Liar, she thought, with a cold certainty that, at that moment, was clear as the ice that skimmed the puddles on crisp winter mornings. I am a little girl. You know I am. It shouldn’t have happened. She kept her eyes on the baby. Her own eyes stared back, questioning her.
The car started to slow down now, and dipped through an avenue of branches, the trees gnarled, bare and twisted together – broom blackened and tortured by man and wind. The track was rough and potholed. The car bounced and jolted from one side of it to another before it rolled over cobbles and came to rest in a yard.
Through the windscreen she could see the softened granite of a farmhouse not unlike Skylark, though longer-slung and more dishevelled, the windows smaller casements, the frames in need of a paint. The garden was overgrown, the grass long, the bushes unkempt. A broken chair and some farm machinery had been dumped at the front of the house, and a water butt sat squat against the barn wall, water dripping into it.
‘Are you sure this is the place?’ She was suddenly filled with doubt. Who was to say they were good people? You help me, I help you – but perhaps it hadn’t been a good bargain. Not sure as I trust him, said Uncle Joe; ’E e’dn much cop, James had added.
‘The very same,’ he said, turning off the engine and reaching for the baby. ‘You stay here. I’ll take him to them.’
Thirty-four
Now: 22 August 2014, Cornwall
The next day, Alice sets out again, and the next. No longer driving in the same state of feverish frenzy, but taking a more systematic approach to retracing her steps. She paces herself, and organises proper supplies this time: a flask of sweet instant coffee; sandwiches, a banana, shortbread biscuits – though her appetite has gone. A warm fleece and her cagoule. Far From the Madding Crowd, and Will’s letter, both carried as talismans, though to whom she intends to show them, she has no idea.
There are several false starts: more abandoned huts and weather-broken farmhouses whose early promise dissipates as soon as she gets close to them. The moor is riddled with evidence of lives spent and then abandoned here. The name Altarnum strikes a chord – and she descends to a remote granite village with a babbling brook and imposing church, only to realise that she recognises it from a novel by du Maurier. A couple of mallards strut in a neat allotment, and rhododendrons bloom in a Georgian vicarage garden. The air is cool and fertile, scented with honeysuckle and wild garlic, plump with moisture. But the spot is too pretty and too sheltered, safe in the crease of a valley, and she is searching for a more exposed and lonely place.
By the third day, she focuses on the highest parts of the moor to the east of the villages of St Breward and Blisland. Driving up another canopied track, she bursts on to open moorland – no trees here but gorse and blackthorn, and a lonely expanse of cropped grass populated by wild ponies, Highland cattle and a flock of tentative, black-faced sheep. She knows it is here somewhere, and so she drives on, seeing no one bar the odd horsewoman for, after her first attempt, she is too shy to venture into the rare village pubs promising real ale and roast dinners in which the locals stare when she dares to enter. She toys with her cheese and pickle sandwiches to the accompaniment of skylarks and the lambs’ bleats.
By the end of the fourth day, she feels a dull ache in her heart, a hard certainty that this is a wild goose chase. And yet how can she give up now? A determination she barely knew she still possessed festers inside her, stronger than the tiredness that makes her draw up at the side of the road for a moment when she fears she will fall asleep at the wheel. She drifts off, then wakes, befuddled. An hour has slipped by and the landscape has changed. A charcoal cloud bruises the dull grey sky and fat raindrops plash down, not the fine spray of a sea mist but a proper rainstorm; and then, just as suddenly, they stop.
As a watery sun filters through the clouds, she drives on, knowing now that she will come out each day, if necessary, to find him. She cannot go back to London without knowing she has exhausted every possibility, snuffed out all hope. And so she continues: retracing her steps; discovering new lanes; searing back and forth over the moor. For she knows she didn’t imagine it, this hidden farmhouse: it has to be here, somewhere.
And then she sees it: an avenue of trees up a high-banked lane that seems even more secluded than all the others, the trees, more windswept, gnarled and wizened, their trunks crawling with ivy, wreathed in others’ roots. She concentrates as the car bounces and jolts down the potholed track, ignoring the light that dapples through the leaves. For she has seen the farmhouse and there is something about its position that is familiar, that tells her that she has found the place that has haunted her for seventy years.
The car stalls to a halt. Through the windscreen she sees a house not unlike Skylark, though smaller and smarter. The casements are freshly painted and gleaming in the sunshine, the door a tasteful, sludgy green. There is a smart slate sign by the gatepost with the name chiselled deep. Trebartha Farm. She pauses, expecting the name to ring a bell. She never saw a sign as the car rolled into the yard, wouldn’t have noticed in the dark. But perhaps it’s a missing piece to her jigsaw; one more clue that will lead her closer to what she needs.
The door opens before she manages to knock: visitors must be rare and she had crunched the car’s gears as she parked in the lane, not wanting to presume she could drive into the yard.
‘May I help you?’ The woman who opens the door is in her late forties. No trace of a Cornish accent. Slim, with her hair swept onto her head and a few tendrils tumbling; her eyes, beneath neat brows, appraising and grey.
‘I was looking for a family who might have lived here years ago. Seventy years, in fact.’ Her voice catches as she sees the woman’s eyebrows rise almost imperceptibly. ‘It must sound ridiculous. I think they lived here in 1944. A farmer and his wife, and their son – he’d have been a baby. But I’m afraid I can’t remember their name.’
The woman – who could be one of her neighbours back home – smiles properly now warmth lighting her eyes.
‘That sounds intriguing. Have you come a long way?’ Her eyes run over her, taking in her age and the exhaustion and desperation that Alice knows must suffuse her face.
‘Padstow. But I’ve been driving all over.’
‘Oh, you poor dear. Here.’ The woman moves back into the farmhouse, gesturing that she should follow. ‘You’d better come in.’
She steps into the slate-tiled hall, feeling self-conscious in her old Peter Storm jacket. The hall is cool and a candle glows in a glass pot, emitting lavender and calm. It is all so tasteful. A house that is cherished by its proud owners – almost too polished to be a real home. She thinks of the dark, damp-infested farm she has imagined, with its neglected casements and scrubby garden, and of the changes wrought by fresh paint, money and time.
‘What a lovely house.’ She feels she must say something as she stands there, her sensible slip-on shoes no doubt trampling dust into the hallway.
‘Thank you.’ The woman smiles more widely and she sees that she is not quite as imposing as she thought: there is a smudge of white paint on her forehead, smile lines around her mouth and eyes. ‘We’ve only recently moved in. The family we bought it from had it as a holiday cottage for fifteen years and rarely used it. But we love it here.’
‘And before them?’ This is the place, she knows it, though she had never stepped into this hallway, had only watched as Patrick Trescothick went in. She imagines a phantom boy slipping past: a child of the fifties, short trousers above scabbed knees; a face, streaked with peat, as freckled as her brother’s; and she knows she cannot leave without confirming that he lived here.
‘It had quite a few owners in the eighties and nineties. People buying it as a second home then discovering they weren’t quite so in love with life on the moor.’ She pauses. ‘But you’re talking about way before then?’
‘The nineteen forties. The end of the war.’ Her voice cracks then tails away. She cannot tell this woman why she needs to track down this family. Sh
e is not the type to unburden herself – no one from her generation does – but she needs to impress on her that there is a point to her seemingly eccentric searching. ‘If you know anything,’ she begins, then pauses, steeling herself to say something confessional. ‘You see: I don’t have much time.’
‘You’d better come right through.’ The woman’s voice softens and she leads her through a room with a flagstone floor and battered leather sofas to the kitchen.
‘The previous owners were history buffs and they left a file on Trebartha’s history somewhere.’
She pulls at the drawer of a dresser and shakes a Manila folder free, then places it on a large wooden table. ‘Here we are! I haven’t gone through it properly – we’ve only just moved back in after the builders left – but I think it mentions the families who previously farmed here. The last owner, the wife, was fascinated with old agricultural practices, you see.’ She pushes a lock of hair back from her eyes and gives a sniff. ‘I think she was some sort of academic. She compiled a paper on the farm. It’s terribly dry, I’m afraid – an awful lot on moorland sheep – but I think she might mention your family there.’
She pushes the file towards her as Alice fights back an impulse to snatch it. The notes are not a neat list of owners, but a lengthy document, in which Meredith Cooper, BA, MPhil, charts the demise of moorland farming in Cornwall in the mid to late twentieth century. And yet, hidden away, among a few statistics and some rather grandiose claims – for Alice is not completely naïve when it comes to social history – there are the gems she has been searching for: the names of the farmer and his wife who tended Trebartha from the early 1930s until the early 1960s, when they retired.
They were predominantly sheep farmers it seems, with a flock of a hundred ewes. And there is even a mention of a nameless son. Her heart jolts. Could this be him? The dates are vague: he helped herd the sheep ‘in the mid-1950s’. At ten or eleven, he could do that kind of work. She looks up at the yard and the moors outside. Why would a family, subsumed by this way of life, ever leave? And then she thinks of the loneliness, the harshness of farming on the moor; the way in which a rogue rain cloud can drench you to the bone and leave you quaking with cold, when the sun goes in; the bogs that suck you down to your knees, or even thighs; the carcasses of elderly or ill sheep, lying, scavenged. The isolation of a farmhouse, circled by rooks, whipped by the wind.
She has what she needs, though. A name. A family name, and this address. Tangible evidence. The crumbs that will lead her through the deepest thickets of genealogical research. The link that might allow her to find a current address, perhaps here in Cornwall. That might let her meet him, at last …
The possibilities are dizzying. A wave of tiredness tugs at her.
‘Are you all right?’ The woman touches her arm. ‘Here, please. Sit down. You need a glass of water.’ A wooden chair is pressed behind her legs.
The touch of this other woman is almost more than she can bear. How long is it since someone has touched her like that? A brisk hug from one of her sons. The guidance of a nurse, professional and calm. For a moment, the temptation to melt at the kindness of this touch almost overwhelms her. But there is no need – there is nothing to cry about, now.
For she has it. Here, in black and white. His family name. The crucial piece of the jigsaw without which she had no chance of finding him.
‘Thank you,’ she says, as a glass of water is put in front of her and a cup of tea materialises. She takes a sip, gaining strength from something hot and sweet.
The woman – Ali: a writer, she later says – is watching her intently, concern evidently tempered by an itch to know what she has discovered and why it is so important, this quest.
She cannot share it; but she smiles, emboldened by her new knowledge.
‘Really,’ she says. ‘I’m absolutely fine.’
She is galvanised now and, the next day, is out by nine to discover more about Trebartha Farm’s inhabitants – or, more specifically, to track down their only child. The local library is closed and so she finds she is drawn, despite herself, back to Bodmin to the street she ran down, wind and rain buffeting against her, with a baby in her arms.
She clutches her handbag, with the name, address and Will’s letter, always the letter, and focuses on the solid, late Victorian library, refusing to look in the direction of the pub from which Patrick Trescothick had lurched. Moments before, she had been so certain she was doing the right thing: her heart bursting with that conviction; breath hot against the baby’s face as she had whispered her promise. Baby Will, I’m going to take you to your daddy and you are going to be so loved.
The library is quiet and studious. The librarian, a helpful young girl, tells her that birth certificates have to be ordered, but that she can check all births within a three-month period in an index. She nods, disappointment seeping through her, for she had thought she would be able to see this proof of his identity today. Her fear that she may not accomplish her search in time increases as she watches the girl tap details into a computer. Come on, concentrate. This matters. But the despair she felt on the moor before finding the farm begins to press upon her. She is getting so close, and yet, in many ways, this baby feels as elusive as before.
‘There we are.’ The girl, for she is in her mid-twenties at most, looks at her brightly. ‘There are seven births with that surname in that district in Cornwall in that period.’
Seven names to contemplate.
‘But,’ the girl continues, ‘if you know if it’s a boy or girl you could rule half of them out.’
‘A boy.’ She clears her throat. ‘A man, now.’
‘So just these four then.’
She looks at the entries, flashing on the screen. Her breath catches like a moth, fluttering in her chest.
‘Are you sure you want me to order four birth certificates? That’s forty pounds.’ The girl looks incredulous that she might want to spend so much money.
‘Yes, yes, of course. And as soon as possible, please. Could I pay more to have it speeded up?’
‘Five to ten working days.’
‘I can’t wait that long.’ She twists the strap of her handbag, feeling the fear rise up thickly.
The girl looks at her, her forehead furrowing. ‘Well, I can’t make any promises, but I could try marking it as urgent?’
‘If you could? Thank you.’ She nods with gratitude and fumbles with her purse, almost thrusting her card at her, so desperate is she to speed up the process. Four to one; and once she has that one, then the trawling of the phone books, the tracking down in earnest, the endless, exhausting search, will start up again. The effort is overwhelming and yet she is getting closer; she is still getting closer.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ the girl says.
The birth certificates arrive two days later. A knock at the door, and the postman stands there, blue eyes shining from a walnut of a face.
She blinks, confused. She had feared it would be Maggie, not this vision in grey shorts and bright Royal Mail red.
‘Mrs Coates?’ His voice is thick with a Cornish burr.
She nods, eyes fixed on the A4 Do Not Bend envelope in his hands.
‘It’s just people don’t often get things sent to the cottages. I wanted to check it was definitely for you.’
‘Yes, it’s for me,’ she says, reaching for the envelope, scarcely believing the answer is finally here.
He hands it over and she takes it greedily, forgetting to thank him in her eagerness to go somewhere private. She lays the four certificates out on the table that she knows she peeled potatoes on, out in the pantry, as a child.
Which one of these is you, she thinks, as she looks at the four male Joses. And the answer springs out at her: Trebartha Farm. Father, Jeremiah, mother, Emmeline. Date of birth: 18.4.1944. The name seems oddly formal for a baby. Biblical. Almost Victorian. No Will, as she half expected, but a Jeremiah Samuel Jose.
She prepares her rucksack with letter, novel, map and b
irth certificate, shortbread biscuits, a flask of weak coffee and a cagoule, just in case. The local library has the Cornish phone directory, the librarian said, and there will be J. S. Joses lurking there, as long as he hasn’t strayed from Cornwall. She cannot bear to contemplate that possibility.
Thirty-five
She doesn’t intend to be seen by Maggie until she has found her son; really she doesn’t. She means to be able to present her with her child – or with the correct address, at the very least.
But there are five J Joses in the phone book in north Cornwall alone and having had no luck with the first two houses she found – bleak, greying bungalows with a John Jose and a Jason – she is utterly drained. The adrenalin that has brought her down from London and driven her up onto the moors, into libraries and onto unknown housing estates, is all entirely spent.
She gazes at the sea, a pool of French navy, through her window. Could she risk pottering around the garden? The sun beats invitingly on a bench. Gingerly, she perches on the wooden slats and tries to relax just a little while she steels herself for another long, potentially fruitless day.
She must have dozed off. When she wakes someone is in the farmhouse garden, hanging washing on a line. A grey-haired figure, bending over a basket then stretching up to peg out the items. Her hands arthritic, her arms wizened, her figure almost childishly thin. Gone are the curves she would once flaunt, without seeming the least bit conscious, in her mother’s hand-knitted jumpers. Yet there is something about the way she tilts her head as she glances at the barley fields, the cows and down to the sea, that marks her out as the girl she was seventy years ago. That reveals her to be, undeniably, her.
Alice holds her breath as if she fears that, if she lets it out, the older woman will hear her. And yet she doesn’t get up and slip back into the cool security of the house. Fear that any movement will attract attention pinions her there – but also, perhaps, a sense of fatalism, or even a secret wish to be found. She has dreaded this, but she is so tired of racing around and of skulking in fear that if exposure has to come, well, perhaps it had better come now, sooner than later, while she has some strength.
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