Tamar (34 page)

We parked down on the wharf, then wandered past the warm grey quayside buildings and up to the house itself. We paid our entrance fee and walked round to the front.

“It’s not real,” Yoyo said, focusing his camera on the lovely jumble of roofs and gables, of chimneys and slender arched windows.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s exactly perfect.” He clicked the shutter. “And nothing can be perfect. Everyone knows that.”

There are level symmetrical lawns and sunken flower beds in front of the house, and then a low stone wall. When you look over it, you can’t help letting out a little gasp, because the garden falls steeply down towards the river in a mad tumble of huge orange and scarlet and white flowering shrubs and unfamiliar trees. The mossy roof of an ancient stone dovecote rises from the mass of colour; as we watched, three white doves descended onto it as if they’d been expecting us. In the distance the Tamar is spanned by a viaduct, a dozen immensely tall arches of pale stone. It was built to carry the railway line from Plymouth over the Tamar, but you can almost imagine the Victorian owners of Cotehele arranging for it to be put there so that they could sit with their tea and watch the plume of train smoke cross the bridge.

Nine of the photos of that afternoon are beautiful in a picture-postcard sort of way. The National Trust could do worse than use them in their brochures. It’s the other one I like best, though. Yoyo and I went down into the garden and came to a wooden open-fronted summerhouse, which is where I took it. The summerhouse is tucked in under a great cascade of leaves. It has a thatched roof, and Yoyo is standing beside one of the timber pillars that hold it up. Because the sunlight is so bright, the inside of the summerhouse looks as dark as a cave; and with his mussy hair and round glasses Yoyo looks like a sleepy animal who’s hibernated too long and just woken up to high summer rather than early spring. He’s wearing a black T-shirt with
NIRVANA
printed across the front in splattery red lettering. Yellow climbing roses are clinging to the pillar nearest him, almost touching his face.

We stayed inside the summerhouse for a long time, stretched out on the wooden bench, listening to birdsong. A few people wandered through the garden, but they were mostly silent too and looked slightly dazed, as if they were lost but didn’t mind. At one point I thought Yoyo had dozed off, and I was just about to poke his foot when he spoke.

“What time is it?”

“Just after half past four,” I said. “I s’pose we should think about where we’re going to stay.”

“We will stay here. Wouldn’t it be very nice to wake up in this garden? Just imagine. Or we could hide in the house. I bet they have those historical beds, you know, with the four posts and a ceiling.”

Normally this would have earned him a kick and one of my sarky remarks. But not this time, because I was so happy and because, I admit, it was a little fantasy that appealed to me too. I wanted to stay in this perfect little world. But we left the summerhouse at last and wandered down through the garden towards the river. We got lost and didn’t care. When we accidentally found ourselves back at the car park, shadows were creeping towards the quay. The tide had turned and exposed a smooth bank of mud on the other side of the river; in the sunlight it looked like molten silver.

The car was a furnace, and we opened all the doors to let it cool. I took the map and sat on a fat wooden bollard close to the water. Then it was as if a cloud had appeared from nowhere and parked itself in front of the sun. I felt suddenly let down. Not depressed, exactly. I can only describe it as that feeling you get when you have to go back to school after a perfect holiday. Reality tugging at you, like a friend you don’t really like. It was the map, I suppose. It reminded me why we were there, and of Grandad. I’d forgotten, completely forgotten. All that stuff had gone from my mind the moment I’d sat in that meadow and realized I was happy. Now it had all come back.

Yoyo saw it in my face. He squatted in front of me. “Tamar? What’s the problem?”

“Nothing,” I said, being pathetic.

“Come on. All of a sudden you have a long face like a horse.”

“Oh, I dunno. I mean, it’s lovely here and everything, perfect really, but I still don’t know what we’re doing. This whole thing is some sort of puzzle, we think. Right? But we haven’t worked out anything. Not a single thing. I don’t know what we’re supposed to be looking for. I don’t know if we’ve already missed things. I don’t know why we’re here.”

“Mmm . . .” was all he said, after looking at my face for a minute. Then he put his hands on my knees to lever himself upright. He walked a few paces away and stood with his back to me, his hands in his pockets.

“If I say what I think,” he said at last, “you will tell me to shut up like usual.”

I probably groaned or something, but not enough to stop him. He turned and looked at me, serious.

“The first time we talked about coming here, at your house, you said maybe there wasn’t anything to find. You said maybe your grandfather just wanted you to see the river with your name.”

“Did I?” I’d forgotten that Yoyo had the irritating ability to remember everything you said to him.

“Yes. And now we are here, I think you were right. Part right, anyway. It’s not just about having the same name. Other things are similar. What we see now is that this river is very beautiful, and so are —”

“Yoyo, don’t start. I’m not in the mood.”

He lifted his right hand to stop me. “Let me ask you something. Did your grandfather ever tell you that you were beautiful?”

A ridiculous question. “Of course not,” I snapped. “He wasn’t like that. It’s not the kind of thing he would say.”

Yoyo looked at the silver-blue curve of the river, the mirrored trees.

“He is telling you now,” he said. He turned to me and smiled. “Better late than never, yes?”

Gunnislake is a steep little town, an avalanche of houses clinging to the Cornwall side of the Tamar valley. The town is there because of the bridge. Until the Tamar Bridge at Plymouth was built, this was the first place up the river where you could cross by road. You can tell Gunnislake was important once, long ago. You can imagine travellers being glad to get there, climbing stiffly out of their stagecoaches after being jolted across Dartmoor. The Kings Arms Hotel had been built for them. It had an arched entrance off the street, tall enough for coaches, that opened onto a cobbled yard. The stable block was now a skittle alley. Even though the holiday season was in full swing, there were several vacant rooms. The landlord gave us a good looking-over, but when Yoyo paid for our drinks with one of Grandad’s fifties, he became much less hostile.

For dinner I had a baked potato with chilli con carne topping. The beans were baked beans from a can, but I didn’t mind that. Yoyo ate a huge slab of battered fish that stuck out over both sides of his plate. When he drenched his chips with salad cream, the woman at the next table nudged her husband and they both watched.

“Rivers aren’t always beautiful,” I said. “It’s not that simple.”

“Of course. They are complicated. They go this way and that way. They are wide, then thin — no, narrow — then wide again. They are sometimes shady and secret, sometimes in the sunshine. You can swim in them and also drown in them. Sometimes they are deep and sometimes . . . what is the opposite word?”

“Shallow,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“So is that what I’m supposed to think? Is that what this is all about?”

Yoyo paused with a chip halfway to his mouth. “What?”

“That we’re doing all this so I can find out that I’m . . . I’m twisty and . . . and never the same from one minute to the next? And shallow?”

He put his fork down and carefully wiped his mouth with the paper napkin.

“Listen to you,” he said. “You pick up all the negative words. Let me tell you something. There are rivers you would not like to be named after. Some in Holland, well, it would be like an insult maybe. In England too, I bet. But you are Tamar, and today we saw how beautiful she — it — is. Okay, okay, I said this already, I know. And yes, those things your grandfather left you, they are complicated when you try to look at them all together. But maybe this part of it is simple. He is telling you that you are lovely. What’s wrong with that?”

“He’s dead, Yoyo. He killed himself.”

“So? You think people stop talking to you when they are dead?”

I didn’t sleep well. There were some well-thumbed trashy novels in the room, and I read one of them until long after the noisy drinkers in the bar had spilled onto the street. The two rooms that Yoyo and I had been given had once been one big room, now divided by a thin wall. I could hear his bed creak. I felt very alone, knowing he was so close to me.

Above Gunnislake the Tamar squirms and wriggles and loops back on itself as though it knows it has to get to the sea but wants to put it off as long as possible. And, just like downriver, the roads couldn’t get near it. We twisted and turned through the narrow lanes for ages but caught a glimpse of the river only once.

This new day was even hotter than the one before. Yoyo had appeared at breakfast wearing old black Levis with the legs cut off, which made him look taller and more stringy than ever. We drove with all the windows down and the sunroof open, but our faces still shone with sweat.

There were only two more of Grandad’s marks before the Tamar ran off the edge of the map, and we were headed for the first. We’d decided we weren’t in any hurry. Despite my restless night, some of the happy mood of yesterday afternoon had returned, and Yoyo was his usual laid-back self. Several times we had to reverse and cram into the hedge or a gateway to let oncoming cars pass, and he did it smilingly, waving cheerfully at the other drivers as they squeezed by. Judging from the expressions on the faces of one or two of them, they thought he was a nutter.

Grandad’s mark was where a narrow lane changed its mind about meeting the river and turned away westwards. At the turn there was a dirt track leading off, with a sign saying
PUBLIC BRIDLEWAY
. Yoyo eased the Saab along it, avoiding the knuckly rocks that poked up through the dusty surface.

A couple of hundred metres later, Yoyo parked, jamming the car tight against the hedge. I had to climb over his seat to get out. The trees met over our heads, and the path was splashes of light and shade that confused my eyes. The air was so hot it seemed to vibrate. For some reason I felt nervous, light-headed. We walked for several minutes and then came to a dead end. On either side of the path, gateways opened onto long fields of high grass. In front of us, a broken screen of tall weeds like white parasols, a line of single trees, and the sound and glitter of the Tamar. We pushed through, treading down nettles.

It was nothing like the wide waterway we’d followed the day before. It was maybe twenty metres across. The opposite bank was a tall cliff of motionless leaves. In both directions the river twisted away and disappeared. The deep silence was disturbed only by the plopping and chuckling of flowing water. It was a secretive place.

Yoyo said, “I need a pee.” He turned back the way we’d come and disappeared.

Just off to my right, a bed-sized slab of stone jutted into the water. I walked out onto it, grateful that it was half in the shade. On this side the river was shallow, sliding over sandy gravel that gave it the colour of pale beer. The deep-water channel was against the far bank, a dark mirror filled with warped and sliding reflections. Something made a faint splash and spread circular ripples on the surface. In the middle of the stream, long trails of weed floated, like thick green hair flecked with white confetti flowers.

It was then that I felt that same chilly unease I’d felt the previous day, standing on Halton Quay, but this time, suddenly, I knew what it was.

Yoyo and I had spent lots of time wondering why Grandad had marked these particular places on the maps. Of course we had. If they were clues to something, how did they work? Were the place-names some sort of code? Were there hidden meanings in Landulph or the Crooked Spaniards? If so, we hadn’t found them. Yoyo showed me how map grid references worked, and we wrote down the references for one or two places and tried translating these six-figure numbers into letters, to see if they gave us words. We thought perhaps that the names or the grid references somehow related to the mysterious letters on the silk sheet. None of this got us anywhere except deeper into headache territory. We’d wondered if there were certain things in each of these places that we were supposed to find. Perhaps a special gravestone in the churchyard, a painting at Cotehele. But if that had been it, Grandad would have given us a bit more help, surely.

What I’d never considered was the possibility that he had actually visited these places. If that seems strange, I can only say that he was the kind of man who worked things out in his head or on paper, not on his feet. I just couldn’t imagine him trudging up and down the Cornish countryside, not at his age. Besides, he didn’t have a car, and I’d never known him to drive. I didn’t even know if he had a licence. And anyway, I couldn’t imagine
when
he could have come down here. He never left London, never left Gran, except once, when his doctor told him he needed a holiday. That was when the stress of Marijke’s illness and her being in the nursing home had pumped his blood pressure way up. So he’d reluctantly taken himself off to Brighton for ten days. It hadn’t done him much good, judging from the mood he’d been in when he got back. Apart from that, he’d not gone away anywhere for years and years. Definitely not since Dad vanished. So I’d decided that whatever the marks on the maps meant, they weren’t places he’d actually been.

But as I stood chilled on warm stone with the water at my feet, I knew with absolute certainty that I’d been wrong. He had been there. I couldn’t understand how or when, but he’d stood where I was standing, just as he’d stood on the worn flagstones of Halton Quay. That was what the spooky feeling was. It was him, his presence. It doesn’t make sense in any normal way, I know, but I was suddenly so sure of it that I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d materialized and stood ghostly among the trees beside me. I even looked.