Cornish Short Stories

by Emma Timpany

  Caught in a net of light, a bird.

  ‘Whatever it is,’ she said, ‘it’s big. And it looks … golden.’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  A name came into her mind along with the image of a bird so rare that she had never thought to see one in her lifetime. As big as a thrush, the bird in the tree was motionless; its yellow plumage was black-edged, as if it had been carved from some dark wood and then, held delicately by its wings and tail, dipped in gilt.

  ‘An oriole?’ she said.

  ‘It looks like one, but they’re incredibly elusive. They don’t just sit in trees out in the open like that.’

  ‘This one does.’

  ‘I can’t be sure unless I go outside. Take a closer look.’ He pushed his chair back.

  ‘Michael?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Michael, there’s something we should …’

  ‘What’s the matter? You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘Before you go, I think that we need to …’ Across the path of her words, a shadow fell and what she had meant to say was lost in darkness. Long ago, she had read something about that ancient world of incessant substitutions, of weird metamorphoses. She had read that after his longest pursuit, in the sea off Rhamnus in Attica, Zeus had finally caught up with Nemesis: in the form of a swan, he had settled on her wild duck.

  ‘What is it, Frieda?’

  Greek mythology had once been a passion of hers, but it was a love that, with the passing of time, she had lost. The older she grew the stranger the world seemed, increasingly hard to comprehend as it actually was, let alone when it was covered in layers of leaky, elaborate myth. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing’s the matter. I don’t mind. Go on. Off you go.’

  He walked out of the doors and along the grey slabs of the terrace.

  When she felt ready, pushing back her chair, she went outside and stood beside him. In flagrant defiance of the men who wrote bird-watching manuals, the bird still sat at the top of the tree, exactly where they had first seen it.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘I can’t be sure without looking at it through binoculars.’

  ‘You go and get them. I’ll keep an eye on her for you.’

  ‘If it is an oriole, it’s probably a female. The males are more intensely golden.’

  ‘Is that so.’

  The moment after he stepped off the terrace, the bird took flight. Down she swooped, back into the cover of the top canopy, the place where she and her kind were known to cower; the place where, despite their extravagant colouring, they habitually eluded detection by even the sharpest-eyed of observers.

  It took her a moment to register the change, her speed and grace as she skimmed through dappled forest light then up and out into the vast, unbroken blue. The next time she looked down, he was already far below her.

  TOO HOT, TOO BRIGHT

  S. REID

  A COVE

  I WAIT for you as I have done these thirty years and more, listen for the brush of bracken along the path up on the cliff top. You are light-footed for a heavyset man. I catch the ghost of a fox cutting over the bank into the field. There have been foxes here all along, cubs in springtime. We are night creatures too, hiding from the light, not wanting to be caught.

  You are late tonight and the cold starts eating into me even though it’s June turning to July. Rooks gather in the dusk to drink at the meeting of the stream and the sea before flying up to roost. I wedge myself into a curve in a rock, turn up the collar of my jacket, listen to the pull of the waves.

  We have mapped this cove, know where to find a flat edge seat, shelter from a sou’westerly, the upper reach of a spring tide. Not much of a moon tonight, just a crescent dipping out of the heavy darkness. We’ve always been careful, left no trace. No letters, no lantern, no torch. I’ve always kept myself to myself in that way.

  It was difficult in those days. I used to go to chapel back then. Didn’t think too deeply about it, not a great believer, but when I was in that musty granite hall, hymns filling every corner, I felt I’d got my feet on the ground, roots stretching down into the salty earth. It was your voice that caught hold of me. A fine baritone that growled into bass. Barrel-chested. I closed my eyes and let the sound wash through me.

  We found this place by chance. A summer hike along the southern stretch, out past Penzer, Kemyel, Half Tide Rock. The stream crossed our path, falling from a spongy corner of a field down to the sea. We dipped our feet in the peaty water and followed its descent, catching hold of willow branches, our feet sliding on the rocks, down to a cove. A slither of shell sand cut through with bands of rock. Hidden. Safe.

  I close my eyes and I can still catch the warmth of you, that first time.

  I taught you how to fish in the early days. Agile then. Free as birds. We scrambled along the rocky arm, our feet catching on limpets and dog whelks, crabs and blennies hidden in the nooks. Out to deeper water on the point, out to cast a line from the jutting edge.

  Our canvas shelter, on a ledge above the tide, tightly knit into the blackthorn, is more comfortable these days. Velvet cushions and a Turkish rug. Still I wait for you. Wrap myself in a woollen blanket. The waves are louder at night, knocking at the door when they are halfway down the beach. The lost chime of the Runnel Stone bell caught in the swell. Cold as winter, jack snipe feathery in the marsh.

  *

  Two weeks come and go, with no sign of you. Our time has a pattern – Wednesday night, if not this one then the next. This summer damp gets under my skin and aches creep through the joints of my wrists and fingers. I cannot settle even in my studio, perched at the top of my house, looking out across the mossy roofs and grassy chimney pots, across the reach from Lizard to Newlyn. The open window catches the calls of swallows flitting in Morrab Gardens below. I cannot paint and put the brush aside, the canvas all shapes and lines but no colour.

  I have lived here for twenty years or so, loved this place from the moment I saw it. A tall, elegant, airy house, a window at each landing catching morning and evening light by turns.

  In the kitchen, I switch on the radio and the jaunty songs of the local station jar the still rooms as I check again for any news of you – an accident perhaps. I phone the hospital but cut the call when a voice asks me for my name. Too risky. Even Martha, my long-legged black and white cat, is restless today, stalking from one room to the next. I need some air and walk through the gardens to the library.

  The reading room is quiet, at rest, the hands of the clock on the mantelpiece held fast at ten to five. I pick up The Cornishman from the fan of periodicals on the table and scan the pages. Palms and ferns dapple light through the window across the carpet. And then, finally, in small neat type, I find it. Robert, beloved husband of Ros, devoted father to Rachel and Hannah. Funeral service to be held at St Mary’s Church.

  A CHURCH

  THE NIGHT ticks by. Brittle sleep. I wake, fear racing, my body breaking into fragments. I tell myself I must attend the service or I will always be waiting for you at the shore. And yet I cannot face your wife, your girls.

  I pick strands of rosemary, geranium, dew-wet, bind them with a string. I iron a shirt, polish shoes, sip coffee at the breakfast table.

  Even now I step aside, put back the hour, avoid the time to come. It’s early yet. I walk down Chapel Street, head out along the promenade, and breathe the seaweed air. High above herring gulls, lifted, rising, forty, fifty, maybe more, glinting morning stars.

  Already early swimmers are queuing at the entrance to Jubilee Pool, open to the elements, cut into the rocks, and I join the line as the attendant draws open the iron gate.

  Robert. This gentle pool, poster blue, cut through with a herringbone breeze, I run my fingers through your hair. These elegant curves, these steadfast rails, this ship of idling limbs and breaths.

  A chilly slab to lay my clothes. The clip of water on the sides. I dive through the line from day to dusk, reach out and touch your skin. Silken salt in this dro
p of ocean. I no longer hear the herring gulls.

  The orange buoy, the safety rope, the tolling of a bell.

  I take a seat near the back of the church. The flowers lie limply at my feet. The pews set close upon each other. Water from the pool trickles down my hair, down my neck, dampens my shirt.

  I hear the clip of shoes on stone, catch whispers.

  Not at the chapel in Newlyn then?

  His mother wasn’t having that. High church. She had her way, of course.

  And Ros?

  Not happy. But not a lot she could do about it.

  The service starts, and I grasp phrases here and there – beloved son, loving husband, devoted father – falling leaves.

  My Robert. A slither of candlelight catches the copper band around my wrist. I touch the cool metal.

  There was a lazy slack tide that night. I remember how you held me close. The warm smell of wood, sawdust in the pores of your skin, touched dusking raven hair speckled with grey.

  You placed a small band of gold in my palm and closed my fingers around it. We’re getting on a bit now, you said, Rachel and Hannah grown up and away. We could take our chance. And as we lay there, still as the night, my mind swithered this way and that. Finally, a life together, something I had not allowed myself to even hope for. But at what price? Ros and the girls, your family torn apart.

  When you had told me, twenty years back it must be now, how you wanted more than us, a settled family life and children – Ros – I accepted that. Loved you still. To be honest, I’d never given them much thought, bracketed them away. I steered clear of the village, never asked you about them. Just a way of coping.

  What about Brighton? You squeezed my hand. A flint house by the sea in Norfolk? Things are different now. People more accepting.

  I pictured our domesticity – log fire in the winter evenings, deckchairs in the garden, a marriage bed.

  You held me. Anywhere, Geoff.

  A HOUSE

  I SLIP out of the church, sit down on a bench. Dusty paths, a granite wall overgrown with valerian, ivy and bramble.

  The mourners brace themselves in the sunlight as your coffin is lowered into the ground. I hold myself steady, cast the flowers into the grave. The girls lean into their mother, slender grasses blown in the wind.

  I follow them, a stranger behind a crowd, walk these windings to Newlyn. I cannot be alone right now, I cannot say goodbye just yet, and part of me just wants to see and know this other part of you.

  The house barely holds us all. A press of bodies in a low-ceilinged room. I lean on the cool damp wall, adjust my eyes to the dim light.

  A glass of brandy is pressed into my hand. A kindly, weathered face. Out of the blue, isn’t it? Fit as a fiddle, he was, what with his work and all. Still can’t take it in.

  He searches my face, can’t place me.

  Ah well, he says and shoulders through the crowd.

  Sweat prickles my back. I down the brandy, loosen my top button. I run my fingers across the dining table, the fine grain of the oak. We share a love for shapes and things – your wood and chisel, my paint and canvas.

  A photo frame. Robert balancing the girls, one on each knee – they must have been around three and five years old when the picture was taken. I look for them across the room, look for Ros.

  Spirits, wine, beer flow like water. I am knocking back brandy. Voices grow louder. The men sing the old songs, arms slung around each other’s shoulders. The sound fills the room and presses against the walls. I close my eyes and hear your voice.

  I gave that ring back to you, placed it in your hand. Too hot, too bright for me. We never spoke of it more, but it lay waiting, a life unlived. Perhaps it was her anger I feared most. Perhaps it was our secret splayed open in the light.

  Ros sits on the window seat, on her own now, just an arm’s length away. Frayed, all washed out. Strands of brown hair have come loose from the neat bun and curl limply onto her black velvet dress. Her gaze passes across me, unseeing, and shifts from one woman to the next, cousins, friends, neighbours. The room feels tight. My head swims. I have no place here.

  I work my way through the rough tide, rolled this way and that. A whisky bottle scrapes hard along the bressummer beam and jags across the faint lines of the coffin drop. The hatch corners out of place and angles from the ceiling, heavy, falling. I am held fast in the swell and can only watch as it slides down towards me.

  Voices, muffled, far away. Jesus Christ. Knocked out cold. Never seen him before. Give him some air. Get him upstairs so he can lie down. He’ll be all right in a bit. I’m lifted. Floating. Nowhere.

  There are twelve squares of glass in the window, twelve squares of grey light. The room spins.

  Are you okay? A soft voice. Brown eyes looking into mine. I feel the weight of a hand on my shoulder. Ros. I close my eyes, shooting pain in my forehead.

  Are you okay, love?

  I force my eyes open. I’m all right.

  She hands me a glass of water. Holds it as I sip. Her hands are cool. Mine slippery, clammy.

  There now.

  She leaves me, pulls the door to.

  The bedspread is soft against my face. The pillow smells of you, of wood. I drift off, sense her presence in the room now and then, turn in my sleep.

  It’s quiet now downstairs. I sit up and steady myself. The room is darker now, dense with evening light. A dressing table, brush and comb neatly placed. A cotton scarf thrown across a chair. My jacket hangs on a hook on the bedroom door. I find my shoes under the bed and, as I bend forward to tie the laces, my hand catches on a crumpled shirt. I lift it to my face, and the thing is, it smells of me as well as you, of us. I hold it close, pressed tight into my eyes. Just breathing, in and out, and it feels like the first time I’ve been able to breathe all day. And then I hear the gentle click of the bedroom door.

  The Wild

  I HAVE not gone back to the cove since you passed away. No doubt the foxes are still there, our shelter tatters in the blackthorn. Force myself to paint these days, try to keep a structure and routine, but find myself more often gazing out of the window, across the rooftops to the bay. My palette is more muted, picking out softer tones. I tell you things I left unsaid, wish you back among the living.

  Autumn now. Every day I head out and walk. The woods shelter me, wrap me round with a cloak of beech and oak and moss. Here I am nothing, invisible, safe. I walk between a broken wall of ancient granite stones and a stream that gathers pace as it falls through the valley. Black stalks of fungi snake up from softening wood.

  I lie down in a shallow dip and look up through the branches to the milky sky. A blackbird rifles through the leaves searching for insects, a wren hops through the ivy. The stream falls into a beach of rounded boulders.

  Ros stands at my door, cotton scarf, red rose pattern, wrapped around her neck and shoulders. She looks different, resolute, lost some of the weariness of that day. I had wondered if she would seek me out.

  I offer coffee, biscuits. I’m all fingers and thumbs.

  I kept looking till I found you, she says. I always knew there was someone.

  I don’t know what to say. I sit opposite her, awkward, feel I am a stranger in my own house.

  Her gaze travels around the room, taking in the paintings on the wall, out through the glass doors to the garden.

  We had a good marriage. Our children. Rob and I were happy.

  She looks back to me. And so I tell her, how we met when we were barely twenty, how I loved you for more than thirty years, and how I miss you now.

  And I hold back from her our beloved cove, the golden ring.

  The early hours are the most difficult for me. They hold an ashen quality, before the waking day. I go upstairs to my studio and focus on my work. The ancient patterns of the woods, the subtle hues of bark and ferns, abstracted into lines and curves. They will ship to London, Berlin and New York early in the year.

  I did not think I would see her again, and yet she returns i
n January, blown in with the gale.

  I’m going out to Bosullow. Come with me, she says.

  I glance at her in the car. Her hands are small, pale on the wheel. The car is old, the radio tinny. She has cut her hair. It’s short now, stylish, curls around her ear.

  We wind through Madron, past the poorhouse lane, park up on the moors. Love, duplicity, our quiet companions as we walk the high-hedged track. We cross the stream to Men an Tol, then up to Ding Dong mine. I follow her along the narrow path across the hollow earth. You wrap your arm around her shoulders, match her stride up the hill. Protective ghost.

  We shelter by the crumbling wall and neither knows where to begin. The secrets, lies, the other life. Another body, another skin, resting here between us, lying still. A delicate thing, too raw to be picked over by small birds. Her eyes are darker than yours, a deeper chocolate brown. The wind is biting cold. My lips are numb. Our words are whipped away unspoken across the tops.

  We walk along the ling-lined track to Nine Maidens and turn to lighter things. My exhibition in New York, Rachel at uni in Bath, Hannah working at the hospital. Sheltered Mount’s Bay to the south. White caps and a boiling sea out past Long Ships to Wolf Rock.

  Through that winter we walk. Mulfra, Grumbla, Pendeen Watch. When the wind is battering at the windows, the clouds hurled across the bay, I have a feeling she will come. And I wait for her, the ship’s bell ringing out at my door. We become companionable in our quietness. We share a love of natural things, a badger track amongst the bracken, a kestrel stalking the cliff top edge.

  I lean against a granite slab. Close my eyes and breathe the warm coconut of winter gorse. I feel her eyes upon me, mapping the details. My freckled skin, red hair, greying now, flecks of paint worn into the creases of my hands.

  A BOOK UNREAD

  THE RAIN. A walk along the promenade. Hand in hand. New lovers old as time. A dog skitters through the glassy puddles. Breakers belly over Battery Rocks, leap the railings and spray collapses on the low terraced houses.