Postcards from the Past

by Marcia Willett

  ‘I’ll call them in,’ he says. He looks slightly embarrassed, as if he is suddenly aware of his role as host, and Tilly realizes just how much she likes him.

  ‘Go on, then,’ she says, ‘and I’ll cut the cake. Harry will be starving. He always is.’

  Alone, Tilly stares around the room. She wonders if it is Dossie who has tried to introduce the feminine touches: an Indian cotton throw draped across the sofa; the bowl of dwarf daffodils on the bookshelf. A plush, striped rabbit, with long ears and legs, reclines on a cushion in the corner of an armchair and some toy racing cars are ranged on the low square glass-topped table beside it. Tilly feels as if she is spying, as if she has some unfair advantage, and then the others come into the hall and she turns quickly to cut the cake.

  * * *

  When Tilly and Harry leave, Clem feels oddly flat.

  ‘I like Harry,’ says Jakey.

  He climbs into the armchair, picks up Stripey Bunny and lolls against the cushion. He looks suddenly weary. After tea the four of them walked down to the beach where Jakey and Harry played a very long and energetic game of football.

  ‘I have to say,’ Clem murmured to Tilly, watching them, ‘that, if I could afford a nanny, this time round I’d have a bloke. It’s exhausting, keeping up with a seven-year-old.’

  He’d spoken briefly of those early years in London, after Madeleine had died, and how he’d given up his training for the priesthood and gone back to his former job in IT so as to earn enough money to pay for a nanny for Jakey and build up a reserve so when the opportunity arose he could sell the flat and take his chance to get out.

  ‘It looks like it’s paying off,’ Tilly said, not looking at him, but watching Jakey and Harry racing together on the beach.

  He wanted to say to her that he could see that a relationship with a priest must be fraught with difficulties – that when he was chaplain at the retreat house it would be a rather different scene – but he didn’t know where to start.

  ‘I hope so,’ he said at last. ‘I shall be priested in June and then I shall go back to the Lodge, to Chi-Meur, and take my chance on how it works out as their chaplain.’

  ‘It sounds as if it might be … well, very challenging. In a good way,’ Tilly added quickly.

  ‘And more privacy,’ he pointed out. He wanted her to see that; it was important that she realized that it wouldn’t be such a goldfish-bowl environment.

  Now, he looks at Jakey.

  ‘Bedtime,’ he says, with that sinking feeling that he’s got a fight on his hands.

  Jakey clutches Stripey Bunny tighter. ‘I want to watch Kung Fu Panda,’ he says. ‘No, Madagascar. Harry’s seen lions and giraffes and hippopotamuses in the wild.’

  He drops Stripey Bunny and scrambles to find the DVD, and Clem watches helplessly, wondering how Tilly would fit into this scene, knowing that it will take a very long period of adjustment, assuming she’s prepared to try it. And why should she? She’s such a gorgeous girl; she must be besieged on all sides by young, single males. Jakey flourishes the DVD.

  ‘Please, Daddy. Just some of it. Pleeeeze.’

  He’d like to say: ‘What do you think of Tilly? Do you like her?’ but he knows that Tilly hasn’t really registered on Jakey’s radar.

  ‘OK.’ He is too tired, too dispirited, to argue. ‘Fifteen minutes, but then that’s it and I don’t want any arguing, Jakes. OK? Promise?’

  Jakey nods solemnly. He can see that Daddy’s just a little bit on edge and that it wouldn’t be a good idea to push his luck. He puts the DVD in, and presses buttons, fetches Stripey Bunny and they sit on the sofa to watch Madagascar companionably together.

  ‘Harry’s uncle has a dog called Bear,’ he tells Clem. He leans against him, resisting the temptation to put his thumb in; he’s a big boy now. ‘He says we can go and see him. He’s absolutely huge. Nearly as big as a bear. His grandfather has a dog as well called Bessie. I want to see them.’

  Clem thinks about this. It might be a good idea to see Tilly on her own patch; maybe it would give her confidence. Perhaps he might have more of a chance with her … His spirits rise a little.

  ‘OK,’ he says, putting his arm round Jakey. ‘We’ll do that.’

  ‘Cool,’ says Jakey contentedly.

  * * *

  ‘Please don’t go away, Hal,’ Tilly pleads with Harry as they drive home. ‘I think I might just have a faint chance if you stay. Jakey utterly adores you.’

  ‘He’s a great kid,’ says Harry. ‘Don’t be such a coward, Tills.’

  ‘But I am a coward,’ she cries. ‘It’s a huge thing. They’ve had seven years together, just the two of them. How on earth can I bust in on that?’

  ‘You don’t bust in on it. You take it very slowly so that Jakey gradually becomes used to you and then realizes that he likes having you around. He spends quite a lot of time with Clem’s family, by the sound of it, so you’ll have plenty of chances to be on your own with Clem. Stop panicking. You really like him, don’t you? Clem, I mean. Surely it’s worth a try?’

  ‘I do like him,’ she answers. ‘I really do, but this is really freaking me out.’

  ‘Well, the next step is to get them over here. Jakey wants to see Bear and Bessie. We’ll make a plan with Billa and Ed.’

  Tilly looks sideways at him, marvelling that one so young can have such a calming effect. She wonders if Dom was like this at twenty-one.

  ‘OK,’ she says, ‘but they’ll tease me rotten about it. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Don’t be wet. You can hack a bit of leg-pulling. Shall we get Sir Alec over as well? Make it a bit of a party so it doesn’t look like you’re inviting Clem home to meet the rellies stuff. He can bring Hercules and make Jakey’s day. Three dogs at one go.’

  ‘You are completely brilliant, Hal,’ Tilly says fervently. ‘That is a fantastic idea. So when?’

  ‘Soon,’ says Harry confidently. ‘I’ve kind of set it up. Text Clem and suggest it.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, her spirits rising. ‘OK, Hal, I will.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  At the Chough, Tris is packing an overnight bag. He’s run out of his cocaine capsules and he’s planning a few nights away to collect some from his contact, the Weedhound, in Bristol. He is quite happy to leave the patch for a few days; he’s confident now that nothing will happen in his absence to change his plan of campaign. The postcards have been sent; Dom and Billa and Ed will be wondering and waiting. Of course, he’d hoped by now to have made his move but he’s going to have to wait until the boy, Harry, has gone, which will not be until after the weekend. The problem is, the one thing he doesn’t have is time. And now he’ll need the extra medication.

  It is irritating that his two attempts to spy out the land have been foiled: first by the huge dog and second by Harry. He’d checked so carefully on each of those days; watching them all coming out of the old butter factory and then actually seeing them happily ensconced at the Chough for lunch. It should have been perfect. The next attempt was more of a risk. From his vantage point he’d seen Billa drive away, watched Dom and Ed and the dogs going down to the woodland, and then he’d driven round the valley and parked under the ash tree. He guessed that a door might be left unlocked – that was how they lived in this remote area – but anyway, he knew how to pick a lock. It wouldn’t have been a problem. And then Harry arrived and the moment was lost.

  Tris shakes his head, remembering the shock of looking at what seemed to be the ghost of the young Dom. The trouble is, he likes Harry. The fact that the boy is so like Dom adds zest to the liking. If the situation had been different, long ago, Tris might have liked Dom, but he saw straight away how it was going to be. ‘If you’re not one up you’re one down.’ He couldn’t have taken the chance, back then, but somehow it’s different with Harry. And he knows why. It’s because Harry reminds him of Léon. Oh, not in looks, of course. Harry is a St Enedoc, a black Cornishman, and Léon is like Tante Berthe, with a mop of thick fair hair and
blue eyes. Nevertheless, both boys share the casual grace of youth: the optimism and courage.

  As he finishes packing his bag, Tris wonders how Léon and Harry might get on, were they to meet. Despite their genetics, neither Léon nor his father, Jean-Paul, spoke a word of English. That was rule number one, once he and Andrew were back in France. Tris sits on the edge of the bed, thinking about the boarding house in Toulon where Andrew took him after their flight from England. He remembers how Andrew turned up at the school following a phone call telling the headmaster that Tris must be ready to accompany his father abroad. Nobody told him much but clearly his father made it sound urgent: even Matron was kind, which really worried him. But he was used to flight, to change, to precious possessions being abruptly abandoned, and he went along with it docilely enough. He’d learned not to make friends – it was too painful.

  Tante Berthe was different, though. He knew at once that it was going to hurt when the time came to leave Tante Berthe. She wasn’t his aunt, of course, but the fiction was useful for a while, until she became pregnant with Tris’s half-brother. The stream of lodgers that came and went at that rather shabby boarding house in Rue Félix Pyat didn’t care. The tall, narrow house with its red-tiled roof and blue-painted shutters was first-rate cover. Tris didn’t quite understand the muttered words ‘extradition’ or ‘Interpol’, though he began to guess the reason for his father’s newly shorn head, his job down at the docks, and the instruction that English was never to be spoken.

  The baby, Jean-Paul, was good cover, too, until something happened and there was another change, another flight abroad. But this time, Tris refused to go. For the first time for fourteen years he had a family and he couldn’t bear the prospect of being ripped away from them.

  ‘Leave him,’ Tante Berthe said to Andrew. ‘Leave him and get out while you can. He’s nearly a man now. He will look after me and little Jean-Paul.’

  And he tried to do just that – he really tried – and it had worked for a few years. The trouble was that taking risks was hard wired into his blood; he couldn’t resist. He began to live too near the edge until things went wrong and he, too, was forced to flee. But he never lost touch with Jean-Paul. Jean-Paul is dead now – an accident at the docks – and Tante Berthe is long gone, too. Andrew simply vanished, probably to perish in prison in some distant country. But there is JeanPaul’s son, Léon, still living with his mother in four small rooms on the top floor of the narrow, shabby house in Rue Félix Pyat. Léon has a job at the new smart marina where once the docks were, and he tries to take care of his mother, who suffers from depression and drinks too much.

  Tris thinks of Harry, with his wealthy family back in South Africa, and of his inheritance here in Cornwall. He stands up, takes his bag and the satchel. He failed Tante Berthe, and he didn’t make much of a fist of being a half-brother to Jean-Paul, but he’s damned well going to do something for Léon before he dies.

  * * *

  Ed sits at his desk thinking about the boy and the white horse. Ever since the morning at Colliford Lake he’s been turning the scene over in his mind, trying to find his way through to a story. Images have presented themselves: the horse up on its hind legs, its front hoofs parrying a huge serpent with a beaklike head; the boy on the horse’s back, dressed sometimes as a princeling, wielding a short sword.

  At last he decides to make some sketches of his thoughts in the hope that these will lead him on to the story. He knows that he should be working on his book but he is distracted, and so he puts a Dinah Washington CD in the player and takes out his sketchbook. He draws quickly, capturing the magical qualities of the white horse and the fizzing energy of the boy; he sketches Morgawr, the monstrous, hump-backed serpent with its beak-like head, rearing up from the sea, watched by a group of wicked spriggans – wizened, puny old men with huge heads – who guard the cliff-tops and the cairns where treasure might be buried. He draws the Wrath of Portreath, the giant who lived in a cave called Ralph’s Cupboard and terrorized sailors. These are the stuff of Cornish myth and legend, and he fears that he is simply plagiarizing the long-forgotten fairy tales of his childhood, but he continues to draw: a swaggering weasel, a goose with a basket strapped on its back, an immense toad with a jewelled collar. All at once he remembers his father telling him stories of the Knockers, those underground spirits who inhabit the mines and could lead the miners on to rich seams. Ugly creatures with big noses, slit mouths and a delight in making terrifying faces, they might turn malicious if a miner didn’t leave a morsel from his pasty, luring him to dangerous areas of the mine. Ed begins to draw a little group of them, thumbing noses, crossing their eyes, bending double to grimace from between spindly legs. Yet he still cannot see any connection between these mythical creatures and the boy and the horse.

  Dinah Washington is singing ‘Mad About the Boy’ when Billa opens the door and asks if he’d like some coffee. He gets up at once, glad to be distracted, and goes downstairs where Bear greets him, wagging his tail and pushing against Ed’s knees with his heavy head. Ed thinks of putting Bear into the book with the boy and the white horse, and then gives it up in despair.

  ‘Tilly has a request,’ Billa is saying, putting the coffee on the carved chest. ‘She’d like to invite Clem and his little boy over to meet us. Well, actually, she wants them to meet Bear and Bessie. I think we’re rather a long way down the list.’

  ‘Clem’s the curate?’ Ed brings himself more fully into reality.

  ‘He is. And his little boy is called Jakey. She’d like to invite them to tea. I don’t see a problem, do you?’

  Ed shrugs, shakes his head. ‘Why should there be? Is she really serious about him?’

  ‘I think she’d like to be if she could get past him being a man of the cloth with a seven-year-old son.’

  ‘It’s quite an undertaking. A man with a child.’

  ‘You married a woman with two children,’ Billa reminds him. ‘It didn’t put you off.’

  ‘The girls were teenagers with lives of their own. And Gillian hadn’t taken Holy Orders. You’ve met Clem. What do you think?’

  ‘I like him. He’s very straightforward. Very good manners and a quick sense of humour. Alec rates him and he’s known him for quite a little while.’

  ‘Well, I should imagine he’s a good judge of character. Perhaps Tilly just needs time to adjust.’

  ‘It’ll be good for her to see Clem here amongst her own family, as it were. I always think of her as one of the family and she seems to feel the same. She wants to invite Alec, too. And Hercules.’

  ‘That’s quite a good idea,’ says Ed. ‘Takes the pressure off, doesn’t it?’

  He gets up and piles some logs on to the fire. Outside, the wind flings handfuls of chill rain against the windows and down the wide chimney to hiss and sizzle on hot ash. Puddles form on the slate paths where the rain plips and plops, tap-dancing its way to the stream.

  ‘Fine, then,’ says Billa. ‘I think Thursday afternoon is being pencilled in.’

  ‘I expect I shall be here,’ says Ed, sitting down again. He’s just had an idea about the three dogs and the boy and the horse. ‘I don’t suppose it will matter much, will it, if I’m not?’

  ‘It will matter to me,’ Billa tells him firmly. ‘I want you to meet Clem and then tell me what you think about him. Tilly matters to us. I want your input.’

  Ed is always surprised and pleased to know that his opinion is valued. ‘OK,’ he says amiably. ‘I’ll be here.’

  Billa looks at him with exasperated affection. ‘Make sure you are,’ she says. ‘This is important to Tilly. You can show Jakey the frogspawn. He can help you take some of it out of the lake. He’ll like that.’

  Ed seizes gratefully on this distraction from writing. He must make sure the plastic containers are clean and he’ll need to clear a space on the shelves in the summerhouse and find the fishing net. He is filled with relief: the boy and the horse can be banished for a while.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN


  When Tilly arrives to check in and catch up on new punters, Sarah is hoovering. She pushes the vacuum cleaner into the cupboard under the stairs, indicates that George is asleep upstairs, and they go into the kitchen.

  ‘Dave’s dropped a bit of a bombshell,’ she says, filling the kettle. ‘Someone’s offered him a rented house in Yelverton. We could have it for two years. Seems like an offer we can’t refuse.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Tilly is startled. ‘I mean, I know it’s the right thing, and what you wanted, but it’s still a bit of a shock, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ Sarah admits. ‘It’s like something that was always going to happen, but not just yet.’

  She’s been surprised by her own reaction; she doesn’t want to leave this little cottage or Peneglos. She’s settled in, Ben is happy at school, and she knows so many people after all the holidays she’s spent here. And apart from that, her business is beginning to thrive.

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ Dave said, disappointed by her lack of enthusiasm. ‘We both agreed we need to be nearer to the dockyard. It’s what we always planned. It’s crazy when the ship’s in, to have that daily commute.’

  ‘I know,’ she said quickly. ‘I know it is. It’s just I suppose I’m really settled here. Well, it’s my home in a way, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, it’s up to you,’ he said rather coolly. ‘But it’s a one in a thousand offer so you’ll need to make your mind up quickly.’

  And then George started to scream and she said she couldn’t talk now but she promised to phone back later.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she says now, to Tilly. ‘Well, I do. There isn’t an option, to be realistic. It’s very difficult finding rented property on the edge of the moor there. It’s where I wanted to be, it’ll be great for the boys, and easy for Dave to do the dockyard commute, but I hadn’t realized I’d find it so difficult to leave Peneglos.’

  ‘It’s only to be expected,’ protests Tilly. ‘It’s not only that you’ve got Ben at school and U-Connect going really well. This has been your family’s bolt hole for years. It’s home from home for you, which is really important with Dave away so much.’