, standing alone in the dust of this top floor, when the sea-wind is combing through the rowans, it feels like I can hear the words of those monks, caught on the breeze: Ave Maria, gratia plena: Dominus tecum …
At other times I linger in the Drawing Room, my favourite part of Carnhallow, along with the kitchen and the gardens. I’ve checked out most of the books, from Nina’s volumes on antique silverware and Meissen porcelain to David’s many monographs on mainly modern artists: Klee, Bacon, Jackson Pollock. David has a particular liking for abstract expressionists.
Last weekend I saw him sit and stare at the solid black and red blobs of a Mark Rothko painting for an hour, then he closed the book, looked at me, and said, ‘We’re all astronauts, really, aren’t we; interstellar astronauts, travelling so far into the blackness we can never return.’ Then he got up and offered me Plymouth gin in a Georgian tumbler.
But my biggest personal discovery has not been porcelain or paintings but a small dog-eared volume of photographs, hidden between two big fat books on Van Dyck and Michelangelo. When I first opened this battered little booklet it revealed startling monochrome images of historic Kerthen mines and the miners within them.
The photos must, I reckon, be nineteenth century. I look at them almost every day. What amazes me about them is that the miners worked practically without light: all they had was the faint flicker of the tiny candles stuck in their felt hats. Which means that the moment the camera’s magnesium flash exploded was the only time in their lives when the miners properly saw where they worked, where they had spent every waking hour, digging and hewing and drilling. One precious fraction of brightness. Then back to lifelong darkness.
The thought of those miners, who once toiled their lives away in the rocks right underneath me, stirs me into action. Get to work, Rachel Daly.
The drawing is folded and set on the tray, which is warm from the sun. I carry the tray with the lemon-scented glasses into the coolness of the house, the airiness of the kitchen. Then I open my app. There are only two significant places left to explore: I’ve left them to last because they are the ones that give me the most concern. They are the worst of Carnhallow’s challenges.
The first is the basement and the cellars.
David showed me this bewildering labyrinth the day we arrived, and I have not revisited. Because the basement is a depressing place: a network of dismal corridors, grimed with dust, where rusted bells dangle below coiled springs, never to be heard again.
There are many stairs down to the basement. I take the first set, outside the kitchen. Flicking on unreliable lights at the top of the steps, I pick my way down the creaking wooden stairs, and look around.
Ancient signs hang from peeling doors: Brushing Room, Butler’s Pantry, Footman’s Room, receding into shadows and grey. At the end of the dingy corridor ahead of me I can make out the tall, arched stone threshold of the wine cellar. David and Cassie visit the cellars a lot: it is the one part of Carnhallow’s vast basement that gets used. Apparently there are lancet windows in the cellar, blinded and bricked, showing the monastic origin of Carnhallow, one thousand years ago. One day I will sit myself down in that cellar and blow dust off old French labels, teach myself about wine the way I am slowly teaching myself about everything else, but today I need to get an overall grasp.
Turning down an opposite corridor I find more signs: Bake House, Cleaning Room, Dairy. The piles of debris littering and sometimes obstructing the corridors are stupefying. An antique sewing machine. Half of a vintage motorcycle, taken to pieces then left here. Broken clay pipes from maybe two hundred years before. A mouldy Victorian wardrobe. Some kind of light fitting, made possibly from swan feathers. An enormous wheel from a horse-carriage. It is like the Kerthens, as they slowly died out, or dispersed, or decayed, couldn’t bear to part with anything, as it painfully symbolized their decline. So it all got hidden away down here. Entombed.
Phone in hand, I pause. The air is motionless and cold. Two huge antique fridges lurk, for no obvious reason, in a corner. I have a sudden image of being imprisoned within one of them. Hammering on the door, trapped in its reeking smallness, stuck down a basement corridor that no one will ever use. Dying over days in a cuboid coffin.
A shudder runs through me. Moving on, turning left, I find an even older doorway. The stonework of the doorjamb looks medieval, and the painted wooden sign hanging from a nail says STILL.
Still?
Still what? Still here? Be still? Please be still? The sign agitates.
STILL.
Repressing my anxieties, I push the door. The hinges are stiff with rust: I have to lay my shoulder on the door and shunt hard, and at last the door springs open, with a bang. Like I have broken something. I sense the house glaring at me with disapproval.
It is very dark in this room. There is no apparent switch and the only light comes from the corridor behind me. My eyes slowly adjust to the gloom. In the middle of this small room is a battered wooden table. It could be hundreds of years old, or it could have just had a hard time. Various bottles, greyed with dust, sit on shelves. Some have tiny labels on them, hung on exquisite metal chains, like little necklaces for tiny slave girls. Going close I see the handwritten names, scratchily penned – quilled – with ancient ink.
Feverfew. Wormwood. Comfrey. Mullein.
Still.
STILL.
I think I understand it now, maybe. This is a place for distilling. Making herbal remedies, tinctures. A still room.
Turning to go, I see something totally unexpected. Three or four large cardboard boxes in the corner of the room, partly concealed by a case of ancient glassware. The boxes have the name Nina vigorously scrawled on them.
So this is her stuff? The dead woman, the dead mother, the dead wife. Clothes, or books, maybe. Not ready to be thrown out.
Now I feel really improper, like a trespasser. I’ve done nothing wrong, I am the new wife, a keeper of Carnhallow, and David wants me to explore so that I can restore this maze of dust: but the act of almost-breaking-in to this room, and happening upon these sad boxes, makes me blush.
Trying not to run, I retrace my steps, and I climb the stairs with a definite sense of relief. Taking deep breaths. Then a glance at my watch reminds me. I have to collect Jamie, soon, which means I have enough time for my final task.
There is one more interior space I want to see: the entirely untouched West Wing. And at its heart, the Old Hall. David has told me it is impressive.
But I’ve not once set foot inside this space yet. Only seen the gaunt exterior. Taking the corridor beyond the grand stairs, I cross from east to west, and from now to then.
This must be it. A large but unpainted and very heavy wooden door. The handle is a twisted, cast-iron ring. It takes an effort to turn, but then the door swings smoothly open. I step, for the first time, into the Old Hall.
The tall arched windows are Gothic, and leaded. Obviously from the monastery. The vaulted stone chamber is cold; it is also totally uncarpeted and unfurnished. David says that centuries ago they used to pay the miners in this hall. I can see them now. The humble men, stoically queuing, summoned by their surnames. The mine captains looking on with crossed and burly arms.
The room is imposing, but also oppressive. I shiver like a child in here. I think the atmosphere must be something to do with the size of the room. Here in the frigid empty heart of the house, I realize the scale of Carnhallow. Vast and engulfing. This is where I truly comprehend that I am in a house with space for fifty people. For three dozen servants, and a large extended family.
Today, just four people live here. And one, David, will be spending most of his time in London.
Three o’clock. Time to pick up my stepson. Heading outside, jumping in the Mini, I gun the engine – then slowly navigate the narrow drive, up through the sunlit woodlands. It’s a difficult road, but lovely, too. Inspiring. One day maybe my kids will play here. They will grow up in the magnificence of Carnhallow – surrounded by space and beauty, beaches and trees. They will see bluebells in spring, and pick mushrooms in October. And there will be dogs. Happy, galloping dogs, fetching mossy sticks: in the glades of Ladies Wood.
At last I hit the main road – and I drive west, threading between the green and stony moors to my left and the rioting ocean on the right. This mazy B road takes in most of the little ex-mining villages in West Penwith.
Botallack, Geevor, Pendeen. Morvah.
After Morvah, the road splits: I take the left turn, heading over the barrens of higher moorland to Jamie’s school in Sennen, a private prep school.
Two left turns, another mile of moor and the landscape has subtly changed. Down here on the southern coast sunlight dapples calmer seas. When I park the car near the school gates and swing the door open the air is slightly but noticeably softer.
Jamie Kerthen is already here, waiting. He walks towards me. He is in his school uniform, despite it being a Saturday. This is because Sennen is a pretty formal school that demands uniforms whenever the kids are on the grounds. I like that. I want that for my kids, as well. Formality and discipline. More things I didn’t have.
I climb out of the car, smiling at my stepson. I have to resist the urge to run and hug him, close and tight. It’s too soon for this. But my protective feelings are real. I want to protect him for ever.
Jamie half-smiles in response – but then he stops and stands there, rooted to the pavement, and gives me a long, strange, concentrated stare. As if he cannot work out who I am or why I am here. Even though we have now been living together for weeks.
I try not to be unnerved. His behaviour is peculiar – but I know he is still grieving for his mother.
To make it worse, another mother is coming out now, guiding her son, passing us on the pavement. I don’t know who she is. I don’t know anyone in Cornwall. But my isolation won’t be helped if people think I am weird, that I don’t fit in. So I give her a wide smile and say, all too loudly, ‘Hello, I’m Rachel! I’m Jamie’s stepmother!’
The woman looks my way, then at Jamie. Who still stands there, motionless, his eyes fixed on mine.
‘Um, yes … hello.’ She blushes faintly. She has a round, pretty face and a posh, clear voice and she looks embarrassed by this strange, loud woman and her wary stepson. And why not? ‘I’m sure we’ll meet again. But – ah – really must be going,’ she says.
The woman hurries away with her boy, then looks back at me, a puzzled frown on her face. She probably feels sorry for this frightened boy with this idiot for a stepmother. So I turn my fixed smile on to my own stepson.
‘Hey, Jamie! Everything OK? How was the football?’
Can he stand there in rooted silence for much longer? I cannot bear it. The weirdness is prolonged for several painful seconds. Then he relents. ‘Two nil. We won.’
‘Great, well, great, that’s fantastic!’
‘Rollo scored a penalty and then a header.’
‘That’s totally brilliant! You can tell me more on the drive home. Do you want to get in?’
He nods. ‘OK.’
Chucking his sports bag in the back seat, he slides in, clunks his safety belt in its socket, then as I start the car, he plucks up a book from his bag and starts reading. Ignoring me again.
I change gear, taking a tight corner, trying to focus on these tiny roads, but I am nagged by worries. Now I think about it, this isn’t the first time Jamie has acted oddly, as if suspicious of me, in the last few weeks: but it is the most noticeable occasion.
Why is he changing? When I met my stepson in London he was nothing but laughter and chatter: the initial day we met we got on brilliantly. That day was, in fact, the first day I felt real love for his father. The way man and boy interacted, their love and understanding, their joking and mutual respect, united in grief yet not showing it – this moved and impressed me. It was so unlike me and my dad. And again I wanted some of this paternal affection for my own child. I wanted the father of my children to be exactly like David. I wanted it to be David.
The sex and desire and friendship were already in place – David had already charmed me – but it was Jamie who crystallized these feelings into love for his father.
And yet, ever since I actually moved in to Carnhallow, Jamie has, I now realize, become more withdrawn. Distant, or watchful. As if he is assessing me. As if he kind of senses that there’s something awry. Something wrong with me.
My stepson is quietly looking my way in the mirror, right now. His eyes are large, and the palest violet-blue. He really is a very beautiful boy: exceptionally striking.
Does this make me shallow – that Jamie Kerthen’s beauty makes it easier for me to love him? If so, there’s not much I can do; I can’t help it. A beautiful child is a powerful thing, not easily resisted. And I also know that his boyish beauty disguises serious grief, which makes me feel the force of love, even more. I will never replace his lost mother, but surely I can assuage his loneliness.
A lock of black hair has fallen across his white forehead. If he were my son, I’d stroke it back in to place. At last he talks.
‘When is Daddy going away again?’
I answer, in a rush. ‘Monday morning, as usual, day after tomorrow. But he’ll only be gone a few days. He’s flying back into Newquay at the end of the week. Not so long, not long at all.’
‘Oh, OK. Thank you, Rachel.’ He sighs, passionately. ‘I wish Daddy came home longer. I wish he didn’t go away so much.’
‘I know Jamie. I feel the same.’
I yearn to say something more constructive, but our new life is what it is: David commutes to and from London every Monday morning and Friday evening. He does it by plane, in and out of Newquay airport. When he gets home he burns his silver Mercedes along the A30, then crawls along the last, winding moorland miles, to Carnhallow.
It is a gruelling schedule, but weekly, long-distance commuting is the only way David can sustain his lucrative career in London law and retain a family life at Carnhallow, which he is utterly determined to do. Because the Kerthens have lived in Carnhallow for a thousand years.
Jamie is silent. It takes us twenty-five muted minutes to drive the tortuous miles. At last we arrive at sunlit Carnhallow and my stepson drags himself from the Mini, tugging his sports bag. Again I feel the need to talk. Keep trying. Eventually the bond will form. So I babble as I rummage for my keys, Maybe you could tell me about your football match, my team was Millwall – that’s where I grew up, they were never very good – Then I hesitate. Jamie is frowning.
‘What’s the matter, Jamie?’
‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing.’
The key slots, I push the great door open. But Jamie is staring at me in that same bewildered, disbelieving way. As if I am an eerie figure from a picture book, come inexplicably to life.
‘Actually, there is something.’
‘What, Jamie?’
‘I had a really weird dream last night.’
I nod, and try another smile.
‘You did?’
‘Yes. It was about you. You were …’
He tails off. But I mustn’t let this go. Dreams are important, especially childhood dreams. They are subconscious anxieties surfacing. I remember the dreams I had as a child. Dreams of escape, dreams of desperate flight from danger.
‘Jamie. What was it, what was in the dream?’
He shifts his stance, uncomfortably. Like someone caught lying.
But this clearly isn’t a lie.
‘It was horrible. The dream. You were in the dream, and, and,’ he hesitates, then shakes his head, looking down at the flagstones of the doorway. ‘And there was all blood on your hands. Blood. And a hare. There was hare, an animal, and blood, and it was all over you. All of it. Blood. Blood all over there. Shaking and choking.’
He looks up again. His face is tensed with emotion. But it isn’t tears. It looks more like anger, even hatred. I don’t know what to say. And I don’t have a chance to say it. Without another word he disappears, into the house. And I am left here standing in the great doorway of Carnhallow. Totally perplexed.
I can hear the brutal sea in the distance, kicking at the rocks beneath Morvellan, slowly knocking down the cliffs and the mines. Like an atrocity that will never stop.
149 Days Before Christmas (#ulink_aadb677e-a4df-5be9-94ab-e94d40659385)
Lunchtime
‘Verdejo, sir?’
David Kerthen nodded at the waiter. Why not drink? It was Friday lunchtime, and he was already en route home, for once ending work early, instead of at ten in the evening. So today he could drink. By the time the plane landed at Newquay he would have sobered up. There was barely any chance of being caught by the police on the A30 anyway. The Cornish police could often be spectacularly inept.
The drink might, also, allow him to forget. Last night, for the third night in a row, he’d dreamt of Carnhallow. This time he’d dreamt of Nina wandering the rooms, alone, and naked.
She used to do that a lot: walk naked about the house. She found it erotic, as he found it erotic: the contrast of her pale skin with the monastic stone or the Azeri rugs.
Sipping his Verdejo, David remembered the night they came back from their honeymoon. She’d stripped and they’d danced: she was naked and he was in his suit and the champagne was ferociously cold. They’d rolled back the carpets in the New Hall to make the dancing easier, he had put an arm around her slender waist, one hand clasped in another. And then she’d slipped from that grasp, running away from him, shadowed and arousing, disappearing into the darker corridors, a blur of youthful nudity.
The memories killed him. Their early happiness had been overgenerous. The sex was always too compulsive. It still gave him bad dreams, charged with a tragic desire or a child-like neediness, followed by regret.
He checked his watch: 1.30. Oliver was late. Their table was half empty, yet the dark, plutocratic Japanese restaurant was conspicuously full.
Unbuttoning his suit jacket, David looked around, taking the mood of Mayfair, checking the oil of London. The wealth of modern London was gamey: the city was marbled with success. You could smell the opulence, and it wasn’t always nice. But it was heady, and it was necessary. Because David was a beneficiary of London’s commercial triumph. As a fashionable QC he got a regular table at Nobu, a sleek office in the serene Georgian streets of Marylebone and, best of all, a half-million-pound salary, with which he could restore Carnhallow.
But they certainly made him work for it. The hours were grim. How long could he keep it up? Ten years? Fifteen?
Right now he needed more alcohol. So he sipped the Verdejo, alone.
David didn’t like being alone at lunch. It reminded him of the days after Nina’s fall. The dismal, solitary meals in the old Dining Room, with his mother self-exiled to her granny flat, refusing to talk. David winced internally as he recalled the eagerness with which he had returned to work after the funeral. Leaving his mother and the housekeeper to look after Jamie in the week. He had, in effect, run away. Because he simply couldn’t face the way all the different emotions had combined into a symphony of remorse. London had been his escape.
Draining the wine glass, David gestured for a refill. As he did, he noticed Oliver, striding to the table.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I had a meeting that dragged. At least we are fashionably late?’
‘Yep, a week after they lost their Michelin star.’
Oliver smiled, pulled out a seat. ‘It doesn’t, ah, seem to have affected business much.’
‘Have a glass, you look as if you need it.’
‘I do, I do. Sss! Why did I join the civil service? I thought I would be serving the country, but it turns out I am serving a cabal of halfwits. Politicians. Can we have the black cod?’
The waiter was attending, fingers poised over tablet.
David knew the menu by heart. ‘Inaniwa pasta with lobster, bluefin tuna tataki. And that cabbage thing, with miso.’
The waiter nodded.
Oliver said, ‘We really have been friends for too long. You know exactly what I want. Like a bloody wife.’ He raised a glass, ceremonially.
David was happy to join in, to toast their friendship. Oliver was the only friend he still kept from Westminster School, and he treasured the sheer longevity of their relationship. They’d been so close for so long they now shared a form of private language. Like one of those obscure languages spoken by two people in New Guinea. If one of them died, an entire tongue would be lost, with all its secret histories, its metaphors and memories.
The third member of their trio was already dead. Edmund. Another lawyer. Gay. The three of them had formed a gang at school. A trio of conspirators.
So here they were, twenty-three years later, sharing their ancient schoolyard jokes. And talking about Rachel.
‘It’s just that,’ Oliver sat back, his round face slightly flushed from the toil of eating a three-hundred-pound lunch. ‘Well, I didn’t expect it to get so far, so fast.’
‘But you got us together.’
‘Well, I know I introduced you, yes. And I also knew that you’d like her.’
‘And how did you know that?’
‘She’s smart. She’s petite. She’s very ornamental.’ Oliver dabbed his lips with a napkin. ‘I think God designed her for you.’
‘So why the surprise?’
Oliver shrugged. ‘I rather presumed that you would do your normal thing.’
‘Which is?’
‘Sleep with her, get a little bored, move on to the next.’
David sighed. ‘Christ. You make me sound terrible. Am I really that bad?’
‘You’re not evil, just annoyingly successful with women. I’m jealous, that’s all.’
‘Well, stop. I only do it on medical advice. They say multiple partners reduce rates of prostate cancer.’
Oliver laughed, and ate the last morsel of poussin yasai zuke. He shook his head. ‘But, ah, Rachel Daly turned out to be different. Of all the women you’ve bedded. Rachel Daly. And you married her within a month.’
David sat back, swirling his Verdejo. ‘Eight weeks, actually. But it was a bit quick.’
‘Putting it mildly.’
‘But I really did fall for her, Oliver. Is that so implausible? And she got on so well with Jamie. It felt entirely right.’ David scanned his friend’s face for a hidden meaning. ‘Are you implying it was too soon – after Nina?’
‘No,’ Oliver shook his head, emphatically, maybe awkwardly. ‘No no no. Of course not. It’s more that Rachel is so, well, different to your usual girlfriends.’
‘You mean she’s working class.’
‘No, I mean she’s underclass. You do know where she came from?’
‘The rookeries of Plumstead. The favelas of Tooting Bec. What does it matter?’
‘It doesn’t, not really. It’s more that it’s such a leap. She’s so very different to Nina. I mean she looks similar, that elfin face, that gamine quality you always go for, but in every other way—’
‘But that’s the point.’ David leaned forward. ‘That’s one of the reasons I fell in love with Rachel, so quickly. She’s different.’ He was talking slightly too loudly now, his talk fuelled by wine. But he didn’t care. ‘All those nice girls from Notting Hill, from Paris and Manhattan – Rachel is superbly different to all that. She’s had experiences I can’t imagine. She has opinions I never hear, she has ideas I could never expect, she is also a survivor, she’s been through serious shit, yet come out of it intact, intelligent, funny.’ He paused. ‘And, yes, she is sexy.’
The table was silenced. David wanted to say: She’s almost as sexy as Nina, she’s the only woman I’ve met who might actually one day compare to Nina, but he didn’t. Because he didn’t want to think about Nina. Instead he ordered two Tokays.
Oliver smiled affably. ‘I suppose you and Rachel have also got things in common.’
‘You mean both our fathers were bastards, and we’re both clearly and ridiculously impulsive.’
‘No, I was thinking that – you’re both a little fucked up.’
‘Ah.’ David laughed. ‘Yes. Possibly the case. But damaged girls are better in bed.’
‘Sweet.’
‘Though the same surely applies to men. Maybe that’s why I was good at womanizing. I’ve got issues.’ David looked across the restaurant at a young family. At a laughing child, happy with his parents. His words came as a reflex. ‘God, I miss Jamie.’
Oliver offered a sympathetic smile. David summoned the waiter, and asked for the bill. Their wine glasses glittered subtly in the low restaurant light.
Oliver sat back. ‘Is it worse, missing kids? Worse than missing girlfriends, or partners? I wouldn’t know.’
David shook his head. ‘Trust me. It’s worse. And the worst of it is, there’s nothing you can do. Even when you do have a nice time with your kids, it makes you regret how you should have done more of the same in the past. Having a kid is like an industrial revolution of the emotions. Suddenly you can mass produce worry, and guilt.’
‘Well, at least you’ll see him tonight.’
David brightened. ‘I will. It’s the weekend. Thank God.’
The lunch over, they wandered out into a bright, soft afternoon, into London at its most benign: the plane trees of Piccadilly caging the city sunlight in softening green. Shaking hands, and slapping backs, Oliver walked off to St James and David headed the other way, tipsily grabbing a cab to his office in Marylebone, picking up his weekend case, and then taking the same taxi, for Heathrow.
But as the traffic stalled through Hammersmith, the good buzz of the booze began to ebb. The bad thoughts came back, the wearying yet unavoidable anxieties.
Jamie. His beloved son.
It wasn’t just that he missed Jamie: it was the fact that the boy was behaving strangely, again. Not as badly as the first terrible months after Nina’s funeral, but there was definitely something amiss. And it was seriously dismaying. David had hoped that bringing Rachel to Carnhallow would mark a new chapter in their lives, would definitively draw an emotional line under it all, let them move into the brighter light of the future, but that hadn’t happened. Jamie was, if anything, regressing. The latest of his letters, to his mother – which David had found in his son’s room just last week – was particularly disturbing.
A quiet panic made David loosen his tie, as if he was being physically choked in the back of the taxi. If only he could tell someone he might at least feel unburdened. But he couldn’t tell anyone, not his new wife, not his oldest friends, not even Oliver – as the lunch had proved. Edmund was the only one who’d known it all. And now Edmund was gone, and David was alone. David was the only one who knew the truth.
Except, perhaps, for Jamie himself.
And there again was the source of David’s ongoing torment. How much did his son know? What had she told him? What had the boy seen, or heard?
David looked out at the endless traffic. It had now come to a complete stop. Like blood frozen in the veins.
136 Days Before Christmas (#ulink_bfc8c449-bed8-5fc3-811c-46048f9d7360)
The August sun is bright, the distant sea like beaten tin. David is taking me walking, on the final day of his summer break. This Sunday hike will lead us, David says, away from all the tourists, high up on to the peak of the Penwith moors.
David is in jeans, jumper, boots. He turns and grasps my hand to help me over a granite stile. Then we walk on. He is telling me some of the history of Carnhallow, Penwith, West Cornwall.
‘Nanjulian, that means the valley of hazels. Zawn Hanna means the murmuring cove, but you know that. Carn Lesys is the carn of light—’
‘Gorgeous. Carn of light!’
‘Maen Dower, that’s stone near the water. Porthnanven, port of the high valley.’
‘And Carnhallow means rocks on a moor. Right?’
He smiles, his sharp white teeth framed by a holiday tan and dark stubble. When he goes a few days without shaving, David can look decidedly piratical. He only needs a thick gold earring and a cutlass. ‘Rachel Kerthen. You’ve been at the library!’
‘Can’t help it. Love reading! And don’t you want me to know all this stuff?’
‘Of course. Of course. But I like telling you things, too. It makes me feel useful when I come home. And if you know everything’ – he shrugs, happily – ‘what will I have left to say?’
‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll never run out of things to say.’
He laughs.
I go on, ‘I also looked up Morvellan: that means milling sea, right?’
A nod. ‘Or villainous sea. Possibly.’
‘But “Mor” is definitely sea, right? The same root as in Morvah.’
‘Yes. Mor-vah. Sea grave. It’s from all the people that died, in shipwrecks.’
I can barely hear his answer: I have to run, slightly, to keep up with him as we stride between the heather and furze. David forgets he is so much taller than me, and therefore walks much faster than I do. His idea of a stiff hike is more like my idea of a jog.
Now he pauses, to let me catch up; then we stride on, breathing deeply. The moorland air is scented with coconut from the sunwarmed gorse. To me it’s the smell of Bounty bars, the coconut-and-chocolate sweets I rarely got as a kid.
‘Actually, that name always creeps me out,’ I say. ‘Morvah.’
‘Yes. And the landscape doesn’t help – all those brooding rocks, next to the wildness of the waves. There’s a famous line from a travel book which describes that bit of road: ‘the landscape reaches a crescendo of evil at Morvah’. Very apt. Hold on, another stile. Give me your hand.’
Together we jump the warm stone stile, and continue down the dried-out mud of the footpath. We’ve barely had rain in the two weeks of David’s summer holiday. It’s been an almost flawless fortnight of sunshine. And David has been equally perfect – loving, charming, generous: taking me to local pubs, buying me wine in the Lamorna Wink, and fresh crab sandwiches in riverside Restronguet. Introducing me to his rich, yacht-owning friends in St Mawes and Falmouth, introducing me to the hidden caves of Kynance Cove, where we made love like teenagers, with sand in our hair, and little seashells on my tingling skin, and then his dark, muscled arms, turning me over.
It’s been lovely. And for this reason I’ve stayed silent about my doubts. I haven’t mentioned Jamie’s odd behaviour, the staring, the silence, that odd dream about blood on my hands, and a hare. I haven’t wanted to fracture our summery happiness with some vague misgivings. The dream, I have decided, must have derived from Jamie’s traumas, his grief. The silences are the confusion of a child getting used to a new stepmother, such a painful transition. I want to share this pain, and so dilute it.
Besides, all three of us have had a happy time this last fortnight. David’s continued presence has apparently calmed Jamie down. I have brilliant memories of David, Jamie and myself, these past two weeks, walking the coastal paths at Minack, watching the seabirds playing with the waves, or lying in the warm clifftop grass, sharing picnic sandwiches, admiring sea-pinks on the way home.
Today, however, it’s me and David. Jamie’s friend Rollo has a birthday party. Cassie is picking him up later. I’ve got precious time alone with my husband, before he goes back to work. Before the perfect summer ends.
We are still talking about language. I want to know more. ‘So did you ever try to learn Cornish?’
‘God, no,’ he says, striding along the stony path. ‘A dead language. What’s the point? If Cornishness survives as a culture it won’t be because they revive the language, it’ll be the people. Always the people.’ He gestures at the weathered scenery, the eroded boulders, the stunted trees. ‘You know these little paths were made by the miners? They would walk for hours over the moors, through the woods and heather.’ He is facing away from me now, talking into the cooling breeze. ‘Imagine that life: stumbling through the dark, walking to the mineshafts, across the cliffs. Then climbing down hundreds of fathoms, for an hour – then crawling for a mile under the sea, and digging the tin from the rocks all day.’ He shakes his head, like he is doubting it himself. ‘And all the time they could hear the ocean boulders rolling above them in the storms; and sometimes the seas would break through, pouring into the tunnels—’ He stares wildly, at the sky. ‘And then they would try to run, but the sea usually claimed them. Dragged them back, sucked them in. Hundreds of men, over hundreds of years. And all the time my people, the Kerthens, we sat in Carnhallow. Eating capons.’
I gaze his way. Not sure what to say. He goes on:
‘And you want to know something else?’
‘Uhm. Yes?’
‘According to my mother, on really quiet summer evenings, when the stamps were silent, and the family was in the Yellow Drawing Room, sipping their claret, they could hear the picks of the miners half a mile beneath them. Working the tin that paid for the wine.’
His face is shadowed by a passing cloud. I have that urge to heal him, as I want to heal his son. And perhaps I can try. Coming close, I stroke his face and kiss him, gently. He looks at me, and shrugs, as if to say: What can I do?
The answer, of course, is nothing.
Clasping hands, we stride uphill, nearing the highest point of the moors. Here is another ruined mine, with noble arches, like a Norman church.
Regaining my breath after the climb, I lean a hand on the fine brickwork of the Engine House. The view is magnificent. I can see much of West Cornwall: the dark vivid green of the woods surrounding Penzance, the grey road snaking to Marazion, and the dreaming mysteries of the Lizard. And of course the vast metallic dazzle of the sea around St Michael’s Mount. The tide is in.
‘Ding Dong mine,’ David says, slapping the sparkling granite wall. ‘Reputedly the oldest in Cornwall. It was said to have been worked by the Romans, and before them the Phoenicians. Or maybe the fairies. Shall we sit down, out of the wind? I’ve brought strawberries.’
‘Why thank you, Mr D’Urberville.’
He chuckles. We sit down together on a rug from David’s rucksack. We are in the lee of the high moorland breeze, protected by the Engine House at our backs. The sun casts vivid warmth on my face.
A couple of hikers in lurid blue windcheaters are navigating a valley below. Otherwise we are alone. David gives me a strawberry from a plastic punnet.
I snuggle closer to my husband. Here is a lovely moment. Us, alone, together: in the sun.
He says, abruptly, ‘Don’t worry about Jamie.’
My heartbeat quickens. If there was ever a time to mention it, to speak out, this is it. But I don’t want to hurt or upset David. I’m not sure I have anything important to say, so I shall say nothing direct.
‘Jamie is still grieving, isn’t he? That’s why he is kind of distant sometimes?’
David sighs. ‘Of course.’
My husband slings a protective arm around my neck. ‘It’s not even been two years … And it was horrific as well as confusing. So he can be absent, or distracted, but he’s getting better. He’s been good these last two weeks. Please don’t worry about it. He will come to love you, and accept you.’
‘I don’t worry.’
David up-tilts my chin with a hand, as if he is going to kiss my lips; instead he kisses my forehead.
‘Are you sure, Rachel?’
‘Sure I’m sure! He’s a lovely boy. Angelic. Fell for him the moment I first saw him.’ I smile and kiss David on his lips. ‘In fact, it was when I met him that I began to really fall for you.’
‘Not when you saw pictures of Carnhallow, then?’
‘Oh. Listen. Funny man. Idiot.’
We fall companionably silent. David sucks a strawberry, and tosses the green stalk into the grass.
‘When I was a boy we used to come up here, my cousins and I, during the summer holidays. When my father was away in London.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘I think that was the happiest time of my childhood.’
I squeeze his hand, listening.
‘Endless summers. That’s what I remember, endless summer days. We’d go down to Penberth, beachcombing, looking for driftwood, old masts, crab-pots, Korean pickle packets. Anything.’ He hugs me as he talks. ‘The sea has a unique colour, at Penberth. Kind of a transparent emerald. I think it’s the pale yellow of the sand, seen through the blueness, the unpolluted waters. And there would be these amazing sunsets. Tingeing the hills and rocks with gold, filling the valleys with this purple glow. And I’d look at the shadows of me and my cousins, on the beach, the shadows getting longer and longer – going on for ever, until they were lost in the warmth, and the haze, and the midsummer dark. And then we knew it was time to go back to Carnhallow, for supper, heading home for cold meats and hot drop scones. Or strawberries and clotted cream in the kitchen. With the windows thrown open to the stars. And I was blissfully happy, because I knew my father was away in London.’
I am surprised, and touched. David is a lawyer, he can be very eloquent, but he seldom talks like this.
‘Were you really that lonely, the rest of the time?’
‘In the holidays, no. But the rest of the time? Yes. Before I toughened up.’
‘Why? How?’
‘They sent me to boarding school, Rachel, at eight years old. And there was no reason to send me away, Mummy wasn’t working. It was simply his choice. He had one son, one child – and he sent me away.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s the worst of it, I don’t really fucking know. Because he was jealous of the bond between my mother and me? Because he was bored with having me around? Mummy wanted me to stay, and there are plenty of good day schools in Cornwall. Perhaps he did it to hurt her. A pure act of sadism. And now he’s dead. So I will never know.’ He hesitates, but not for long. ‘I sometimes think the best thing a parent can do is live long enough for the children to grow up, so the kids are old enough to ask their parents, How the fuck could you get it so wrong?’
Another strawberry. Another stalk, hurled into the grass. The sun is dipping its chin in the west, turning rags of cloud to purpled gold. Some of those clouds look ominous, anvil-shaped: a summer storm, perhaps. Storms come so fast in West Cornwall, summer idylls to brutal squalls in bare minutes.
‘On clear days you can see the Scilly Isles from here,’ David says. ‘I must take you there one day. They’re beautiful, the light is marvellous. The Islands of the Blest. The pagan afterworld.’
‘I’d love that.’
He eats half of the last strawberry, then turns, and gives it to me, lifting it to my mouth. A strawberry taken from his hand. I eat the strawberry, taste its lurid sweetness. Then he says, ‘One day, perhaps, you could tell me about your childhood?’
I try not to flinch at this.
He goes on, ‘I know you’ve told me a bit of it. You’ve told me about your father, the way he treated your mother, but you haven’t told me much more.’ He looks at me, unblinking, perhaps seeing the anxiety in my expression. ‘Sorry. Talking about my past – it made me think of yours. You don’t have to tell me anything, darling, if you don’t want.’
I look at him, also unblinking. And I feel a huge desire to yield, and confess. Yet I am blocked, as always. Can’t tell, mustn’t tell. If I do tell everything, he might shun me. Won’t he?
David strokes my face. ‘Sorry, sweetheart. I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘No.’ I stand up, brushing grass from myself. ‘Don’t be sorry. You should want to know, you’re my husband. And one day I will tell you.’
I want this to be true. I so want this to be true. I want to tell him everything, from my tainted entrance into university to the dissolving of my family. I will telleverything.
One day. But not today, I don’t think. Not here and now.
Does David detect my sadness? Apparently not. Brisk and confident, he gets to his feet, and tilts his head to the west. To those darkening clouds, busily turning blue to black. ‘Come on, we’d better get going, before the rains kick in. I told Alex I’d have a quick drink with him at the Gurnard’s, last chance before I go back to work. You can drop me off.’
Afternoon
I do as I am told.
We climb in the car and I drive through the stiffening wind, and then the sharpening rain, to the clifftop pub, the Gurnard’s Head, where David leaps out of the car, and shouts through the weather: Don’t worry, I’ll get a taxi. Then he runs, sheltering under his rucksack, into the pub. Off to see Alex Lockwood. A banker, I think. He’s certainly another one of those wealthy friends of David’s, those tall guys who smile politely at me in yachty bars, like I am a quaint but passing curiosity, after which they turn and talk to David.
Pulling away from the pub, I accelerate down the road – hoping I can get to the house before the lightning starts. Because this is definitely a big, late summer storm, racing in from the Atlantic.
By the time I reach the final miles to Carnhallow the rain is so heavy it is defeating the wipers. A proper cloudburst. I have to slow to five, four, three miles per hour.
I could be overtaken by a cow.
At last I make the gate to the Kerthen estate and the long treacherous lane down Carnhallow Valley, through the rowans and the oaks. I dislike this winding track during the day and it is seriously dark now: storm clouds making night from day. I’ve got the headlights on, to help me through the murk, but the car is skidding, accelerating on the wet and fractured concrete, it’s almost out of control.
What’s this?
Something runs out into my lights. It is a blur through the rainy windscreen, a grey smear of movement – then a swerve of my wheel, and a queasy thump.
Jerking the car to a stop, the wind is salty and loud as I open the door, as I run up the track, heedless of the rain, to see what I hit.
A rabbit is lying in the grass, lit by my headlamps. The pulsing body is shattered, there are red gashes in its flanks, showing muscles, and too much blood. Way too much blood.
Worst is the head. The skull is half-crushed, yet one living eye is bright in its socket, staring regretfully, as I cradle the broken form. A milky tear trickles down, and the animal shudders and then, as I crouch here on the grass, it dies in my arms.
Filled with self-reproach, I gently drop the body to the ground, where it lolls, lifeless. Then I look at my hands.
They are covered in blood.
And then I look at the animal. I take a long frightening look at its sleek, distinctive, velvety ears. It’s not a rabbit. It’s a hare.
110 Days Before Christmas (#ulink_97f24041-3694-5e47-8e01-b1009702d2f3)
Lunchtime
I’m lying to my husband.
‘I told you, I’m going shopping. We need some food.’
His sceptical voice fills the car, disembodied. Calling me from London. ‘Shopping in St Just? St Just in Penwith?’
‘Why not?’
He laughs. ‘Darling. You know what they say, the seagulls in St Just fly upside down because there’s nothing worth crapping on.’
I chuckle, briefly. I’m still lying, though. I’m not telling him why I’m shopping, not yet. Not until I know.
‘What’s the weather like down there?’
I gaze through my windscreen as the car rolls along the coastal road. The stunted church tower of St Just is a grey silhouette on a grey horizon. ‘Looks like it’s going to rain. Bit chilly, too.’
He sighs. ‘Yes, the summer’s pretty much over. But it was good, wasn’t it?’ His pause is earnest. Hopeful. ‘Everything is OK now, everything is getting better, with Jamie, you’re feeling better.’
‘Yes,’ I say, and again I lie, and this lie is probably more important. I am certainly not feeling better: I am still thinking of the hare I killed. I haven’t mentioned it, to anyone. As soon as the accident happened, I cleaned the car and quickly disposed of the body,I wiped the blood from my hands, and then I tried to wipe the event from my mind. My first reaction had been to call David, tell him, share the story. But a minute’s thought told me that, no matter how trivially disturbing, it was probably better to stay silent. The moment I broached the subject, even as a passing and frivolous remark – oh your son said this and then it really happened, how funny, it could appear, to David, that I actually believe his son can foresee events, is clairvoyant, is a Kerthen from the legend. My remarks could make me sound mad. And I must not sound mad. Because I am not mad.
I don’t believe that Jamie has any power. The accident was an uncanny coincidence: animals die on the narrow, rural, zigzagging Penwith roads all the time – badgers, foxes, pheasants, and hares. I’ve seen dead hares before, they always make me sad; hares somehow seem much more precious than rabbits. Wilder, more poetic, I love the fact they live in Penwith. But they do get killed with regularity, as people speed round those granite-walled corners. My encounter on that rainy lane through Ladies Wood was, consequently, Jamie’s anxieties conflating with a simple accident. Yet it still faintly haunts me. Perhaps it was the way the body lolled in my hands. Like a dead baby.
‘Rachel?’
‘Yes, sorry. Driving.’
‘Are you OK, darling?’
‘I’m fine. Gotta find a parking space. I’d better go.’
He says goodbye and says let’s Skype later and then he drops the call. I scan the streets for a place to slot my car. It doesn’t take long. It’s never that hard to park here. Remote, regularly battered by the weather, the ‘last town in England’, one of the last places in Cornwall to speak Cornish, St Just-in-Penwith on the best of days has an empty and melancholy feel: bereft of its mines and miners but not their memories. But it is also the nearest town with the shop I need, the nearest to Carnhallow, and I need this shop right now.
Pushing the car door open I sense the inevitable dampness in the air. It is threatening to mizzle: that specific form of fine Cornish rain which is half-mist, half-drizzle. Like a spa treatment, but cold.
The pharmacy is down the fore street, at the corner of which is the medieval church; the central square is eighteenth-century shopfronts and big Victorian pubs – which retain hints of that wealthier mining past, the days of count-house dinners and hot rum punch, the days when adventurers and stockholders would celebrate the boom days of another copper lode, when giddy mine-captains would bring their sweethearts into the saloon to drink their gin-and-treacle.
Crossing the road, feeling the odd sensation that I am being watched, I press the door. It opens with an old-fashioned chime.
The girl at the counter gives me a look. She’s young. Very pale.
Slowly I make my way around the scented pharmacy. The girl is still looking at me, but hers is a warm, friendly glance. I realize with a sense of surprise that she’s almost my age: I spend so much time alone, or with David, I sometimes forget that I am also young. Only thirty.
The beautiful tattoo of a mandala on her neck implies she might be arty, or musical, the kind of friend I would usually make, without a worry, in Shoreditch. Maybe she’s working here to support a creative career; either way she looks fun and alternative. I’d like to go up to her and crack a joke and have a laugh – make a friend. It’s what I would have done in London.
But I’m still struggling to make real friends here, and I’m not sure why. Over the last weeks and months Cornwall, or Carnhallow, or the Kerthens, have somehow muted me. Or maybe it’s Jamie; the boy absorbs my emotions, even if we barely communicate.
The shelves do not have what I want. I am going to have to brave a conversation. With a glitch of anxiety in my throat, I approach the counter.
‘Do you have any um, um, pregnancy testing kits?’
The girl gazes at me. Perhaps she can tell how important this is from the crack in my voice. Pregnancy is my escape from worry and the growing sense of pointlessness: I will become a new mother, meet other new mothers. I will have a proper role and a real job and something extraordinary to give to David and Jamie. I will forget my anxieties. And I will make my husband happy: I know David is very keen for me to fall pregnant.
I am five days late, as I realized this morning, staring in confusion and tingling hopefulness at the calendar.
The girl is frowning.
‘There aren’t any kits on the shelves?’
‘Not that I can see.’
‘Well, uhm. Not sure we have any left. I’ll go check.’
She disappears. Gazing around, I see a poster for some kiddie medicine on the wall. The poster shows a mother with an angelic little baby, superhumanly cute and flawless. The mother has a smile as radiant as the faithful on Judgement Day. For unto us a child is born.
‘Here,’ says the shop girl. ‘Had a bunch at the back, must have forgot to put them out on the shelves. Sorry!’
I snap from my daydream. ‘Thank you. Brilliant. Can I take two?’
The girl smiles. Two to make sure you are definitely pregnant. Grabbing my kits, I scoot out into the drizzle and wind. Shoppers in drab hoodies turn my way, as if they have all been there a while, waiting for me. Look at her.Skulking around.
Am I pregnant? It is what I’ve wanted, needed, desired, for so long, to make things whole. My heart sings at the idea. A daughter, a son, I don’t mind. And a sibling for Jamie. This will repair the world. I bring you glad tidings.
The tension is too much. I can’t even wait to drive home. I’m going to find out this very second. Climbing out of the car again I head for one of those rather handsome old pubs, the Commercial Hotel.
The pub is, inevitably, almost empty. Just one young guy at the end of the varnished wooden bar, staring at a pint of Guinness. He briefly leers at me, then stares at his beer again.
Into the Ladies. I take out the kit, squat on the loo. I pee.
And then comes the wait. I am actually trying not to pray. I mustn’t get my hopes up. But oh, my hopes. My brilliant hopes.
Count the time, count the time, I must number the moments until I can call my husband and sing out the wonderful news, the news that changes everything, the news that will make us truly happy, properly a family.
I shut my eyes, tick off the final seconds, and look down. One line means not pregnant, two lines means pregnant. I need two lines. Give me two blue lines.
I look at the stick.
One line.
The sadness bites hard. Why did I get my hopes up so high? It was silly. We’ve only been trying for a few short months. The chances are fairly low.
Should I even bother with the second kit? I’ve got my answer. One line. Not pregnant. Get on with things …
And yet. Who knows?
I wait, counting the stupid seconds. I look at the stick.
One line. Crossing out my dreams.
Chucking the kits vigorously in the bin, I pause as I exit the toilet, then go to the mirror and give myself a hard, instructive stare. Looking at my white freckled face, my red hair, at Rachel Daly. I must shape up, snap out of self-pity – and count myself lucky. I have a rich, sexy husband, I have a beautiful stepson, I am living in a magnificent house which I truly adore.
And yet it is a house I don’t want to go back to – not yet. Not with all its vastness and silence. Not when I am in this pensive mood. Trying not to think about the hare. That uncanny coincidence. The blood on my hands. Again.
Wandering into the bar, I check the array of drinks: local beers, Doom Bar, St Austell Breweries. But I don’t like beer. Instead I ask the yawning bargirl for a rum and coke. Why not? After all, I am not pregnant.
‘Here you go, my lover.’
I take the drink and sit at a table. The young man is still looking intently at his Guinness, like it is a lap dancer.
Reaching into my handbag, I find my book. It’s a thickish volume about tin mining, sourced from David’s library. David’s rhapsodies on the old mining life have got me interested. This is another way for me to understand my new family. The mine-owning Kerthens.
The book is old and has that annoyingly dense Victorian typography, very difficult to read, but it is full of curious, moving, even sinister vignettes of mining life.
The author toured the West Cornish mines in the 1840s, near the peak of production, and saw the wealth and the energy and the horror. He talks of the suffering and mutilation: the many cripples he met in the villages, men with permanently blackened faces from explosions; men missing fingers or hands or arms from shooting rocks with gunpowder; blinded and broken men being led around the humble Cornish villages by boys, eking out a pitiful living by selling tea, door to door.
In some places, he says, one miner in five died violently. Sometimes they died at each other’s hands: from drunken brawling. The boozy violence of the ‘wild men of the stannaries’ was legendary. In the mid nineteenth century it was said that, in West Cornwall, wherever three houses met together, two would be alehouses.
Yet the author also saw a vivid beauty: how boats would sail up the night-time coast then anchor to gaze in astonishment at the sight of Pendeen and Botallack and Morvellan blazing away on the cliffs without cease, the rising and falling beams of the fire whims, the winding drums of the horse engines, the cries of the landers, the glare from boiler house doors, the crashing of the stamps. And the lights glowing in the windows of the great three-storeyed engine houses, halfway up the cliffs. And then, most magnificent of all, the mighty fires of the smelting houses lit by fountains of molten metal, springing up fifteen feet into the air, then splashing back into the basin, like majestic geysers of quicksilver.
And now, incredibly, it is all gone. After four thousand years. The men no longer work half-naked in the terrible heat at the end of undersea tunnels; they no longer climb a mile down ropes, like monkeys, deep into the reek of sulphur; and boys of eight are no longer sent down the pit to produce half the world’s tin and copper and many millions in profit. All that is left is those ruins by the sea, those ruins on the moors, and in the woods. Scorrier, South Crofty, Wheal Rose, Treskerby, Hallenbeagle, Wheal Busy, Wheal Seymour, Creegbrawse, Hallamanning, Poldise, Ding Dong, Godolphin, and Providence.
Gone.
I look up from the book, hoping to see a face, swap just a smile with the bargirl. But now I realize the pub is deserted. The drinker has gone, even the bargirl has disappeared. I am totally alone. It’s like no one else exists.
Afternoon
The house is quiet when I get back. The house is always quiet. The great front door opens and I am greeted by perfect stillness, the scent of beeswax, and the long and lofty New Hall.
Something brushes between my legs and makes me start. It’s Genevieve. Nina’s slender grey cat. Winding between my ankles.
When Nina died David gave her to Juliet to look after in her granny flat, because David doesn’t like cats. But sometimes she leaves Juliet’s apartment and stalks the house.
Bending down, I tickle the cat behind the ear, feeling the bone of her skull. Her fur is the colour of wintry sea mist.
‘Hey, Genevieve. Go catch a mouse, we need the help.’
The cat purrs and gives me a sly, green-eyed glance. Then abruptly Genevieve stalks away, towards the Old Hall.
The silence returns.
Where is everyone?
Juliet is presumably in her flat. But where is Jamie? Heading right, I make for the kitchen, where I find rare human life. It’s Cassie, busy unloading the dishwasher, listening to K-Pop on her iPod. Cassie is young, amiable, Thai, thirty-two. She’s been with the family ten years. She and I don’t interact very much. Partly because her English is still hazy, and partly because I don’t know how to act with her – I don’t know how to deal with ‘servants’. I am of the serving classes. I feel awkward. Better to leave her to it.
But I feel like I need interaction right now.
Cassie is oblivious to me. She has her earphones in as she works and she is cheerfully humming along.
Stepping forward, I touch her gently on the shoulder. ‘Cassie.’
At once she flinches, startled, nearly dropping the mug in her hands. ‘Oh,’ she says, ripping the earphones out. ‘I am sorry, Miss Rachel.’
‘No, please, it was my fault. I made you jump.’
Her smile is soft, and sincere. I smile in return.
‘I was wondering. Do you fancy a cup of tea?’
She looks at me in a friendly, puzzled way. ‘Tea. You want me make you cup of tea?’
‘No. I thought …’ I am shrugging. ‘Well, I thought you and I could chat and, er, y’know. Have a cuppa and a conversation. Girl to girl. Get to know each other a bit better. This house is so big! You can get pretty lost.’
‘Cup … pa?’ Her puzzlement is plain now and tinged with concern. ‘There is problem, you must tell me?’
‘No, I—’
‘I collect Jamie OK. He is in the Drawing Room. But – is a problem? I have done something—’
‘No, no no. It’s nothing. I just, I just, I thought we might …’
This is hopeless. Perhaps I should tell her the truth. Sit her down with the teapot and spill it all out. Confess it all. Confess that I am finding it difficult to find my role. That David’s friends are nice but they’re his friends, older, richer, different. That Juliet is lovely but she is frail and reclusive and I can’t keep intruding on her. That there is generally no one else to talk to, no adult in my days – I have to wait for David to come home to have interesting conversations face to face, or ring up Jessica in London and beg for scraps of gossip about my old life. I could tell Cassie the facts. Tell her that the isolation is starting to gnaw.
But I can’t say any of this: she would find it bizarre. So instead I give her a big fat smile and say, ‘Well, that’s great, Cassie. Everything is totally good. I wanted to make sure you’re OK, that’s all.’
‘Oh yes!’ She laughs, lifting up her earphones. ‘I am fine, I happy, I OK, I have a new song, I love Awoo, you know? Lim Kim!’ She laughs again, and then she warbles a couple of lines, ‘Mamaligosha, Mamaligotcha … alway Mamaligosha! Help me work. Miss Nina she used to say I sing too much, but I think she make a joke me. Miss Nina was very funny.’
Her earphones are replaced, she smiles again, but her smile is a little sad now, and maybe sharper at the edges. As if I am something of a disappointment after Nina, though she is far too nice to say this.
Again, the awkwardness returns. Cassie is waiting for me to go, so she can finish her chores. I return her fading smile, and then – defeated – I leave the kitchen.
There isn’t much else for me to do. The house looks at me in derision. Why don’t you do some restoring? Buy a carpet. Make yourself useful. I stand like a frightened interloper in the hall. I must go and see Jamie, check on my stepson.
I find him soon enough, in the Yellow Drawing Room, sitting on the sofa. He does not respond as I open the door, does not move a millimetre. He is still in his school uniform, and he is intently reading a book. It looks serious for his age. A lock of dark hair falls across his forehead, a single dark feather on snow. The beauty of the boy is saddening, sometimes. I’m not sure why.
‘Hello, how was school?’
At first he barely moves, then he turns my way, and frowns for a second, as if he has heard something rather puzzling about me, but hasn’t entirely worked it out. Yet.
‘Jamie?’
The frown persists, but he responds. ‘It was OK. Thank you.’
Then he goes back to the book, ignoring me completely. I open my mouth to say something but realize I have nothing to say to my stepchild, either. I am flailing here. I don’t know how to reach out, to find common ground, to form the vital bond: with anyone. I don’t know how to talk to Cassie and I don’t know what to say to Jamie. I might as well talk to myself.
Lingering by the bookshelves, I strain to think of a subject that might engage my stepson, but before I do, Jamie speaks.
‘Why?’
But he isn’t speaking to me. He is staring at the large painting on the wall opposite the sofa. It is a huge abstract, a column of horizontal slabs, of hazy, throbbing colour, blue over black over green.
I don’t especially like this painting; it’s the only one of Nina’s purchases of which I disapprove. The colours are beautiful and I’ve no doubt the painting cost thousands – but the colours are evidently meant to represent the coast, here, at Morvellan: the green fields, the blue sky, the black mine houses between. It has a dominant and foreboding quality. One day I will move it. This is my home now.
Jamie is still staring, rigidly, at the painting. Then again he says, to himself, as if I am not in the room, ‘Why?’
I step closer. ‘Jamie, why what?’
He doesn’t turn my way. He keeps talking into nothing. ‘Why? Why did you do that?’
Is he lost in some deep daydream? Something like sleepwalking? He looks perfectly conscious. Alert even. But intently focused on something I cannot perceive.
‘Ah. Ah. Why. There will be lights in the Old Hall,’ he says. Then he nods as if someone or something has answered his question, and then he looks at me – not directly at me, but slightly to my right – and he smiles: a flash of surprised happiness. He smiles as if there is someone nice standing next to me, and then he goes back to his book. Reflexively, I snap my head right, to find the person who makes Jamie smile.
I am staring at the wall. At empty space.
Of course there’s no one there. It’s only me and him. So why did I turn my head?
Part of me, abruptly, wants to flee. To run away. To get in my car and drive as fast as possible to London. But this is ridiculous. I am merely spooked. The hare, and now this. It is unbalancing. I’m not going to be scared by an eight-year-old boy, a soulful stepson with traumas. If I leave the Drawing Room now I will be admitting defeat.
I must stay. And if we cannot talk we can at least sit in companionable silence. That would be something. I can read in here, as he is reading. Let stepson and stepmother read together.
Crossing to the bookcase on the further side of the Drawing Room, I check the shelves. Jamie turns the pages of his book, his back to me. I can hear him flick the pages, quickly quickly.
There is a section here of Nina’s books that I have not read: tall, authoritative books on historical furniture, silverware, embroideries.
I pull out one book, The Care and Repair of Antique Furniture, flick through it and replace it, not sure what information I am seeking. Then I try another: Regency Interiors: a Guidebook. Finally, I choose a third: The Victoria and Albert Catalogue of English Woodwork, Volume IV. But when I pull the book from the shelf, something very different comes with it, flapping to the floor.
A magazine.
It looks like a gossip magazine. Why would it be kept here? Amongst Nina’s books?
Jamie is still deep in his reading. His capacity for quiet concentration impresses me. He gets it from his father.
Sitting down in one of Nina’s beautifully reupholstered armchairs, I scan the cover of the magazine and my question is answered. The magazine is dated from eight years ago, and right there, at the very top, is a small box. With a photo of a glamorous couple. David and Nina.
My heartbeat quickens. I read the caption.
Nina Kerthen, eldest daughter of French banker, Sacha Valéry, proudly shows her new baby, with her husband, Cornish landowner, David Kerthen.
We take a look inside their historic home.
Briskly I flick through the pages. Find the relevant section.
The article’s prose is silly celebrity journalese, venerating David and Nina for simply being rich and good-looking, aristocratic and lucky. The word ‘elegant’ is employed in almost every paragraph. It is froth and nonsense.
So why did Nina keep it? She was highly intelligent: she wouldn’t usually read this stuff. My guess is that she kept it for the photos, which are good. The magazine got a proper professional to do the job. There are some night-time exteriors of Carnhallow, showing the house glowing in the dark nocturnal woods like a golden reliquary in a shadowy crypt.
The photos of David and Nina are also impressive. And one, in particular, compels. I pause as I look at it, biting my own hair, thinking, reflecting.
This photo shows Nina, in a summer dress, sitting in a satin armchair, in this very room – the Yellow Drawing Room – with angled knees pressed together. And in this one singular picture she is holding baby Jamie. This is the only photo where we see their son, despite the promise of the magazine cover.
At her side, David stands tall, slim, and dark, in a charcoal black suit, with a protective arm poised around his wife’s bare, suntanned shoulder.
The photo is mysteriously perfect. I feel a sudden and powerful twinge of jealousy. Nina’s shoulder is so beautiful and flawless. She is so immaculate, yet decorously sensuous. Suppressing my envy, I scrutinize the rest of the image. The baby is, for some reason, barely visible. You can only just tell that it is Jamie, lying in his mother’s suntanned arms. But you can very clearly see a tiny fist, reaching from white swaddling.
If my heartbeat was quickened before, now it beats faster still. Because I am getting the sense I am staring at a clue, maybe even a distressing or important clue. But a clue to what? Why should there be a clue at all? I have to fight down my bewilderment. Regain my rationality. There is no mystery, there is no reason for me to be frightened or jealous. Everything is explained. Jamie is getting better, albeit slowly. We had a good summer. I will get pregnant. I will make friends. We will be happy. The dead hare was a coincidence.
‘What’s that you’re reading?’
Jamie is standing beside me. I didn’t hear him move.
‘Oh,’ I say, with a flash of startled embarrassment, quickly shoving the magazine between two books. ‘Only a magazine. Nothing important. Have you finished with your book? Do you want something to eat?’
He looks unhappy. Did he see the magazine in my hands? See his mother? It was daft and wrong of me to read it in here, in front of him, the grieving child. I won’t do that again.
‘Tell you what, I’ll warm up some of that lasagne, from yesterday, remember? You said you liked it.’
He shrugs. I babble on, eager to make the most of this conversation, however staccato. I can make us all a family.
‘Then we can talk, talk properly. How about a holiday next year? Would you like that? We’ve had such a nice summer here, but maybe next year we could go abroad, somewhere like France?’
Now I pause.
Jamie is frowning intensely.
‘What’s wrong, Jamie?’
He stands there, black and white in his school uniform, looking at me, and I can see the deep emotion in his eyes, showing sadness, or worse.
And then he says, ‘Actually, Rachel, you should know something.’
‘What?’
‘I already went to France with Mummy. When I was small.’
‘Oh.’ Rising from the armchair, I chide myself, but I’m not sure why; there is no way I could have known about their holidays. ‘Well, it doesn’t have to be France, we could try Spain, or Portugal maybe, or—’
He shakes his head, interrupting. ‘I think she has been staying there. In France. But now she is coming back.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Mummy! I can hear her.’
He is obviously troubled: the terrible grief is resurfacing again. I respond, as softly as possible, trying to find the right words, ‘Jamie, don’t be silly. Your mummy is not coming back. Because, well, you know where she is. She passed away. We’ve all seen the grave, haven’t we? In Zennor.’
The boy looks at me long, and hard, his large eyes wet. He looks outright scared. I want to embrace him. Calm him.
Jamie shakes his head, raising his voice. ‘But she isn’t. She’s not there. She’s not in the coffin. Don’t you know that?’
A darkness opens.
‘But, Jamie—’
‘They never did. They never found the body.’ His voice trembles. ‘She isn’t in that grave. They never found her. Nobody has ever found my mummy. Ask Daddy. Ask him. She isn’t buried in Zennor.’
Before I can reply, he runs out of the room. I hear his footsteps down the hall, then the same light boyish steps, running up the Grand Staircase. To his bedroom, presumably. And I am left here alone, in the beautiful Yellow Drawing Room. Alone with the intolerable idea that Jamie has placed in my mind.
Pacing across the room I find my laptop, lying on the walnut sidetable. Wrenching it open, I hesitate, take a deep breath, and then urgently type into the search engine: ‘death Nina Kerthen’.
I’ve never done this before: because there seemed no need. David told me Nina was dead. He described the tragic accident: Nina fell down the shaft at Morvellan. It was awful. I even went to see her grave in Zennor churchyard, with its poignant epitaph: This is the light of the mind.
My curiosity ended there. I didn’t want to know anything more, it was all too sad. I wanted a brand-new life with my brand-new husband, unblemished by the past.
My fingers tremble as I scroll the page and click on a couple of likely websites. Local news reports. Neatly cached.
No body has been found.
Divers are still searching, but nothing has been discovered.
The body was never found.
Slamming the laptop shut, I stare through the lead diamonds of Carnhallow’s windows: into the green-grey autumn evening, the black trees of Ladies Wood. Gazing deep into the gloom.
Jamie is right. They never found the body.
Yet there is a grave in Zennor. Complete with epitaph.
109 Days Before Christmas (#ulink_b5357fda-c746-515d-8c42-c6a92c26622b)
Morning
It must be the most beautiful supermarket view in Britain. The new Sainsbury’s, looking out over Mount’s Bay. To my right is the crowded and steepled town of Penzance, the marina bobbing with boats and activity. On my left is the softly curving coast, disappearing towards the Lizard. And directly in front of me is the tidal island of St Michael’s Mount, surrounded by vast and shining sands, topped by its medieval castle, comical yet romantic.
There is a coffee shop on the first floor, overlooking the bay. When I come here I always order a skinny cappuccino, and then I step past the dentured pensioners nibbling their pastries and sit outside at the metal tables even when it is cold, as it is today. Cold but sunny, with clouds gathering far to the west, like a rumour.
My coffee sits on the table, neglected this morning, because I have my mobile phone pressed to my ear. David is on the other end. Listening to me, patiently. I am trying very hard not to raise my voice. Trying not to alert the pensioners. Ooh, look at her, that’s the woman who married David Kerthen …
‘So, again, why didn’t you tell me? About the body?’
‘We’ve been over this already.’
‘I know. But think of me as an idiot. I need to hear it several times to understand. Tell me again in small words, David. Why?’ I know this is difficult for him. But it is surely more difficult for me.
He answers. ‘As I said, because it’s not the sort of thing you chat about on a romantic date, is it? Oh, my wife is dead but the body is trapped in a mine, shall we have another drink?’
‘Hmm.’
Maybe he has a point, yet I still feel angry. Or perhaps unnerved. Now it is in my head I can’t get rid of the mental image. The gruesome idea of a body, preserved in icy minewater. Mouth and eyes open, suspended in lightless clarity, and staring into the silence of the drowned corridors, under the rocks of Morvellan.
David is very silent. I can sense his restrained impatience, along with his eagerness to calm me. He is a husband, but he also has a busy job, and he wants to get back to work. But I have more questions.
‘Were you worried that I might not move here? Into Carnhallow, if I knew they never found her?’
A pause. ‘No. Not really.’
‘Not really?’
‘Well, perhaps. Maybe there was a slight reluctance. It’s not something I like to dwell on. I want to forget all that, I want us to be us. I love you, Rachel, and I hope and believe you are in love with me. I didn’t want the tragedies of the past to have any bearing on our future.’
For the first time this morning I feel a twinge of sympathy for him. Possibly I am overdoing it. After all, he lost a wife, and he has a grieving son. And what would I have done in his situation?
‘I do kind of understand,’ I say. ‘And I love you, David. You know that, you surely know that. But—’
‘Look, hold on, I’m sorry, darling – I have to take this call.’
The moment I am coming to terms with all this, the agitation returns. David has put me on hold. For the second time this morning.
I tried calling him last night after I discovered the truth about Nina, but his secretary patiently told me he was in some endless, mega-important meeting, until 10 p.m. Then he simply turned his phone off without responding to my many messages. He does that sometimes when he is tired. And normally I don’t mind: his job is hard, if well rewarded, and the hours are insane.
Last night, I minded. I was shaking with fury as I kept reaching voicemail. Answer. The. Phone. This morning he finally picked up. And he has been dealing with me ever since, like a store manager with a furious customer.
As I wait for him to come back on line, I gaze at that view. It seems less appealing today.
My husband returns. ‘Hi, sorry, that damn guy from Standard Chartered, they’ve got some crisis, he wouldn’t let me go.’
‘Great, so glad you’ve got more important people to talk to. More important things than this.’
His sigh is heartfelt. ‘Darling, what can I say? I totally messed up, I know I messed up. But I did it for the best reasons—’
‘Serious?’
‘Truly. I’ve never deliberately deceived anyone.’
I want to believe him, I want to understand. This is the man I love. Yet now there are secrets.
He continues, his voice smooth, ‘To be perfectly honest, I also presumed you might know much of it already. Nina’s death was in the papers.’
‘But I don’t read the bloody papers! Novels, yes. Papers never.’
I am nearly shouting. I must stop. I can see a pensioner with a cinnamon whirl on her plate, looking at me through the glass walls. Nodding, as if she knows what’s going on.
‘Rachel?’
I lower my voice. ‘People my age don’t read newspapers, David. You must get that, no? And I had no idea who you were till I met you at that gallery. You might be a famous Cornish family. But, I’m from Plumstead. Sarf London. And I read Snapchat. Or Twitter.’
‘OK.’ He sounds genuinely mortified. ‘Again, I’m truly sorry. If you want to know the brutal details, it’s probably all online now, you can still find it.’
I let him hang on, for a second. Then, ‘I know. I printed everything out, last night. The pages are in my bag, right here.’
A pause. ‘You did? So why are you cross-examining me, like this?’
‘Because I wanted to hear your explanation first. Give you a chance. Hear your evidence.’
He allows himself a small, mournful laugh. ‘Well, now you’ve heard my evidence, Justice Daly. May I please step down from the witness box?’
David is trying to charm me. Some part of me wants to be charmed. I reckon I am prepared to let him go, after he has answered one last important question. ‘Why is there a grave, David? If there is no body, why a grave?’
His answer is calm, and his voice is sad. ‘Because we had to give Jamie some closure. He was so bitterly confused, Rachel, he still is sometimes, as we know. His mother hadn’t just died, her body had disappeared, been spirited away. He was bewildered. Kept asking where she’d gone, when Mummy was coming back. We had to have a funeral anyway, so why not have a grave? A place for her son to come and mourn.’
‘But,’ I feel prurient, yet I have to know. ‘What’s in the grave?’
‘The coat. The last thing she wore, that coat with her blood, from the mine. Read the report, from the inquest. And also a few of her favourite things. Books. Jewellery. You know.’
He has fairly and candidly answered my questions. I sit back. Half relieved, half creeped out. A body. Under the house, in the tunnels that stretch under the sea. But how many bodies are already down there, how many drowned miners? Why should another be any different?
‘Look, David, I know I’ve been pretty hard on you, it’s like, well – it was a shock. That’s all.’
‘I understand entirely,’ he says. ‘I only wish you hadn’t found out this way. How is Jamie, anyway?’
‘He’s all right, I think, he calmed down after that outburst. He seemed fine this morning. Quiet, but fine. I drove him to football practice. Cassie’s picking him up.’
‘He is getting used to you, Rachel. He is. But, as I say, he’s still confused. Look, I have to go. We can speak later.’
We say our goodbyes, and I slip the phone in my pocket.
A sea wind from Marazion, laced with the tang of salt, ruffles the printed pages as I take them out of my bag and set them on the table. There is a lot of information: I googled and printed for an hour.
Nina Kerthen’s death was, as David said, definitely a news story. It even got as far as some national papers for a day or two. And it filled the local press for weeks. And yet, it seems, there wasn’t that much to it.
It is believed Nina Kerthen had been drinking on the night in question. There is no suspicion of foul play.
Foul play. The antiquated phrase, from the Falmouth Packet, conjures ghoulish, fairytale images of a dark man in a long cloak. A Venetian assassin, grasping a beautiful woman, and throwing her in the canal. I see a pale face staring up through the watery grey. Veiled with darkening liquid, then gone.
More pages flutter in the wind. Even the southerly breezes are fanged with freshening cold, today. Distracted for a moment, I gaze out.
There is a lone man walking the flooding sands out past Long Rock. Walking aimlessly, in circles, apparently lost. Or looking for something that he will surely never find. Abruptly he turns and stares my way, as if he senses he is being watched. A strange panic fills me, a quick and sharpened fear.
I calm my anxieties. Hints of my past. Turning back to the pages, I read on. I need to know all this detail, nail it down in my mind.
The initial idea of a murder was journalistically appealing. At the time of her death the newspapers spiced their reports with the delicious possibility of homicide.
The questions were never asked outright, but clearly they hung in the air: the captions are unwritten but the meaning is implicit. Take a look at this. Isn’t David Kerthen a bit too handsome, a bit too rich, a man you want to hate? A potential killer of his beautiful wife?
When all this was ruled out, early on, the national papers gave up, while the local journalists turned, with a rather forlorn optimism, to speculations of suicide. Who would go to a mineshaft in the dark? Why take the silly risk, on a cold christmas evening?
Unfortunately for the local press, the coroner was prosaic in his verdict.
I sip my cold coffee as I scan the coroner’s summation for the third time.
It was a clear moonlit night: December twenty-eighth. Nina was seen by Juliet Kerthen, David’s mother, walking down the valley and along the cliffs, in the vicinity of the mine stacks, as she sometimes used to do, to clear her head. She had been drinking that night, with the family.
Her actions were not unusual: the area around the mine houses was a fine place to take in the spectacular view: of the brutish sea, raging at the rocky cliffs below. Especially on a bright moonlit night.
But when Nina did not return, the alarm was raised. At first it was presumed she had merely got lost, down a path, in the dark. As her absence lengthened, speculation grew more negative. Perhaps she had fallen down one of the cliffs. Bosigran, maybe. Or Zawn Hanna. No one imagined she had actually fallen down Jerusalem Shaft: she knew the dangers well enough. But then, amidst the confusion, Juliet spoke up, and made the suggestion. Search Morvellan. That was the last place she was seen, after all: walking near the mineheads.
And it had been raining heavily in the preceding days. And the mine houses were unroofed. And she was wearing heeled shoes.
The little search party – David and Cassie – made for the Shaft House, where the door was found ajar. David turned his torch-beam down the shaft. The watered pit revealed no body, but it did offer up one significant and melancholy piece of evidence. Nina’s raincoat, floating in the water. Nina had been wearing that coat. She had surely, horrifically, fallen down the pit, then thrown off the coat as she struggled to save herself. But she had nonetheless succumbed. A person would swiftly freeze in those icy waters, then sink beneath them.
The raincoat was initial and crucial evidence. Two days after the accident, divers retrieved traces of blood and splintered fingernails from the brickwork of the shaft, above the black water. They also found strands of broken hair. The DNA was matched with Nina Kerthen: it was her blood, these were her broken fingernails, this was her hair. Here was the evidence of her desperate attempts to climb out of the mine, of her doomed and failing struggle to get out of the watered shaft. Evidence that could not be faked or planted.
Taken with the eyewitness evidence from Juliet Kerthen it seemed conclusive. The coroner delivered his verdict of accidental death. Nina Kerthen was drunk, her judgement was marred, and she therefore drowned, after falling down the Jerusalem Shaft of Morvellan Mine. Her body had sunk in the freezing water and would probably never be retrieved: lost as it was in the unnumbered tunnels and adits of the undersea mine, shifted by unknowable tides and currents. Trapped beneath Carnhallow and Morvellan, for ever.
I shiver, profoundly. The wind off the bay is cutting up, and venomed with hints of rain. I need to do my tasks, and get back to the house. Binning my empty cup, I go downstairs and do my shopping and the shopping is done in seventeen minutes. It is one advantage of my frugality, born of my impoverished upbringing. A relic of Rachel Daly, from south-east London. I rarely get distracted in supermarkets.
Spinning the car on to the main road, I take a last look at St Michael’s Mount, where a shaft of September sun is shining on the subtropical garden of the St Levans, a family five hundred years younger than the Kerthens.
Then the clouds open, and the sun shines on us all. And I realize what I need to do. I believe David’s answers, but Jamie still needs help. My own stepson unnerves me, and that has to be explained: I need to read him, to decipher him, to understand. Maybe David doesn’t need to know any more. But I do.
102 Days Before Christmas (#ulink_4a6633a3-8c14-517f-92f0-dc118e74309a)
Afternoon
It’s taken me a week to pluck up the courage to come in here. David’s study. Where I will maybe learn more about Jamie. My husband has come and gone from London, the days have come and gone, palpably shortening now, I’ve done the school runs and talked to the gardener and read my books on marquetry, carpentry, and masonry, and I have hesitated maybe twelve times in front of this imposing door.
The house is deserted. Jamie is still at school; Cassie has gone shopping. Juliet is with friends for the day, in St Ives. I have an hour at least. So now I must do it. I know I am, arguably, going behind David’s back, but the grief in this house is too intense for me to keep asking questions, directly. That way is too painful for everyone. So I must be more subtle. Discreet.
A fine but angled autumn sun makes a rich amber patch of light on the polished floorboards. These boards creak as I step forward, and open the door.
I’ve only been in this spacious, cedar-scented room three or four times before, and always in David’s presence. Now I gaze about, in faint but definite awe. There are several ancient portraits on the wood-panelled walls. Clumsy, vernacular portraits of patriarchal Kerthens: portraits of rich men who could only commission very provincial painters.
I know the biggest and darkest of these portraits shows Jago Kerthen, the man who sank the Jerusalem Shaft in the 1720s. He had a reputation, David says, for severity, if not brutality. Damning men to death down risky pits, urging them on through day and night, his troops of willing Cornishmen with their tallow candles glued on to their little hats. Jago Kerthen’s pale blue eyes glint with avarice in the gold-framed portrait: however clumsy the artist, he caught that look well enough. Yet it was Jago Kerthen’s appalling greed that turned the Kerthen thousands into millions in the early eighteenth century.
David has positioned the portrait so that it stares out of the tall sash window, down the last of Carnhallow Valley to the just-visible blackness of Morvellan Mine. And then onwards, to the shimmering wastes of the sea. The greedy and violent Jago Kerthen is staring at the very same mine he sank into the granite.
I’ve no doubt this positioning is deliberate.
The rest of the room is also very David. A couple of fine abstract paintings, possibly even a Mondrian. The floor is softened by some of those Azeri rugs David likes, apparently superior to Turkish or Persian rugs. As I look down, I can hear him airily explaining, as is his wont, ‘Oh, them, yes, the rugs, I bought them in Baku.’
Dominating the room is a large desk, solidly built, and clearly old. I walk closer, swallowing my sense of impropriety, the sense that I shouldn’t be here. Prying.
A brand new Apple laptop, firmly closed, sits right next to military memorabilia, from all the Kerthens who went to England’s wars: there are medals with faded sashes, from the Crimean and Peninsular wars, and beside them a rusty old revolver with mud still visible in its metalwork – probably, I’m guessing, from the First World War. Then a long, gleaming sword with a gilded hilt. Looking close, I see that it is engraved Harry St John Tresillian Kerthen, Paardeburg, 1900.
On the other side of this big desk there are three photos. Paired together is a tilted photo of me and David – and one of Nina and David. Both photos taken at our respective weddings. I try not to compare them: the swaying beauty of her wedding dress compared to my humble summer frock, the sense of grandeur in Nina’s glamorous nuptials compared to my modest London party. I resist the urge to slap the photo of Nina face down on the desktop.
The third silver-framed photo is of Jamie, aged four or five, laughing unselfconsciously in the sunlit kitchen here at Carnhallow. It is a poignant, lovely image: Jamie is looking at his beloved mother, almost off-camera, who has apparently made him laugh. He looks piercingly happy, in a way I have never witnessed. I have never seen this laughing, happy boy, the untroubled son before his mother’s death.
The sense of loss throbs, in this study, like a reopened wound at the heart of Carnhallow. And I feel like I am the shard in the flesh. Renewing the hurt.
And yet I am doing this for the best reason: helping Jamie. So I will carry on. Crossing the room, I examine the bookshelves. I know, from being here before, that one of these shelves is dedicated to Jamie: it holds everything from his school reports to his football rosettes. The last time I was in here with David I saw him take out Jamie’s medical records.
I run my hand along the shelf. A school photo. Some exercise books. Vaccination records. Blood type, A. Birth certificate, 3 March. Gold star for English, Year 2. I pause at an untitled folder, then pull it out, and open it up.
There’s not much in here. A few loose pages with some childish writing. Yet, as I read on, I am choked with unexpected emotion as I realize that I am holding Jamie’s letters to his dead mother.
Dear mummy
I am riting this because the therappist in the hospittal says it is good if I rite to you now you are dead. I miss you mummy. You were funny wen you put sand on yor nose in France when we went on holliday. Every day I think of you after you fel down
Since you
Lots of things hapend some of them were very sad and daddy went away a lotlikeand he says he misses you to. I have a new pencil case now mummy.
After you fel in the water grannytolld saidsayed you were on a very long holiday and I askd somewere like France and she says Yes. But daddy sayed you are not comeing back and granny sed a ly and you were dead and not comeing back.
I have a lift the flap book
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