Postcards from the Past

by Marcia Willett

  Tilly glances sideways at Clem, who stands silently, his hands clasped, head bent a little. She wonders if he is praying – and then he looks at her and she feels an odd sense of fellowship. He speaks quietly but quite naturally to her.

  ‘What would you like to start with? The altar?’

  She speaks quietly too. ‘Could I just walk about a little? Get the feel of it?’

  His nod, his little shrug, say: go ahead, and she walks forward, marvelling at the simplicity, looking through the viewfinder to get some ideas. She takes a photograph of the statue and the candles, and another of the altar with its vase of daffodils. Presently she smiles at Clem, indicating that she’s all done here, and they go out together.

  ‘I’m just trying to get inside the head of someone who might be drawn to the idea of a Holy Holiday,’ she tells him, as they pass through the house to the hall. ‘I have to say that I’m not much of a churchgoer’ – she thinks it’s best to get this into the open – ‘so it’s a difficult one for me, but I can imagine if you’d been bereaved, say, or you needed to be alone, that it might be rather appealing. You’ve already got some nice photos of some of the guest rooms and the library, but I think we need to go a step further.’

  ‘I agree,’ he says. ‘The current website’s a bit pedestrian; a bit obvious. That’s why I thought they should bring in someone with some fresh ideas.’

  ‘Well, we’re not that experienced,’ Tilly admits, ‘but I hope we can make a difference. Could anyone here manage a blog, d’you think? You need to keep a website fresh, change it a bit so that people look at it regularly.’

  He looks thoughtful as he opens the front door for her. ‘I’m not sure. How much would you charge to do that?’

  Tilly makes a little face. ‘That would depend on Sarah.’ She glances slyly at him. ‘Perhaps you should have a word with her.’

  ‘Perhaps I should,’ he says blandly. ‘Would you be happy to do it if she agrees?’

  Tilly is caught off balance. ‘Well, I suppose so but, once we’ve set it up, you need someone who is very clued up to what’s going on here. Seriously, it ought to be someone in-house really.’

  ‘I think there’s a room going in the Lodge,’ he suggests.

  Instinctively she glances down the drive to the little stone house by the gates. He watches her, amused, and she bursts out laughing.

  ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ she says. ‘Sarah told me that you used to live there with your little boy.’ She decides to get this out into the open, too. ‘It looks rather nice.’

  ‘It was good,’ he says. ‘But I have to be part of the parish now I’ve been ordained deacon. I want to come back when I’ve finished my curacy and be chaplain here. Or warden.’

  ‘Would you live in the Lodge again?’

  He nods. ‘Better for Jakey. It’s being let at the moment in return for the work I used to do: gardening, general maintenance and so on. We’re very happy at the vicarage in the village but it’ll be good to come back.’

  ‘So it’s definite, is it? That you’d come back?’

  ‘Assuming the retreat house is making enough to pay me a salary. Obviously the diocese would cease to pay me at that point.’ He grins at her. ‘That’s why I suggested that they called you in to get the website going. It’s pure self-interest.’

  She can’t help laughing. ‘But you said that Father … Pascal, is it? You said he’s the chaplain.’

  ‘He is, but not full time. Several other local priests help out. But I want to be really hands-on, to try new things, and reach out to people.’

  His face is serious now, intent, almost that of a visionary, and just for a moment Tilly is moved by his clear sense of vocation. He looks at her questioningly, wondering if she’s understood, and she nods, gives him a little smile.

  ‘No pressure then,’ she says lightly. ‘I’ll have to do my best, won’t I? And you’ll have to persuade Sarah to lower her rates.’ She hesitates, decides to take a chance. ‘Have you got time to do the walk to the beach with me? Just to confirm whether it’s a good idea for the video and whether a voice-over will work?’

  ‘OK,’ he says. ‘But we won’t start from here. The visitors will use a side door where they can keep boots and coats and stuff. Let’s start there. It takes the path through the azaleas.’

  ‘The one Sister Emily mentioned? She is great fun. I utterly love her,’ says Tilly.

  ‘You and me both,’ says Clem.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Alec Bancroft wakes early. He lies quite still, missing Rose’s warmth beside him, preparing to do battle with those demons of loneliness and fear that lie in wait for these first vulnerable moments when memories and the heartaching sense of loss make him weak. The winter, his first without her, has been long and dark but now the year is climbing slowly into the light.

  He gets out of bed, knowing that action is the best way to keep the demons off balance. There is coffee to be made, Hercules to let out, but first he draws back the curtains. Above the distant rough-edged tors, little fleecy clouds are sun-streaked; to the west a ghost of a moon still hangs in an indigo sky.

  ‘There’s nowhere like Cornwall,’ he hears Rose’s voice murmuring in his ear, and his hands tighten briefly on the thick material of the curtains.

  She was an unconventional, and sometimes exasperating, wife for a diplomat, but life was fun with Rose around. It was she who found the cottage, close to the village where she’d been born and brought up, and insisted they buy it to use for home leaves.

  In Madrid, or Hong Kong, or Tanzania, in a succession of consulates and embassies, they’d invariably lived with a menagerie of animals – puppies, donkeys, goats – rescued from drowning, starvation, execution. She’d argued with local dignitaries, questioned the motives of missionaries, encouraged everything that was bohemian and artistic.

  Alec drags on his dressing gown, searches for his slippers, and goes downstairs and through the kitchen to where Hercules sleeps in the plant room. This conservatory is Rose’s true legacy. The quarry-tiled floor is covered with rugs brought from Africa, the steamer chairs are draped with alpaca shawls, bamboo tables sag with the weight of books, and plants are everywhere: in big ceramic tubs, in wooden planters, in terracotta pots along the low slatted shelves beneath the windows. Hercules’ bed is beneath one of these shelves.

  ‘We must have a dog,’ said Rose once they were home for good, unpacked, settled in. ‘And I know just where to find one.’

  Rose knew everyone around Peneglos: she knew where to get dry, seasoned firewood, the best local sausages, the right cuttings for their coastal garden – and the perfect Labrador puppy.

  Hercules was a delightful, good-natured puppy and now he is an arthritic, benign old gentleman. He raises his head as Alec comes in and his tail beats the side of his basket in welcome.

  ‘Good fellow. Good old boy.’ Alec bends to fondle an ear, to pat the broad yellow head, and then straightens up and goes back into the kitchen to switch on the kettle. He thinks about the visit to the St Enedocs. He is looking forward to it: they sound good fun, and the old butter factory is intriguing.

  ‘You’re going to meet a new friend,’ he says to Hercules, who has come in search of his morning biscuit. ‘A Newfoundland. Twice your size, my boy.’ He makes coffee, gives Hercules his biscuit, and opens the kitchen door into the garden where he waits while Hercules goes out across the grass to lift his leg against the trunk of the flowering cherry tree by the wall.

  ‘Not on the daffodils, you wretched hound,’ Rose shouts from somewhere behind him, and Alec smiles reminiscently.

  He can hear a disputation of rooks arguing about territory in the beech trees at the edge of the churchyard. The coffee is hot and strong, and he sips gratefully and thinks about Clem and Jakey down in the vicarage. He remembers Clem’s appreciative lift of the brows after Tilly had gone, and the little silence.

  ‘Pretty girl,’ Alec said tentatively.

  Clem simply nodded but his eyes crinkled u
p in that now familiar, but rather unsettling way that indicated that he knew exactly what Alec was thinking.

  As Alec makes toast, puts the marmalade on the table, he reflects on Clem’s ability to connect with how he, Alec, feels since Rose died. He was shocked when Clem explained that his own wife had died in childbirth; moved by the way that Clem is able to identify Alec’s need to talk about Rose, to keep her alive in his daily living, whilst attempting to accept her absence. Clem doesn’t use a hushed, reverent voice when he talks about her, or behave as if Alec is some kind of invalid who needs special treatment and sympathetic looks. Instead, Clem talks openly about his own feelings; the emptiness in his and Jakey’s lives.

  ‘Madeleine and I were together for such a short time,’ he says, ‘that you might think that it would be much less painful – but there was Jakey. I couldn’t bear it that Madeleine wouldn’t see him growing up. All those special times – his first smile, learning to walk, playing Herod in the Nativity play – and being unable to share them with her. Each new development reopened the wound and revived the pain. There’s a Madeleine-shaped hole in our lives.’

  Alec grabs the toast as it is flung out by the temperamental toaster, puts it in the hand-painted china rack and carries it to the table. He is getting used to laying the table for one instead of two; to making coffee in the small cafetière. Talking to Clem comforts him – and now he has Tilly’s visits to look forward to – and he is going to meet some new friends.

  * * *

  Later, as he drives away from Peneglos, inland towards the moors, he is aware of an almost forgotten sense of adventure. He talks to Hercules, who sits with his ears pricked as if he too is aware that this is not quite like the usual journey to see old friends in Padstow or to shop in Wadebridge. Meanwhile, Alec rehearses in his head the important things that Tilly has told him about the St Enedocs.

  ‘It’s only fair that you have a bit of a background,’ she said. ‘Billa’s husband died a while back. Philip was quite a lot older than she was and you get the feeling that it was a kind of semi-detached marriage. They had no children. He was a scientist and seemed to live in the lab, and Billa just kind of immersed herself in charity work. She looked after Philip for several years when he was ill and when he died she moved back to the old butter factory. Ed had retired by then to do his own books. He was in publishing. So they just carried on together rather as if nothing much had happened, if you see what I mean. It’s like they’ve always been there. Ed used to come down from London nearly every weekend and Billa often joined him. Ed didn’t have children either. He married a divorced woman who already had two teenage children with a very hands-on father. He and Gillian didn’t last very long.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Alec remarked at this point, ‘neither of them was particularly good marriage material. Not all of us are.’

  ‘Their father died when they were very young and then their mother remarried and it was an absolute disaster for Ed and Billa. At least, that’s what Dom says. Ed and Billa never talk about it.’

  She explained about Dom.

  ‘I’m not gossiping,’ she added anxiously. ‘It’s not a secret. It’s just that he and Ed are so alike that you might make some remark and it could be a bit embarrassing.’

  He was more and more intrigued.

  ‘And they call it The Old Butter Factory?’ he asked her. ‘Like The Old Bakery? Or The Old Schoolhouse?’

  ‘Actually it’s called Mellinpons. It means the Mill on the Bridge, but the locals still call it the old butter factory. We all do.’

  ‘I can’t wait to see it,’ he said. ‘And to meet Ed and Billa and Dom.’

  ‘And Bessie and Bear,’ she reminded. ‘Don’t forget the old doggles.’

  Now, as he turns off the A39 into the lanes at the edge of the moor, he concentrates on Tilly’s instructions. Across the valley he can see a hamlet, which he thinks might be his destination. A small hatchback is parked rather carelessly in a gateway and a man stands with his back to the car, binoculars raised to his eyes, staring across the valley in the same direction. He turns quickly, lowering the glasses as Alec negotiates the narrow space left between the hatchback and the thorny hedge on the opposite side of the lane. He raises his hand to the man, indicating that all is well, leaning to look at him and gets a glimpse of russet-grey curly hair, light frosty eyes. Then he is past and driving on, whilst the man has turned back and raised his binoculars again.

  As he sees the old village pub, the Chough, he remembers Tilly’s directions: ‘Go past the Chough, carry on up the hill and turn left. Then it’s straight on for a couple of miles before you turn right…’

  Nearly twenty minutes later he is passing Dom’s cottage – he recognizes it from Tilly’s description – driving over the old stone bridge, pulling rather cautiously into the gateway of the old butter factory. He can see at once that it had been a mill but before he can take in much more Tilly comes hurrying out to meet him with a huge tobacco-brown dog at her heels.

  ‘Goodness,’ murmurs Alec to Hercules. ‘You’ve certainly met your match with this fellow, old boy.’

  He gets out of the car, waving to Tilly, just as a woman comes out of the door behind her. She is not very tall, very slim, in jeans and shirt and a scarlet padded gilet. Her short fair hair curls attractively and she looks very relaxed as Tilly makes introductions whilst keeping an eye on Bear. Alec lets Hercules out of the car and the two dogs begin the usual sniffing ritual of greeting.

  ‘Don’t worry about Bear,’ Billa says. ‘He’s far too lazy to get uptight with another dog.’

  ‘And Hercules is far too old,’ says Alec. ‘Bear’s a splendid fellow, though, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’s very special,’ agrees Billa, ‘though not everyone’s idea of a domestic pet.’

  Alec laughs. ‘I can see that. He’s like a Shetland pony.’

  ‘I knew they’d like each other,’ Tilly says triumphantly. ‘Good boys, aren’t you?’ She strokes them lovingly. ‘Dom’s bringing Bessie up in a minute for some coffee.’

  ‘Rather like the chimps’ tea party,’ Billa says to Alec, ‘only with dogs. Come and meet Ed.’

  He is taken into the hall where the log fire burns brightly on the old millstone, and he can see up past the galleried landing into the rafters, and he exclaims with delight.

  ‘Ed can tell you the history of it,’ Billa says. ‘He’s got lots of old photographs. The land rises behind the house to the first floor. Upstairs there are big double doors that open out from the gallery. They were there to allow the lorries to come in so the milk could be poured from the churns into the vats, which were down here. Before that it would have been horses and carts bringing the milk.’

  ‘It must have taken great vision to convert it,’ says Alec.

  ‘It was my father’s vision,’ she says smiling.

  Her smile is tinged with sadness and Alec remembers Tilly telling him that their father died when she and Ed were very young.

  ‘A wonderful memorial?’ he suggests, and he is relieved when she smiles at him more openly, almost with gratitude.

  ‘It was good to come home,’ she admits, ‘when Philip died. Tilly tells us…’ She hesitates. ‘I am so sorry to hear that your wife died last year.’

  Alec is pleased that she is so direct. ‘We’d been together for a very long time,’ he answers, ‘and it seems very odd to be alone. We bought our little cottage at least thirty years ago so that we had a foothold in Cornwall whilst we were travelling around so much. When we retired our sons wanted us to buy something much bigger but I’m glad now that we didn’t. The cottage has so many memories and it’s more than big enough now for an old boy like me on his own.’

  ‘I was lucky to be able to come back to Ed,’ she tells him. ‘And to Dom; that’s our brother who lives down the lane. Oh, here is Ed…’

  A tall man comes out of a room on the galleried landing and hurries down to meet him, and when Dom arrives a few minutes later with his golden retriever, Bessie, ev
erything is easy and Alec has begun to enjoy himself.

  They have coffee and brownies by the fire in the hall and then go to look at the lake, with the three dogs racing around them. When Alec tentatively suggest that all they go to the Chough for lunch everyone agrees with enthusiasm.

  ‘We haven’t been to the Chough for months,’ Dom says. ‘We tend to walk down to our local so that we can drink. You know that Tilly pulls pints at the Chough? She says that it’s very trendy these days.’

  Billa drives Ed and Dom; Tilly travels with Alec. Tilly is flushed with happiness that everything has gone so well. She twists round in her seat to praise Hercules – who is now exhausted – and Alec looks sideways at her with affection. He sees her smoothly soft skin, the thick butter-coloured hair, her brightly laughing eyes and he suddenly wishes, with an aching, poignant longing, that he was young again.

  ‘No fool like an old fool,’ he hears Rose mutter, and he grins ruefully to himself.

  The pub is quite busy but they get a table near the fire and Alec goes to the bar to order a round of drinks. While he waits, the inner door to the lounge opens and a man looks in; it is the man from the lane, the man with the binoculars. He glances at Alec with indifference but when he sees the St Enedocs at their table an odd, wary look crosses his face and he withdraws quickly and closes the door.

  Alec thinks about it, gives a little shrug, and presently forgets all about him.

  * * *

  Bear lies on the cool slates in the hall, exhausted after his morning with Hercules and Bessie. The house is silent, everyone has gone out, and he is quite alone. Usually he likes to go along for the ride but today he is content to rest, to stretch his big body out on the cold stone floor and sleep. He dreams that he is running, chasing and being chased in his turn, and his great paws twitch and he makes grunting noises. Suddenly the noise of the back door opening disturbs him from his sleep; the dream fades and he lies, waiting. He is too tired to get up and go out into the kitchen to welcome his people home so he stays, stretched out and relaxed, listening. He hears footsteps moving around in the kitchen, cupboards doors opening, closing, and moments of silence. The footsteps approach the hall and the door is pushed wider open. Bear prepares to get up but he sees that the man who is standing in the doorway is a stranger. He can smell all sorts of emanations coming from this man: excitement, tension, anxiety. There is something else that Bear doesn’t like, doesn’t trust, and he moves suddenly, heaving himself up. His deep growl is formidable. The stranger sees him and steps backwards.