by Anne Calhoun
“My dear, this is lovely. What do we have?”
“Well,” Tilda said. “We’ve got cheddar made near Exeter that seems to have won some sort of award, olives, freshly baked bread, two quiches, yogurt, scones, crackers and chutney, charcuterie from a local farm, and dessert.”
They ate while the sun traced a slow arc in the sky. Nan didn’t ask the questions about how they met. In fact, she seemed to know all about Daniel, his job, his family, his history with Tilda, which surprised Daniel in his jet-lagged state, until he remembered the letters, crossing the Atlantic once or twice a week for over a decade. He felt a little like one of those letters, flattened, colorless, only thinly connected to New York now that he was in Cornwall. Nan brought Tilda up-to-date on the latest news from this tiny, unknown, almost forgotten part of the world, a running conversation about people and places. Daniel watched, and listened.
And learned. Because this was a completely different side of his wife. She was so gentle with Nan, matching her bite for bite, cajoling her into another slice of sweet bread, or a sliver of the spiced peach tart, spreading the crackers with some of the chutney, making a second pot of tea. Most of it was the same, the wild restlessness alive in Tilda seemingly from birth. There were stories about wrists sprained falling out of trees, knees skinned tumbling down rocks near the sea. Tilda belonged in this old house, full of sunshine and sea air. She belonged here in a way that was deeper and more powerful than the way she made New York her own. Suddenly her life in New York seemed like a profound dislocation.
“How old were you?”
“Oh, six, I think,” she said.
“Five,” Nan corrected. “Five, and nowhere to be found from sunup to sundown.”
“It was summer,” Tilda objected.
“And what about the times the head teacher called, ‘Matilda’s not here yet, Mrs. Davies, have you any idea where that child’s got to this time?’”
Tilda laughed. “I always turned up.”
“Down some path to the sea, or under a bush. You’d turn up dirty and late, brazen as you please.”
“But I did turn up.”
“Near feral, your grade-one teacher said. Unruly, undisciplined, unable to sit still two seconds together, and brilliant. You were bored, you didn’t like it, and you didn’t care who knew it.”
“I still don’t.”
“You solved the problem with dirt and fresh air, and running. She never walked anywhere,” Nan confided to Daniel. “A little whirlwind. Ran with the boys from an early age. She had them wrapped around her little finger. They couldn’t sort her out, you see.”
“She hasn’t changed much. I’d love to see more of the pictures like the one you sent me before Christmas,” Daniel said.
Nan’s face brightened, but Tilda went blank, like a fire brutally quenched, before laughter trilled from her throat. “Oh, Nan doesn’t keep anything like that. Besides, all this,” she said with a sweeping gesture that took in sea and sky, “and you want to look at old snaps of me?” she said.
“Where are you staying?”
“At Cliff House, where you’ll be having supper with us. I want to have a look at your bank statements while I’m here,” Tilda said.
Nan put her hands on the table to rise. “I’ve got this,” Daniel said when Tilda started to gather the dishes.
The interior of the house was as small as the outside hinted, a single story with very low ceilings. The kitchen ran along the front wall, a couch and table the length of the house and a small table in between, a bathroom, a cupboard, and a single bedroom off the main living area. The room seemed locked in time. The taps were handles so old they’d become retro popular again, and the water streaming out of them smelled of well water. The room smelled faintly of bleach and pine, the windows sparkled, but under the spotless surfaces, everything was worn, scratched, dented, stained. A cheery tree decorated with multicolored lights and ancient ornaments sat on the little table by the sofa.
He washed all the dishes carefully, then dried them with the threadbare tea towels draped over the oven’s handle. Tilda and Nan put their heads together over a sheaf of paper, murmuring, while he covered the leftovers and set them neatly in the small fridge. The sums they discussed were small, with a few gaps in Nan’s memory Tilda had to prompt her to fill. Daniel contrasted her gentle tone with the sharp precision she used on the call with the financier in London, and tried to assemble the pieces of Tilda into a coherent picture.
“I’ve got something for the pair of you,” she said, after Tilda folded away the bank statements.
“Nan, you really didn’t have to.”
She rose, then made her way into the bedroom. While she rummaged around, Tilda nodded at the sofa. “That’s my childhood bed. That very sofa. I slept with Nan until I was three or four, but I kicked.”
With Tilda, conversational shifts came out of nowhere. He was tired enough to need a second to find the reference: their conversation at Christmas, in his room at his parents’ house. “Okay.”
“Surprised?”
What characterized true poverty was a complete disconnect from family and a sense of place. Love and belonging permeated this house, even if Tilda had slept on a sofa. “Not after a decade with the FBI. How long did you live here?”
“Until the year I turned eight. Mum finished her PhD that year, and came to collect me. She left when I was two, and came back for breaks, unless she was doing research or attending classes elsewhere.”
“That must have been hard,” he said absently. His brain was past the point of sloshing in his head, and now vibrated at a frequency barely audible to human ears. “Not having your mother around, I mean.”
“I had Nan. I loved it here,” she said. Her voice was low, intense. “You’ll see later. Rocks and sea and sky, the wind in the grass. I loved it here.”
“Here you are. It’s not much, mind you,” Nan said.
The box was wrapped in used paper and tied with a bow. Tilda smiled at it, smoothing her hands over the box then carefully opening it. Nestled in a bed of new tea towels, the kind Tilda preferred to dry dishes, were three jars of homemade currant jam.
“My favorite,” she said softly, and leaned into her Nan’s shoulder.
“I know.”
“Nan used to feed me biscuits spread with this jam for tea,” Tilda said.
“Not a proper tea, but I had to get her to eat somehow.”
“I have a similar problem,” Daniel said. The jars were neatly labeled in a script similar to his own grandmother’s handwriting.
“Thank you,” she said, and leaned forward to kiss Nan’s cheek. “I’ll have some on my toast in the morning, and think of you.”
“You’re welcome. It’s not much—”
“It’s perfect. Exactly what I want,” Tilda said. “Something that reminds me of you. Of . . .”
Her voice trailed off. She smiled, bright as a scythe, bright as the tears in her eyes, smoothing the tea towels over and over.
—
“Nap,” he said when they got back into the car.
“It’s better not to sleep, and I want to go for a long walk,” she said. Her eyes were bright, and wild.
“Nap,” he repeated, more firmly, and started the engine. “Just an hour or so. I can’t even go for a walk. I’ll trip over my own feet.”
They drove back into the village and checked into the inn. The owner knew Tilda by reputation and welcomed her warmly. In their room Tilda perched in the window seat, while Daniel set his phone to go off in an hour and stretched out on the bed in his clothes. He was asleep in seconds.
When the alarm went off Tilda was still sitting in the window seat, staring out at the cliffs enclosing the harbor, the ocean beyond. “Did you sleep?”
“I might have dozed for a few minutes,” she said.
After quickly cleaning up they
set off through the village, Tilda pointing out landmarks like the church, the school, the pub on their way to the path worn into the tough grass long ago. Dirt gave way to thick, tall grass and a split-rail fence. Her jacket knotted around her waist, Tilda stepped through the stile and set off along a narrow dirt path. Daniel followed her.
The wind patted him from all angles, the sunshine more constant but less powerful. Ahead of him, Tilda’s hair lifted in the ocean-drenched breeze. When she turned to check on his progress, she looked shockingly young.
“Keep up,” she called, mischief in her grin.
“I’m trying to enjoy the walk,” he said. “Where are we going?”
She pointed to a promontory curving into the bay. A narrow beach hugged the base of the long cliff, the water dotted with huge stone towers left behind after the ocean carved away softer portions. “There,” she said.
Mossy grass ran up to the very edge of the cliffs, and ran down the sides, clinging to any flat spots. The dirt trail was nearly invisible behind and ahead of them. While the wind’s speed and intensity varied, its presence never did. Without the unseasonable temperatures, it would be a cold, damp visit.
Several yards ahead of him Tilda stopped and flung her arms out and her head back, exposing her throat and collarbones to the wind and sky. She said nothing, but the way her wedding ring glinted in the sun, the sheer exuberance of her tousled, dancing curls, the utter abandon screamed, Home, home, I am home!
He smiled, and followed, increasingly aware of seismic shifts under the continental plates of Tilda. She fit here, loved it here. He could see her working as a waitress in one of the restaurants, somehow capturing the essence of Cornwall for visiting tourists, bright smile and laughing eyes and wind and sunshine and sea. He could see her having affair after affair with wealthy businessmen down from London on holiday, laughing at their efforts to woo her and take her away from this wild place, rich only in gifts that couldn’t be given, only received, spurning their offers of jewelry or a car or clothes, walking out of their bedrooms and back onto the moors. The wind would scour her clean of their scent. She wouldn’t have a car here, either. She’d walk or bicycle everywhere, in her slim jeans and her Wellington boots, needing nothing they valued, wanting only whatever they could offer her that night, trading it for her freedom—
He tripped on a rock embedded in the dirt path and came back from his decidedly unromantic mental detour.
“All right, then?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said. Who spent a walk by the sea with his new bride mentally conjuring up a different version of her, one where she loved and left as much as she laughed?
As he pondered this question, Tilda sat down on the edge of the rocks, nothing between her and a three-hundred-foot drop to the ocean, and slipped over the edge. He gave an inarticulate shout and lunged for her, going to his knee on the grass. She popped back up again like a jack-in-the-box, genuinely bewildered.
“What?” she said. She stood on a shelf of rock only as wide as her feet that was, as far as he could tell, supported by fuck-all underneath it.
He dropped his head to his upper arm and waited for his heart rate to slow into the double digits again. “I thought you went over the cliff.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, although her eyes were dancing.
“You’re going to pay for that,” he replied, and peered over the edge to see a tiny beach sheltered between two towering, hewn edges of the cliff. Now that he knew to look for it, he could see the path leading down the rocks, to the crescent of sand. “What’s down there?”
“A very private, very sheltered beach.”
That sounded appealing, but one of them had to be reasonable. “I don’t know, Tilda,” he said. “I’ve got size-twelve feet. A goat couldn’t get down that path.”
“I’ll give you a really filthy blow job,” she said so seriously he laughed.
“Deal. Let me go first. That way if I slip, I won’t take you out on the way down.”
In the end, he didn’t fall, although there were a couple of near misses, and his knuckles were scraped and bloody by the time he set foot on the beach. The sunshine warmed the sand and rocks. All he could see was a two-hundred-degree swath of ocean.
Tilda sprawled out on the rocky sand and heaved a sigh of contentment. “We’re really lucky with the weather. It’s uncommonly warm and sunny.”
“How did you know about this place?”
“Rory showed me, the summer I was fourteen,” she said. Her first kiss, Daniel remembered, but he was reconstructing his impressions of a first kiss in this place, the sea and sky and the cries of the birds.
“You’re different when you’re with your grandmother.”
“How so?”
“Calmer, softer, quieter,” he said. “More receptive. You smile differently, hold yourself differently.” Without the sharp angles, without the edge, but he kept that observation. She was vulnerable with Nan, something he never would have realized if he hadn’t seen her here.
“Isn’t that how people are supposed to be with their nans?”
“I suppose,” he said. “Why didn’t you want me to see pictures?”
“Nan put them away after Granddad died and Mum left for school. I think it’s too hard for her to have them out. She doesn’t have much room, either. Not really a packrat, our Nan.”
He felt like a jerk for writing Nan and asking for a picture to give Tilda. He’d thought it would be thoughtful, and instead he’d put his foot in it.
“You didn’t know,” she said. “Don’t think anything more about it.”
Sun-warmed and protected by the cliffs, he dozed to the sound of the waves lapping irregularly at the beach, and awoke to the sensation of Tilda’s mouth on his cock. For a moment the possibility of being seen seized him. He closed his fingers in Tilda’s curls and tugged. “We shouldn’t,” he said.
“No one can see,” she whispered. The breeze dried her saliva on his shaft, tightening the skin.
It was as filthy as she’d promised. Utterly exposed and completely hidden, he felt like he was at the end of the world, lost in time and space. She slicked his entire shaft with saliva, then tugged his jeans down far enough to lick at his balls. He came with his cock nudging the back of her throat and the rush of the ocean in his ears. The wind carried away his shout.
“I don’t think I can climb the hill,” he said.
She swished her hands in the ocean and dried them on her jeans. “The tide’s coming in,” she said matter-of-factly.
Properly motivated, he scrambled to his feet. The climb up the cliff was only slightly less terrifying than the climb down. They walked back to the inn with the sun setting into the ocean. He thought about the picture in his mother’s house, the one that said Home is where your story begins. He thought about the albums Tilda deftly prevented Nan from showing him. He thought about their story, so new, about how little he’d known about Tilda’s home, and wondered what kind of story they’d begun together.
– THIRTEEN –
New Year’s Eve
The cabdriver heaved their bags from the trunk of the black London cab that amused Daniel to no end. “I’ll get them,” Daniel said, and handed him several bills. Tilda scanned the backseat one more time to be sure all the bags had made the transition from cab to street; they’d nearly left her shoulder bag in the rental car when they turned it in, and she wasn’t eager to have to go back out again and track down her laptop, tablet, cell phone, and wallet in the back of a black cab.
When she looked up, the front door to the town house was open. Her mother stood in the doorway. “Hello, darling,” she said, but made no move to come down the stairs and greet them.
Daniel glanced up, then at Tilda. There was no point in explaining that her mother would never greet them in the street, would never fly down the steps and envelop her daughter and new son-in-law in a
hug that either would be considered common at best and hopelessly gauche at worst. Instead, she shifted her bag higher on her shoulder and reached for the smaller of the two suitcases.
“I’ve got them,” Daniel murmured.
She climbed the steps. “Hello, Mum,” she said, leaning in for a kiss.
“Come in, come in,” she said to Daniel, who somehow managed to jockey their enormous suitcase through the narrow door without smearing the grime from the pavement on her mother’s cream cabled leggings. She wore a heavy brown wrap sweater over the leggings, and her hair was swept back from forehead and temples. Her mother had the classic beauty of a forties screen star, high cheekbones and forehead, full mouth. Daniel didn’t do anything as obvious as a double take, but as she watched, he did some very simple math and put together another piece of the puzzle.
Tilda closed the door. “Mother, this is Daniel Logan. Daniel, my mother, Elizabeth Davies.”
“So lovely to meet you, Daniel,” her mother said.
Daniel correctly deduced the body language and shook her hand rather than bending for a cheek kiss, as Tilda had. “It’s a pleasure, Doctor Davies,” he said.
“Elizabeth, please,” her mother said. “How was the drive? I heard there was construction on the A30.”
“There is, but traffic was light. We left the car outside the city and caught a cab here,” Daniel said.
“You’ve got lovely weather for your visit.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Daniel said.
And that covered the two English standbys, the weather and the state of the roads. Tilda smiled to herself.
“Although I think Tilda will see more office parks than anything else,” Daniel added.
“Really, darling?” Her mother turned to look at her, genuine surprise on her face, leaving Tilda to wonder once again if her mother actually read her emails.
“I’ve got meetings with Quality Group,” she said.
“How nice. We can discuss it over dinner,” her mother said. She tucked her hair behind her ear. Silver strands gleamed in the black, and a very expensive pen was tucked over one ear. Tilda recognized the abstracted expression on her face. “Unless you’d like to have coffee in the reception room, but I’m in the middle of a rather tricky chapter and I’m sure you’d like to freshen up.”