The Day of the Storm

by Rosamunde Pilcher

  “Oh, yes, of course.” He took it from his pocket, the fateful letter, a little crumpled now, and handed it to Mollie. “Don’t let Pettifer make too big a meal of it. He’s a sentimental old chap.”

  “I won’t.”

  He smiled again, saying goodbye to both of us. “See you at dinner.”

  And he was gone, whistling up his dog as he went down the hall. We heard the front door open and shut, his car start up. Mollie turned to me.

  “Now,” she said, “come and sit by the fire and tell me all about it.”

  I did so, as I had already told Joss and Mrs Kernow, only this time I found myself stumbling a little when I got to the bit about Otto and Lisa living together, as though I were ashamed of it, which was a thing which I had never been. As I talked and Mollie listened, I tried to work this out, and to understand why my mother had disliked her so much. Perhaps it was simply a natural antipathy. It was obvious that they would never have had anything in common. And my mother had never had much tolerance for women who bored her. Men, now, were different. Men were always amusing. But women had to be very special for my mother to be able to tolerate their company. No, it could not all have been Mollie’s fault. Sitting across the fireside from her, I resolved that I would be friends with her, and perhaps compensate, in a small way, for the short shrift she had received from Lisa.

  “And how long are you going to be able to stay in Porthkerris? Your job … do you have to get back?”

  “No. I seem to have been given a sort of indefinite leave.”

  “You’ll stay here, with us?”

  “Well, I’ve got this room with Mrs Kernow.”

  “Yes, but you’d be much better here. There’s not a lot of space, that’s the only thing; you’ll have to sleep up in the attic, but it’s a dear little room if you don’t mind the sloping ceilings and you manage not to bump your head. You see, Eliot and I seem to have filled up the guest rooms, and as well I’ve got my niece staying for a few days. Perhaps you’ll make friends with her. It’ll be nice for her to have someone young about the place.”

  I wondered where the niece was. “How old is she?”

  “Only seventeen. It’s a difficult age, and I think that her mother felt it would be a good thing if she was out of London for a little. They live there, you see, and of course she has so many friends, and there is so much going on…” She was obviously finding it difficult to find the right words … “Anyway, Andrea’s down here for a week or two to have a little change, but I’m afraid she’s rather bored.”

  I imagined myself at seventeen, in the unseen Andrea’s shoes, staying in this warm and charming house, cared for by Mollie and Pettifer, with the sea and the cliffs on my doorstep, the countryside inviting long walks, and all the secret crooked streets of Porthkerris waiting to be explored. To me it would have been heaven, and impossible to be bored. I wondered if I would have very much in common with Mollie’s niece.

  “Of course,” she went on, “as you’ve probably gathered, Eliot and I are only here because Mrs Pettifer died and really the two old men couldn’t manage on their own. We’ve got Mrs Thomas, she comes in each morning to help do the housework, but I do all the cooking, and keep the place as bright and pretty as I can.”

  “The flowers are so lovely.”

  “I can’t bear a house without flowers.”

  “What about your own house?”

  “My dear, it’s empty. I shall have to take you up to High Cross one day to show it to you. I bought a pair of old cottages just after the war and converted them. Even though I shouldn’t say so, it is very charming. And, of course, it’s so handy for Eliot’s garage; as it is, living here, he seems to be perpetually on the road.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  I could hear footsteps coming down the hall again; in a moment the door opened, and Pettifer edged around it, cautiously, carrying a tray laden with all the accoutrements of mid-morning coffee, including a large silver pot with steam drifting from its spout.

  “Oh, Pettifer, thank you…”

  He came forward, stooped with the weight of the tray, and Mollie got up to fetch a stool and place it swiftly beneath the tray so that the old man could put it down before it tilted so sharply that everything on it went hurtling to the floor.

  “That’s splendid, Pettifer.”

  “One of the cups was for Joss.”

  “He’s upstairs working. He must have forgotten about the coffee. Never mind, I’ll drink it for him. And, Pettifer…” He straightened, slowly, as though all his old joints were aching. Mollie took the letter from Ibiza off the mantelpiece where she had placed it for safety. “We thought, all of us, that perhaps it would be the best if you told the Commander about his daughter and then gave him this letter. It would be best, we thought, coming from you. Would you mind?”

  Pettifer took the thin blue envelope.

  “No, Madam. I’ll do it. I’m just on my way up now to get the Commander up and dressed.”

  “It would be a kindness, Pettifer.”

  “That’s all right, Madam.”

  “And tell him that Rebecca is here. And that she’s staying. We’ll have to make up the bed in the attic but I think she’ll be quite comfortable.”

  Again a gleam came into Pettifer’s face. I wondered if he ever really smiled, or whether his face had dropped permanently into those lugubrious lines and a cheerful expression had become physically impossible.

  “I’m glad you’re staying,” he said. “The Commander will like that.”

  When he’d gone, I said, “You’ll have a lot to do. Shouldn’t I go, and get out from under your feet?”

  “You’ll have to collect your things from Mrs Kernow anyway. I wonder how we could manage that? Pettifer could take you, but now he’ll be occupied with Grenville and I must speak to Mrs Thomas about your room and then start thinking about lunch. Now what are we going to do?” I could not imagine. I was certainly not going to be able to carry all my belongings up the hill from the town. But luckily Mollie answered her own question. “I know. Joss. He can take you and bring you back up the hill in his van.”

  “But isn’t Joss working?”

  “Oh, for once we’ll interrupt him. It’s not often he’s asked to put himself out—I’m sure he won’t mind. Come along, we’ll go and find him.”

  I had thought that she would take me to some forgotten outhouse or shed where we would find Joss, surrounded by wood shavings and the smell of hot glue, but to my surprise, she led me upstairs, and I forgot about Joss, because these were my first impressions of Boscarva, where my mother had been brought up, and I didn’t want to miss a thing. The stairs were uncarpeted, the walls half panelled and then darkly papered above and hung with heavy oil paintings. All was at variance with the pretty, feminine sitting-room which we had left downstairs. On the first-floor landing passages led to left and right, there was a tallboy of polished walnut, and bookcases heavy with books, and then we went on again, up the stairs. Here was red drugget, white paint, again the passages led away to either side, and Mollie took the right-hand one. At the end of this passage was an open door, and from behind it the sound of voices, a man’s and a girl’s.

  She seemed to hesitate and then her footsteps quickened, determined. Her back view became, all at once, formidable. With me following she went down the passage and through the door, and we were in an attic which had been converted, by means of a skylight, to a studio, or perhaps a billiard room, for against one wall was a massive, leather-seated sofa with oaken arms and legs. Now, however, this cold and airy room was being used as a workshop, with Joss in the middle of it, surrounded by chairs, broken picture frames, a table with a crooked leg, some scraps of leather, tools and nails, and a gimcrack gas ring on which reposed an unsavoury-looking glue pot. Wrapped in a worn blue apron, he was carefully fitting beautiful scarlet hide over the seat of one of the chairs, and as he did this, was being entertained by a young and female companion, who turned, disinterested, to see who had come into
the room, and was so breaking up this cosy tête-à-tête.

  Mollie said, “Andrea!” And then, less sharply, “Andrea, I didn’t realize you were up.”

  “Oh, I’ve been up for hours.”

  “Did you have any breakfast?”

  “I didn’t want any.”

  “Andrea, this is Rebecca. Rebecca Bayliss.”

  “Oh, yes,” she turned her eyes on to me. “Joss has been telling me all about you.”

  I said, “How do you do.” She was very young and very thin, with long seaweedy hair that hung on either side of her face, which was pretty, except for her eyes which were pale and slightly protuberant, and not improved by a great deal of clumsy mascara. She wore, inevitably, jeans, and a cotton tee-shirt which did not look entirely clean and which revealed, with no shadow of a doubt, the fact that she wore nothing beneath it. On her feet were sandals which looked like surgical boots that had been striped in green and purple. There was a leather bootlace around her neck upon which hung a heavy silver cross of vaguely Celtic design. Andrea, I thought. So bored with Boscarva. And it made me uncomfortable to think that she and Joss had been discussing me. I wondered what he had said.

  Now, she did not move, but stayed where she was, legs straddled, leaning against a heavy old mahogany table.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Rebecca’s going to stay here,” Mollie told them. Joss looked up, his mouth full of tacks, his eyes bright with interest, a lock of black hair falling over his forehead.

  “Where’s she going to sleep?” asked Andrea. “I thought we were a full house.”

  “In the bedroom along the passage,” her aunt told her crisply. “Joss, would you do a favour for me?” He spat the tacks neatly into his palm and stood up, pushing his hair back with his wrist. “Would you take her, now, down to Mrs Kernow, and tell Mrs Kernow that she’s coming here, and then help her with her suitcases and bring her back up to Boscarva again? Would that be very inconvenient?”

  “Not at all,” said Joss, but Andrea’s face assumed an expression of bored resignation.

  “It’s a nuisance, I know, when you’re busy, but it would be such a help…”

  “It’s no trouble.” He laid down his little hammer and began to untie the knot of his apron. He grinned at me. “I’m getting quite used to carting Rebecca about.”

  And Andrea gave a snort, whether of disgust or impatience it was impossible to tell, sprang to her feet and marched out of the room, leaving the impression that we had been lucky to escape without a monumentally slammed door.

  * * *

  And so I was back where I started, with Joss, crammed into the ramshackle little van. We drove in silence away from Boscarva, through Mr Padlow’s building estate, and on to the slope of the hill that led down to the town.

  It was Joss who broke the silence.

  “So, it all worked out.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you like your family?”

  “I haven’t met them all yet. I haven’t met Grenville.”

  He said, “You’ll like him,” but the way he said it, he made it sound. “You’ll like him.”

  “I like them all.”

  “That’s good.”

  I looked at him. He wore his blue denim jacket, a navy polo-necked sweater. His profile was impassive. I felt it would be easy to be maddened by him.

  “Tell me about Andrea,” I said.

  “What do you want to know about Andrea?”

  “I don’t know. I just want you to tell me.”

  “She’s seventeen, and she thinks she’s in love with some guy she met at Art School, and her parents don’t approve so she’s been rusticated with Auntie Mollie. And she’s bored stiff.”

  “She seems to have taken you into her confidence.”

  “There’s no one else to talk to.”

  “Why doesn’t she go back to London?”

  “Because she’s only seventeen. She hasn’t got the money. And I think she hasn’t quite got the courage to stand up to her parents.”

  “What does she do with herself all day?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not there all day. She doesn’t seem to get up until lunchtime, and then she sits around watching television. Boscarva’s a house of old people. You can’t blame her for being bored.”

  I said, without thinking, “Only the boring are bored.” This had once been drummed into me by a wise and well-meaning headmistress.

  “That,” said Joss, “sounds uncomfortably sanctimonious.”

  “I didn’t mean it to.”

  He smiled. “Were you never bored?”

  “Nobody who lived with my mother was ever bored.”

  He sang, “You may have been a headache, but you never were a bore.”

  “Exactly.”

  “She sounds great. Exactly my sort of female.”

  “That’s what most men thought about her.”

  * * *

  When we got to Fish Lane Mrs Kernow was out, but Joss seemed to have a key. We let ourselves in and I went upstairs to pack my suitcase and my rucksack while Joss wrote Mrs Kernow a note to explain the new arrangements.

  “How about paying her?” I asked as I came downstairs, bumping the rucksack behind me.

  “I’ll fix that when I next see her. I’ve told her so in the note.”

  “But I can pay for myself.”

  “Of course you can, but let me do it for you.” He took my suitcase and went to open the door, and there did not seem to be opportunity for further argument.

  Once more my belongings were heaved into the back of the little truck, once more we headed for Boscarva, only this time Joss took me round by the harbour road.

  “I want to show you my shop … I mean, I just want to show you where it is. Then if you want to get hold of me for any reason, you’ll know where to find me.”

  “Why should I want to get hold of you?”

  “I don’t know. You might need wise counselling; or money; or just a good laugh. There it is, you can’t miss it.”

  It was a tall narrow house, boxed in between two short fat houses. Three storeys high with a window on each floor, and the ground floor still in a state of reconstruction, with new wood unpainted and great circles of whitewash splashed over the plate glass of the shop window.

  As we flashed past it, tyres rattling on the cobbles, I said, “That’s a good position, you’ll get all the visitors coming in to spend their money.”

  “That’s what I hope.”

  “When can I see it?”

  “Come next week. We’ll be more or less straight then.”

  “All right. Next week.”

  “It’s a date,” said Joss, and turned the corner by the church. He put the little truck into second gear and we roared up the hill with a noise like a badly tuned motor bicycle.

  Back at Boscarva, it was Pettifer who, hearing our arrival, emerged from the front door as Joss lifted my suitcase from the back of the truck.

  “Joss, the Commander’s downstairs and in his study. He said to bring Rebecca in to see him just as soon as you arrived.”

  Joss looked at him. “How is he?”

  Pettifer ducked his head. “Not too bad.”

  “Was he very upset?”

  “He’s all right … now you leave that case, and I’ll carry it upstairs.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” said Joss, and for once I was glad that he was being his usual bossy self. “I’ll take it up. Where’s she sleeping?”

  “In the attic … the other end from the billiard room, but the Commander did say, right away.”

  “I know,” Joss grinned, “and Naval time is five minutes beforehand. But there’s still time to take the girl up to her room, so stop fussing, there’s a good man.”

  Leaving Pettifer still mildly protesting, I followed him up the two flights of stairs that I had already climbed this morning. The sound of the vacuum had stopped, but there was the smell of roasting lamb. I realized then that I was very hungry and my mou
th watered. Joss’s long legs sped ahead of me, and by the time I reached the slope-ceilinged bedroom which was to be mine, he had set down the suitcase and the rucksack and gone to fling wide the dormer window, so that I was met by a blast of cold, salty air.

  “Come and look at the view.”

  I went to stand beside him. I saw the sea, the cliffs, the gold of bracken and the first yellow candles of gorse. And below was the Boscarva garden which, because of the stone balustrade of the terrace, I had not been able to see from the drawing-room window. It had been built in a series of terraces, dropping down the slope of the hill, and at the bottom, tucked into a corner of the garden wall, was a stone cottage with a slate roof. No, not a cottage, perhaps a stable, with a commodious loft above it.

  I said, “What’s that building?”

  “That’s the studio,” Joss told me. “That’s where your grandfather used to paint.”

  “It doesn’t look like a studio.”

  “From the other side it does. The entire north wall is made of glass. He designed it himself, had it built by a local stonemason.”

  “It looks shut up.”

  “It is. Locked and shuttered. It hasn’t been opened since he had his heart attack and stopped painting.”

  I shivered suddenly.

  “Cold?” asked Joss.

  “I don’t know.” I moved away from the window, undoing my coat, dropping it over the end of the bed. The room was white, the carpet dark red. There was a built-in wardrobe, shelves full of books, a washbasin. I went over to wash my hands, turning the soap beneath the warm water. Over the basin was a mirror which gave me back a reflection both dishevelled and anxious. I realized then how nervous I was of meeting Grenville for the first time, and how important it was that he should get a good impression of me.

  I dried my hands, went to unbuckle my rucksack, and found a brush and comb. “Was he a good painter, Joss? Do you think he was a good artist?”

  “Yes. The old school, of course, but magnificent. And a marvellous colourist.”

  I pulled the rubber band from the end of my plait, shook the coils free, and went back to the mirror to start brushing. Over my reflected shoulder I could see Joss watching me. He did not speak while I brushed and combed and finally re-plaited my hair. As I fastened the ends, he said, “It’s a wonderful colour. Like corn.”