by Patrick Gale
So instead of riding down into St Just they turned left out of their track then down the hill in the other direction, past the cemetery, drinking in the magnificent view across the fields towards Sennen and Land’s End.
Entirely without caution, Dido flew on ahead while Eliza found she could not quite surrender to sensation and kept spoiling her own wild pleasure by applying the squeaky brakes. Watching the wind whirling Dido’s pigtails she wondered whether they should be wearing safety helmets. And they should surely have tightened the wheels, checked the brake blocks, oiled things. There were few cars however; this was hardly like riding down Blackstock Road or Archway Hill in a welter of London traffic. Then she went over a bump and tensed her hands on the handlebars, unable to stop herself imagining the front wheel parted from the plummeting frame and the sudden contact of ankle with tarmac.
But the road was levelling out and with it her fears. She was also distracted by a single word on a sign at the road’s edge. There was a cluster of old houses where the road swung sharply to the left as the road rose again. The sign stood some way beyond them, leaning into a hedge where a lane plunged down towards the sea. All she glimpsed was a bright yellow background, a cartoon of a tent and the word Vingoe. As they rode on, Eliza growing breathless in her effort to keep Dido at least in view, on their route past a little airfield, round several tight bends, across a T-junction and onto the stretched out village of Sennen, the word took hold and with it, like an unscratchable itch, the need to hear the mysterious madrigal again.
The night before, lying in bed in the moonlight, lulled by the comforting sound of Dido’s snores, she had convinced herself that she was mistaken, that the piece was simply one she had never heard and that the suggestion of a common author sprang simply from hearing the two compositions side by side. Though there were not many English madrigals she had not heard – she was specialising within an already specialised field after all – she suspected there were many so minor they had never been republished even by enthusiasts. One of the ‘old boys’ in Molly’s group had probably stumbled on the music in some Victorian album of his grandmother’s, some mildewed collection of Glees For the Fireside or bowdlerised Catches and Rounds of Merrie England. The few nineteenth-century editors to have taken an interest in Elizabethan or Tudor song had invariably felt they must ‘correct’ the daring harmonies and more suggestive words or impose key or time signatures which made more ‘sense’. Given that they would then misread the originals and have the pieces performed at funereal paces, it was a wonder the revival of interest ever came at all.
Land’s End was a disappointment. The first impression was of a huge clifftop car park abutting the film set for a cheaply made historical epic; the second, as one drew nearer, of an already undistinguished hotel inflated into a baldly whitewashed, blank-walled cinema or prison. The extension was a theme park, thrown up in an effort to make money from crowds that would otherwise have come merely to view a geographical feature. With such a view to either side, it seemed perverse to have built a structure with no windows but of course the view might have distracted visitors from parting with money.
Skirting the aimless crowds, gift shops and amusement arcade, they wheeled their bikes around the side to recover their energy while looking at the view. Eliza fantasised about flattening all the buildings and planting the headland out as a forest instead.
‘You’d still need a car park,’ Dido told her.
The view of the Longships rocks and their lighthouse, set in a meringue of surf was fine enough but the famous headland was not nearly so dramatically sharp in rocky reality as it looked on the map. The more exciting cliff scenery of the north and south coasts was plainly visible farther off. As Dido and Eliza sat and gazed, anticlimax settled about them like so much slackening sail.
‘I thought it’d be like the prow of a ship,’ Dido said. ‘And it isn’t at all. How do we know Land’s End’s really this bit? It could be there. Or over there, say.’ And she looked disdainfully at a couple from Ottawa posing for photographs beneath an artificial crossroads sign pointing to London one way and to the hometown of one’s choice in the other, complete with preposterous mileage.
They consoled themselves with ice creams – which were not even Cornish – then Eliza sat and stared at the view while Dido fired off a salvo of postcards to classmates and neighbours. It amazed Eliza to see she not only knew so many people but remembered their addresses and postcodes.
‘Who’s that?’ she asked, seeing one addressed to someone called Naz who lived in their building. (At least Dido had forgotten his surname.)
‘Naz,’ Dido said simply. ‘He lives on the floor below us, opposite corner. He’s quite old. He’s got a little dog with a funny eye. I help him carry things sometimes when the lift’s not working. He’s very serious but he’s nice.’
It was like catching Dido in unfamiliar clothes or emerging from an unfamiliar house. Eliza knew she ought to be reassured that she had a social life but the glimpse of her niece’s independence only made her feel somehow under fire.
Dido coerced her into co-authoring a cheery missive to Kitty then began to stick stamps on the little pile of cards.
‘Aren’t you writing one to Giles?’ Eliza asked.
Dido shrugged and raised her eyebrows to avoid frowning. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Later maybe.’
‘Are you two getting on okay?’
‘Fine.’
‘You did tell him we were coming away?’
‘Of course I did,’ Dido said with a quick glare. ‘He gave me the money, remember?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘It’s just that…’ Dido looked down at the cards and flicked their edges across her fingertips. She clamped her teeth together and pouted crossly so that her jaw stood out and the obstinate ghost of her mother was only thinly masked.
‘What?’ Eliza asked, disturbed, anxious to change her expression.
‘Stop!’ she wanted to say. ‘Stop that or the wind might change!’
‘Well he’s not my father, is he? But sometimes he tries too hard to…’ Dido frowned again, looked away. ‘He’s not as nice as he thinks he is.’
‘What do you mean? What’s he been saying to you?’
‘It’s okay, Mum. Nothing.’
She only ever called Eliza Mum when she wanted to calm her. Used so rarely, the tiny word was doubly efficacious. It was her elephant dart, capable of flooring the wildest temper. Eliza was always so startled by it that she forgot everything but the momentary pride of being claimed as a parent.
‘To hear him go on,’ Dido continued, ‘you’d think all he did was give but in fact he’s quite needy.’
‘I thought he had everything,’ Eliza said honestly. ‘What does he need?’
Dido slid off the bench clutching her cards. ‘Oh, you know,’ she said casually. ‘Stuff. Love. Better post these. Then we can set off again.’
Eliza watched her walk to the postbox and solemnly scrutinise the details of collection times before trusting it with the postcards and was confronted with a brief, terrible vision of her as a kind of child labourer, staggering under a burden of adult wishes.
I should shield her more, she thought. It’s good that we had to come away.
But then Dido turned from the postbox and strode back, confidently plain, skittish even, robustly putting a clutch of herring gulls to flight, and Eliza saw there was no cause for alarm.
On the way home Dido demanded they break off to climb Chapel Cam Brea, which their route closely circled. The small car park at the hill’s foot was deserted but they hid their bikes behind a farm wall to keep them safe. Eliza was far from fit – even cycling on the level had left her breathless – but the path lay up the hill’s shallowest side. They climbed gently, breathing the coconut scent of gorse blossom and the butcher’s shop whiff of warm bracken.
There was a charred metal beacon at the top, a leftover from the millennium eve celebrations, Dido said, and the land around was so low lying that t
he summit seemed gratifyingly higher than it probably was. West Cornwall was spread around them like a map; the north and south coasts, Land’s End, Penzance and the graceful sweep of Mount’s Bay towards the Lizard. Turning the other way they watched a small plane taking off for the Scillies from the grass runway of the tiny airfield then stared beyond it at the sheepy moorland which led down to Zennor and St Ives. The hamlets around each farm or church seemed distributed with perfect evenness among the ancient field patterns. Dido exclaimed at the number of churches. There weren’t so many more than in London, Eliza explained. It was just that the fields between London’s villages had all been built on, which blurred the view and hid the towers.
‘What’s this?’ Dido pointed to a stumpy concrete pillar with a brass insert.
‘A trig point,’ Eliza told her.
‘What’s it for?’
‘Oh God. Erm. To tell you how high you are? To join up with other trig points? O-level Geography. Sorry. I’ve failed you.’
‘That’s all right.’ Dido looked back at the view. ‘You know other things.’
‘Down there,’ Eliza told her, pointing to the seaward valley beyond the airfield, ‘is where Roger Trevescan lived.’
‘Your Trevescan? Old Trevescan?’
Eliza nodded.
Dido looked back towards the valley and frowned. ‘I thought he lived with Elizabeth I.’
‘Well, he spent time at court, yes, and there’s even a theory that he was a spy for Walsingham. There were lots of Cornishmen there. Elizabeth said they were ‘all born courtiers and with a becoming confidence’ which of course, in those days, meant as much that they were trustworthy as that they were brave. But then Trevescan had to leave, under a cloud. So he came home, to the family manor down there, and died protecting his brother’s wife in a Spanish raid. I’d always thought they lived nearer Mousehole but then I saw it on the library map yesterday. Where’s Kitty’s map? Yes. Look. There it is. Vingoe. I suppose Spanish ships could have set down a boatful of men in a little hidden valley like that far more easily than they could sail into Mount’s Bay. Or perhaps they were driven apart from the rest and forced to land there so they had to fight their way back to join the others.’
They sat together on a rock, staring towards Trevescan’s heroic last stand. Dido breathed deeply, as she always seemed to when pondering.
‘What cloud was he under?’ she asked.
Eliza paused only a moment, wondering whether Dido was old enough to know of such things then dismissing her qualms; the girl watched plenty of soap operas at Giles’ house.
‘He was accused of being gay. Well, they didn’t call it that then. They called it effeminacy or sodomy or something. The nobleman who accused him was embarrassed because Trevescan was in love with his brother. So he took the sneaky, patriotic way out by accusing him of being involved with a Spanish envoy instead. People have always had a way of linking gayness with treason. Anyway Trevescan was a good courtier and knew it was also treason to draw a sword in court except in the Queen’s defence, so he chose to respect the Queen and be thought a coward and he came back to Cornwall. But of course he proved himself not a coward or a traitor at all, by dying defending his brother’s fiancee from the Spanish. It’s a good story but it could all be nothing more than gossip.’
‘What about the boyfriend?’
‘History doesn’t relate. I expect he married and settled down. Most men did then. Life tended to be short and dangerous so it was important to have children. Love was a sort of extra. Marriage was about securing property and heirs.’
Dido yawned. Eliza feared she was boring her but Dido jumped up saying, ‘Let’s go and have a look.’
‘There’ll be nothing there. I’m not even sure it’s the right place; Cornish names tend to repeat themselves. For all we know Vingoe just means rocky valley or vineyard.’
‘No harm in looking, though.’
So they continued their ride around the base of the hill and back past the airfield to where the lane branched off down into the seaward valley. The yellow sign was more clearly visible than when they had been riding from St Just. Vingoe it said. And in smaller letters: Campsite. Showers. Shop. WCs. Pony trekking. No dogs sorry.
Dipping out of the salt-laden prevailing wind, the valley drew them down to proper, fairly straight trees, ferny banks, the sound of a stream. Two of the cottages they passed had ad hoc plant stalls at their gates, as if the spot had lushness to spare.
Promisingly ancient granite gateposts gave onto a short drive to what had once been a farm. They passed a line of pony trekkers on the way down. The tents and caravans were scattered across one field, mobile homes, smarter, less camouflaged versions of Kitty’s retreat, stood in strict order across another. There was a view of a rocky inlet.
Vingoe. Like Manderley, the name had always conjured for Eliza imagery of old, ivy-draped charm, a pillared porch, mullioned windows, the doomy calls of rooks. Instead here was an entirely ordinary house, its walls smoothly rendered and painted white, its sash windows replaced with white plastic ones which added insult to injury by having pseudo glazing bars in the right places while opening the wrong way. There was a proud modern conservatory, a patio marked out in potted pelargoniums, a tidy lack of overshadowing trees. The outbuildings were old, or had been once, but had all been put to new use as communal shower rooms, a WC block, a shop. Only the stable was still a stable. Vingoe proved more of an anticlimax than Land’s End had done.
A man emerged, whistling, trailing terriers, from a door marked Reception.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked.
‘Erm. I don’t think so,’ Eliza began, already turning her front wheel, but Dido chipped in.
‘We’re looking for Vingoe. My mother’s writing a book about Roger Trevescan.’
‘Bull’s eye,’ the man said. ‘Not much of it left, though.’ He said they did not normally show people the house but, since Eliza was writing a book, he would make an exception for her.
He summoned his wife, a well-maintained woman evidently adept at delegating, who proudly showed them around. Traces of the old house remained, all but swallowed by later building: an exposed granite lintel, an inglenook fireplace, a cramped back staircase. There was a well in what had once been a courtyard but was now roofed over as a ping-pong and pool room. The well was glazed in and the wife smartly flicked a switch to turn on a green spotlight in its dank and mossy interior.
‘And this is the Betrothal Window. It’s all old glass, see?’
It was an old mullion window but its glass wasn’t old at all. It was nearly all Victorian, to judge by the intense colouring of the stained panels and olde worlde leading but Eliza feigned interest out of politeness.
‘Why betrothal?’ she asked and the woman drew attention to one pane, probably once obscure but now repositioned at the window’s gaudy centre.
It was a diamond lozenge of clear glass whose drippy inconsistencies would have marked it out as older than the rest even without the scratches made on it: RT&MS1595. Eliza leaned closer so that her breath misted the glass.
‘Did Roger Trevescan write that, then?’ Dido asked.
‘No, my beauty,’ the woman said. ‘He was dead by then. Died fighting off the Spanish. This was Robert, his brother and Mary Semmens, who married that year.’
Eliza had seen such initials and graffiti many times before, carved in glass with diamond rings or in stone pillars or choir stalls with patient penknives. As in other cases, this one had doubtless been gone over with more professional tools in later years but the original could only be gone over afresh, not erased, so there was no reason to doubt that the design, the letters and date were a tracing at least of the sixteenth-century original.
Dido was restlessly unimpressed and the woman wanted her house back so Eliza pulled herself back to the present and followed them out to the front door.
Within, however, she felt the way she had in the Bodleian Library once when a librarian handed her a small box tied
with grubby ribbon, as casually as he might have passed over last week’s Sunday papers. And she had sat at her desk and opened the box and taken out a drably bound first edition of Byrd’s Songs and Sonets. It was, she told herself, only paper, just as the carved window pane was only glass, paper not so very different from that used today. But it was paper made in the sixteenth century, printed in the 1590s and fingered and sung over if not by Byrd himself then quite possibly by a member of Elizabeth’s court. Stone was different. One thought little of climbing steps or walking courtyards climbed and walked centuries before by legendary figures but paper was so very vulnerable, so apt to soak up sweat, grease, blood, wine splashes, that each reader left behind their own impression on it.
‘Is anybody there? Hello?’
‘Sorry,’ Eliza said. She had ridden home in a silent daze and had still been miles away as they ate the pasties bought at the Vingoe campsite shop. And now she was sun-dazed as well and Dido was staring at her expectantly. ‘Did you say something?’
‘What are you going to wear?’ Dido said.
‘When?’
‘For your date this evening.’
‘God, I’d clean forgotten! It’s not a date anyway. You’ll be there.’
‘It’s still a date. What have you got that’s nice?’
‘Nothing. I dunno. Nothing probably. It’s not a date, Dido, honestly. We’re just going there for supper.’
‘You don’t remember his name, even. Do you?’
‘Pearce did dance with Petronella. He’s called Pearce.’
‘You’re hopeless.’
‘So you choose, if it matters so much.’
Dido stared for a moment then thought better of what she was going to say and went inside to riffle with judicious scorn through Eliza’s clothes.
Overcome by the sun, the bike ride, the weight of pasty in her belly and the sense that her life was undergoing one of its periodic convulsions, Eliza fell deeply asleep.
She had no vivid sense of his face. Giles and Paul had left immediate, strong impressions, the one of angelic perfection, the other of ugly sexiness. She had noted that he had dark, curly hair and a labourer’s deep tan but when Dido woke her saying it was time to get ready, Eliza felt a mounting fear that all she could recall with any clarity were his big, battered hands and rumble of a voice.