She takes a deep breath of Cornish air, so sharp compared to the warm fug of Paddington, with its smell of coffee and anticipation. She thinks of her sons, Ian and Rob, who she hasn’t told about the cancer, let alone that she is coming to Cornwall – well, they have such busy lives. Her stomach hollows. A bird of prey hovers, scrutinising potential prey before swooping down, and she feels equally poised: on the cusp of achieving something daring, but so wary, so unconvinced, now that she is down here, that she is capable of achieving this, after all.
Well, she has to do it. This cancer is growing stealthily inside her: she imagines it spreading through her liver. These two weeks will be critical: perhaps the last when she will be able to travel and think clearly without experiencing the sickness, the extreme fatigue that she knows will come. She must stay out of Maggie’s sight, while she does what she needs to do, while she works on her surprise. And only when she discovers if it is feasible or not – whether that letter, found in Pam’s effects, is all that she can offer Maggie, or if she has managed something else, something incredible – will she risk approaching her.
She almost breaks her resolve when she reaches the cottage she is to hire and meets Lucy. The likeness is striking: she would have guessed she was Maggie’s granddaughter even if they had met in a London street. There are those same almond-shaped, hazel eyes; and the dimple – the one that stabbed Maggie’s left cheek. Her hair is lighter – a dark blonde, dyed she assumes – and she has less of an accent than she remembers Maggie having, for Evelyn had been unable to quash her lilt, despite her best efforts and her good education. It was as if she were determined to assert her Cornishness just a little; for to speak RP would be to distance herself from James and Joanna; from her father and even her mother; from herself and Will – whose voice had thickened, rising at the end of sentences, the longer he worked on the farm …
‘Mrs Coates? Do you have everything you need?’ This pretty, smiling young woman makes her heart start: Maggie, as she would have looked, ten or more years after she had last seen her. A little sturdier perhaps – for Maggie was slight when Alice left, consumed with grief at losing her baby – but unmistakably her, or almost her.
‘I’ve left you a welcome pack – milk, eggs, bread, jam and scones – but there are plenty of shops, and places to eat in Padstow. Do you know how to get there?’
‘Of course,’ she says, and it is on the tip of her tongue to say: ‘It’s just along the coast path; or I could walk over the hill and down the first lane.’
Lucy smiles and slightly raises an eyebrow. ‘It sounds as if you know the area well. Have you stayed before?’
‘Oh, no.’ She fusses with the jacket she has taken off, unable to lie freely. ‘I’ve been to this area years ago, but I don’t know it well. Not at all.’
‘Well, I’ll leave you to explore then. There’s a folder of visitors’ attractions on the dresser, though perhaps you’d rather stay local and enjoy old haunts?’
‘I’m quite all right.’ She speaks more brusquely than she intended, for she has no intention of hanging around the farm, and she isn’t here on holiday.
‘I’ll just leave you to settle in then, but do let me know if there’s anything you need.’
‘I won’t.’ She shuts down the conversation and the young woman’s kindness. ‘I mean: I’ll be fine, thank you.’ She smiles weakly, belatedly trying to apologise for her sharpness.
And Lucy smiles, and ducks out of the door.
It is when she is unpacking her clothes and placing them in an antique chest of drawers – Victorian pine and, she suspects, the one she had in her old bedroom – that she is overcome with doubt. For it suddenly seems melodramatic, her arriving like this, like a figure in one of her beloved Hardy novels. An Alec d’Urberville, perhaps; or a Sergeant Troy.
Perhaps she risks being cruel. She doesn’t want to spring a surprise, and yet of course that is what she will do, turning up after seventy years with no communication at all. What was wrong with a phone call or an email? Or – more fitting for women of their age and the confessional nature of what she has to say – what was wrong, for goodness sake, with a letter?
Panic fells her as she dithers in front of the chest, wondering whether to put her underwear straight onto the lavender-scented drawer liners and risk unpacking properly. She should have just booked into a hotel in Bodmin – for if she is discovered before she is ready, before she has something positive to show her, she risks not just angering Maggie but destroying any happiness, or at least contentment, her one-time friend may have won. She needs to keep her head down and be absent as much as possible, at least until she establishes if the letter is all that she can offer. The consolation prize, if she cannot achieve the incredible and deliver up her son.
First thing tomorrow, then, she must be out of here; must set off to do her detective work, out on the moor. Apprehension fills her – for it would be a daunting task for someone twenty years younger, let alone someone who, with a cancer growing inside her, is definitely slowing down. And then she feels a tingle of excitement; a growing thrill at the thought that she is actually doing something after all this time. Tomorrow she will try to right a wrong – the only real regret of her life – or confront the possibility that it really is too late, after all.
She sleeps badly, of course, and when the dawn chorus bursts into her stark, light room she abandons any pretence that further sleep is possible. She settles herself with a cup of tea and watches the sky grow peachy pale through her tiny window, set low into the foot-deep wall.
Memories long suppressed come cascading back. Being Queen of the Harvest, perched astride Noble, swaying over the barley. The harvesting: Will beating rabbits from the crops as the men threshed inwards, the corn hissing as the stalks rubbed together and tumbled down. The food. Pasties, made with heaps of golden potato, onion and swede; copious rabbits; mackerel with newly dug potatoes, carrots and runner beans; sharp gooseberries and black-and redcurrants; and, for high teas and holidays, Cornish splits, saffron buns and an impossibly exotic blend of cream, sugar and gelatine, topped with raspberries or blackberries: Russian cream.
But all too soon the other memories creep in. If she thinks of a fox cub gambolling at dusk, she sees its mother wreaking havoc – the barn strewn with decapitated chickens and a pillowcase of feathers; the birds, broken-necked, puddled with blood. If she remembers Cocoa, she imagines her brothers and sisters, drowned: plunged in the butt, tight in their sack. And if she recalls jumping from hay bales, she sees herself spying, transfixed and frightened by Maggie and Will.
By seven, she has punished herself enough and so she gets up, has a tepid shower and makes her breakfast: the bread provided by Lucy, dabbed with butter and home-made jam. She makes herself eat, for she has a long day ahead, but finds her stomach is a pit of fear. Better just to get going. She packs a small rucksack with a flask, sandwiches, cagoule, map and her dog-eared copy of Far from the Madding Crowd – and yes, she knows she is being irrational in including this love story of a persistent shepherd and a more educated female farmer – and sets out, just like any tourist, for the moor.
It isn’t as she remembers. The sun beats down on the coarse tussocks of grass and the soft granite outcrops, turns the pale green bracken luminous, greys the blackened branches of broom. The air fills with the song of skylarks, and the sky is so clear that when she parks high on the upper side of the moor – just to catch her breath – she can see the sea, glinting off the north coast, far in the distance. She is at the heart of this peninsula, high up on its ridge – the peak of Cornwall if not quite the edge of the world.
The moor’s wildness rolls before her, and she finds a small stone circle, lying below Rough Tor, a ribbon of granite mounds, propped up like gravestones, emerging from the boggy marshes and scrubby grass. Pisky pits, Joanna used to call them. Those deceptive patches of lush green in between the rough grass and cotton grass that would suck your boot down and swallow you, or so she was told as a child. Th
ere were ghosts who stalked the tors, too: Charlotte Dymond, a Victorian serving maid, whose crippled suitor slit her throat when she dared to taunt him; and a wicked magistrate, tasked with emptying a moorland pool with a limpet shell with a hole in it. Phantom dogs would hound him if he stopped baling. Or was that the Beast of Bodmin? A giant cat that left the carcasses of cows and sheep strewn all over the moor.
Ridiculous tales. She has enough ghostly memories of her own to torment her. And enough to do in the present, she realises, as she picks her way from the stone circle back to the car. She had hoped she might find her way there instinctively, but the moor is different from how she remembers. Wild and open here – the narrow tracks fringed only with gorse bushes; the terrain entirely exposed to the elements. The tiny lanes, high hedgerows, avenue of trees and farmhouse found down a rough track and folded into the shadow of a tor have not materialised. She unfolds her map; realises she needs to be more systematic. To connect where she thinks they may have gone to where she is now.
But it is all so difficult. She finds herself driving down high-banked lanes thrusting with green shepherd’s crooks of curling bracken; buttercups, greater stitchwort and red campions; potholed tracks that she can barely squeeze through, and that she drives down with her heart in her mouth at the thought of meeting another car.
Down she twists, disappearing to the bottom of valleys only to soar up the other side and find herself at another perplexing crossroads. Signposts point to hamlets, but she either misses the turning or interprets the Cornish miles too literally. She doubles back, disappears down another steep-banked lane, covered with a canopy of holm oak, beech and maple, and finds herself in a hamlet, folded into the crease of a hill, that time seems to have forgotten. A couple of granite cottages; a farmyard; a chapel where no one has worshipped for quite some while.
She manoeuvres the car, a complicated six-point turn, and sets off again. It becomes claustrophobic, this excessive lushness, and she starts to panic, for she has journeyed to the south-east of the moor and doesn’t recognise the names: Bathpool, Slipperhill, Rilla Mill, Upton Cross.
And then the road bursts from a wooded dip and out onto a stretch of open moor, with Neolithic stones and the remains of an old copper mine. Disorientated, she parks and steps out onto the tufty grass, marvelling at how the ruined chimney enhances the bleak landscape, imagining the miners’ harsh lives.
The moor is khaki: dotted with mustard gorse and the cream of sheep’s wool. But as she watches, the colours fade, glazed sepia by a mizzle that creeps up on her, seeps into her bones and soaks through her shoes. The air fills with the lonely bleat of a lamb, the caw of a rook, the eerie moan of the wind picking up and wailing like a lost child. She makes for the car, suddenly unsettled and – more than that – frightened, and starts off once more.
It is late afternoon before she spies something that she thinks could have been it and makes her way towards it. A small ragged farmhouse, more compact than Skylark, but also made of slate and granite, snuggled below lonely Garrow Tor. For one painful moment, she believes this is it, and knows then that if it is, she has no way of finding him, for the place is deserted – the lichen-covered tiles slipping from the roof, the broken windows, empty eyes that stare blankly at the moor.
And then she sees that there is no evidence of stables or barns, no cobbles found when she scuffs at the grass. Nor has she come down a high-banked lane with oaks and ash bending over it, though perhaps the banks have been eroded? If clapper bridges have been destroyed and railway lines ripped up, then why should such details remain?
She walks stiffly to lean against the wall of the garden, feels the wind picking up as the sun disappears behind a cloud to cast her in shadow, making her pull her fleece around her and cradle her waist in a way she would not normally do.
And then the tears come. Not just because it seems insurmountable, this ridiculous search, but because the memories of that terrible night are flooding back now. A torrent of them. Like water from a weir, thrusting her under: relentless, furious, fast.
She cowers. Sinks down into the corner, so that the dry-stone wall that has withstood the wind for more than two centuries can offer her partial shelter, and gives herself up to them, at last.
Thirty-three
Then: 18 April 1944, Cornwall
Alice was shaking. She hadn’t really stopped since Aunt Evelyn had thrust the baby into her arms with a bottle of sheep’s milk, the type she was used to feeding motherless lambs. At her feet was a bag with some cut-up towels to be fastened with a nappy pin: Joanna had already secured one to the baby and dressed him in a nightie that had once belonged to Maggie.
Alice stifled a sob and pulled the baby closer, breathing in the smell of his scalp, sweet and distinct; a clean smell compared to the earthiness of the manure-strewn farmyard or the unfamiliar scent of Mr Trescothick’s car, where she was sitting now.
She sank down into the leather seat, hiding herself and the baby from view; trying hard not to look at the water butt that loomed just outside the window, or to fear the darkness pressing in around them. The dashboard was glossy walnut, and the dials gleamed. She focused on these, as she wrapped herself around the baby; trying to cocoon him, to keep him safe from harm.
From this spot, she could still spy on Aunt Evelyn and Patrick Trescothick in the car’s wing mirror. Aunt Evelyn looked formidable; the vet angry, and then sullen – like Will on the rare occasions when he had been told off.
Would he be coming soon? They had to get going as quickly as possible. Before Maggie woke and that dratted child started screaming again, she had heard Aunt Evelyn tell Joanna. Before, Joanna had muttered as she had struggled to put a fresh nappy on the baby, anyone had second thoughts about taking him away from the farm.
She dreaded a long, silent drive with the vet. Back in the house, he had given Maggie a sedative, plunged from a syringe similar to those he used for the horses. Well, she was hysterical, Aunt Evelyn had said, matter-of-factly; she needed something to calm her down.
‘I’m not happy about this,’ the vet had tried to object, as Maggie had sobbed uncontrollably: too weak to crawl after her baby, who had been whisked away from her by Joanna.
‘I’m asking you to show some compassion for the girl.’ Aunt Evelyn’s voice was light though her eyes were hard and bright, as if it wouldn’t do to cross her.
Then she had sensed Alice, still watching behind the door, and had turned on her. ‘Alice? Go away, immediately. Go! With Joanna.’
And Alice had had to abandon Maggie as the vet stepped towards her.
She was scared of him, she realised now, as he jerked away from Aunt Evelyn and walked towards the car, his face set and unreadable. What was it Uncle Joe had said? Not sure as I trust him. A shifty bugger. ’E e’dn much cop, James had added. And yet she and this tiny baby were relying on him to drive them to safety. Her knees knocked together as they did when she stayed too long in the sea because Maggie dared her. She hoped her teeth wouldn’t start chattering.
He didn’t look at her as he put the key in the ignition. The engine started up. A gentle phut, then a roar as he reversed swiftly and started up the track, the stench of burned rubber filling the air.
Alice’s knuckles were white where she clutched the baby. He gave a whimper in his sleep, and she loosened her grip. You could smother babies, Joanna said, just as Doris had squashed her piglets by rolling onto them – or a sheep could butt a lamb it had rejected against a stone wall. She tried to breathe more steadily, concentrating on her breath going out in one long stretch, then worrying that the vet could hear her. At least she could try to keep the baby safe, for the time being: for the length of this journey. But after that? Well, then, she could be no help at all.
She began to well up with self-pity, and concentrated on peering through the windscreen. The road was empty and the sky a blue-black: just a few stars and a full moon lighting a cloud-smudged sky. The car’s headlamps were dipped, and the hedgerows loomed as the car s
wung around the corners in the darkness. A rabbit bounded past, picked up by the car’s beam at the very last moment. Thud. She squealed as the car jolted, the rabbit flung away from the wheels.
They peeled from their lane onto a main road towards the centre of Cornwall. The vet remained silent and Alice didn’t dare speak. She risked looking at him, though. To think she had once thought him beautiful! Now, his face was all puffy, he had dirt beneath his nails, and dark smudges under his eyes. He was unshaven too, and jittery. He used to move as if entirely relaxed in his own body so that his clothes hung just so. But now his shoulders hunched and he kept peering forwards. Below his left eye, a nerve twitched.
‘What a nightmare, eh?’
His voice, clipped and dry, took her by surprise. She felt herself redden.
He glanced at her, briefly. ‘Poor kid. The last thing I imagine you ever thought you’d be involved in. Or perhaps you knew all along?’
She peered intently forwards. Had she known? Well, of course she had guessed. Maggie’s reaction when she’d glimpsed her getting dressed earlier this month – the horror as her eyes had flitted to her turned-away stomach – had told her, really; and yet, until she’d come across her, earlier today in the bedroom, she hadn’t accepted what she had known. She fiddled with the blanket, wrapping the baby close. Safer to deny all knowledge: she didn’t want to get into further trouble or to cause problems for Maggie. And yet she didn’t want him to think she was childish. After all, she was hardly being treated as a child now. Aunt Evelyn wanted her to pretend that she had had this baby. That she was old enough to have done that. The injustice, and the shame, began to smart.
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