A Brighter Tomorrow

by A Brighter Tomorrow (retail) (epub)

  ‘What’s upsetting you, Betsy?’ Skye asked cautiously when they met in a Truro tea room on a late February afternoon. ‘It’s not like you to get so ruffled.’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’ Betsy snapped, clearly having bottled up her resentment for too long. ‘He’s gone too far this time. He just can’t leave things alone, always poking his nose in where he’s not wanted. And ’tis not as if ’tis any of his business no more. He should be taking things easy now, but he just can’t stop his meddling and interfering—’

  ‘Hold on a minute, Betsy,’ Skye said, putting a hand on her arm as she noticed the other tea room clients glancing their way. ‘I presume you’re talking about Theo. What’s he done that’s so terrible?’

  She tried not to let the glimmer of a smile escape her lips, since this was obviously a serious matter to the normally mild-mannered and forgiving Betsy.

  Whatever Theo did, Betsy could normally be relied upon to settle things, even to the extent of clearing up the unholy mess when Theo had hurled a vase through his precious television set. Not that it mattered a hoot now, thought Skye, since all transmission had been suspended after the outbreak of war, and their own set, that Olly had clamoured for so much, had been relegated to the attic of New World for the duration.

  A good thing too, Nick had said, never happy about the thing sitting there like a blind, square grey eye in the middle of the drawing room.

  Skye stopped her thoughts from meandering as Betsy’s mouth became more pursed than usual in her tirade about Theo.

  ‘You might not be so understanding when you hear where he’s gone, and the rumpus because of it,’ she said darkly.

  ‘Not to the clayworks?’ Skye said, reacting at once. ‘We both made a bargain with the new owners not to go near the place. Theo fully agreed that it was for the best—’

  ‘Theo will agree with anything for the moment. I know that better than anyone. I’ve lived with his lies and deceits for years, Skye, and I’ve overlooked it – most of it, anyway. But this could bring trouble on all our heads.’

  Skye felt her heart lurch. How could Theo possibly meddle to such an extent? Ever since Killigrew Clay had merged with Bourne and Yelland China Clay Holdings Ltd, to become the combined Bokilly Holdings, she had truly believed that like herself, Theo had refrained from all contact with the new way of things. It was no longer their business.

  This obviously needed discussion and she spoke more urgently.

  ‘Perhaps it would be better if we continue this conversation somewhere else before you tell me what he’s done, Betsy. Is he at home today?’

  ‘He is not,’ she retorted. ‘Nor any other day.’

  ‘Then why don’t we go to the house?’

  Betsy nodded, and Skye quickly paid the bill to the waitress. Even though she was becoming more alarmed than she allowed Betsy to guess, there was also a frisson of something else stirring in her veins. Until the arrival of the evacuees, there had been harmony in her own house since she and Theo had finally sold all their shares in Killigrew Clay and she had relinquished her interest in the White Rivers Pottery. Everyone had told her it was time she stopped being a businesswoman and took a more leisurely interest in life.

  But in the secret heart of her, she had to admit that it wasn’t a harmony she would have chosen. It wasn’t her way to sit back and let the world revolve around her. It made her feel old and useless, which was why she had responded so readily to having the little evacuees at New World. At not yet fifty, being old wasn’t how she wanted to feel.

  The miscarriage she had suffered a year ago had undoubtedly made her assess her life, but not in the way everyone seemed to think. She had wanted that child, with a possessiveness that hadn’t dawned on her until it was too late. It was a virtual certainty, now, that she wouldn’t conceive again. And that made her feel old too…

  Her thoughts became concentrated on the reason she was returning to the imposing Killigrew House with Betsy. Her cousin Theo was sixty-three years old, and clearly not ready to hang up his boots yet. And neither was she.

  But she also began asking herself severely just what she was thinking about. She had been the one to push him into selling, following her husband’s legal advice that a merger was the best way to keep both companies afloat. It seemed the best option for Killigrew Clay to cut the strings completely, but now it seemed that Theo couldn’t let go so easily.

  Once they were sitting in Betsy’s comfortable parlour, she asked her bluntly to explain just what was going on.

  ‘He’s up there every day,’ Betsy exploded. ‘I swear to you I think he’s going senile, Skye, and the clayworkers ain’t going to play up to his shenanigans for much longer. He’s up there lording it over them as if he’s still one o’ the clay bosses – far worse than old Charles Killigrew ever was in his day, by all accounts.’

  ‘But they all know Theo has no authority any more.’

  ‘Oh ah, they know it, and so far they’m all tickled pink by the way he goes on, and some of ’em are pretending to kowtow to him, funning with him, and then having a high old time aping his manner over jars of ale in the kiddleywinks, from what one o’ the older clayers told me. Theo can’t see that they’re mocking him, o’ course, but it can’t last for ever, and I know they’ll turn on him soon. He shames me, Skye, and that’s a fact.’

  She paused for breath, and Skye sensed her humiliation. It was bad enough that the clayworkers had bitterly resented Theo Tremayne’s caustic manner when he was in charge. They had no say then. But now, he didn’t pay their wages and he amounted to nothing, and she could just imagine the way some of the younger ones enjoyed jeering and mocking him.

  ‘He must know they’re just baiting him,’ she said uneasily. ‘He’s not stupid, Betsy.’

  ‘I told you. I think he’s going senile,’ she repeated. ‘He rants and rambles on as if he’s still a clay boss, and although he drives me to distraction, sometimes I fear for him. It’s just like your Uncle Albie all over again.’

  ‘Please don’t say that,’ Skye said quickly.

  ‘Why not? The lapses happened to old Luke Tremayne as well before he passed on, and I ain’t so sure the one who went to Ireland years ago didn’t suffer the same kind of affliction too, so why shouldn’t it be in the family?’

  ‘Because I don’t want it to be. Because I’m one of the family too, and both my parents were Tremaynes, and first cousins at that. If anybody’s directly in line for any kind of abnormality, it’s me.’

  Betsy recovered from her brooding fury over Theo’s antics to realise that Skye’s voice had become shriller and that she was deeply distressed.

  ‘Oh my God, I didn’t mean to upset ’ee, Skye,’ she said, acutely embarrassed now. ‘You know I wouldn’t do that for the world, and anyway, there’s none so bright as you, so you don’t need to take no notice of my nonsense.’

  ‘But it’s not nonsense, is it? It’s just something I never thought about before.’

  ‘Well, you can stop thinking about it right now,’ Betsy said firmly. ‘’Tis Theo who’s the madman, and he’s been one since he were knee-high to a grasshopper, so there’s no cause to think ’tis something that’s just caught on, is there?’

  Skye knew that was true enough, but she also knew that something had to be done to stop Theo making a complete fool of himself over a business that no longer belonged to them. The family had been steeped in the fortunes of Killigrew Clay for almost a century, but when it was time to let go, you had to let it go completely. She thought he had understood that.

  ‘I’ll have to speak to him, won’t I?’ she said slowly, knowing Betsy didn’t have a hope of making him understand.

  ‘I reckon you’re the only one who can.’

  * * *

  She had intended going straight home to relax for an hour or so. Mary Lunn would be having an afternoon sleep in the old nursery, and their maid Liza always gave the child her afternoon tea now. Celia had managed to arrange her tram shifts so that she could fetch th
e others from school, and there wasn’t much for Skye to do except to be the nominal matriarch of the family.

  She shuddered at the word. A matriarch was an elderly woman, such as her Granny Morwen had been in her final years, and Skye wasn’t ready for that yet. She instinctively turned her car away from the main road back to New World, and headed inland up to the huge, sprawling gash in the moorland that was Clay One, the remaining pit of the old Killigrew clayworks.

  Life went on up here much as it had done for years, with the exception of the fine new electrical machinery that had been installed to make production faster and more efficient. The old days, that everyone referred to with such nostalgia, had been a time of hardship and poverty for the hundreds of clayworkers who had worked out in the open in all weathers, but this area had been reduced to a skeleton of those former times, and she doubted that any of her forebears would recognise it now.

  The soaring white hills of the sky-tips didn’t change, though, she thought stoutly, and nor did the milky green clay pools that looked so serene and beautiful in the sunlight. No visitor to Cornwall could fail to be affected by the wild, futuristic, moonscape appearance of it all. The phrase surged into her mind at that moment, and she stored it away to use in her record of the family background.

  ‘Come to help your cousin on his way, have ‘ee, Mrs Pengelly?’ she heard a voice jeer, as she gazed down unseeingly, trying to recapture the memory of this place alive with hundreds of clayworkers, instead of the comparative few who worked here now. Nostalgia wasn’t only for the old…

  She whirled around at the sound of the voice, and saw a group of clayers nearby, leaning on their long shovels, their thigh-high boots caked in wet clay, their clothes dusted grey-white with the substance. They were strangers to her, but they clearly knew who she was.

  ‘Is he here?’ she asked, knowing at once that they must mean Theo Tremayne, and sharing Betsy’s shame.

  ‘You’ll ’ear him any minute now, missis,’ another one sniggered. ‘He’s been at the scrumpy, and he ain’t feelin’ too clever. Pit Captain says he shouldn’t drive ’is posh car and he should stay here and sleep it off, but now I reckon you can take ’im home.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Skye snapped.

  But she could already hear him, screeching his head off in the bawdiest song that was currently doing the rounds of the clayworks. Her face burned at the coarse words that weren’t yet slurred enough to be mistaken.

  ‘We’ll fetch ’im for ’ee, missis,’ the men laughed, clearly enjoying the sight of the company lawyer’s wife looking so mortified. And an ex-owner at that. It was one more black mark against Theo, she raged.

  The men half-dragged him towards her car, and bundled him inside it. The stink of the rough cider was almost overpowering, and whatever else she had intended chastising him about today was forgotten in her need to get him home as quickly as possible, with all the car windows already flung open to rid it of the stench.

  ‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’ he snarled, still befuddled, but finally realising he was on the move, and that his belly was starting to boil as the car lurched over the uneven moorland track towards Truro.

  ‘I’m taking you home where you belong,’ Skye snapped.

  After a startled moment he slurred on insultingly, ‘Well now, if it ain’t my sweet, beautiful American cuz, whiter than snow and twice as bloody angelic.’

  ‘Shut up, Theo—’

  ‘My sweet and lovely girl, who never let her knickers drop for her cuz, no matter how much he wanted her to,’ he moaned dramatically.

  ‘For God’s sake, will you shut up! The car windows are all open—’

  The next second, she was more than thankful that they were, as Theo suddenly swung sideways towards the nearest one and spewed up the contents of his stomach onto the track. He disgusted her so much; how he could ever have thought she would fancy him in a million years was beyond her. She wondered how Betsy ever had.

  Mercifully the urgent eruption of his stomach contents made him pass out completely, and he slid down on the back seat without another sound until she had returned him to Killigrew House.

  She ran to the house, and Betsy came to the door with her lips tight, calling to the menservants to bring their master inside. The quaintness of the request didn’t escape Skye, and she presumed it was the only way Betsy could preserve a little dignity at this disgraceful exhibition.

  ‘I wasn’t able to speak to him about the other matter,’ she said briefly. ‘He was too drunk, but I’ll do it as soon as possible. And don’t worry about his car, Betsy. I’ll arrange for it to be brought back to the house.’

  ‘You can let it stay there and fall to pieces for all I care. He won’t walk all that way with his gout.’

  ‘But you know how he dotes on that car—’

  ‘Serves him right. No – leave it where it is, Skye. And if the clayers find it amusing to daub it with anything that takes their fancy, that’ll serve him right too.’

  Skye drove away, sobered by the rage in Betsy’s voice, and knowing that Theo had gone too far this time. But so had Betsy, in leaving his car to the wolves… and then, as the varying smells of Theo’s presence in her car almost made her vomit herself, she decided that if this was what Betsy wanted, it wasn’t her place to argue.

  * * *

  ‘We can’t leave the car there,’ Nick said angrily, when she had related all that had happened. ‘The clayworkers will never leave it alone. His bombastic interference is well known by now, and I know just how inflamed they are at his insults. I’ve no doubt it will result in slogans and scratches all over the car. No, two wrongs don’t make a right, Skye. Common decency demands that we bring it back, much as I deplore having to do anything for him.’

  ‘Oh Nick, can’t you forget your lawyer’s conscience for once, and speak as a family member?’ she said irritably.

  ‘Not on this occasion. A lawyer is what I am, and you know it.’

  ‘I don’t always have to like it,’ she muttered. At times she found his logical arguments for and against the smallest thing too much to take.

  ‘Anyway, I can’t do anything about it this evening,’ Nick went on. ‘I’m snowed under with paperwork, and I certainly don’t want you and Celia going up there after dark.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time. My family knew the moors like the backs of their hands, and were never afraid of walking up there, night or day, let alone driving. In my grandmother’s time, they never had cars anyway.’

  ‘Yes well, we don’t live in miserable clayworkers’ cottages, or have to scratch clay for a living.’

  His arrogance was too much. ‘Sometimes, Nick, you can be so insufferable,’ she said. She marched out of the room in time to meet Celia with the evacuees coming home from school, and had to switch her mind to listening to Daphne’s moaning, and Tommy’s yelling.

  ‘Don’t they ever stop?’ she asked her daughter.

  ‘You wanted them here, Mom,’ Celia said cheerfully. ‘But I gather they’ve had a bad day,’ she added in an aside. ‘Some of the older children have been telling them their houses are going to be bombed, and they’ll have to stay here for ever.’

  ‘And that’s a fate worse than death, is it?’

  ‘Of course it is, poor little devils! What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing that can’t wait for the telling,’ Skye said, shamefaced at her black mood, and forcing a smile on her face for the sake of the children.

  * * *

  It was Butch Butcher who reported the news much later that evening. He and Tommy had been squabbling in his bedroom over one of Wenna’s old books, and in the end it had got ripped, and Tommy was yelling that there would be bleedin’ hell to pay now, and that Mrs Pen would give his arse a good old tanning the way his Ma used to tan his.

  Skye was on her way to find out what all the commotion was about, preparing to talk to Tommy in no uncertain manner about his language, when she saw Butch standing by the window, his head pushed inside
the black-out curtain, so that only the rear of his large, ungainly body could be seen.

  ‘Come away from there, Butch,’ Skye snapped. ‘You know the slightest bit of light shines for miles, and I don’t want to have the Warden coming down on us.’

  He pulled his head back from the curtain, his eyes large and full of fear.

  ‘I reckon we might as well go ’ome, missis, if the Germans have started dropping bombs on us here.’

  ‘What? Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody’s dropping bombs here, and you should know better than to frighten the younger ones, Butch. We’re perfectly safe in Cornwall, and besides, there was no air raid warning, was there?’

  ‘What’s that, then?’ he screeched, opening the curtains wider, uncaring now whether or not he showed a wide beam of light to a non-existent enemy.

  Angry at his apparent scaremongering, Skye strode to the window to snatch the curtains across again, and then gasped. The ground rose towards the high spine of Cornwall from here, and by daylight or moonlight it was possible to see the moors and the ghostly white sky-tips. It had always charmed her, but not now. Right now, all that could be seen was a huge fire burning brightly on the skyline, and at the same moment the sound of fire-engine bells as vehicles screamed towards it.

  ‘My God,’ she whispered.

  ‘I told you, missis,’ Butch was still babbling. ‘’Tis them Jerries dropping bombs on us, and we’ll all be killed.’

  ‘Are we going to be bombed, Mrs Pen?’ Daphne Hollis said, dancing up and down, her eyes full of glee. ‘My uncle was nearly killed in France in the other war, and he’s got a hole in his head and a wooden leg now,’ she added importantly.