His face came alive. His whole body sparked with energy, with life.
‘I lied,’ he said, putting on his helmet. ‘Show me what you’ve got, Miss Caron! If we’re going to go down, let’s do it in style!’ He snapped on his goggles with a flourish. ‘I’m ready!’
For the next twenty minutes Edward was taken on the ride of his life. The chill from the wind was fierce, but as we flew low and slow over Angels Cove, children ran out to wave at us, racing the little aircraft as we flew parallel with the road. I flew half a mile out to sea and performed only part of my stunt routine – a tick-tock stall and a few loops – but not too much, it wouldn’t do to turn Edward’s stomach and embarrass him.
On landing back at the field, I taxied the aircraft to just outside the barn and cut the engine. I jumped out once the propeller had stopped and leant across Edward to unstrap him. The cheeks on his face burned red but his eyes were as bright as shiny new pins.
Edward jumped out, ripped off his goggles and helmet and just stood there, looking at me and smiling – half madman – before picking me up, spinning me around and finally placing me, very gently, on the ground again.
‘That was incredible, Juliet. Thank you. Thank you so very much.’ He handed me the goggles and hat. Still on a high from the flight, he babbled on about the joy of flying while we pushed the Tiger Moth back in the barn.
‘I wonder, do you have time to come to the village again for tea? They’re having a Christmas lantern parade on the twenty-third and I seem to have been roped in again to make lanterns and decorate the church, and you seemed to enjoy our afternoon in the hall. I have a feeling you’d love it. What do you say?’
I wanted to go. I wanted to go so very, very badly, but I shook my head, leant against the wing and sighed.
‘I’m sorry, Edward, but I can’t.’
He stepped in, too close for mere friends.
‘Why can’t you?’
I shook my head and smiled resignedly.
‘I think we both know why.’
He stepped closer still and leant in to brush my cheek with his lips. ‘In that case, thank you for the flight,’ he whispered. ‘It was wonderful.’ He stepped back. ‘Consider the debt paid, Miss Caron.’ And then, without looking back, to my absolute surprise, he walked away.
Chapter 9
Katherine
18 December
Poor George
The candles were half their original size and surrounded by pools of wax when I place the manuscript on the sofa beside me, disappointed at Edward for walking away, and cursing Juliet for letting him go.
But it was time to stop reading. Not just because I needed to sleep (although, what did I know of sleep any more? Sleep had become a fitful irrelevance since James had died) or because my phone battery was down to ten percent and I wanted to save a little just in case the roof really did blow off, but because now that I was engrossed in Juliet’s story, I wasn’t sure about the – what to call it – moral correctness? – of reading someone else’s private memoirs, even if that person was no longer around to care. The only answer was to email Sam, the grandson – the coddiwompler? – and ask his permission to read on. I had ventured to Cornwall looking for a historical story to tell and it looked like I had found one, but that suddenly didn’t seem important, because looking into the lives of these strangers tonight had led me to throw side-glances towards my own story which, as Gerald knew, had not just stagnated, but stopped. Juliet was leading me somewhere – I just didn’t know where that somewhere was.
***
I poked my head out of the candlewick bedspread at about ten a.m. the following morning and promptly ducked under again once my nose had direct contact with the cold. I had two options, stay warm under the bedcovers but starve to death, or face the cold and risk hyperthermia. The second option won by a narrow margin leading me to jump out and dance on the spot while throwing open the curtains – a bright, wintery, sunshiny glow flooded the room. I stopped dancing and stared. What a difference a few hours could make, and what a view.
James would have loved this.
Wall-to-wall ocean broken by three little granite islands that sat in the bay.
So here were the famous Angels, splattered with tiny flecks of white, as if God had gone on a paint flicking frenzy. I put my glasses on and realised the white flecks were actually seagulls, presumably taking a well-earned rest after the stress of the storm. The sea was a little swollen still, but it seemed Katherine had moved on to terrorise pastures new, leaving a bright winter morning in her wake.
I turned on a wind-up radio that sat on the windowsill at the top of the stairs and tried the bedroom light. Still no power. Allowing as short a time as possible for my bare skin to feel the sharpness of the cold, I dressed in the previous day’s clothes and headed down the stairs, pausing to sit on the bottom step to check my phone for messages and contact Gerald regarding the day’s agenda.
Uncle Gerald had beaten me to it.
Terrible news. George has had a heart attack. Have rushed to Brighton in Land Rover – used the spare key as didn’t want to disturb. Have spoken to Fenella and she’s going to look after you – you are not to sit home alone moping! Will text when I know more about George as there is talk of a stent being put in. So very sorry to love and leave. Have a fabulous time. Don’t forget about the apostrophe, will you? Oh, and best keep a beady eye out for Percy and Noel who will no doubt try to cajole – they are leaders of opposing camps! X
My first thought was obviously, ‘Poor George …’ but my second thought was very definitely … ‘Bollocks!’
‘Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks.’
And, ‘Bollocks to the bloody apostrophe, too!’
Sitting on the bottom step of the stairs I stared at the door, just as Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas came on the radio. Alone again for Christmas after all.
There was only one thing for it – I’d go back to bed for an hour and bury myself in both the snuggly covers and the embrace of my new friends – Juliet and Edward. Hoping that their paths would surely cross again.
Chapter 10
Juliet
22 December 1938
The promise
Dear Juliet
On second thoughts, I’m not entirely sure the debt is paid completely. The children are making lanterns in the hall from eleven and as the future lady of the manor, I thought it probably your wish – your duty – to help out. Lunch on the beach afterwards as a thank you?
Yours, the incorrigible coddiwompler,
E. Nancarrow
P.S. If you come, I’ll tell you what a coddiwompler is.
P.P.S. Wrap up warm!
The Christmas Card was hand-delivered by a young boy shortly after breakfast. I was having coffee with Lottie in the lounge when Katie handed it to me. I recognised the card. Edward had made it in the village hall during our afternoon together, when we sat with the children, in a moment of perfect happiness. I dare not open it and yet to leave it unopened would draw suspicion from Lottie.
Lottie glanced up from her book. I opened the card and feigned a smile.
‘It’s from Jessops,’ I said. ‘To thank us for the cider.’
I returned the card into the envelope, both gleefully happy and torn apart, made my excuses by explaining to Lottie that I really must return to servicing the aircraft– that sticky rudder came to my rescue again – and I explained that I would be out for the day. No one batted an eye at this. All they had ever known me do was walk for miles along the Cornish coast and tinker with my aircraft. As the Lanyons were neither walkers nor flyers, I had often spent much of my time during the day in Cornwall alone gathering my thoughts and healing my broken heart.
I dashed to my room to read the card again – slowly this time, drinking in every word. There was such a cocky confidence about his invitation and a secret intimacy, too. If Charles were to read it, he would think nothing untoward, but what Edward was really asking was to be alone with me one final time
before I married.
There was only one thing to be done.
Without a moment’s hesitation, I pulled on my flying jacket over my best trousers, blouse and cardigan and headed, as fast as my feet could carry me without actually running, down the road to Angels Cove.
I lost the final piece of my heart to Edward that day. And yet, the very next day found me standing on a small table in the garden room at Lanyon, with Katie fussing around me with pins in her mouth adjusting Lottie’s cream cashmere suit. Lottie and Ma Lanyon looked on. I tried my best to smile, but my mind was a whirlpool.
I have often wondered if human attraction works in the exact same way as magnetic attraction and if this is why it is so utterly impossible to repel someone you are deeply attracted to. I knew I shouldn’t see Edward again and yet the pull towards him was beyond my control. If the universal law of magnetism was involved, then it really wasn’t my fault.
It was weak excuse but all I had.
And here was another – just as the north pole of one magnet will attract toward the south pole of another, so will the same polarity force each other apart, and I wondered if, with the introduction of Edward, Charles and I no longer attracted but repelled each other. In the evenings at Lanyon I tried my utmost to be near to him, to hold onto him, to be in love with him, but I couldn’t. And the more I thought of Edward, the more Charles became pushed away. The physics of magnetism then, was my feeble excuse for my behaviour that day, my excuse for dashing to Angels Cove at the first possible moment, hoping to find Edward in the village hall.
But Edward was not in the hall. He was, I was told by a lady trimming the Christmas tree, most likely at his cottage, Angel View, a whitewashed cottage up a little track to right of the harbour. And it’s got the best view in the village – said another lady who was hanging off a ladder hanging paper chains in the hall.
I had not yet been to Edward’s home. Our meetings, although inwardly intimate – certainly intimate inside my thoughts and dreams, and I’m certain intimate inside of his – had been kept purely on a friendship footing, which meant keeping away from the privacy of his house. There had been no talk of love, no snatched kisses, no hand holding, just lots and lots of fun. Which was why, as I approached Edward’s cottage, I felt nervous. I stood there for a moment, just short of the cottage and stared out to sea, at the islands, my confused thoughts bouncing around my head. The tide was out and the Angels – the three granite mounts I had used as a navigational aid just a few days before, when life had been so much simpler – stood proudly in the bay. They were larger when the tide was out and it was odd, but as I stood there and looked out to sea, with my coat fastened tightly against the freshness of the Cornish breeze, I wondered how on earth they had been given such a name and thought that ‘angel’ was far too beautiful a word to have been adopted for these ragged-looking islands, which seem to hide in every nook and cranny, some dark and foreboding secrets.
My thoughts returned to the present and to Edward and also to a story that Edward needed to be told. And yet it was a story I couldn’t possibly tell him – a story I had promised never to tell. It was a story that promised to tie me to the house – to Charles and to Lottie – forever. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
***
From the moment Lottie and I met, we were inseparable. We were for each other the sisters neither of us had ever had and despite my early misgivings, I loved my time in Paris and even felt the tug of my French ancestry calling me home. I spent every holiday with Lottie at Lanyon and became a welcome member of the family. Ma and Pa could not have been kinder and I became, without question, an accepted and loved member of the family. Those holidays at Lanyon were days of a privileged, gentrified youth – sailing on the river, a game of tennis, riding, croquet on the lawn – and although the loss of my parents could knock me sideways into a deep depressive abyss without a moment’s notice, bit by bit, although the weight didn’t lift completely, the grief became lighter as the months and years passed on.
My dream of flying as a career was not forgotten, but very definitely put on hold while I reluctantly did exactly what my mother had wanted me to do, transform into a lady. Ultimately – inevitably, perhaps – Lottie’s brother, Charles, became part of the package. I suppose it was expected from the get-go that Charles and I would marry, and so when Charles kissed me one balmy June afternoon in 1938, I kissed him back with the mechanical acceptance of a woman who had known for some time that this moment would come and accepted it.
This, I said to myself, was love.
Love was two people who got along and, after an appropriate amount of time, kissed, and after a further appropriate amount of time, married and perhaps had children. It was a steadier romance than Lottie and I had imagined during our nights reading novels at school, but I didn’t mind. My passion was reserved for flying and unlike Lottie, I had never actively looked for romance or expected anything other than that one day, I would perhaps marry the kind of man my mother had instructed me to marry – the non-predatory kind, the kind who would adore me to eternity.
Charles, very definitely, fit the bill.
Lottie, by comparison, was desperate to find the opposite kind of love, one that burned with the raging heat of a thousand furnaces and was determined not to settle for anything less until she found it. In late September 1938, while I took myself off on a flying tour around France with an old flying club friend, Lottie disappeared north to spend two months in Scotland on an estate belonging to friends of her parents – the son was deemed to be a suitable match. Bored by the son, Lottie found passion elsewhere, with another house guest, an eminent one, who was not only a married man and a charlatan, but also a high-profile politician, close to the Prime Minister himself. By November she knew she was pregnant and with her tail between her legs and her heart well and truly broken, Lottie dashed home alone.
There were no histrionics. A plan was hatched. A promise made. I would marry Charles earlier than planned and we would leave immediately for Oxford. The child would, after Lottie’s confinement with an aunt in Yorkshire, be passed off as mine. My only proviso was that I would continue to fly. The child would be kept in the family at Lanyon. Lottie would be the doting aunt and everyone would be happy. And I had, until the moment I met Edward Nancarrow, in a breezy Cornish field just before Christmas, been, if not happy, then resigned to this arrangement. I owed it to them.
Determined to do the right thing for everyone concerned, I took the final few steps up the lane towards Edward’s cottage and knocked on the door.
***
Edward sat in a chair across from me next to the fire and listened as I told him – not Lottie’s story, I could never tell him that – but how I loved the Lanyons and how, no matter what, I intended to marry Charles. I explained that I was marrying not just the man, but the family – my family. I explained how well they had treated me and how much they relied on my substantial fortune to save the house and estate from ruin – relied on me to save the hard-working tenant farmers like Jessops from ruin, too. When my story reached its natural end, he reached across the fire and took my hand.
‘Are you in love with him?’
‘I love him,’ I answered without hesitation, and it wasn’t a lie. ‘He’s a good man. And until recently, I believed myself to be in love.’
Edward released my hand and stepped over to the window.
‘Your silence says everything there is to say, Edward.’
He turned to face me. ‘I’d rather say nothing at all than say the wrong thing. With people like the Lanyons, I have found that it’s generally best to keep one’s own counsel.’
‘The Lanyons? That’s so dismissive. They’re good people, Edward. Truly they are.’
Edward took a deep breath.
‘All I know is they will stop at nothing to keep their house – their name – in order.’ He sat down again. His voice was kind. ‘Why are you here, Juliet, in my cottage, right now?’
Because
I’ve fallen in love with you. Because you’re my every waking thought …
‘I wanted to explain.’
He stared out to sea before suddenly sitting forwards in his chair. He took my hands.
‘What are you doing for the rest of the day?’
‘Nothing much. I’m supposed to be working on the Moth. Charles is in Penzance making some last …’ I stopped, not wanting to speak about wedding preparations. ‘At any rate, I shan’t see him until dinner, I suppose.’
‘In that case, spend the day with me. Let’s take one last day just for us – one wonderful day together – a day to last a lifetime. Let’s coddiwomple together, one last time. What do you say?’
I laughed at this.
He knelt by me and took my hands again. ‘You know why I said I’m a coddiwompler, Juliet?’
I shook my head.
‘Because I’ve never wanted to become focused on any big goals or aspiration. I’ve seen too many men forget to live in the moment because all they can see are the goalposts ahead of them. I live for today, right now. No promises. No expectations.’
My mother would definitely have despised him …
‘Say you’ll spend the day with me. I’ll show you the cove – the best bits – and you can take me flying. I’ll grab my camera. Do you like lobster?’ His bright smile was intoxicating. I nodded, my eyes swelling with tears.
This was how it was supposed to be, being in love.
‘I love lobster.’
Edward took a handkerchief from his pocket again and dabbed away my tears that now flowed freely. ‘And we can even sail on the river this afternoon,’ he added, ‘if it stays fine. Did I tell you I have a little boat here? The Mermaid. She’s lovely. What do you say?’
The Last Letter from Juliet Page 7