“But…” Phoebe’s endless digressions did nothing to clarify the situation. “What happened?”
“Oh, heavens, nothing happened. They used to go to parties together, picnics on the beach, swimming. She had a very flashy car that summer. It had a hood you could put down, and they used to drive all over the place together; very dashing they looked, too. Very eye-catching. Oh, you can imagine it, Prue.”
I could. Only too clearly. “But I wouldn’t have thought that Daniel…” I stopped, because I wasn’t sure what I did think.
“You wouldn’t have thought that Daniel was the social type. Perhaps he wasn’t, but he was a very attractive young man. Still is, for that matter. And it must have flattered his ego to have her so eager to spend her time with him. I told you, she was beautiful. There were always queues of men swooning around her like lovesick cows. Or do I mean lovesick bulls? But Daniel was always a very quiet person. I think it was his quietness that intrigued Annabelle.”
“How long did this go on?”
“The whole summer, on and off. It was just a little flirtation. Perfectly harmless.”
“What did Mrs. Tolliver have to say about it?”
“Mrs. Tolliver never says anything about anything. She’s the sort of woman who truly believes that if you don’t look, it will go away. Besides, she must have realised that if it wasn’t Daniel, it would have been some other man. Perhaps she reckoned that he was the lesser of a lot of other evils.”
“But the little boy … Michael?”
“There was a starchy nanny taking care of him. He never got in the way at all.”
“And her husband…” I could hardly bear to say his horrid name. “Leslie Collis?”
“He was left in London, running his office. I suppose living in some service flat or other. I’ve no idea. It’s not important, anyway.”
I thought carefully through this extraordinary revelation. I finally said, “Then last night … you think that’s why Daniel didn’t want to talk to Mrs. Tolliver.”
“Maybe. Maybe he just didn’t want to get involved with four bridge-playing ladies.”
“I wonder why he didn’t tell me himself.”
“There was no reason he should. It has nothing to do with you, and it was a total nonevent, anyway.” She poured herself more coffee and said, quite briskly, “You’re not to make anything of it.”
“I’m not. I just wish it had been anybody but Annabelle Tolliver.”
* * *
Red sky at morning, shepherd’s warning. But it was the sort of day when you couldn’t be sure what would happen to the weather. A warm, west-wind sort of day, with gusts that tore leaves from trees and sent them flying and flecked the indigo sea with white horses. The sky was a brazen blue swept by high clouds, and the very air seemed to glitter. From the top of the hill above Porthkerris, I could see for miles, long beyond the lighthouse to the distant spur of Trevose Head. From the harbour far below me, a solitary fishing boat butted out into the choppy sea, making for the deep water beneath the cliffs of Lanyon.
The way led steeply downhill, through the narrow streets of the little town. Most of the summer visitors had now departed. Only a handful, looking chilly in shorts, stood about outside the news agent’s or made their way down the hill to where a bakery was redolent with the smell of fresh, hot pastries.
At Porthkerris the Ship Inn stands, where it has stood for three hundred years or more, on the harbour road by the old quay where the fishermen used to land their pilchards. I drove by it, but there was no sign of Daniel, so I found a place to park the Volkswagen and then walked back along the cobbles and went in, dipping my head beneath the low, smoke-blackened lintel. Inside, after the brightness of the day, it was very dark. A small coal fire burned in the grate, and an old man sat by this, looking as though he had sat there all his life or had, perhaps, grown up out of the floorboards.
“Prue.”
I turned. Daniel was sitting in the deep window seat with an empty pint tankard on a wobbly table that had been made out of a barrel. He stood up, easing himself from behind this table, and said, “It’s too good a day to have lunch indoors. What do you think?”
“So what shall we do?”
“Buy something. Eat it on the beach.”
So we went out again and down the road until we reached one of those convenient shops that seem to sell everything. We bought fresh pastries, so hot that the man had to wrap them in newspaper. We bought a bag of apples, and some chocolate biscuits, and a packet of paper cups, and a bottle of dubious red wine. When the kindly man realised we were going to drink it right away, he threw in a corkscrew as well.
We went back out into the sunshine and crossed the cobbled street, and climbed down the stone steps that were dry at the top and coated with green weed at the bottom. The tide was on its way out and had left behind it a sickle of clean yellow sand. There was a cluster of rocks pounded smooth by the seas of centuries, and we settled ourselves on these, sheltered from the wind and with the sun on our faces. Screaming gulls wheeled in the windy air, and from where some men worked peacefully on a boat came the pleasant sounds of hammer blows and muted voices.
Daniel opened the bottle of wine, and we unwrapped the pastries. I was suddenly very hungry. I bit greedily into mine, and it was so hot that I nearly scalded my mouth and bits of steaming potato fell out of the pastry onto the sand, to be spied and scooped up in an instant by a great, greedy gull.
I said, “This was a brilliant idea.”
“I have them, every now and again.”
And I thought that if it had been Nigel, we would in all probability have been lunching at the Castle Hotel, with white tablecloths and waiters hovering, hampering conversation. Daniel had taken the cork out of the bottle; now he took a mouthful of wine, considered its taste, and swallowed it.
“An amusing and unpretentious little wine,” he said, “if you don’t mind it being stone cold. I don’t suppose it improves its bouquet, drinking it out of a paper cup, but beggars can’t be choosers. The only alternative seems to be the neck of the bottle.” He took a bite out of his pastry. “How’s Phoebe this morning?”
“She was tired last night. She went to bed early, and this morning I took her up her breakfast in bed, and she promised she’d stay there till lunchtime.”
“What would she have done if you hadn’t been able to come to Penmarron and take care of her?”
“She’d have managed. Lily would have looked after her, but Lily can’t drive, and Phoebe hates being without her car.”
“Were you able to get away from work just like that? What does Marcus Bernstein do without you?”
“I was on holiday anyway for two weeks, so that was no problem. He’d already engaged a temp to take over while I was away.”
“You mean you had two weeks’ holiday and you weren’t going to do anything with it? What were you going to do, stay in London?”
“No. As a matter of fact, I was meant to be going to Scotland.”
“Scotland? For heaven’s sake, what were you going to do there?”
“Stay with people.”
“Have you ever been to Scotland?”
“No. Have you?”
“Once. Everybody kept telling me how beautiful it was, but it rained so hard that I never found out if they were telling the truth or not.” He took another mouthful of pastry. “Who were you going to stay with?”
“Friends.”
“You’re being cagey, aren’t you? You might as well tell me all, because I’ll just go on asking questions until you give me some answers. It’s a boyfriend, isn’t it?”
I would not look at him. “Why should it be?”
“Because you’re far too attractive not to have some man languishing with love for you. And you’ve got the most extraordinary expression on your face. Confused nonchalance.”
“I’m sure that’s a contradiction of terms.”
“What’s he called?”
“Who?”
“
Oh, stop being coy. The boyfriend, of course.”
“Nigel Gordon.”
“Nigel. Nigel’s one of my most unfavorite names.”
“It’s no worse than Daniel.”
“It’s a wet name. Timothy’s a wet name, too. So is Jeremy. And Christopher. And Nicholas.”
“Nigel is not wet.”
“What is he, then?”
“Nice.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s an insurance broker.”
“And he comes from Scotland?”
“Yes. His family lives there. In Inverness-shire.”
“What a frightfully good thing you didn’t go. You’d have hated it. A great unheated house, with bedrooms cold as refrigerators and baths encased in mahogany, like coffins.”
I said, “Daniel, you make more ridiculous sweeping statements than any man I’ve ever met.”
“You won’t marry him, will you, this Highland insurance broker? Please don’t. I can’t bear the thought of you in kilts and living in Inverness-shire.”
I very nearly laughed but managed to keep a prim face. “I wouldn’t be living in Inverness-shire. I’d be living in Nigel’s desirable residence in South Kensington.” I threw what remained of my pastry to the gulls and helped myself to an apple, rubbing it to a shine on the sleeve of my sweater. “And I wouldn’t have to work, either. I wouldn’t have to go trudging off to Marcus Bernstein’s every morning. I could be a lady of leisure, with time to do all I want to do, which is paint. And it wouldn’t matter if nobody bought my pictures, because my husband would be there, ready and willing to pay all the bills.”
He said, “I thought you thought like Phoebe. I’m disillusioned.”
“Perhaps sometimes I think like my mother. She likes life to be neat and squared off and conventional and safe. She adores Nigel. She’s longing for me to marry him. She can’t wait to start planning a wedding. St. Paul’s, Knightsbridge, and a reception in Pavilion Road…”
“And a honeymoon at Budleigh Salterton, with the golf clubs in the boot of the car. Prue, you can’t be serious.”
I took a great bite of the shiny apple. “I might be.”
“Not about a man called Nigel.”
I was beginning to feel irritated. “You know nothing about him. And anyway, what’s so bad about getting married? You think the world of Phoebe, you thought the world of Chips. But, you know, they would have been married, years ago, if only Chips could have gotten a divorce. But he couldn’t. So they compromised, and made the very best of their life together.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong in getting married. I just think it’s insane to get married to the wrong person.”
“I suppose you’ve never made that mistake.”
“No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t. I’ve done just about everything else. Made every other sort of mistake, but getting married wasn’t one of them.” He appeared to be considering this state of affairs. “Never even thought about it, as a matter of fact.”
He smiled at me, and I smiled back, because for no particular reason I was filled with gladness, simply because he had never married. And yet I was not surprised. There was something nomadic, free, about Daniel, and I found I was envious of this.
I said, “I wish there was time in life to do everything.”
“You’ve got time.”
“I know, but already I seem to be in a sort of rut. I like the rut. I like my job and I’m doing exactly what I want to do, and I love Marcus Bernstein, and I wouldn’t change my job for anything in the world. But sometimes, on a certain sort of morning, I drive to work, and I think, I’m twenty-three and what am I doing with my life? And I think of all the places I long to see. Kashmir and the Bahamas and Greece, and Palmyra. And San Francisco, and Peking and Japan. I would like to have been to some of the places you’ve been to.”
“Then go. Go now.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“It can be. Life is as simple as you make it.”
“Perhaps I haven’t got that sort of courage. But still, I would like to have done some of the things you’ve done.”
He laughed. “Don’t wish that. Some of it was hell.”
“It can’t still be hell. Everything’s going so well for you now.”
“Uncertainty is always hell.”
“What are you uncertain about?”
“About what I’m going to do next.”
“That shouldn’t be too frightening.”
“I’m thirty-one. Within the next twelve months I’ve got to make some sort of a decision; I’m frightened of drifting. I don’t want to drift for the rest of my life.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want…”
He leaned back against the knobby granite of the harbour wall and turned his face to the sun and closed his eyes. He looked like a man who longed for the oblivion of sleep. “When this exhibition at Peter Chastal’s is over and finished with, I want to go to Greece. There’s an island called Spetsai, and on Spetsai there is a house, square and white as a sugar cube. And there’s a terrace with terra cotta tiles on the floor, and geraniums in pots along the tops of the wall. And below the terrace there’s a mooring and a boat with a white sail like the wing of a gull. Not a big boat. Just large enough for two.” I waited. He opened his eyes. He said, “I think I shall go there.”
“Do that thing.”
“Would you come?” He held out his hand to me. “Would you like to come and visit me? You just told me you wanted to go to Greece. Would you come and let me show you some of its glories?”
I was very touched. I laid my hand in his and felt his fingers close about my wrist. How different this was, how frighteningly different, from the invitation Nigel had painfully offered me, to visit his mother in Inverness-shire. Two different worlds. The insecurity of two different worlds touching. I wondered if I was about to burst into tears.
“One day,” I told him, in the voice of a mother placating an insistent child. “One day, maybe, I’ll be able to come.”
The sky clouded and it grew cold. It was time to stir ourselves. We gathered up the picnic rubbish and found a little bin by a lamp post, and threw all the trash into that. We walked back to where I had left Phoebe’s car, and there was the smell of rain in the air and the sea had turned angry and leaden.
Red sky at morning, shepherd’s warning. We got into the car and slowly drove back to Penmarron. Phoebe’s heater did not work, and I felt cold. I knew that there would be a fire ablaze at Holly Cottage, and possibly crumpets for tea, but I wasn’t thinking about these things. My mind was filled with images of Greece, of the house above the water and the boat with a sail like the wing of a gull. I thought of swimming in that dark Aegean sea, the water warm and clear as glass …
Memory stirred.
“Daniel.”
“What is it?”
“That night I got off the train from London, I had a dream. It was about swimming. I was on a desert island, and I had to walk a long long way through shallow water. And then all at once it was deep, but so clear I could see right to the bottom. And once I had started to swim, there was a current. Very fast and strong. It was like being swept down a river.”
I remembered again the sensation of peace, of blissful acceptance.
“What happened then?”
“Nothing. But it was nice.”
“Sounds a good dream. What brought it to mind?”
“I was thinking about Greece. Swimming in Homer’s wine-dark seas.”
“All dreams have meaning.”
“I know.”
“What do you think that one signified?”
I told him, “I thought perhaps it was about dying.”
But that was before Daniel had come into my life. Now I was wiser, and I knew that the dream was not about dying at all but loving.
* * *
When we got back to Holly Cottage, there was no sign of Phoebe. The firelit sitting room was empty, and when I c
alled up the stair, thinking that perhaps she had spent the whole day in her bed, there was no reply.
But sounds of clashing crockery and opening drawers came from the kitchen. I went down the hall with Daniel behind me to open the door and investigate, only to discover Lily Tonkins engaged in whisking up a bowl of batter.
“You’re back then,” she said. She did not look too pleased to see us, and I wondered if she was in one of her cross moods. Lily could get very cross. Not with us in particular but just with the world in general, which included her morose husband, the cheeky girl who worked in the grocer’s, and the man in the town hall who dealt with Lily’s pension.
“Where’s Phoebe?” I asked.
Lily did not look up from her task. “Gone down to the water.”
“I hoped she’d stay in bed today”
“Stay in bed?” Lily set down the bowl with a thump and faced me with her arms akimbo “Some chance she’s had of staying in bed. We’ve had that little Charlotte Collis here all day, ever since ten o’clock this morning. I’d just taken Miss Shackleton a nice cup of tea and was polishing up the brasses when I heard a ring at the bell. Dratted nuisance, I said to myself, and went to the door, and there she was. And been here ever since.”
“Where’s Mrs. Tolliver?”
“Gone over to Falmouth for some meeting—Save the Children or Save the Church or something. Seems funny to me. I mean, I can understand some people don’t like looking after children. There are some that do and some that don’t. But she’s that little girl’s granny. No business to be up and about all the time, playing cards and saving things. Somebody’s got to look after the little girl.”
“Where’s Mrs. Curnow?”
“Betty Curnow, she’s there all right, up at White Lodge, but she’s got her own work to do. Mrs. Tolliver can’t be bothered to look after the child, then she should pay some other person to do the job.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, I let her in, poor little soul, and I said Miss Shackleton was still in bed and you were out, gone for lunch. So she went up the stairs to see Miss Shackleton, and I heard them talking together. Talk, talk, you’d think that child had never had a soul to talk to the way she carries on when she’s here. Then she came down, the little girl, and said Miss Shackleton was getting up and getting dressed. And that vexed me because I knew she needed a good rest. So I went up and gave her a hand with her clothes, and then down she came and phoned Betty Curnow and said that we were keeping Charlotte here and giving her lunch. Luckily there was a bit of cold lamb, and I peeled a few potatoes and made a custard, but it’s not right Miss Shackleton being landed with the child to take care of, and her with that bad arm and everything.”
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