A Gathering Storm (4 page)

She put the cake-tin aside to find what else was in the box. There were none of her father’s identity documents, but she supposed Helena would have needed to keep hold of those. There were yet more photographs, from further back in time, a rare one of her Grandfather Gerald as a young man, before he was wounded. She only remembered him faintly, an alarming-looking old gentleman with a scarred face and a glass eye.

An Elizabethan house with high chimneys featured often. In one snapshot an elfin maid was shaking a duster from an open window, in another, a troupe of five children played croquet on the lawn. There were two boys in the picture, one dark, one fair, both older than the girl who was Granny. The youngest child, a glum, square-faced girl, squinted at the camera, pointing her mallet like a rifle – that must be Great-Aunt Hetty. A slender dark girl hung shyly in the background. Lucy had no idea who she could be.

Her grandmother had sometimes talked about the house on the south Cornish coast where she’d been brought up. Carlyon, she’d called it, Carlyon Manor. It was gone now, she’d say. Lucy wasn’t sure how. Lucy next unearthed a black and white postcard of a seaside town.
St Florian
, the caption said. That was where Carlyon was, she remembered now.

She went back to the photograph of the children at Carlyon. It was sad to think of the change time had wrought. Granny’s eldest brother Edward was dead, killed in the war. Great-Uncle Peter was still alive, but living in Manhattan, and little heard of. Great-Aunt Hetty, a rather grumpy lady whom she only saw on important family occasions, lived in a residential home somewhere, and had been too unwell to come to Lucy’s father’s funeral.

There was nothing so far about Great-Uncle Rafe. It seemed indeed that he’d been wiped from the family annals. What on earth had he done? Lucy delved once more into the box and brought out a photograph that had caught itself in a corner. She’d almost missed it. As she studied it she felt she was staring into the face of someone she’d known once, long ago, but forgotten. Could this young man be Rafe?

The Mermaid Inn on the quay in St Florian had been newly painted the colour of clotted cream. On the bright sign, an alabaster-skinned siren lolled in the surf. Lucy smiled at the mischievous look in her eye and walked inside.

The reception area was empty, though a delicious smell of frying butter suggested that someone couldn’t be far away. The ping of the bell brought a round-faced young woman with a scrappy ponytail, who struggled through the service door with a parcel of clean laundry and dumped it next to the desk.

‘Sorry to keep you, lovely,’ she said. ‘They’re all late with deliveries today. What can I do for you?’

‘Have you got a room, please? I haven’t booked or anything.’

‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘We had a cancellation come in this morning.’

The room was surprisingly cheap and the girl showed Lucy up several flights of stairs. It was a poky L-shaped attic with a view of the sky, but Lucy liked the solidity of the old building, the scent of lavender polish. A glance at the tiny shower room and the coffee-making facilities completed her satisfaction. It might be a bit cramped but it would certainly do for a few nights.

‘Oh, I’ll need to give you some washing,’ she told the girl. She’d only brought enough clothes for her week’s holiday with Will.

‘That’s no trouble. There’s a bag in the wardrobe. Just put it out for me,’ was the reply. ‘I’m Cara, by the way. Let me know if there’s anything else you need.’

As soon as Cara left, Lucy picked up the television remote control and sat cross-legged on the bed flicking through the channels with the sound off. On the news channel, soldiers moved in tanks through a rocky landscape. After a while, she pressed the off-button and lay back on the pillows, suddenly weary. And all her anxieties rushed in.

Why had she marooned herself here?
The reality of what she’d done rose like a bubble in her chest. She’d offended Will – of whom she’d been quite fond, and who’d brought her on a not unpleasant holiday – and was stuck alone in a hotel room, probably miles from any public transport. And for what exactly?

The panic passed. She pulled a plastic folder out of a pocket in her suitcase and consulted the pages she’d printed from her father’s laptop. He’d visited the Imperial War Museum in search of Rafe and checked certain National Archive documents. Apart from Rafe’s date of birth, 1920, and the bare facts of his schooling and war career, he hadn’t found out much – nothing personal anyway. Except something that connected him with St Florian: his mother’s sister had lived there.

Inside the folder was an envelope containing the photograph she’d found in the bottom of the box with Granny’s things. It was of a very young man, thick fair hair sleeked back, a joyous expression in his sparkling eyes. The photo caught him leaning over a stone wall with his head resting on his forearm. There was no name, yet somehow she knew. The young man looked very like her Grandfather Gerald, but he wasn’t Gerald. He must be Rafe.

Over the past three months, Lucy had tried to make sense of her father’s investigations but she’d ended up finding out more about Tom Cardwell than about his Uncle Rafe.

‘Did you know about Rafe?’ she asked her mother on a weekend visit in March.

Following the divorce, Gabriella had decamped to a small cottage in North Norfolk where she painted great abstract canvases that didn’t sell, and more conventional sea scenes that paid her living expenses. Gabriella actually seemed happier and calmer than she had for months. Lucy wondered whether a man named ‘Lewin’ who owned a local art gallery and whose name Gabriella would frequently drop into the conversation had something to do with this, and if so she was glad. Still in her late fifties, Gabriella Cardwell deserved a little happiness.

‘No. Your father was so secretive,’ Gabriella said, caressing her beautiful long-haired tabby cat. ‘Not like Lewin. We talk about everything.’ Lucy was familiar with this line of argument. ‘Your father had such a strait-laced upbringing, you see. Those public schools are responsible for so much, and as for his mother – oh . . . a nightmare, so possessive. I saw right away what she thought of me. But despite our differences Tom and I were so happy together, Lucy. So very happy.’ She looked appealingly at her daughter.

‘I know, Mum,’ Lucy said gently.

‘It was only when your granny died, and then you left to go to college – not that I blame you, of course, darling – that he sort of changed, got awfully depressed. It was grief, I suppose. Still, we’d have pulled through if that cow hadn’t come along.’ She cast her eyes to the south, as though Helena, sitting tight amidst her neutral decor in Suffolk, might, even at this distance, be scorched by her vitriol.

Lucy tried to move the conversation forward. ‘But he never mentioned his Uncle Rafe?’ she said.

‘Not a thing. Grandad Gerald was unwell in his later years and he didn’t make much sense. I remember that he’d lived in India as a child, because as I told you, I had that wonderful year at the ashram before I met your father, but I didn’t know there’d been a younger brother.’

Now, recalling this conversation, Lucy put away the photograph and her notes, picked up her bag and her camera and went downstairs, thinking she’d look round the town. Cara was vacuuming the lobby, but nodded encouragement when Lucy picked up a free tourist map from a pile on the desk.

She walked the tangled streets and looked at the harbour, breathing in the pungent smells of oil and paint and wet rope, and trying to imagine what the place would have been like between the wars. Not so chocolate-boxy for a start. No Spindrift Gift Shop or Surf Girls boutique with pop music blaring; rather, it must have been an ordinary working town with grocer’s shops and a baker and boarding-house ladies and fishermen’s nets drying in the sun. The parish church would be the same one and might have some memorials, but there wasn’t really a graveyard, and when she tried the oak door she found the building locked.

The small museum she came across in one of the back streets might be useful, but the notice on the door said it was closed between noon and 2 p.m., and she was a minute or two too late.

Eventually Lucy bought herself a bag of crisps and a flapjack for lunch and sat on the quay wall to eat, looking at her surroundings and absent-mindedly composing a few photographs. She felt at peace here, thinking how she was connected to the place yet was not of it. No one knew she was here – except Will, of course – and no one was making any demands of her. Her eye was drawn to the boats in the harbour. The tide was surging, and half a dozen small craft bobbed safely within the embracing walls. Along one jetty, a tanned, broad-shouldered young man was tying up his sailing boat – a particularly pretty craft, Lucy thought, with a white cabin and its hull painted the exact pale blue of a robin’s egg. A very suitable colour seeing that
Early Bird
was inscribed on its stern. She thought it the perfect foreground for a shot of the harbour.

When the boat was secure, she watched the man step down into it and set about tidying up. She didn’t know anything at all about boats but liked the idea of riding the wind and the waves, and being close to the elements. The man fixed a cover across the cabin roof, then slung a kitbag over his shoulder and strolled along the jetty towards her. As he passed they smiled at one another. He had short reddish-brown hair, blue eyes with fair lashes, and a strong, open face.

She finished the flapjack and dropped the wrapping into a bin. All right, so she didn’t know what she would do here, but something would turn up, she felt sure. The light was perfect. She began to take some pictures.

The St Florian museum opened again at two, and when Lucy pushed open the door, a man with a grizzled beard looked up from packing tourist brochures into a revolving stand and greeted her.

‘Hello,’ she replied. ‘Is it all right to look round?’

‘Of course,’ he said, looking at her over his spectacles. ‘That’s what we’re here for. There’s no entrance charge – we rely on donations.’ He indicated a collection box on the counter. ‘There’s just the two rooms. We used to be a sweet shop, by the way.’

Lucy fished out her purse and dropped some coins in the box. She could easily imagine the shelves in the bow window being full of jars of candy where now they displayed pretty stones and shells. There was also a small selection of Second World War memorabilia – a gas mask, a ration book, an evacuee’s teddy bear.

‘Was there anything in particular you wanted to see?’ the curator asked. ‘The war exhibition is in the back room, and we’ve
Life of a Victorian Fisherman
as the spring exhibition over there. People are always bringing things in, so we often have a change of focus.’

‘I was wondering, do you have anything about Carlyon?’ Lucy asked.

‘The old manor house?’ he said. ‘You know it’s just a ruin now?’

‘Yes, it’s so sad. What happened?’

‘The fire? I believe it was soon after the war. What’s your interest?’

‘My grandmother was brought up there. Her name was Angelina Wincanton before she married.’

‘She was a Wincanton, was she? Now that was a well-known local name. I thought they must have died out.’

‘They practically have,’ Lucy said, with a rueful smile. ‘Of my generation, there are some second cousins in New Zealand I’ve never met – and me. My name’s Lucy, by the way. Lucy Cardwell.’

‘I’m Simon Vine,’ he said. ‘I don’t really have much about the house, to be honest, though there might be something in the storeroom. What precisely were you looking for?’

‘Anything to do with the Wincantons, really.’

‘Let me see,’ Simon said. ‘I’m trying to think who I know who might help you, but there really isn’t anyone . . . ah. That lady who came in recently – what on earth was her name? Wait a moment and I’ll check.’

He went away into the back room where she heard a door open. She followed him to look at the war display. There was more of the kind of thing she’d seen in the window: old clothes coupons, a letter from a soldier to his girlfriend, a black and white photograph of a concrete look-out post, behind which a beach was littered with spirals of barbed wire.

After a few minutes Simon Vine returned, carrying two flat wooden boxes with glass tops. ‘Here we are,’ he said, putting them in front of her on the desk.

‘Oh,’ said Lucy, looking with puzzlement. ‘They’re amazing.’ Each box contained an array of insects pinned on to cork: butterflies, their wings as brightly patterned as the day they were mounted; different kinds of moth, a huge beetle – all carefully labelled with tiny strips of paper. ‘How does this help me?’ she asked.

‘The lady brought them in a few months ago. She said she’d caught them round here when she was a girl, so we have a snapshot of natural history from the 1930s, which is rather fascinating. I imagine she’d have some useful stories to tell you. I wrote her name and address down somewhere.’ He pulled a foolscap notebook from a drawer in the counter and started hunting through it. ‘I bump into her occasionally and I can never remember her name but she always remembers mine, though she must be well over eighty. Hold on.’ He checked a label stuck on one of the boxes and flipped a few more pages. ‘Here we are. Mrs Beatrice Ashton. And the house is on the road that leads to the cliff path. This lady will certainly be able to tell you about this place before the war.’

‘Beatrice Ashton?’ Had she heard him correctly?

‘Yes. I’ll tell you what – are you staying in Saint Florian?’

‘Yes, at the Mermaid.’

‘Why don’t I call in on her on my way home this evening and ask if she’ll see you.’

Lucy left the museum and its curator, hardly believing her luck. Beatrice Ashton. Surely the name wasn’t a coincidence. Who could she be? Rafe’s wife or some other relative? She’d written down Simon Vine’s directions to Mrs Ashton’s house carefully, her mind awhirl.

She spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the town before returning to the hotel. It felt odd being on her own on a Saturday night, without anything definite to do. Back in her room she slept for a little, then ate an early supper in the hotel bar. She enquired of Cara, but there was no message from a Mrs Ashton. After a last look at the harbour, she went to bed early to read.