Andrew leaned on the parapet beside the gangly girl. “Girl” was such an inadequate term for this wonderful little human being beside him. She was destined for an exceptional life, he was sure. For one thing, even at this age, she didn't suffer fools. She'd never “go along to get along” like other girls. She'd never hide her brains to fit in. In another five, maybe six years, she'd be dating boys, and he almost felt sorry for them. They'd be no match for this one. Five years after that, a little more, she'd be a scientist, or studying the law, or running some activist organization.
He sighed. “It must have been hard for you to come down here to tell me that,” he said.
“A little,” she confessed.
Andrew turned and scooped up the bony child in his arms in a giant hug. “I love you to pieces, Lee Trelissick, and if I had a daughter I'd want her to be just like you.”
She wriggled away, giggling, and he let her go. He was a little surprised by his own impetuousness. Something inside him was softening, uncurling, anxiety calving off him like a glacier melting. This new gentleness was, he knew, partly a legacy of the hedge building. He didn't need to anticipate or prepare for anything, he could let things take their natural course. He could just “be.” He could even admit to himself the pure joy and wonder he felt whenever he was with this solemn little girl.
They were walking back to the work site.
“What are you going to do about this Johnny?” Lee asked. She could hear the anxious note in her voice; she didn't know what happened in situations like this.
Andrew stopped and kneeled in front of her. “Look, I'm a visitor here, Lee. I'm just passing through. I have no business being involved in the troubles and cares of those who live here. It would be like someone coming to stay at the cottage for a week and telling your father how to run the farm. Know what I mean?”
Lee nodded. “Yeah. But that's a bad example. You love Nicki. That makes it different.”
Andrew just stared at her. “You're right. I do. And I'm gonna take care of this Johnny guy. Thank you for telling me. But now I have to get back to work; it's our last day. That okay with you?”
Lee nodded and Andrew set off for the hedge site.
“You won't hurt him, will you?” Lee called after him.
“Who?”
“Johnny!”
He looked back at the girl, who was all angles and attitudes. “No, Lee; I don't think that will be necessary.”
But, of course, he had no idea what would be necessary.
During the morning, shower clouds developed inland as temperatures rose past the trigger temperature required to start convection.… The approaching air would have been bodily lifted past its Level of Free Convection (LFC) allowing deep cumulonimbus clouds to develop.
Boscastle Flood Special Issue,
Journal of Meteorology 29, no. 293
eleven
Nicola had been painting furiously for hours. She'd started in the dark, before dawn, covering a fresh canvas with a ground of fiery yellow ocher mixed with a tiny bit of alizarin crimson for depth. She was working now with a palette far darker than any she'd used before, working, too, almost automatically. She did not have a vision she was trying to capture; the vision was emerging from the paint itself, as if she were simply delivering pigment to it, like fuel to a furnace.
It was as if she'd shut off the power to the left side of her brain, the side that gives names to things, and, by doing so, limits their expression. Her hand, holding broader brushes than she normally used, swept across the ocher ground, adding slashes of muddy, almost olive, brown; swirls of ivory black mixed with viridian; smudges of umber and orange; flashes of brilliant red; and, behind the violent darkness, beacons of pure cadmium yellow. There was a vaguely suggested horizon, tilted, a thin pale blue line almost engulfed in massing clouds of fire and smoke. She'd also laid in a few nearly vertical features, brush bristles creating veils of paler yellow and green plunging from the darkness at the top of the painting to the pale horizon, like approaching squall lines over the ocean—but an ocean that was aflame. On some level, this was emotion on canvas, and yet it was more accurately the case that she was, for the present, caught up in a world of pure perception. She was not painting the idea of an emotion, or even being driven by emotion, as much as she was finding the emotion through the paint. She made no attempt to correct what emerged from under the brush, though she responded constantly to what appeared—the shapes, the angles, the hues—her brush scrubbing together new colors on the palette and swirling them onto the surface of the image that was developing.
She stopped only when, a little before noon, Randi let her know she was trying his patience, and his bladder, sorely. She took him for a short walk along the harbor front, but it was as if she was in a trance, her body navigating the familiar landscape—the quay, the breakwater, the cliff path above—but her eyes seeing only the painting and feeling what it needed next. She grabbed a banana on her way back upstairs, ate half before forgetting about it, and was lost again in the work.
She felt both free in the way she was painting and oddly compelled—like a dog on a very long chain, free to move or bark as it wished, but nonetheless constrained by the limits of the chain. She suspected this storm of paint arose from her nightmare, from anger, from fear. But it also felt weirdly like a premonition, a vision not so much of the anguish of the past as of the present and future. As if a threat were cresting high above her, as if getting it on the canvas would freeze it there, perhaps. She didn't know. She wasn't trying to know. She was just painting with an intensity and at a speed she had never experienced before. As if her life depended on it.
Sometime around three o'clock, she put her brush down. It wasn't because she was tired, though she was exhausted, or that she was hungry, though she was famished. It was just done. Whatever it was, it was finished. She stared at it as if waking from a dream. She'd never painted anything this fast before, or this strange. It was as if she'd been taken over by some spirit and she was merely its instrument. She was shocked by the violence of the work, but also exhilarated. She shrugged at the work in amazement, called to Randi, and headed off to the Cobweb to celebrate. She just made it through the door when the sky opened up and fat raindrops fell like diamonds through the slanting afternoon sunshine.
* * *
Jamie had seen it coming.
“All right, you lot,” he'd called out as the first drops splattered the dusty ground, “get the tools in the van and your sorry selves to the pub; you've been reprieved!” He watched them finish their work and gather the equipment, laying it out neatly on the bed of the big van. Though there was still another twenty yards or so of hedge still to be laid, what they'd built looked clean and solid. And he'd turned his crew from a group of clumsy amateurs into skilled craftspeople—proper hedge layers who, by and large, he'd be proud to work beside. It was always like this at the end; he hated to let them go. Ever since his wife of forty years died—what, five years ago now—his students had been his family. In between courses, without their company, he felt bereft, holing up in his ancient house up on the moor, drinking whisky and reading Shakespeare—the plays, not the love sonnets. The sonnets were too painful.
Now here they were, this latest lot, shambling in from the street, sweaty, dirty, smiling, their shirts pockmarked with raindrops.
“Flora, my dear, sweet lass,” he called to the barmaid after they'd muscled their way through the crowd of tourists who were also sheltering from the shower, “drinks for my crew, on me.” This was met with a chorus of dispute from his students, but the teacher prevailed, and when their glasses were delivered, he lifted his in a toast.
“You're ugly as sin, every last man of you—the ever-lovely Becky, of course, excepted—but you're Cornish hedgers now, by God, and damned fine ones!” He knew he was lying about Casehill. That bloke would never give up his mortar crutch, though Jamie hoped he'd appreciate the craft a bit more. But as to the rest, he knew he'd succeeded. Especially with this A
merican chap. The rest of them had become skilled, but this one had gained more than skill. Something about the fellow had changed, sometime during the third day. At the beginning, Andrew was a blur of excess motion. Jamie would watch him walk back and forth between the hedge face and the rock pile, lifting, carrying, and then returning stone until he found something he thought was perfect. And sometimes it was, but often it wasn't. Then, somewhere along the line, he'd got it: got that perfection, if it could be attained at all, was the product of the whole, not a requirement of each piece; got it that the essential oddity, almost the absurdity, of hedge building was endeavoring to make straight lines out of wildly irregular chunks of rock; got it that the mystical heart of the craft was visualizing the whole even as you're working with just a small part—that the stone in your hand is the hedge. And so is the next one, and the next. They're just waiting for you to find them, to give them a home.
Nicola sat on a stool in the bar on the other side of the double fireplace wall; only the back of the bar communicated with the two rooms. She was wolfing down a delightfully sinful and messy hamburger smothered in caramelized onions and melted cheddar, along with a plateful of chips, and washing it all down with her usual gin and tonic. Flora had told her that Andrew was there in the adjoining bar with the rest of Jamie's crew, but she stayed put. She didn't want to see him. Well, actually she did, but she had no idea what to say if she did, how to begin, and, having begun, where to stop. Whatever the new painting was about, whatever it defined or resolved, it wasn't about Andrew; there was no resolution there. As good and as caring a man as he was—and she was sure all that was genuine—she could not get past her wariness. She didn't really want to continue fencing with him, but she was afraid to stop, afraid to let her guard down. Not because of what he might do if she did, but because she did not know what might emerge from herself—what fears, what ghosts, what demons. And then there was the repeated refrain, the leitmotif: He was as good as gone anyway.
The shower passed, the tourists drifted outside again, and Flora plunked herself down next to Nicola on her break, a half pint of lager in front of her. She leaned close to Nicola's ear.
“Tell you what, luv; that there Jamie: If he weren't always so bloody filthy, I could get to likin' him. Hard body, soft eyes. What's not to like, eh?” She was grinning and blushing simultaneously.
“Flora, you trollop; you shock me!” Nicola said, giggling.
“What, you think 'cause I'm old enough to be your mother I can't hanker after a good man?”
“No! It's just… I don't know … I thought you were sweet on Brian, over at the Welly.”
“What, him? Oh, our Brian's okay as far as that goes, good for a laugh and a bit of a flirt, but I don't see him ever makin' much of hisself Men who bartend, well, most of them are a bit short of ambition, you know? Like they're just markin' time. Unless they own the place, which Brian don't. Plus, I think he likes that bar between him and the rest o' the world—protection, like. Can't tell whether he's hidin' something or got nuthin' to hide, if you take my meanin'.”
Nicola liked Flora a lot. She might be old enough to be her mother—it was hard to tell—but she was much more like the kind of aunt you could talk to about anything, without fear of being judged. She was open and dead honest; it was something the regulars admired about her.
“But is Jamie Boden that much better a prospect? I mean, the chap's a hedge builder.”
Flora laughed. “Hedge craftsman to you, dearie. But he wasn't always, is what I hear.”
“Oh?”
“No, been at that less than ten years, for all his skill. What I hear is that before that he was in finance, up in London. Worked for that billionaire currency trader, Soros. Made a pile in hedge funds, got fed up, and moved back here to live in his wife Lydia's family's place up there on the moor. Then lost her to cancer, poor soul.” She went quiet for a moment and then started laughing, her ample body rippling with mirth. “Old Jamie went from hedge funds to hedge building! Just thought of that, I did; pretty good, eh?”
Nicola laughed, too, and Flora got called back behind the bar.
She liked watching Flora work, the way she moved smoothly from one task to another, the way she worked without seeming to be working. Not that it was effortless, mind you, just that it looked that way—the way a talented ballet dancer could make flying leaps look effortless. And then it struck her that Jamie worked the same way, as if he and the stone were in harmony somehow. Yes, maybe Flora and Jamie were right for each other. She wondered whether Flora would make a move. Or Jamie. Or if Jamie even had a clue. She realized she didn't know the first thing about this “courtin'” stuff. Jeremy had come along and swept her off her feet, and she'd been paying for it ever since.
And as happy as she was, painting in her attic studio, visiting with friends like Flora and Anne, adoring Lee, volunteering at the witchcraft museum, walking Randi along the cliffs, knowing most people in the village by their first name, she suddenly wondered whether perhaps she wasn't a bit more like Brian than Flora. Was she, too, simply “marking time”? Was she living in the present or just avoiding the future? Her routines gave her a certain quiet comfort, as if the patterns of a day were the meaning of the day. But were they? Okay, she knew the answer to this one. No, patterns were the rhythm, not the meaning. Meaning came from one's work and, if you were a woman, from what one gave and received from one's partner and one's children. She had neither … or, rather, she had both, in the form of Randi—steadfast friend and protector, and dependent child. It wasn't enough. But anything more put her at risk. And that frightened her more than her loneliness.
Jamie kept buying rounds and the crew was full of affection for one another, Burt clapping his arm, thick and heavy as a haunch of beef, around Andrew's shoulder; Ralph becoming ever-so-mildly amorous with a tipsy Becky; Case promising in the most solemn terms that he would forswear mortar henceforth. Jamie watched them with a bemused and benevolent smile, turning occasionally to flirt with Flora.
“Flora, my sweet,” he called to her at one point, “let's have us some peanuts!” He pointed to a cardboard display for Big D nuts that hung on a wall behind the bar. The display featured the face of a sultry blonde, beneath which image were clipped rows of salted peanut packets. Flora pulled down several, in the process revealing the plunging décolletage of the model pictured on the display.
“Oh, I think we'll need a few more, my dear,” Jamie said to Flora with a wink. Flora gave him a jaundiced look, but obliged, revealing, as she removed the next row of packets, the model's Big Ds in all their fulsome, naked glory. This, of course, to the accompaniment of hoots from the crew, and “Oh my God, that's so disgusting,” from Becky, at which point Flora leaned across the bar, her own formidable bosom perfectly evident, put her face close to Jamie's, and said, “You ain't seen nuthin, mister.” There was more raucous laughter, followed by “You tell him, sister” from Becky. Jamie blushed almost as red as his hair.
After several more rounds than usual, Jamie's students began to take their leave—Burt and Ralph first, with a salute from Ralph and a standing invitation from Burt to come up to the farm for a visit anytime and an unexpected, bone-crushing hug. Andrew got a nod from Casehill, not unlike the one he'd greeted him with on the first day, and a handshake. And a luscious smooch from Becky accompanied by a boozily whispered, “Bloody bother I've already got a husband,” which left Andrew speechless. She hugged Jamie and said, “See you Monday,” and was gone.
“Monday?” Andrew asked his teacher.
“Got a crew of National Trust volunteers coming to continue work on the hedge. Becky's rounded them up; some experienced, some not. What're your plans next week, lad?”
Andrew sighed. “Leaving. Probably Wednesday or Thursday.”
“A shame is what that is, now I got you nearly useful.”
Andrew laughed. “I can't spend the rest of my life building Cornish hedges, Jamie.”
“Why not? Market demand's growing, and I can'
t begin to keep up with it. Pay's good, too; plus, no one's your boss.”
“I'm an architect, Jamie.”
“You like being an architect?”
This stopped Andrew cold. It wasn't a question he'd ever consciously entertained. He'd known he wanted to be an architect almost from childhood; he'd never even considered anything else. Then he'd sort of fallen into teaching, rather than designing and building, but thought it suited him. It was what he did. It was who he was. But were you an architect if you never built anything? Did teaching count? When Kat slammed him on this the day she walked out, he'd thought it mean-spiritedness, meant to make him feel a failure—at which she'd largely succeeded. But maybe it was really truth telling. Maybe he had disappointed her. And himself.
“How old d'you reckon I am?” he heard Jamie ask.
“Sixty-something?” Andrew answered.
“Pushin' seventy. And feeling every year of it. Been lookin' for someone to pass the Stone Academy on to for a while now, and I'm thinking you're a natural for it.”
Andrew looked at his friend and took a slug from his pint. “Well, sir,” he said finally, “that's as fine a compliment as I've been paid in a very long time.”
“It isn't a compliment, you bloody numbskull; it's the offer of a lifetime!”
Andrew turned to his mentor. “Jamie, look. I've got a house in Philadelphia and a mortgage and a new semester of classes to teach in less than a month. I'm sorry. I can't.”
“Can't or won't?” It could have been a taunt, but Andrew could see the affection in the older man's eyes. “You know what they say, don't you?”
“No, what's that?”
“No one ever said on his deathbed he wished he'd spent more time at his job.”
“Very pithy, I'll admit,” Andrew said. “But aren't you just offering me a different job?”
“Nay, lad, that's where you have it wrong. I'm not offering you a job; I'm offering you a life. The only question is whether you have the courage to live it.”
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