by Nicola Upson
‘And I’d happily have paid twice as much to own it.’ She smiled. ‘Have you any idea how strange it is to walk into a gallery and see a portrait of yourself on the wall?’ Archie asked, opening the gate that led from the terrace to the coastal path. ‘I see that one’s in somebody’s private collection. I hope I’ve got a good home.’
‘Mine, of course. I don’t know if you’d call it good, but it’s never dull.’
‘You kept it?’
She looked out across the estuary, turning her face away so that he couldn’t see the colour rise in her cheeks. ‘Who else would want to look at you, Archie?’ she said, a little too glibly. ‘And they certainly wouldn’t pay me for the pleasure.’ He was about to say something, but she cut him short by pointing further down the path; three women – two walking arm in arm and the other slightly apart – were heading in their direction. ‘Somebody’s waving to you. You didn’t tell me the birthday party was such a female affair. I’m not surprised you look so revoltingly pleased with yourself.’
‘Believe me, it’s not what you think,’ Archie said, and there was something in his tone that made her look at him curiously, but there was no time to probe any further. ‘Bridget – this is Josephine,’ he said, beginning the round of introductions, then added rather weakly‚ ‘It’s her birthday.’
They shook hands, and Bridget wondered what the appraising full-length glance told Archie’s friend about her. ‘Congratulations,’ she said, resisting the temptation to apologise for her clothes, her hair, her very existence. ‘I went to bed for a week when I was forty, but you soon get over it.’
To her credit, Josephine laughed, but Bridget guessed that Archie would not be forgiven quickly for revealing her age. ‘And Marta Fox and Lydia Beaumont,’ he continued, oblivious to his breach of etiquette.
Marta smiled warmly at her. ‘We saw you working on our way in,’ she said. ‘You were up a ladder, but I recognise the paint on your trousers.’
‘Bridget’s an artist,’ Archie explained redundantly to Josephine. ‘She painted the oil of Grantchester in my flat. Well, she didn’t paint it in my flat, obviously – I meant the oil that’s hanging on the . . .’
‘I know the one.’ Josephine looked at Bridget again, but this time there was a glint in her eye which suggested that they might share an amused solidarity in Archie’s discomfort, and Bridget revised her first impressions. ‘You didn’t tell me you knew the artist, though,’ Josephine continued. ‘No wonder you were so delighted with it.’
‘Where is it hanging, Archie?’ Bridget asked. ‘Just out of interest.’
‘It’s in the bedroom.’
‘Do you live near Portmeirion, Bridget?’ Lydia asked brightly, while everyone else looked at each other.
‘No, in Cambridge most of the time, but I have some friends in Hampstead so I stay with them whenever I need to be in town.’
‘Oh, whereabouts? We’re in Holly Place.’
‘Redington Road, not far from Clough and Amabel.’
‘Then you must come for supper some time.’
‘And bring Archie,’ Marta added. ‘It would be lovely to see you both.’
‘We must go,’ Josephine said, looking at her watch. ‘I have to decide what to wear for cocktails with Mrs Hitchcock, God help me.’ She smiled at Bridget. ‘Will you have dinner with us? I haven’t seen that painting of Grantchester since Archie first bought it, but at least I could get to know you a bit better.’
It was an exceptionally eloquent white flag, Bridget thought, and something told her that it was not aimed exclusively at her. ‘I’m sorry – I have to work tonight,’ she said, ‘but I’ll gladly accept a drink tomorrow when I’ve had a chance to assess everything that’s wrong with the mural. You’re here for the weekend?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. I’ll look forward to it.’ Bridget watched them go, noticing how often Marta glanced across at Josephine. ‘Well, that’s all very difficult,’ she said.
‘It’s fine, honestly – she just wasn’t expecting to see me with anyone.’
She laughed and hit his shoulder. ‘You men – you always think it’s about you, don’t you? I meant those three. Call it a peril of the job, but I can spot an awkward composition a mile off. God knows, I’ve been involved in enough of them myself.’ He smiled, but she could see that he was trying to work out if the comment referred to her work or to something more personal. ‘The only thing dividing my affections at the moment, though, is a pair of border terriers, both of whom will leave me if I don’t get back and take them for a walk.’ She kissed his cheek. ‘So I’ll be free for a drink later on. Come and find me at the cottage.’
‘I thought you were working?’
‘Give me a reason not to.’
He smiled, and shook his head. ‘If anything, you’ve got worse over the years and I never imagined that was possible. What time shall I come over?’
‘Whenever you like. If I’m not there, I’ll only be walking the dogs, so make yourself at home.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘And I’ll be needing you to explain why you’ve kept me quiet all these years, even with your closest friends.’
He looked uncomfortable. ‘I haven’t deliberately kept you quiet, Bridget, but you’re not very easy to explain. I never quite understood what we were.’
‘We were lovely, Archie,’ she said, turning to go. ‘What is there to explain?’
13
The bus from Porthmadog to Harlech was late, and it was five o’clock by the time Gwyneth Draycott put her shopping away in the kitchen and went up to the attic. Weary from the heat and the effort of leaving the house, she used the banister to haul herself up the final flight of stairs, marking her progress with a series of prints on the wood from palms that refused to stay dry. Her clothes were sticking to her, and she was glad to kick off her shoes and settle down by the window; even with the casement flung wide, there was very little air at the top of the house, but the chance to sit still was something to be grateful for. The weather would surely break soon. Over the past few hours, she had felt the pressure tighten like a wire around her throat, threatening the storm that carried with it so many memories. When it came, she knew that each flash of lightning would illuminate the past, and she dreaded it. Anxiously, she shifted in her chair and reached behind her to remove the toy monkey which dug at her back. The mohair made her feel hotter than ever, but she looked fondly down at its black button eyes and felt ears. Its arms and legs moved, although Taran had always carried it by its tail; the repairs she had made to the monkey’s hands and feet were nothing compared to the criss-cross of neat stitching which almost obliterated its face, patching the tears where its nose had bumped and dragged along the floor. Taran. Thunder, in her native language. She had always loved the name, and what it represented. Now, it was the hollowest sound she knew.
For Gwyneth, trying to describe how she felt in the days and weeks that followed Taran’s loss was like struggling with a foreign language, looking for words which simply did not exist in her vocabulary. The one emotion that she could identify with any certainty was resentment: she felt cheated. She had been a good mother during the brief time allotted to her, watching the cot as her child slept and keeping a careful eye on playtime in the garden of the old house; she kept Taran by her while she worked, always away from the stove, always within reach, always safe. So many innocent dangers carefully negotiated, only to be let down by a horror beyond her control. Gwyneth had tried not to lay blame or wish her suffering onto others, but there was no common ground between reason and grief. All around her, women started to take greater care of their children, learning from her mistakes. She saw the guilty relief in their eyes and knew exactly what they were thinking: there but for the grace of God. It would have taken a better woman than she not to despise them for what they still had.
As news of Taran’s disappearance spread, suspicion scarred the whole community, breathing new life into age-old prejudices and obliterating any impulse to reason or compassion
. It was an unthinkable crime, the abduction of a child, and the locals responded in the only way they knew, turning instinctively on the outsider – even though he had lived quietly among them for years and no child’s body was ever found to justify their conviction that he had killed one of their own. Anger spread, as swift and as sudden as the tide that covered the estuary sands, surrounding Gwyneth and leaving no possibility of escape. Other people’s rage suffocated her until she felt there was no room for her own, and, in that way, Taran was taken from her for the second time: as the newspapers spoke of a collective tragedy and a community’s loss, the child she wept for became somebody else’s. Their violence had terrified her, not least because it was done in her name, but she understood now that it was inevitable. In those fragile years that followed the war, her grief had become a focus for everything that was lost, for the children of a nation who had disappeared in their thousands.
The irony of it all was that she had never seen herself as a mother. She knew from her own family what a burden children could be and had sworn to herself long ago that one generation’s pain would not be replicated in the next. She married for security, because passion frightened her and she had never expected love, and, in that joyless, ill-judged compromise, husband and wife had learnt first to exploit the shame and disappointment of the other and then to find what they needed elsewhere. When they parted, Gwyneth would have danced for joy had Henry Draycott not left her with a living scar of their marriage. She had denied the pregnancy for as long as possible, even praying that what was growing inside her was a tumour rather than a child, and then, when the baby could be ignored no longer, had done everything she could think of to get rid of it, half killing herself in the process. But Taran had proved too strong for her, worthy of the name she eventually chose, winning her round day by day with that smile and those eyes and the most forgiving nature she had ever known. A gift rather than a curse.
The air smelt of rain‚ and Gwyneth stood to close the window, ready to go downstairs. Her foot brushed against one of the toys on the floor, a wooden Noah’s Ark whose elaborate arched windows made it look more like a house than a boat. Its paint was chipped now, and the palm trees that stood on either side had faded from green to brown, as though they were as vulnerable to the seasons as their less exotic counterparts. She reached down and lifted the lid. All the tiny animals had seen better days: both elephants had lost their trunks; one of the giraffes was reduced to three legs; and the zebra’s stripes were so pale that it could easily have been mistaken for a surplus pony. None of them was a specimen that Noah would have chosen to ensure the earth’s future, but Gwyneth knew that it would have been pointless to try to replace them with other toys, even if she had wanted to. Taran had loved those creatures and played with them constantly, finding an infinite number of ways to arrange and rearrange them. She was always coming across the figures, stowed away two by two in a pocket or under a pillow. The dogs had been missing from the set now for eighteen years. At first, she had harboured a foolish belief that they might somehow keep Taran safe, but that was a very long time ago, and Noah’s world remained as incomplete as hers. Incomplete, and reliant on a miracle simply to stay afloat.
PART THREE
Rich and Strange
25 July 1936, Portmeirion
1
There was a queue at reception. Impatiently, Leyton Turnbull leant over the desk and removed his own car keys from the hook, ignoring an apologetic smile from the harassed woman on duty. He found the Alvis in the garage allocated to him and drove quickly out of the village, allowing the familiar sense of power and control to calm his temper.
The breeze against his skin was a relief after the oppressive heat of the hotel, but the sunshine was uncomfortably strong, even through dark glasses. His sight was a casualty of the primitive studio conditions in the 1920s, when the lights were noisy and generated too much heat; staring into them for long periods of time had damaged his eyes, and the heavy make-up – which made the actors look and feel ridiculous – had aged his face. The psychological scars of his profession were less obvious: his career had fizzled out as the industry had left him behind, and he had struggled to relearn his craft. Making films with sound was alien to him. He had put up with the indignity of diction coaches, the arrival of new studio personnel and the pressures of more demanding production schedules, but it had all been in vain: those at the top of the pile were back at the beginning like grateful newcomers, and he had known it would be so from the moment he heard Al Jolson open his mouth and sing. Turnbull was filled with an immense sadness whenever he thought back to that brief period in his life‚ when what he wanted to be and what he was were less at odds. It wasn’t about the money. He had found other ways to make that – more, probably, than he would ever have got from legitimate cinema. It was about shame, and what he had sunk to: Hitchcock’s stooge and thankful for it, beholden to a much younger man.
At the Minffordd junction, he turned right and took the road that had almost tempted him on his journey down. In the end he had decided against it but, as he stood on the hotel lawn, staring at the house across the water and troubled by Bella’s unexpected arrival, the pull of the past had proved too strong: he was curious to see if, in the past twenty years, bricks and mortar had fared better than flesh and bone. He crossed the estuary by the toll road, surprised by how familiar the route still felt to him, and slowed down as he entered Talsarnau. The house he sought was at the end of a lane. He pulled onto the verge before he reached it and parked in the shade of some trees where his car could not be seen from the windows. Across the estuary, Portmeirion shone in the late-afternoon sun like a child’s colourful drawing, extreme in its invention, yet vivid enough to be real. From here, it seemed so far away, but its distance was an illusion: the journey had only taken him twenty minutes, and it was still not quite five o’clock. He sat in the car, trying to peel back the layers from the landscape he had once woken to every day, then got out and shut the door behind him. Quietly, he walked through the copse of silver birch until he was within a few yards of the garden wall.
At first, the house had seemed unchanged; now he was upon it, he could see that his former home had given up on itself, like a woman shrinking from the truth of a harsh mirror. The bars attached to some of the downstairs windows were red with rust. One of them – his old study – had been bricked up; the rest stared out, blank-eyed. Deep cracks in the brickwork zigzagged down from under each sill and disappeared into the ivy which clung to the walls and crawled into gaps where the wooden window frames had rotted. Turnbull imagined it working its way through the building, curling round the banisters and down the staircase. He remembered how the hallway used to be bathed in colour and how, at a particular time of day, the sun had shone through the fanlight over the door directly into the room where he worked; now, the glass was so thick with dirt that it was barely distinguishable from the cast iron which divided the panes, and even a day as bright as this would find no way in. Several slates had fallen from the roof and lay uncollected on the path around the house, nestled in long grass. The garden, for want of a better word, was gloomy, too – unkempt, and defined by absence: no plants in the greenhouse; no dog in the kennels; no birds in the dovecote. Deprived of their function, the outbuildings looked faintly ridiculous. What was there left of him inside, he wondered? Did Henry Draycott – the man he had once been – still exist here? There was no way of knowing. The house remained now as it had been then: secretive and unwelcoming, the shell of all that was private in a life, a physical embodiment of his darkest fantasies. A fortress of sorts, and that was what he had loved about it. He had been sorry to leave‚ and, for a moment, he wondered if the melancholy he sensed here was in the brick at all or if he had brought it with him. Things could have been so different. If he had made other choices at each crossroads, he might never have arrived at the point where there was no choice.
Behind him, he heard the rhythmic creaking of a badly oiled bicycle. A girl was pedalling
along the road towards him‚ and he noticed her glance curiously at the car as she passed, but she seemed in too much of a hurry to linger. To Turnbull’s surprise, she braked when she was level with the house and leant the bicycle against the hedge. He thought she looked familiar, then recognised her as the waitress he had seen talking to Bella on the terrace of the hotel. She was pretty in an obvious sort of way, with carefully curled brown hair and a full figure that she carried well. She looked older in her green cotton dress and hat than she had in a uniform – early twenties, he guessed, but it was so hard to tell with women these days; they copied their make-up from the faces on the screen, had their hair done to look old before their time, and all because they saw fame in the cinemas, read about it in the magazines and thought they could taste it in their own mouths. How did she know Bella, he wondered, and what was she doing here? He moved further back into the trees and watched, uneasy, as the girl opened the iron gate and walked up the path to the door, pushing the overhanging branches away from her face. She seemed familiar with the place‚ and he half expected her to get a key out of her bag and let herself in, but she stood on the step and pulled the bell instead. When there was no response, she tried again, then left the door and walked over to one of the downstairs windows. The curtains were drawn but there was a gap between‚ and she peered through, cupping her face with her hands to block out the sunlight. She knocked on the glass – more in frustration, it seemed, than in any real hope of attracting attention – and walked full-circle around the house, repeating the process at every window. Eventually, she returned to the front door and took an envelope out of her bag, ready-written as if she had not expected to find anyone at home. She put it through the letter box, retrieved her bicycle without bothering to close the gate behind her, and cycled away. Her expression, Turnbull noticed, was that of a disappointed child.