Coming Home (64 page)

He found himself, all at once, extremely hungry. Upstairs, in the half-empty dining-room — fusty, old-world Turkey carpets and starched white table-cloths, and lowered voices over the timorous scrape of cutlery — he ate his way through soup, and boiled beef with carrots, and Queen of Puddings, and then, feeling a new man, paid his bill and escaped once more into the open air. He walked for a bit down the cobbled pavements until he found a bookshop and there went in, and bought an ordnance-survey map of the west of Cornwall. Back in his car, he lit a cigarette, and opened out the map and planned his route. Nancherrow. Edward, over the telephone, had given him a few vague instructions, but now, working on a scale of an inch to a mile, Gus decided that only an idiot could lose the way. Truro to Penzance, and then the coast road that led to Land's End. His finger traced its way across the stiffened paper and stopped at Rosemullion, clearly marked with church and river and bridge. And then, Nancherrow, the word written in italics, a dotted line for the approach road, a tiny symbol for the house. It was good to find it there, set down by some knowledgeable geographer. It made his destination real, not simply a name, casually spoken, nor a figment of his own imagination. He folded the map and laid it on the seat beside him; dealt with his cigarette, switched on the ignition.

He drove, down the bleak backbone of the county where evidence of defunct tin-mines reared its head, old engine houses and crumbling stacks. Not beautiful. And when would he come to the sea? He was impatient for the sea. But, at last, the road sloped downhill ahead of him, and the countryside was changing. To his right appeared a range of hillocky sand-dunes, and then a deep estuary, and finally he was rewarded by a first sighting of the Atlantic. A glimpse, no more, of green rollers pouring in over a sand-bar. Beyond the estuary, the road turned inland, and there were pasture fields filled with dairy herds, or others south-sloping and planted with market-produce, all bounded by irregular dry-stone walls which looked as though they had stood forever. Palm trees grew in cottage gardens, houses wore the chalky patina of lime-wash, and narrow lanes led away from the main road, dipping down into wooded valleys, invitingly signposted with obscure or saintly names. All slumbered in the warm afternoon sunshine. Trees threw dark shadows, sun-speckled on dark Tarmac, and there was an extraordinary air of timelessness, as though here it would always be summer; the leaves would never fall from those ancient trees, and the gentle slopes of farmland would never know the cruel blast of winter gales.

Presently, ahead, shimmering in a glare of diffused light, Gus saw the other sea, the great sweep of Mount's Bay, a shout of blue, the horizon blurred. A flock of small craft were out on the water, a regatta, perhaps. The dinghies, redwings, scudded into the breeze, close-hauled, scarlet sails keeling, headed for some distant buoy.

And it was all piercingly familiar, as though he had seen it all before, and was simply returning, to a place long-known and deeply loved.
Yes. Yes, there it all is. Just the way it always has been. Just the way I knew it would be.
The sheltering arm of the harbour pier, the coppice of tall-masted boats, the air alive with the scream of gulls. A small steam train, chuffing out of the station and along the curve of the shore. A terrace of Regency houses, windows blinking in the bright light, gardens rich with magnolia and camellia bushes. And over all, flowing in through the open window of the car, the fresh, cool, salty smell of tide-wrack and the open sea.

La Mer

Les a bercés

Le long des golfes clairs

Et d'une chanson d'amour

La Mer

A bercé mon coeur pour la vie.

It was all part of it. He felt like a man returning to his roots, as though everything he had ever done, every place that he had ever lived, had simply been a waiting time, an intermission. Which was strange, but, analysed, perhaps not strange at all, because he was simply witnessing, albeit for the first time, an experience that had become totally recognisable through the Cornish artists whose work he had studied and followed so avidly. Laura Knight and Lamorna Birch and Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes and countless others. And he remembered his boyhood fantasy, born in the art room at Rugby: of coming to live in Cornwall, to embrace the Bohemian life, and to paint; to buy himself a white sun-washed cottage, and plant geraniums at the door. And he smiled, remembering that the fantasy had included a vague and undefined female companion. No person in particular, and she had never been given a face, but she had of course been young, and beautiful and eminently paintable, and an excellent cook. His mistress, of course. And, driving, Gus laughed out aloud, at the innocence of his own lost youth and the harmless dreams of the gormless boy he had once been. And then ceased to laugh, because now that he was
here
, now he had actually
come
, the dreams seemed perfectly viable and not in any way beyond the bounds of possibility.

By now these recollections had brought him through the town and out into the country on the other side. He had climbed a hill, steep as the roof of a house, and reaching its summit, saw that the terrain, once more, had changed abruptly, and the fields of isolated farms swept up to moorland, tan-coloured and crowned with cairns of rock. The sea, to his left, was ever-present, but now its tang was overlaid by the sweet, mossy scent of stream and bogland, and he heard, from far off, the long, bubbling call of a curlew.

And there was the other dream, also long-forgotten and put out of mind, but all at once suddenly poignant and very real again: that one day, he would come to a house, a place never visited before, and there, instantly, utterly, would know that he belonged, as he had never belonged either in the gloomy Victorian mansion on Deeside, or the hospitable homes of his school friends. Cambridge was the closest he had ever got to this particular fantasy, but Cambridge was a university, a seat of learning, an extension of school. Not a bolt-hole, but a corner of the world where one put down roots, returned to, knowing that it would always be there, unchanged, making no demands, comfortable and comforting as an old pair of shoes. One's own.
Gus. Dear Gus. You're back.

Long forgotten. Just as well. Day-dreams were the prerogative of the very young. With some firmness Gus put it all out of his mind and set his thoughts once more on the immediate task of not losing his way. But just then he saw a cross-roads, and a wooden signpost with the name ‘Rosemullion’ printed upon it, and realised that he had only another ten miles or so to go, and common sense flew out of the window, to be replaced by the reasonless excitement of a boy returning from school for the holidays. Coming home. And that was peculiar in itself, because
coming home
, for Gus, had never been a thought to fill him with much pleasure. On the contrary, going home had become something of a painful duty, which he undertook with deep reluctance, loyally returning to be with his parents, but never lasting more than a couple of days before he began searching, desperately, for any excuse to leave. His mother and father could not help being elderly, set in their ways and pathetically proud of their only child, but for some reason, this only made matters worse. It wasn't that Gus was ashamed of them in any way. In fact, he was rather proud of them, and his father in particular. But he had become distanced from the old man, had little in common with him, and resented having to search for things to say and struggle with the most banal of conversations. And all this was because the doughty Duncan Callender had been determined for his son to become a gentleman; had insisted on an expensive private education, and so elevated Gus away from him, into a world that he and Gus's mother had never known, and would never know.

It was a cruel situation. Ironic. But it was not Gus who had built the barrier which lay between them all. Even before he had left Rugby, he had forced himself to come to terms with the uncomfortable situation and his own uneasy conscience, and had finally, firmly, shed all sense of blame. This was important, because otherwise he was going to have to spend the rest of his life with a millstone of guilt slung about his neck.

Loveday, shut into the fruit-cage, picked raspberries. It was good to have something to do, because everything just now was so horrible. Anxiety and fear for Aunt Lavinia pervaded the house like a heavy cloud, affecting everything and everybody. For her father, it had even taken priority over the News and, instead of listening to the wireless, he now spent his time on the telephone: talking to the doctor; to Diana in London; getting messages through to Athena in Scotland; arranging for day and night nurses to be in constant attendance at The Dower House. There had been some discussion as to whether Aunt Lavinia should be moved to hospital, but in the end it was decided that the physical demands of a journey by ambulance, and the distress of finding herself in strange surroundings, would most likely do more harm than good, and Aunt Lavinia should be allowed to remain, peacefully, where she was, in her own house and her own bed.

It was Loveday's first experience of possibly mortal illness. People died, of course. She knew that. But not her own, close, family. Not Aunt Lavinia. From time to time, she made a real effort to imagine life without the old lady, but she had always been so much part of Nancherrow, and her influence, on all the family, so strong and benevolent that Loveday found it impossible. It didn't, in fact, bear thinking about.

She moved down the line of canes, picking the sweet red fruit with both hands, and dropping them into the sturdy basket which she had slung, by a piece of string, around her waist. It was afternoon, bright and sunny, but a nippy wind blew in from the sea, and because of this, she had pulled on an old cricket sweater of Edward's, yellowed and darned. It was far too long, drooping down over her cotton skirt, but the sun lay on her shoulders, warm through the thick wool of the sweater, and Loveday was grateful for its brotherly comfort.

She was on her own because, after lunch, her father and Edward and Mary Millyway had all gone up to The Dower House. Pops had made an arrangement to speak to the doctor, Edward was going to sit with Aunt Lavinia for a bit, and Mary had accompanied them in order to keep poor old Isobel company. They would sit in Isobel's kitchen and drink tea. Isobel, perhaps, needed comforting more than any of them. She and Aunt Lavinia had been together for over forty years. If Aunt Lavinia died, it was likely that Isobel would not be far behind her.

‘How about you, my darling?’ her father had said to Loveday. ‘Do you want to come as well?’

And she had gone to him, and put her arms around his waist and pressed her face into the front of his waistcoat. He understood, and held her close. Muffled, ‘No,’ she told him. If the worst happened, she wanted to remember Aunt Lavinia the way she was, alert and gracious and joining in all the family jokes. Not an aged and sickly lady, bedridden, slipping away from them. ‘Is that awful? Should I come?’

‘No. I think you shouldn't come.’

She wept, and he kissed her and dried her eyes with his huge, clean white linen handkerchief. They were all very kind to Loveday. Edward gave her a hug and said, ‘Anyway, there has to be somebody here when Gus arrives. He's coming sometime this afternoon, and it wouldn't be hospitable if there was nobody to meet him. You can be a one-man reception committee.’

Loveday, still sniffling a bit, didn't think that this was much of an idea. ‘Have I got to hang about?’

Mary laughed. ‘No, of course not. Do what you want. I'm sure Fleet would appreciate a good gallop.’