Charlie

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘They were so know-it-all and flashy,’ he said, and his eyes twinkled with mischief. ‘They spoke to me as if I was some dim-witted yokel who’d never been out of Salcombe. But by the time I had them all throwing up yesterday’s dinner, they were a little more humble. With luck they’ll take their holidays in Benidorm in future, that’s where they belong.’

  He was amazed that she’d sold the fishing rod, and laughed heartily when she told him what had passed between her and the man called Guy Acton-Bond.

  ‘We get a lot of his type down here,’ he said. ‘Public school prats with fat wallets and nothing between their ears but air. I expect dozens of them will chat you up, my dear, but just take a word of advice from an old codger. Watch your step with them. It’s easy for a young girl to be swayed into thinking a man really cares for her when he lays on the charm with a shovel. But some of these chaps are rotters, and you, my dear, are a little vulnerable right now.’

  Charlie smiled. She thought she knew how to handle men.

  At half past seven Ivor took her across the road to meet Beryl Langley, Minnie following them with the calm assurance of a dog who was used to shadowing her owner.

  ‘This is my new first mate,’ he said by way of an introduction to the woman behind the bar. ‘And I can boast that today she’s already trebled my usual takings.’

  ‘Well, my lover,’ Beryl said to Charlie in a similar Devon accent to Ivor’s, ‘you’re a pretty little flower and no mistake. Let me show you your room. It’s not much to write home about, I’ll warn you, just a little old attic room. But if you’ll put in a couple of hours a night for me when we’re busy, you’re welcome to it.’

  Charlie felt she was going to like Beryl. Aside from her warm smiles and welcoming manner, she had a rather amusing appearance which reminded her of a pantomime dame: about fifty, slightly overweight, with tightly permed orange hair which vied for attention with her shiny pink, ruffled dress. Just the way she came rushing round the bar, picked up one of Charlie’s suitcases, then admonished all her customers to behave themselves while she was gone, suggested she was a fun-loving person.

  ‘Watch yourself on the stairs,’ she said as she swept out through a back door, leaving Charlie to follow with the other case. ‘The stair carpet’s as old and worn as me.’

  The inn seemed like a rabbit warren with its narrow dark passages, winding stairs and dozens of doors. Beryl led her to the top floor and a room at the back.

  ‘This is it,’ she said. ‘Sorry it hasn’t got a sea view, but then you’ll be looking at the sea all day over at Ivor’s.’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ Charlie said weakly. In fact she had never seen such a tiny, cheerless room before. All it held was a single bed, a narrow wardrobe and a chest of drawers. The ceiling sloped so steeply it was only possible to stand upright in the middle of the room. But she reminded herself that she was lucky to be offered a bed at all. ‘It’s very kind of you to let me have it, Mrs Langley.’

  ‘Beryl’s the name, Beryl the Peril to some,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll throw in an evening meal any time you want it,’ she added, humping the case she carried up on to the bed and opening it. ‘You’ll have to help yourself to a bit of breakfast, I’m not usually about early in the morning. Oh, what nice clothes you’ve got!’

  Charlie might have been offended at anyone else opening her case and pulling out items unasked, but the woman did it in an almost motherly way and her approval was welcome.

  ‘My parents were rich,’ Charlie said, feeling she had to give some sort of explanation. ‘But everything’s gone wrong for them. Did Ivor tell you about it?’

  ‘All Ivor told me was that you needed a home,’ she said, patting Charlie’s shoulder. ‘I put two and two together when he said you were Chinese, because I read about your poor mother in the paper. But I don’t pry, my lover, if you wants to tell me anything, I’ll be all ears, but don’t feel you’ve got to. From what I can see, I reckons you’ve had a basin full of people poking their noses in.’

  ‘You’re very nice,’ Charlie said, and suddenly her eyes were prickling with tears. In just a few words this woman with her odd dress and hair had made her feel at home and secure. She was so very glad she’d come to Salcombe. ‘Shall I come down now and do some washing-up?’

  ‘Certainly not, tomorrow will do for that,’ Beryl said firmly. ‘You stay and unpack, make yourself at home. If you want to pop down later for a cup of tea or anything, you know the way.’

  Charlie got into bed at ten. From down below she could hear the sound of laughter and clinking glasses and bottles. Although it was dark outside now, people were still walking about. She could hear the sea in the distance and it was a soothing sound.

  Her clothes were all unpacked. Her little radio, alarm clock and a photograph of her parents were placed on the locker by her bed. Beryl had popped up just once to bring her a cup of tea, cake and some clean towels. She used the excuse that she’d forgotten to tell Charlie where the bathroom was, but Charlie guessed the woman wanted to make sure she wasn’t sitting up here alone and crying.

  She did feel tearful, but only because she’d been made so welcome by both Ivor and Beryl. She wondered why some people could be so kind, yet others so cruel. Were the kind ones like that because they’d had some period of terrible unhappiness in their lives too?

  She picked up the photograph of her parents. Charlie had taken it last Christmas with the camera she’d been given. They were cuddled up together on the settee in the drawing room with the Christmas tree behind them. It was often said by other people what a striking couple they were, her mother’s silky blonde hair and fair skin a perfect foil for her father’s olive skin and jet-black hair. In this picture Sylvia was wearing a pale grey cashmere dress, her father a maroon jacket, and they both held glasses of champagne.

  At the time when she got the photograph developed Charlie was pleased with the sophistication of the picture. But in the light of recent events, it looked phoney. Everything, the adoring way they were looking at each other, the elegant glasses of champagne and the tree behind them, was posed. Until she suggested taking the picture they had been sitting on opposite sides of the room. It wasn’t representative of how they really were alone at home with one another at all.

  Why was it that with such a wealth of evidence, her mother’s strange moods, her father’s long absences, and the rows she overheard, she had continued to believe her parents were deeply in love with one another, and that their life together as a family would never change?

  Now she was here in a funny little room above a pub, working in a fishing shack. Mum was in hospital and would perhaps never be able to walk again. And Dad, where was he? Was he, as her mother believed, off with another woman, financing a new start with the money he’d cheated his wife and daughter out of?

  Charlie knew this was the most likely scenario. She could even see for herself that Jin might have got so tired of Sylvia’s moods and her ever-increasing dependence on him that he felt he had to walk away. If he’d also fallen in love with someone else he could be really happy with, maybe he thought it was right to take everything he’d worked for too.

  Yet however likely that was, she still didn’t believe it, not deep down inside. Her father just wasn’t a callous man. Besides, he had loved ‘Windways’. Charlie could remember the many occasions when he’d just come back from abroad. The first thing he would do was insist Sylvia and Charlie join him in wandering around the garden. He would smile with delight over each new flower, drink in the sea air and cuddle them both as they all admired the view. Would any man willingly walk away from something he loved that much?

  ‘Come back, Daddy,’ she whispered in the dark. ‘Even if it’s only to see me and explain.’

  Chapter Four

  On Charlie’s third day working for Ivor, he came into the shack around three in the afternoon and announced it was her turn to make their evening meal.

  ‘Me?’ she said, dropping the pile of sun hats she had in her hand
s in surprise.

  Ivor was pleased at the way Charlie was shaping up in the shop. She had a nice manner with the customers and she was so enthusiastic to learn about boats and fishing. He’d fed her for the last two evenings because it was as easy to cook for two as it was for one, and he enjoyed having her company, but if a shared meal was to become a regular thing, he thought she should take her turn cooking too.

  ‘Yes, you,’ he grinned. ‘I’m not your slave. Go over to the butcher’s and get some pork sausages. I’ve already got potatoes in.’

  He shoved a 10-shilling note into her hands and sat down outside to fill his pipe. Charlie didn’t have the nerve to tell him she’d never cooked a sausage in her life.

  She reasoned with herself as she went over to the butcher’s that it couldn’t be that hard, she’d seen her mother do it often enough. You just put them in a pan and fried them till they were brown. And potatoes only had to be peeled and put in water.

  Ivor was outside talking to one of the boatyard men when Charlie started to cook. She got out the frying pan, put a lump of fat in it, then dumped in the sausages. It was a great deal harder to peel potatoes than it looked, and she was so engrossed in it that she didn’t notice the kitchen was getting smoky.

  Ivor came rushing in, followed by Minnie barking loudly. ‘You’ll set the house on fire! You’ve got the gas on too high,’ he yelled, grabbing the pan off the cooker. ‘My God, they’re burnt to a crisp. Is there something the matter with your eyes and nose?’

  ‘I was doing the potatoes,’ she said indignantly.

  Ivor dumped the sausages into the rubbish bin. Minnie put her nose in after them, but even she moved back in disgust when she saw the burnt offerings. ‘We can’t eat those. Go and get some more,’ Ivor bellowed at Charlie. ‘Be quick before they close.’

  While she was gone, Ivor found she had only managed to peel two potatoes, and they looked like a small child’s first attempts, heavily gouged with stray pieces of peel all over them. In a flash he realized it was something she’d never done before, and that shocked him. His first reaction was to do them quickly himself, but after a moment’s reflection he saw that wouldn’t teach her anything.

  When Charlie came back five minutes later, he was standing in the kitchen, hands on hips, looking fearsome. Minnie had retreated to her basket as if she sensed trouble. ‘Potatoes take longer to cook than sausages, so you peel those first and put them on to boil,’ he said curtly.

  Charlie sullenly returned to the peeling, but she was aware Ivor was watching her closely. ‘What sort of a way is that to hold a potato peeler?’ he asked, coming up behind her and grabbing her hands. ‘This is the way you do it.’

  She thought he would get tired of instructing her and take over, but he didn’t, he just stood over her, criticizing the eyes she’d left in, and her slowness. It took her nearly half an hour to peel them all.

  ‘Have you put salt in?’ he asked as she lit the gas under them. ‘Not that much!’ he yelled as she dug a spoon into the china pot he kept it in. ‘Only a pinch.’

  Charlie wanted to cry. He kept shouting at her for not pricking the sausages, for not keeping her eye on the gas under the potatoes, for not turning the sausages, and for scalding herself when she tried to strain the potatoes.

  ‘You’ve never cooked anything before, have you?’ he said eventually, when she finally admitted defeat and said she didn’t know how to mash potatoes.

  ‘No, and I don’t want to,’ she said and burst into tears. ‘Mum or Mrs Brown always did it.’

  Ivor smiled to himself. He rather admired the fact she’d had too much pride to tell him so in the beginning. He smeared some butter on her scalded hand, but forced himself not to be overly sympathetic. ‘Well, there’s no mum here. You like to eat, don’t you? So you have to learn to cook. It’s as simple as that. So I’m going to teach you.’

  He didn’t let her off anything. She had to mash the potatoes, and he stood over her instructing her at each stage. Finally they sat down to eat, but by that time Charlie wasn’t hungry and all Ivor did was go on about how meat had to be cooked gently otherwise it burned on the outside while the inside remained raw.

  ‘Don’t be so mean to me,’ she burst out eventually. ‘It’s not my fault I don’t know.’

  Ivor wanted to laugh. Scowling didn’t suit her, it made her look like a Pekinese.

  ‘Quite so. But it’s no good just bleating about it, you have to make up your mind to learn,’ he said evenly, reaching over and taking her plate. He cut up her leftovers for Minnie who wolfed them down appreciatively. ‘Cooking’s a skill even the most stupid person can master, and you aren’t stupid, just stubborn. And by the way, your washing-up is hopeless too. So we’ll put that right tonight, we don’t want Beryl sacking you.’

  When he finally let her go back to the Victoria at half past seven, Charlie was livid with rage. He had humiliated her, made her burn herself and implied she was worthless. She hated him.

  Beryl came into the kitchen later that evening and found Charlie crying as she washed glasses. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  Charlie blurted it all out. To her surprise Beryl laughed.

  ‘So the old dog’s teaching the new one tricks,’ she said. ‘Can’t say I approve of his brutal methods, but it is pretty shocking that a girl of sixteen doesn’t even know how to peel a spud.’

  Charlie cried harder. She had expected Beryl to be on her side. ‘Now, now.’ Beryl put her arms round her comfortingly and drew her against her shoulder. ‘Ivor’s a good man really, just a bit crusty. But he’s right, you must learn these things, or how will you manage when you get a place of your own?’

  ‘I can’t go back there tomorrow,’ Charlie cried. ‘He thinks I’m stupid.’

  ‘He doesn’t think anything of the sort, you should have heard him in the bar last night, praising you to the skies. And you will go in there tomorrow, my love. You’ll march in there proudly with your head held high. Ivor will be sorry by now that he was so fierce. Let him teach you to do things, he’s a good cook, nearly as good as me, but I haven’t got the time to teach you. In a few weeks you’ll be laughing about this.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Charlie said stubbornly. She was embarrassed now that she’d allowed herself to be caught crying.

  ‘You will when you can cook a whole meal all by yourself,’ Beryl said, patting Charlie’s back. ‘Just you wait.’

  Five weeks later, on a wet Thursday afternoon in August, Charlie got off the bus at Kingsbridge. Ivor had given her time off to visit her mother who had recently been transferred to a nursing home there. He said there wouldn’t be any customers because of the rain, and there wasn’t much point in both of them sitting idly watching it from his shack.

  Charlie would have much preferred to spend a lazy afternoon chatting with him than with her mother, who was still being extremely difficult, and she’d said so, but Ivor gave her a pretend slap across the bottom and said, ‘Duty comes before pleasure.’

  Beryl was right when she’d said that in a few weeks Charlie would laugh at her hapless first attempts at cooking; she did think it was funny now. But then she felt she was a different person now to the snooty, spoilt kid who’d actually expected her employer to cook her a meal every night. Who would have thought that in just five weeks she would have progressed from burnt sausages to making a chicken casserole from a recipe book without anyone standing over her?

  She thought she had learned more useful things in a few weeks from Ivor than in her whole time at school. Every day there was something new, whether it was boiling up her white shorts and blouse in a bucket on his stove to get some stains out, sewing a button on, using Cardinal polish on the red tiles on his kitchen floor to make them gleam, or the correct amount of bleach to put down the lavatory to keep it hygienic. In the shop she’d learned the differences between fishing in the sea and fresh water, which bait had to be used depending on what the customer wanted to catch, and indeed how to handle customers and pick up
hints from the ones who were experienced fishermen and sailors.

  But it was more than new skills she’d learned from Ivor. In his often brusque manner he’d knocked the corners off her, made her aware of her arrogance and the need to look around her and take in how other people lived and learn from them too, because it was unlikely she was ever going to return to her once pampered life.

  Although Charlie still yearned for the comfort of her old life, especially when she was tired in the evenings and still had to do two or three hours of washing glasses and clearing up in the pub before she could go to bed, mostly she loved being in Salcombe. If it hadn’t been for the anxiety about her mother, who was still deeply depressed and utterly convinced she would never walk again, and the fact that her father still hadn’t surfaced anywhere, she could have been ecstatically happy.

  There was the colourful bustle of the harbour on hot days, the peace and tranquillity on wet ones, walks with Minnie and the joy of bringing order to the cluttered shop. She enjoyed talking to the many children who bought buckets and spades, and flirting with boys who came to buy bait. In the evenings at the pub as she collected glasses, she could moan about the strange habits of tourists with other locals, and late at night Beryl would give her a glass of cider with a dash of lemonade and they’d chat about everything from clothes to the latest news in the papers.

  But as each day passed, she saw how much she owed to Ivor. He had so little money – what he made in summer had to last right through the winter – yet he shared everything he had with her, whether it was a catch of mackerel, a cake, or just his time. He made her laugh, he entertained her with stories of when he was in the navy, he listened when she needed to air her fears and anxieties about her parents and the future. His advice and teaching were always practical. But above all he made her feel safe and cared for.

  Charlie put the hood up on her raincoat and hurried up Westville Hill towards Franklin House. Mr Wyatt had telephoned her a few days earlier at the Victoria to tell her the almoner at Dartmouth Hospital had managed to get Sylvia into this nursing home.