‘Because it went so well last time?’ I pant.
‘Well, it wasn’t entirely unenjoyable. I’m willing to risk it again if you are.’
I can’t resist the cheeky glint in his eyes. I slide my sand-covered hand into his and let him pull me up, and this time I crash into him on the ground, his arms wrap around me to stop us falling, but we start sliding down the shallow grassy bank on the other side anyway.
He’s already out of breath from the climb and now he’s laughing again, so I’m laughing again, and I’m not sure if I’m laughing because it’s funny or because of how absolutely jubilant he seems. ‘Are we the clumsiest people on the planet or does this hill not want us up here?’
‘I think you’re just really terrible at helping people up hills.’
‘Ah, but you like my hand-washing skills so I’m still winning.’
‘I’m too knackered to laugh this much, Nath,’ I say, still laughing.
We’re both lying upside down on the grass in a tangle of limbs, trying to catch our breath. I close my eyes and try not to think about how close he is, or how I can feel his chest heaving where my forearm is squashed against him, how after all that climbing and sweating, I can still smell his cologne, and feel the scratch of his stubble where his chin is brushing my bare upper arm with every ragged breath as we both try to calm ourselves down.
When I open my eyes, the old grey stone that we could see from the beach is looming above, and Nathan disentangles his arm from underneath me as we sit up.
I bite my lip as he holds my gaze for a long moment, until he hastily looks away, getting to his feet with surprising ease. My legs are literally shaking with exhaustion.
He holds a hand out and pulls me up again, and somehow, this time we both manage to stay upright as we turn to look at the ruins of the house. I’ve had so much fun getting up here with him that I’d forgotten we were coming here for a reason. It’s easy to see from here that the piles of stone were once a house. Now it’s just a few crumbling walls and half-formed doorways. You can see a bit of the foundations and a couple of what used to be rooms, but whatever was left of the roof and most of the walls have fallen in.
‘You’re covered in sand,’ I say as Nathan reaches over to collect his rucksack from where it landed on the grass.
‘Brush me off, will you?’
It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it. It’s weirdly intimate as I brush his back down with my hand. I linger a bit too long on his left shoulder and carry on down his back, loving the feeling of solid muscles under the soft black material of his T-shirt, warm from the sunlight, stopping myself before I reach his bum, then I make him bend down so I can brush it out of his hair. I’m sure he could manage that bit himself, but he doesn’t seem to be minding the closeness.
‘You’re glowing,’ he says when he stands back up and gets the water bottles out again.
‘That’s a nice way of saying I look like I’m about to spontaneously combust.’
‘I am about to spontaneously combust, if it makes you feel better.’
I turn to look at the view as I desperately suck water from the bottle, trying to wash away some of the sand I’ve definitely swallowed, and it takes my breath away in a completely different way.
‘Wow,’ Nathan murmurs.
It’s been over four hours since we left the cottage at eight o’clock this morning, and for the view alone, it’s been worth it. From up here, you can see right the way along the coastline as it stretches out either side from Pearlholme. The sea goes on forever, glittering in the mid-afternoon sun and disappearing into the sky where it meets the horizon. We’re too close to see the village, but Nathan points out the spot on the beach where we must’ve stood with the binoculars.
‘Do you want to do the Titanic thing?’
It makes me grin because it had crossed my mind and I love that he’s thought about it too.
He’s standing behind me before I can even say I think it’d be wrong not to. His arms hold my wrists and spread my arms out wide.
‘I’m flying!’ I shout into the distance and we sway about on the hilltop for a moment.
It really does feel like flying, kind of. Well, if flying feels like standing still in a strong breeze. Unfortunately we don’t end it with a kiss like Leo and Kate do in Titanic.
‘Your turn,’ I say, moving to stand behind him as he takes up the position on the crest of the hill.
‘I’m the king of the world!’ he shouts, howling like a wolf a couple of times. ‘Well, Pearlholme anyway! Not quite the world!’
‘I wonder how long it’s been since anyone’s been here.’ I say as we both step back, lest another sliding-down-dune disaster befall us.
‘A while, I think. It looks completely undisturbed.’ He glances at the fresh trenches in the sand. ‘Well, it did.’
‘It’s like our little secret place.’
‘Just for us.’ He meets my eyes again. ‘Maybe it was like that for Ivy and the mystery carousel maker too. Isolated up here, together.’
‘Until she was alone.’ I look back out at the amazing view.
‘Waiting for someone who would never come …’ He shakes his head. ‘I’m even making myself sad now. Come on, shall we have a look?’
We head towards the ruins of the house, and go through one of the crumbling doorways into what was probably an entrance room of some kind. There’s only two parts that you can clearly see were once rooms, the rest of it is barely more than walls that have fallen down to knee height, and arches where everything but the arch itself has collapsed around it. I stop as Nathan goes over to a wall and starts poking at it, and I assume he’s trying to guess at a date for the property.
I turn around and look back at the view, because stone walls aren’t very interesting but that view is something that will never get old. I run my hand down the side of a stone arch, brushing away white lichen as I lean against it because I’m still recovering from the climb but I don’t want him to know quite how shaky my limbs are. And I’m not sure it’s just from the exertion.
Everything feels different here. I feel different. Barely a week has gone by since that morning on the train, but it feels like a different lifetime. You can get lost in Pearlholme, in vintage carousels and sea air and gossipy old villagers. I can’t imagine ever not being here, ever not knowing Nathan, and yet a week ago, I’d never met him or heard of this place.
I stay in the archway and watch as he goes through another empty doorway into a roofless room, made up of nothing more than four walls demolished down to varying heights. It was obviously a huge room once, bigger than my entire flat at home, but now every wall and ceiling that was once above it is in debris on the ground, and what’s left of the concrete floor has been taken over by grass and weeds. Even some gorse bushes have crept in.
Nathan pokes around among the rubble, picking up things and examining them, pocketing the odd one or two and tossing anything else back where it came from. ‘I think this is where the carousel stood.’
‘Really?’ I can hear the excitement in his voice and I feel it rubbing off on me too as I walk across the clumps of Marram grass and stand in the broken doorway watching him.
‘This is a horse’s ear.’ He holds up a lump of wood, pointed at one end, a few specks of red paint still remaining on it. ‘I know exactly the one that’s missing it. And this is the rounded edge of an ivy leaf,’ he says as he rolls another unidentifiable piece of wood between his fingers. ‘And the roof’s on the floor. I thought a roof had caved in on it. And look at that view.’
I make my way across the rubble-filled room to where he’s standing and look out of the wide hole in the broken wall he points to.
‘Wow.’ It really is the best view in the house. It’s directly above the path we came up, and gives the widest, almost-panoramic view right the way along the coastline. You can see every inch of beach in both directions from Pearlholme, until it rounds a jagged cliff to the north and disappears around a bend in the seash
ore to the south. The sparkling sea seems to go on forever. You could sit at this window for fifty years and you’d never get tired of that view. If the stories are true, maybe that’s exactly what Ivy did.
‘There’s no other spot in the house with a view like that. The room would definitely have been big enough and, if you look at the way these walls join, I think it was the Victorian equivalent of building an extension.’
‘You think he built a room especially for the carousel?’ I ask, impressed that he can tell that.
He nods. ‘It was what I couldn’t work out. Camilla said he didn’t have much money, but he had a house big enough for something so huge – it didn’t make sense. But getting up here and actually seeing it … the stones aren’t as aged and you can tell they’re laid differently. Again, it’s just a guess, I’d need documentation to prove it and God knows how you’d find that from so long ago.’
‘So he didn’t just build her a carousel, he built her an actual extension on his house to keep it in? Wow.’ I shake my head, unable to comprehend how much he must’ve loved her.
‘Nothing’s too much trouble for a man in love,’ Nathan whispers.
I don’t know why he’s whispering but it feels like a sacred spot, like some kind of hallowed ground that we shouldn’t disturb. There’s a feeling of magic dancing just below the surface, like I could reach out and touch it if we just stayed here long enough. I lean close to him so he can hear me. ‘This is really special, isn’t it?’
He drops his head to rest against mine for just a moment. ‘I thought it was just me.’
I think you might be really special too. ‘I understand why you like touching the things you work on. Just standing here, you can feel it.’ I suddenly feel like I should move away from him before the ghosts of lovers past make me do something stupid. I step across a pile of stone to put some space between us. ‘You can sense the history of the place. The love that’s come and … gone.’
I step back out the doorway and go round to the window from the outside, peering in as he goes back to moving his foot through the debris on the floor. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘I don’t know. Anything that tells me something about it. This is where the carousel came from. I just wanted there to be something. Something solid rather than guesswork, assumptions, and ghost stories.’
I should be looking at the view, but I can’t tear my eyes away from him as he crouches down to examine something before discarding it with a disappointed huff, all the while humming ‘If I Loved You’ under his breath. ‘Are you humming that because you’d usually hum it or because you know I like it?’
He looks up with a grin, his eyes closing against the sun behind me. ‘Let’s just say it’s been in my head lately.’
Something inside me flutters even more than it was fluttering in the first place. I lose track of time as I stand there listening to his humming and watching him move around the room, half-heartedly kicking at fragments, clearly not expecting to find anything worthwhile.
He uses his foot to push a large stone aside and crouches down to poke at something sticking out of the ground.
‘Ness, look at this!’ When he stands back up, he’s got a flat piece of metal in his hand, which he blows on and then rubs his thumb over, trying to clean it up as he reads it out loud. ‘For Ivy. 1896 to 1901. Carved by … no! No, no, no, you can’t corrode there.’
‘What is it?’
‘A nameplate. There are two little holes in one of the panels of the carousel where I thought one must have been, but I never in a million years expected to find it up here. God, that’s amazing. Even if I can’t read his name.’
I lean in the window hole and take it when he holds it out. It’s a little metal plaque with the inscription engraved on it. It’s started to rust and is covered in scratches, but you can still make out the first part of the words, the dedication and date, but the part where his name was is worn away and blackened by corrosion. ‘Any way of getting it back?’
He shakes his head. ‘It’s gone beyond that. The dampness from the soil has destroyed the part that was underground. It’s disintegrated entirely. There’s nothing I can do with that. So after all this, we still don’t know his name.’
‘We know more than we did before.’ I lean in the window to hand the nameplate back to him, and he pauses in the middle of taking it to look up at me, his little finger touching the side of mine as he holds my gaze.
‘So it was worth all the climbing?’
‘Definitely.’
He winks at me. ‘And you haven’t had one of my sandwiches yet. Believe me, that’s definitely worth it.’
I can’t help grinning at how excited he is about these sandwiches, because so far they’re a bigger mystery than anything to do with Ivy and the missing carousel maker.
Chapter 12
‘Close your eyes.’
‘What the hell is in this sandwich, Nath? I’m getting a bit worried now if I can’t even eat it with open eyes.’
‘You just have to taste it first. It’s good, I promise, but if I tell you what it is, you’re going to go, “Urgh, that doesn’t go at all.” You have to try it with an open mind and then you can judge it. Go on, trust me, I think I know you well enough by now to know you’ll love it.’
I narrow my eyes at him but he grins and I can’t resist his cheeky smile, so I close them and let him open a Tupperware container and place it on my lap. His hands close gently around my wrists and direct them to either side of a soft-bread sandwich.
It’s so tempting to open my eyes as I lift the sandwich and try to aim for my mouth, but I decide to let him have his fun. He directs my hands until I’m nearly there, then he lets them go and shifts to the side, and I hear him sit down and get his own sandwich out.
I take a fortifying breath and try a bite, immediately surprised by the crunch as salt and vinegar bursts across my tongue, followed by the tang of something else, and the warm softness of the bread.
Usually when someone tells me I’ll like something, I’m determined not to just to prove them wrong, but it doesn’t even cross my mind with Nathan. ‘Okay, crisps and …’ I say with my mouth still half full.
‘Marmite,’ he finishes for me.
I open my eyes in surprise and look over at him. He’s chewing his own sandwich and trying to swallow and beam proudly at the same time. ‘Good, right?’
‘Oh my God, Nath, I would never have tried that if you’d said what it was, but this is amazing. I haven’t had a crisp sandwich since I was young and Mum and Dad would go out for the night and leave me to get my own tea and then come back expecting me to have eaten something healthy, and I’d tell them I’d had a sandwich, which technically wasn’t a lie.’
‘Food of the gods,’ he says, not even trying to hide the proud smile.
‘I’ve never thought of having anything with it though. I mean, Marmite … who would’ve thought? You’re a genius, do you know that?’
‘I didn’t invent it,’ he says with a laugh. ‘It’s an old British tradition. I’ve just perfected the art of making the perfect crisp sandwich over the years. There’s not many things I’m good at but I would put making crisp sandwiches on my CV.’
‘Don’t forget your hand-washing talent. You’re probably one skill away from taking over the world.’
His laughter rings out across the cliff tops, making me laugh too, even though there’s definitely more than a few things he’s good at.
* * *
After eating, we’re both sitting on a picnic blanket stretched out on a slope in the grass in front of the ruin, looking out at the view. Nathan’s got his arms wrapped around his knees and he’s turning the carousel nameplate over and over in his fingers.
‘So why spend six years carving a carousel to show your love for someone, win the fair maiden’s heart, and then disappear?’ He twists it in a spiral on his palm.
‘It couldn’t have been deliberate. He must’ve been in an accident …’ I look at the sceptica
l expression on his face. ‘Mustn’t he?’
‘What, and no one told our Ivy? If he was dead, why did she spend so many years waiting for him to come back? She couldn’t have known, but if any part of Camilla’s story is true, they lived together, they were engaged. How would she not know?’
‘Maybe they didn’t live together. Maybe she just visited him? Things were different in that day and age, maybe his family didn’t approve and kept it from her …’
‘But she was allowed to stay in this big house, with this incredible carousel, and no one else laid claim to it? It doesn’t make any sense. Six years, Ness. You could knock together a carousel in much less time, but not with the love and thought that he put into it. She was worth six years of incredibly hard work to show her how much she meant to him, to give her something that no other man could, this thing that is unimaginable to own, and for her part, he was worth the wait and the ridicule she undoubtedly suffered. If the stories are true, she waited for him forever. Literally.’ He shakes his head. ‘See? You leave me to my thoughts for two minutes and I turn the conversation back to carousels. I’m sure you don’t want to hear any more about this today.’
‘You’ve been told to shut up a lot, haven’t you?’
I see tension shoot through his body and he freezes on the spot. He stops turning the nameplate, stops even breathing. The only thing about him that still moves is the wind rustling his dark hair.
The silence stretches between us for so long that I think he’s not going to answer.
‘No. I don’t know where you got that idea from.’ He crosses his arms behind his head and lies down on the picnic blanket with a huff.
I’m sitting level with his waist so I can’t see his face as he lies behind me, but I can see how stiff his denim-covered legs are, bent at the knees, full of the tension thrumming from him.
I must’ve said the wrong thing, crossed a line I didn’t mean to cross, and I want to say something but I don’t know what. I sit there in silence instead, pulling petals off a daisy a la The Little Mermaid.
‘All the time,’ he murmurs after I’ve gone through another daisy and a half, decimating the little patch on the hill next to us.
The Little Vintage Carousel by the Sea Page 17