by F. G. Cottam
In the chrome and glass and stone of the Greers’ bright kitchen, the painted images of the little port looked more mysterious and folkloric than they had viewed at the hospital. Light brooded and coalesced in some of the illustrations, as though they depicted a scene at dawn or dusk. There was a flushed look to the cobbles and slates on the roofs. The ruined church looked darkly sinister, the smashed stained glass of its windows, portals of black mystery. The pub and the butcher’s shop, though, had only increased in their charm and the vista of the village from the sea was utterly enchanting.
It was still only six in the morning. The post arrived early and James was an early riser. Lillian would wake with her alarm call at seven and Olivia would stir half an hour after that. It was a school day. Jack was still a couple of weeks away from his potential return to school. Potential only, because his father had determined that he was never going back there.
James put the coffee pot on, his eyes on the book on the polished grain of the kitchen counter. Its images had reminded him that Cornwall was probably the English county richest in folklore and legend and myth. It had been the only Celtic kingdom in ancient England, hadn’t it? It had been isolated. He did not know enough about Cornwall. He would have to do some research into the history of the place.
He was more convinced than ever that his wife had illustrated the book. It was her work, vivid, clever and unmistakable. It had that spellbinding charm and originality that had made her so successful. The details in the illustrations had a charm independent of his wife’s style. But the way they had been portrayed added to their allure. Her touch with a brush was seductive, beguiling. It had a dreamlike quality that had made her fortune. He had not calculated it to the pound, but they both knew that she earned substantially more than he did.
Theoretically, they were peers in their relationship and they ran their family as a democracy. But Lillian’s professional success and the relative wealth it had brought meant that important choices could not be made if she felt any reluctance over them. He was allowed the illusion of equality, but decisions were never reached without her assent, which meant that, in reality, she made them. There was a name for this. He remembered it from his own school history lessons. It was called benevolent despotism. That was harsh, he thought, hearing the feathery thump of his wife’s feet descending the stairs, because Lillian was not really by temperament at all despotic. But it was accurate. It was the truth.
She came into the kitchen, tousled and lovely, her dark blonde hair tangled around her head and shoulders, her breasts pushing against the taut sheen of her satin dressing gown. She rested a hip against the counter and picked up the book and hefted and opened it and the colour drained from her face.
‘Jesus,’ she said.
‘You can see what I mean.’
‘It’s unbelievable.’
‘Except that you’re holding it in your hands.’
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘I think you’re going to have to, Lily.’
‘Jesus,’ she said again.
Her eyes rose from the page she was studying to meet his. She had pale blue eyes and they were startling in the bright light of the morning kitchen, because her pupils had narrowed to nothing with the shock of what she had just seen. ‘It’s like some uncanny forgery,’ she said. ‘I mean, these are my pictures, James. This is my work. But I swear to God I have no recollection of this job whatsoever. I would take an oath on a Bible that I have never been to this place.’
‘You don’t believe in God.’
‘No more than I believe in magic or predestination. Or reincarnation, come to that.’ She had turned to the frontispiece.
‘It was published in 1993,’ James said.
‘Then the illustration must have been done the previous year. I was in my second year on the graphics course at St Martin’s.’
‘I know.’
She snapped the book shut and put it on to the counter. She exhaled a long, steadying breath through her mouth.
‘On the plus side, you did a beautiful job, Lily.’
‘Evidently it’s a beautiful place. At least, it was then.’
‘It still is. It’s completely unspoiled.’
‘I’m going to have to examine my old diaries. This is a mystery I need to solve for my own sake, if I can solve it, of course. It’s funny because I’m not an amnesiac and I don’t recall having had a breakdown at college. Maybe I was just hypnotised into completing this commission.’
‘You believe in hypnosis?’
‘It worked for you.’
James didn’t say anything. That had been hypnotherapy.
Lillian nodded at the book. ‘So that’s it then,’ she said. ‘That’s your white-flight destination of choice.’
‘It isn’t as simple as white flight.’
‘Yes it is.’
‘London is more dangerous and volatile than it was when you were a St Martin’s graphics student. It’s become a far more hazardous place. I don’t think I like it very much any more.’
‘And immigration is to blame for that?’
‘I don’t want to get into the politics of it, Lillian. I just know that we’re not going to encounter the sort of people who attacked Jack if we relocate to the Cornish coast.’
‘Had it escaped your attention that the police officer determined to bring those boys to justice is a black man?’
‘I’m not a racist, Lily.’
‘I should bloody well hope not. Your biggest contract last year came from an Asian entrepreneur. You’ve got Muslim clients. You’d be some kind of bloody hypocrite if you were racist.’
James did not reply.
‘What about Jack’s football? He might be good enough to turn professional. He’s not going to get competitive games if we relocate to the West Country.’
‘It’s going to be some months before Jack is medically fit to head a football. It’s going to be longer before he’s going to be able to risk a clash of heads challenging for a high ball. He’s just thirteen. When the time comes I’ll drive him to trials. When he’s selected to play for a team I’ll drive him to games.’
It was Lillian’s turn to remain silent.
‘It’s a dream we’ve harboured for ever, Lily. We can go on dreaming about it until the day when we need to install one of those stair contraptions just to get us up to bed. Or we can do something about it while we’ve got the drive and energy and the kids are still young enough to appreciate the adventure.’
Again, Lillian said nothing. She sipped the coffee her husband had poured her.
‘One thing’s for sure,’ James said. ‘My son has caught a bus to a school in the south London badlands for the last time in his life.’
‘Our son,’ Lillian said. ‘He’s our son, not just yours.’ She put a hand on the cover of the book. Above them, they could hear their daughter leave her bedroom for the bathroom, heavy-footed, thumping like the eight-year-old she was. ‘Maybe you should go and take a look at the place, James.’
‘I might come back and paint a rosy picture.’
‘I’ve already painted a number of those,’ Lillian said. ‘I just can’t remember having done so. Anyway, you won’t do that. There’s too much at stake.’ She smiled. ‘I trust you.’ She drained her coffee and went off upstairs to dress.
He knew that she would look at her old diaries to rediscover what she had been doing in the eighteen months or so prior to the publication of the book. Lillian was a well-organised and punctilious person and not at all the type just to forget about such a substantial professional accomplishment as the Brodmaw illustrations represented, even if she had done them for pin money as an impoverished student. They had both been hard up back then, when they had first met. And much as he loved his children and appreciated his family life, it was difficult for James to look back on the period of their courtship without an intense feeling of nostalgia flooding through him.
It was not that he was exactly unhappy now. It was just that he was a
different person and so was his wife. Then, they had been carefree and independent and making life up as they went along and the world had seemed infinite with exciting possibilities. Nothing replicated that intensity of feeling now. He had tried to compensate by indulging in expensive toys like the watch on his wrist and the Jag he rarely drove parked in an underground garage half a mile away. Expensive hobbies didn’t do it, either. They had given up on their wine cellar after the delivery of the first few cases. The most recent remained on the basement floor, half-heartedly unpacked. The bottles hadn’t even made it to their designated rack.
Perhaps they would end up relocating to Brodmaw Bay. And perhaps the abrupt drama of that massive change in their manner of living would restore to them some of the old feelings they had shared at the outset of their lives together. He was optimistic that it would.
He was relieved that Lillian had sanctioned his exploratory trip without too much debate. He was glad too she had not read the Richard Penmarrick article he had discovered on the internet. He hoped, when he pondered on it, that she would never now read it. The more he thought about the piece, the stranger its tone of injured defiance seemed to be. And the values it championed were not exactly those espoused by Lillian, were they? He smiled to himself. He thought that if Oswald Mosley had penned something from beyond his Blackshirt grave for the English Tourist Board, it might read like Penmarrick’s championing of his unspoiled West Country hamlet by the sea.
It was a Friday. Lillian would drop Olivia off at school. Her school was only a couple of blocks away but the roads were always hostile with traffic. Walking on summer mornings was an ordeal of exhaust fumes and impatient pelican crossings. Riding a bike was simply too dangerous. There were too many lorries with too many blind spots on the stop-start rat run of a route. Anyway, the school was on the way to Lillian’s studio.
Later, since it looked already like being a fine day, James had decided he would take Jack out. They would do something gentle, maybe just stroll in the fresh air along the river westward as far as Gabriel’s Wharf and back. But Jack was a teenager now and slept like one and since sleep was recuperative, James would let him sleep until at least mid-morning. He would make breakfast for Lily and Olivia. Then he intended to settle down to a couple of hours of research on Cornwall generally and the area specifically in which he increasingly looked forward to the romantic adventure of relocating.
He had never been there. He had never travelled further in that direction than north Devon. Until seeing the Brodmaw book, his impression of Cornwall had been lazily accrued from newspapers and television. He knew vaguely from television about Padstow and its seafood restaurants run by the celebrity chef Rick Stein. He knew from newspaper stories about the little resort of Rock, blighted each summer by hordes of delinquent hoorays from the sixth forms of English public schools. He had heard dimly of the Poldark novels and the hit series on television they had inspired in the 1970s. He had never read them and he never would. Period fiction wasn’t his thing at all.
When he really thought about it, he remembered that there had been an artistic colony in the port of St Ives in the mid-twentieth century. He thought they had been abstract colourists, but wouldn’t have bet on it without asking Lillian, who would certainly know. His impression was that Cornwall had thrived on tin mines and fishing and then gone into serious economic decline. It had prospered in more recent years as a tourist playground. There were surfing and kite and windsurfing and the proximity of the Gulf Stream made the sea warm enough for sharks. There were great whites, if you believed the stories in the Sun. There was the Eden Project, which he thought was something to do with ecology. The entrepreneur Peter de Savary had built a theme park at Land’s End.
He thought that at the remoter spots there would still be morris men and much folk tradition. There would be standing stones and corn dollies and ancient burial sites; the Richard Penmarrick article had promised as much. And there was all the Arthurian stuff, the Tintagel-based legends of Avalon and Camelot and the Lady of the Lake. Excalibur, if you were of a fanciful turn of mind, lay waiting to be rediscovered, buried in Cornish silt. When it was found it would summon the Round Table knights from their slumber. The legend insisted that they would rescue England from peril.
It was James Greer’s private and strengthening opinion that it was all a bit late in the day for the rescuing of England from peril. At least, that was, for the major cities. The task had become way too intractable for a band of chivalric warriors attired in rusty armour. Peril was kept at bay by complex alarm systems and private security guards and heavy locks and cautious habits such as not going out on foot in Southwark after dark if you were a woman.
He kissed his wife and daughter goodbye at their front door. He bolted the door behind them. He went upstairs and checked briefly on his sleeping son, baffled as he always was at the variety and pungency of smells an adolescent boy’s bedroom could generate despite a fairly strict insistence on domestic hygiene. He picked up the Brodmaw book from where Lillian had left it on the kitchen counter and took it into his study, where he switched on his laptop and began a bit of preliminary research.
His study was on the ground floor of the house and looked out on their tiny back garden through the single window he faced at his desk. It was a quiet room. They had installed double-glazing to insulate them against the constant traffic hum and the daily barrage of noise from construction sites. Most days he could hear a pneumatic drill or a pile driver hammering away somewhere in the locality and the double-glazing could not combat the deep vibration from passing lorries so heavily laden they made the road outside rumble. But quiet in central London was always a quality measured in relative terms.
The area was in the latter stages of that transition converting it from its light industrial and mercantile past to its heavily residential present. It was a pattern pursued everywhere in close proximity to the river. It had begun in earnest in Bermondsey a decade earlier, when the old Hartley’s Jam Factory a block away from the Greers’ house had been cleverly transformed into apartments. The process had been accelerated by the rumour, ridiculous in retrospect, that the American film star Robert de Niro had put a deposit down on one of them.
Their house was no sort of a conversion, beyond the glass wall they had erected in the kitchen. It had been built originally in the mid-eighteenth century by a merchant who had traded profitably in tobacco and cloth and slaves. The garden too was original. Somewhere at the back of it, overgrown by a tangle of thorn bushes and ivy, was a water fountain that had long since ceased to function. In the stone above its perforated bronze bowl, the date of its manufacture was engraved as 1743.
The garden was verdant. In every one of the eight years they had lived in the property, the spring and summer in their garden had surprised James with its sheer abundance and richness of foliage. Laurel bushes were a deep green at the garden’s rear, behind the trunks of two small silver birches. On the ground, the grass grew in velvety, uncut clumps. In the morning and evening, there was the loud and piercing chorus of songbirds. James had read that cats had done in recent years for most of London’s bird population. He thought that Bermondsey must be a district happily short of cats.
They had never done anything to their garden but look out at it. It had always been too small for the children to play in given that there was a spacious grassy square, enclosed by railings and a locked gate, less than a block away that their freehold had given them residents’ access to. That was where Jack had learned to kick a ball and Olivia, on the gravel path at its perimeter, to ride a two-wheeler bike without falling off. James thought that if it came to selling the house, he would probably have to pay someone to tame the little tangle of wild seclusion that provided the view through his study window. He thought that would be a shame.
Cornwall was a place apart. That was the point repeatedly made in whatever he read about the county and from whatever source it came. The Cornish had always been a people apart. Until well into the eight
eenth century, there had been a language barrier. Old Cornish was a Celtic tongue similar in structure and grammar to Breton and Welsh. Nobody spoke it any more. But the language had been symptomatic of the willing isolation of the place.
Bound on three sides by the sea and on the fourth by the Tamar, long before it became a county, Cornwall was a domain easily defended. This was held to be the principal reason it had first attracted settlers in prehistoric times. Traces of these people were still very evident in dolmens and quoits, great stone circles and avenues that dated from about five thousand years ago.
The Celts crossed from mainland Europe from about 500 bc on. They brought their folkloric tales of gods and giants, demons and fairies and witches and their blood-chilling curses with them. Paganism persisted after the coming of Christianity in habits and symbols that had more to do with the old religion than the new. Holy wells were said to be able to cure disease and promote fertility. Sacred stones were invested with the same miraculous powers.
Two Cornish features fostered myth through the centuries, even after a railway bridge was built across the Tamar in 1859 in a feat of engineering that diminished the isolation of the region at a stroke. The first was the sheer quantity of coastline. Seafarers, sailors and fishermen, are deeply superstitious. They engendered and fostered their own legends. The second was the austere wastes of moorland. The moors bred dark stories of their own and they too stubbornly endured.
‘Tin mines, trawler men and ancient magic,’ James said to himself, reminded that Cornwall was the mythic home of Merlin, greatest and most famous of English magicians. It was notorious for smugglers and wreckers too. It was the setting for Daphne du Maurier’s fictional masterpiece, Rebecca. In more recent times, its reputation had owed more, though, to seafood, surf and a sunny sort of hedonism that seemed very twenty-first century in its youthful orientation.
Then there was the Eden Project. James was unenthusiastic about that. He was a sceptic about global warming and the apparent reasons for it. He thought that wind turbines were a con, monuments to energy inefficiency that were built to cash in on subsidies and simply blighted the land. The industry built on environmentalism was inspired by science that was not just unproven but flawed. Like multiculturalism, another myth, it was sustained and perpetuated only by those who profited from it. He didn’t bother reading about the Eden Project. It would only have raised his blood pressure and worsened his mood.