“No, I live alone.”
“Do you go to parties and things?”
“Yes, if someone asks me and I want to go.”
“Do you work? Do you have a job?”
“Yes. In a bookshop.”
“God, how grim.”
“I like it.”
“Where did you meet Joss?”
Now, I thought, we’re getting down to business, but her face was empty of expression.
“I met him in London … he mended a chair for me.”
“Do you like him?”
“I don’t know him well enough to dislike him.”
“Eliot hates him. So does Aunt Mollie.”
“Why?”
“Because they don’t like having him around the place all the time. And they treat him as though he should call them Sir and Madam, and of course he doesn’t. And he talks to Grenville and makes him laugh. I’ve heard them talking.”
I imagined her creeping up to closed doors, listening at keyholes.
“That’s nice, if he makes the old man laugh.”
“He and Eliot had a terrible row once. It was about some car that Eliot had sold to a friend of Joss’s and Joss said it wasn’t roadworthy and Eliot called him an insolent, interfering bastard.”
“Did you listen in to that one as well?”
“I couldn’t help hearing. I was in the loo and the window was open and they were out on the gravel by the front door.”
“How long have you been staying at Boscarva?” I asked, curious to know how long it had taken her to dig all these skeletons out of the family cupboards.
“Two weeks. It seems like six months.”
“I should have thought you’d have loved coming down.”
“For heaven’s sake, I’m not a child. What am I meant to do with myself. Go bucket and spading on the beach?”
“What do you do in London?”
She kicked a pebble, viciously, hating Cornwall. “I was at an art school, but my parents didn’t approve—” she put on a mealy voice—“of my friends. So they took me away and sent me here.”
“But you can’t stay here for ever. What are you going to do when you go back?”
“That’s up to them, isn’t it?”
I felt a twinge of pity for her parents, even parents who had somehow raised such an obnoxious child.
“I mean, isn’t there anything you want to do?”
“Yes, just get away, be on my own, do my own thing. Danus, this fabulous chap I went around with, he had a friend who was running a pottery on the Isle of Skye, and he wanted me to go and help … It sounded super, you know, living in a sort of commune, and right away from everybody … but my grotty mother shoved her great oar in and spoiled it all.”
“Where’s Danus now?”
“Oh, he went to Skye.”
“Has he written to tell you about it?”
She tossed her head, fiddled with her hair, would not meet my eye. “Yes, actually, long letters. Reams of them. He still wants me to go there, and I’m going to, just as soon as I’m eighteen and they can’t stop me any more.”
“Why don’t you go back to Art School first, and get some sort of a qualification … that’d give you time…”
She turned on me. “You know something? You talk like all the rest of them? How old are you anyway? You sound like someone with one foot in the grave.”
“It’s crazy to wreck your life before it’s even started.”
“It’s my life. Not yours.”
“No, it’s not my life.”
* * *
Having thus stupendously quarrelled, we continued our walk into the town in silence, and when Andrea did speak again, it was to say, “That’s the fish shop,” and wave a hand in its direction.
“Thank you.” I went in to collect the halibut but she stayed, pointedly, outside on the cobbled pavement. When I emerged again, she had gone, only to appear the next moment from a papershop next door, where she had been buying a lurid magazine called True Sex.
“Shall we go back now?” I asked her. “Or do you want to do more shopping?”
“I can’t shop, I haven’t any money. Only a few pence.”
I was suddenly, irrationally, sorry for her. “I’ll stand you a cup of coffee if you’d like one.”
She looked at me with sudden delight and I thought she was going to gleefully accept my modest offer, but instead she said, “Let’s go and see Joss.”
I was taken unawares. “Why do you want to go and see Joss?”
“I just do. I often go and see him when I come down to the town. He’s always pleased to see me. He made me promise always to go and see him if I’m down here.”
“How do you know he’ll be there?”
“Well, he’s not at Boscarva today, so he must be at the shop. Have you been there? It’s super, he’s got a sort of pad on the top floor, just like something out of a magazine, with a bed that’s a sort of sofa and masses of cushions and things, and a log fire. And at night—” her voice became dreamy—“it’s all closed-in and secret, and there’s nothing but firelight.”
I tried not to gape. “You mean … you and Joss…”
She shrugged, tossing her hair. “Once or twice, but nobody knows. I don’t know why I told you. You won’t tell the others, will you?”
“But don’t they … doesn’t Mollie … ask questions?”
“Oh, I tell her I’m going to the cinema. She doesn’t seem to mind me going to the cinema. Come on, let’s go and see Joss…”
But after this revelation, nothing would have induced me to go near Joss’s shop. I said, “Joss will be working, he won’t want to be interrupted. And anyway there isn’t time. And I don’t want to go.”
“You said there was time for coffee, why isn’t there time for Joss?”
“Andrea, I told you, I don’t want to go.”
She began to smile. “I thought you liked Joss.”
“That’s not the point. He doesn’t want us under his feet every time he turns round.”
“Do you mean me?”
“I mean us.” I was beginning to be desperate.
“He always wants to see me. I know he does.”
“Yes, I’m sure,” I said gently. “But let’s go back to Boscarva.”
I reminded myself that from the very start I had not liked Joss. Despite his concern and apparent friendliness he had always left me with that strange sensation of disquiet, as though someone were creeping up behind my back. Yesterday I had begun to forget this initial antipathy, even to like him, but after Andrea’s confidences it was not hard to whip back to life my first distrust of the man. He was too good-looking, too charming. Andrea could be a liar, but she was no fool; she had pigeon-holed the rest of the family with disconcerting accuracy, and even if there was only a grain of truth in what she said about Joss, I wanted to have no part of it.
If I had known him and liked him better, I would have taken him aside and taxed him with what she had said. As it was, he held no importance for me. Besides, I had other things to think about.
* * *
Grenville did not come down for lunch that day.
“He’s tired,” Mollie told us. “He’s having a day in bed. Perhaps he’ll join us for dinner. Pettifer’s going to take him up a tray.”
So the three of us ate lunch together. Mollie had changed into a neat woollen dress and a double string of pearls. She was going, she said, to play bridge with friends in Fourbourne. She hoped that I would be able to occupy myself.
I said that of course I would be perfectly all right. Across the table, we smiled at each other and I wondered if she had really told Andrea that my mother was a tart, or if this was simply Andrea’s interpretation of some vague euphemistic explanation that Mollie had given her. I hoped it was the latter, but still I wished that Mollie had not found it necessary to discuss Lisa with Andrea. She was dead now, but once she had been funny and enchanting and full of laughter. Why couldn’t she be remembered that way?
>
As we sat around the table, the day outside changed its face. A wind got up from the west, and with great speed a bank of grey cloud sped over the blue sky, obliterating the sunshine, and presently it started to rain. It was in this rain that Mollie set off for her bridge party, driving her little car, and saying that she would be home about six. Andrea, perhaps exhausted by her morning’s exercise, but more likely bored to death with my company, disappeared up to her bedroom with her new magazine. Alone, I stood at the foot of the stairs, wondering how to amuse myself. The silence of the gloomy afternoon was broken only by the ticking of the grandfather clock and small, occupied sounds which came from the direction of the kitchens, and which, investigated, proved to be Pettifer, seated at a wooden table in his pantry and cleaning silver.
He looked up as I put my head around the door.
“Hallo. I didn’t hear you.”
“How’s my grandfather?”
“Oh, he’s all right. Just a bit weary after all the excitement of yesterday. We thought it would be better if he had a day with his toes up. Has Mrs Roger gone?”
“Yes.” I pulled up a chair and sat opposite him.
“Thought I heard the car.”
“Do you want me to help you?”
“That’d be very kind … those spoons there need a good rub up with the shammy. Don’t know how they get so marked and stained. But, there, I do know. It’s this damp sea air. One thing silver really hates it’s damp sea air.” I began to rub at the thin worn bowl of the spoon. Pettifer looked at me over the top of his glasses. “Funny to have you sitting there after all these years. Your mother used to spend half her life in the kitchen … When Roger went off to boarding school there wasn’t anyone else for her to talk to. So she used to come and spend her time with Mrs Pettifer and me. Taught her to make Fairy Cakes, Mrs Pettifer did, and how to play two-handed whist. We had great times. And on a day like this, she used to make toast at the old range … mind, that’s gone now, we’ve got a new one and good thing too … but that old range was cosy, with the fire burning behind the bars, and all the brass knobs polished up lovely.”
“How long have you been at Boscarva, Pettifer?”
“Ever since the Commander bought it, back in 1922. That was the year he left the Navy, decided to be a painter. Old Mrs Bayliss didn’t like that. For three months or more she wouldn’t even talk to him.”
“Why did she mind so much?”
“She’d been with the Navy all her life. Her father was the Captain of the Imperious when the Commander was First Lieutenant. That was how they met. They were married in Malta. A lovely wedding with an arch of swords and all. Being with the Navy meant a lot to Mrs Bayliss. When the Commander said he was going to leave they parted brass rags good and proper, but she couldn’t make him change his mind. So we left Malta, for good and all, and the Commander found this house, and then we all moved down here.”
“And you’ve been here ever since?”
“More or less. The Commander enrolled at the Slade, and that meant working in London, so he had this little pied-à-terre, just off St James’s it was, and when he went up to London I went too, to keep an eye on him, and Mrs Pettifer stayed here with Mrs Bayliss and Roger. Your mother wasn’t born then.”
“But, when he’d finished at the Slade…?”
“Well, then he came back for good. And built the studio. That was when he was painting at his best. Lovely stuff he did then, great seascapes, so cold and bright you could smell the wind, feel the salt on your lips.”
“Are there many of his pictures in this house?”
“No, not many. There’s the fishing boat over the dining-room fireplace, and one or two little black and white drawings along the upstairs passage. He’s got three or four in his study, and then there’s a couple in the room where Mrs Roger sleeps.”
“And the one in the drawing room…”
“Oh, yes, that one of course. ‘Lady Holding a Rose.’”
“Who was she?”
He did not reply; was, perhaps, preoccupied with his silver, rubbing away at a fork as though determined to flatten the pattern.
“Who was she? The girl in the picture?”
“Oh,” said Pettifer. “That was Sophia.”
Sophia. Ever since my mother had fleetingly mentioned her I had wanted to know about Sophia, and now here was Pettifer bringing up her name as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
“She was a girl who used to model for the Commander. I think she first worked for him in London when he was a student, and then she used to come down here sometimes during the summer months, take lodgings in Porthkerris and work for any artist who was ready and able to pay her.”
“Was she very beautiful?”
“Not my idea of a beauty. But lively, and what a talker! She was Irish, she’d come from County Cork.”
“What did my grandmother think of Sophia?”
“Their paths never crossed, any more than your grandmother would have had social dealings with the butcher or the girl who did her hair.”
“So Sophia never came to Boscarva?”
“Oh, yes, she used to come and go. She’d be down at the studio with the Commander, and then he’d get tired, or lose his patience with her, and call it a day, and she’d come up the garden and through the back door calling out, ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?’ and because it was Sophia, Mrs Pettifer always had the kettle on.”
“She used to tell fortunes from teacups.”
“Who told you that?”
“My mother.”
“That’s right, she did. And wonderful things she told us were going to happen to us all. ’Course, they didn’t, but it was fun listening to her, just the same. She and your mother were great friends. Sophia used to take her down to the beach and Mrs Pettifer would pack a picnic. And if it was stormy weather they’d go long walks up on the moor.”
“But what was my grandmother doing all this time?”
“Oh, playing bridge or mah-jongg most afternoons. She had a very select circle of friends. She was a nice enough lady, but not really interested in children. Perhaps if she’d been more interested in Lisa when she was a child, they’d have had more in common when Lisa grew up, and maybe your mother wouldn’t have run off like that, breaking all our hearts.”
“What happened to Sophia?”
“Oh, she went back to London, she got married and she had a baby, I think. Then, in 1942, she was killed in the Blitz. The baby was down in the country and her husband was overseas, but Sophia stayed in London because she was working in a hospital there. We didn’t hear about it for a long time, till long after it happened. Mrs Pettifer and I felt as though a light had gone out of our lives.”
“And my grandfather?”
“He was sorry, of course. But he hadn’t seen her for years. She was just a girl who’d once worked for him.”
“Are there any more pictures of her?”
“There’s pictures of Sophia in provincial art galleries up and down the country. There’s one in the gallery in Porthkerris if you want to go and look at that. And there’s a couple upstairs in Mrs Roger’s bedroom.”
“Could we go and look at them now?” I sounded eager and Pettifer looked surprised, as though I were suggesting something faintly indecent. “I mean Mrs Bayliss wouldn’t mind, would she?”
“Oh, she wouldn’t mind. I don’t see why not … come on.”
He got laboriously to his feet, and I followed him upstairs and along the first-floor passage to the bedroom over the drawing room, which was large and furnished in a very feminine fashion with old-fashioned Victorian furniture and a faded pink and cream carpet. Mollie had left it painfully neat. The two little oil paintings hung side by side between the windows, one of a chestnut tree with a girl lying in its shade, the other of the same girl hanging out a line of washing on a breezy day. They were scarcely more than sketches, and I was disappointed.
“I still don’t know what Sophia looks like.”
Pettifer was about to reply when, from the depths of the house, came the ringing of a bell. He cocked his head, like a dog listening. “That’s the Commander, he’s heard us talking through the wall. Excuse me a moment.”
I followed him out of Mollie’s room and closed the door behind me. He went on down the passage a little way and opened a door, and I heard Grenville’s voice.
“What are you two muttering about in there?”
“I was just showing Rebecca the two pictures in Mrs Roger’s room…”
“Is Rebecca there? Tell her to come in…”
I went in, past Pettifer. Grenville was not in bed, but sitting in a deep arm-chair with his feet propped up on a stool. He was dressed, but there was a rug over his knees and the room was cheered by the flicker of a fire. Everything was very neat and shipshape and smelt of the Bay Rum he put on his hair.
I said, “I thought you were in bed.”
“Pettifer got me up after lunch. I get bored stiff lying in bed all day. What have you been talking about?”
“Pettifer was showing me some of your pictures.”
“I expect you think they’re very old-fashioned. They’re going back to realism now, you know, these young artists. I knew it would come. You’ll have to have one of my pictures. There are racks of them in the studio that have never been sorted out. I closed the place up ten years ago, and I haven’t been there since. Pettifer, where’s the key?”
“Put safely away, sir.”
“You’ll have to get the key off Pettifer, go down and nose around, see if there’s anything you’d like. Got anywhere to hang it?”
“I’ve got a flat in London. It needs a picture.”
“I thought of something else sitting here. That jade in the cabinet downstairs. I brought it back from China years ago, gave it to Lisa. Now, it belongs to you. And a mirror that her grandmother left her—where’s that, Pettifer?”
“That’s in the morning room, sir.”
“Well, we’ll have to get it down, give it a clean. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, I would.” I felt greatly relieved. I had been wondering how to bring up the subject of my mother’s possessions, and now, without any prompting, Grenville had done it for me. I hesitated and then, striking while the iron was hot, mentioned the third thing. “… and there was a davenport desk.”
The Day of the Storm Page 11