Coming Home (3 page)

The vicar explained that the church had been built upon this hillock above the beach so that its tower would be a beacon, a marker, for ships seeking a landfall and safe water, and it was not difficult to imagine those bygone galleons, their sails filled with wind, moving in from the open sea, and upstream with the running tide.

As well as discovering places, she got to know the local people. The Cornish love children, and wherever she turned up she was welcomed with such pleasure that her inherent shyness swiftly evaporated. The village fairly buzzed with interesting characters. Mrs Berry, who ran the village shop and made her own ice-creams out of custard powder; old Herbie who drove the coal-cart, and Mrs Southey in the post office, who set a fire-guard on the counter to keep bandits at bay and could scarcely sell a stamp without giving the wrong change.

And there were others, even more fascinating, residing farther afield. Mr Willis was one of them. Mr Willis had spent a good chunk of his life tin-mining in Chile, but had finally returned to his native Cornwall after a lifetime of adventure, and put down his roots in a wooden shack perched on the sandy dunes above the shore of the Channel. The narrow beach in front of his hut was littered with all sorts of interesting bits of flotsam; scraps of rope and broken fish boxes, bottles, and sodden rubber boots. One day, Mr Willis had come upon Judith searching for shells, got talking, and invited her into his hut for a cup of tea. After that, she always made a point of looking out for him and having a chat.

But Mr Willis was by no means an idle beachcomber, because he had two jobs. One of them was to watch the tides and raise a signal when the water rose high enough for the coal-boats to sail in over the sandbar, and the other was ferryman. Outside his house, he had rigged up an old ship's bell, and any person wishing to cross the Channel rang this, whereupon Mr Willis would emerge from his shack, drag his balky row-boat down off the sand, and oar them over the water. For this service, fraught with discomfort, and even danger if there happened to be a roaring ebb-tide, he charged twopence.

Mr Willis lived with Mrs Willis, but she milked cows for the village farmer, and quite often wasn't there. Rumour had it that she wasn't Mrs Willis at all, but Miss Somebody-or-other, and nobody talked to her much. The mystery of Mrs Willis was all bound up with the mystery of Heather's Uncle Fred who hadn't got it in him, but whenever Judith broached the matter with her mother, she was met with pursed lips and a change of subject.

Judith never talked to her mother about her friendship with Mr Willis. Instinct told her that she might be discouraged from keeping company with him, and would certainly be forbidden to go into his hut and drink tea. Which was ridiculous. What harm could Mr Willis do to anybody? Mummy, sometimes, was dreadfully stupid.

But then, she could be terribly stupid about a lot of things, and one of them was how she treated Judith exactly the way that she treated Jess, and Jess was four years old. At fourteen, Judith reckoned that she was mature enough to have really important decisions, that were going to affect
her,
shared and discussed.

But no. Mummy never discussed. She simply told.

I have had a letter from your father, and Jess and I are going to have to go back to Colombo.

Which had been a bit of a bombshell, to say the least of it.

But worse.
We have decided that you should go to St Ursula's as a boarder. The headmistress is called Miss Catto, and I have been to see her, and it's all arranged. The Easter term starts on the fifteenth of January.

As though she were a sort of parcel, or a dog being put into a kennel.

‘But what about the holidays?’

You'll stay with Aunt Louise. She's very kindly said that she'll take care of you, and be your guardian while we're all abroad. She's going to let you have her best spare room for your own, and you can take your own bits and pieces with you, and have them there.

Which was, perhaps, most daunting of all. It wasn't that she didn't
like
Aunt Louise. During their sojourn in Penmarron, they had seen quite a lot of her, and she had never been anything but kind. It was just that she was all
wrong.
Old — at least fifty — and faintly intimidating, and not cosy in the least. And Windyridge was an old person's house, orderly and quiet. Two sisters, Edna and Hilda by name, who worked for her as cook and house parlourmaid, were equally elderly and unforthcoming, not a bit like darling Phyllis, who did everything for them all at Riverview House, but still found time to play racing demon at the kitchen table and read fortunes with tea-leaves.

They would probably spend Christmas Day with Aunt Louise. They would go to church, and then there would be roast goose for lunch, and afterwards, before it grew dark, would take a brisk walk over the golf course, to the white gate which stood high above the sea.

Not very exciting, but at fourteen Judith had lost some of her illusions about Christmas. It ought to be as it was in books and on Christmas cards, but it never was, because Mummy wasn't much good at Christmas, and invariably showed a sad disinclination to decorate with holly, or dress a tree. For two years now she had been telling Judith that she was really too old to have a stocking.

In fact, when Judith thought about it, she wasn't really much good at anything like that. She didn't like picnics on the beach, and she would rather do anything than throw a birthday party. She was even timid about driving the car. They had a car, of course, a very small and shabby Austin, but Mummy would come up with any excuse rather than get it out of the garage, convinced as she was that she was about to drive it into some other vehicle, lose control of the brakes, or be unable to double de-clutch when they came to a hill.

Back to Christmas. However they spent it, Judith knew that nothing could be worse than that Christmas, two years ago, when Mummy insisted that they spend some time with
her
parents, the Reverend and Mrs Evans.

Grandfather was incumbent of a tiny parish in Devon, and Grandmother a defeated old lady who had struggled all her life with genteel poverty and vicarages built for huge families of Victorian children. They had spent an inordinate amount of time treading to and fro from church, and Grandmother had given Judith a prayer-book for a Christmas present.
Oh, thank you, Grandmother,
Judith had said politely,
I've always wanted a prayer-book.
She had not added,
but not very much.
And Jess, who always ruined everything, had gone down with croup, and taken up all Mother's time and attention, and every other day there were stewed figs and blancmange for pudding.

No, nothing could be worse than that.

But even so (like a dog, worrying a bone, Judith's thoughts turned back to her original grievance), the business of St Ursula's still rankled. Judith hadn't even been to see the school, nor to meet the probably terrifying Miss Catto. Perhaps Mother had feared an outburst of rebellion and taken the easiest course, but even that didn't make sense, because Judith had never, in all her life, rebelled against anything. It occurred to her that perhaps, at fourteen, she should give it a try. Heather Warren had known for years how to get her own way, and had her besotted father nicely twisted around her little finger. But then fathers were different. And, for the time being, Judith didn't have one.

The train was slowing down. It passed under the bridge (you could always tell by the different sound the wheels made) and ground to a hissing halt. She collected her bags and stepped out onto the platform in front of the station, which was tiny and looked like a wooden cricket pavilion with much fancy fretwork. Mr Jackson, the station-master, stood silhouetted against the light which shone out from the open door.

‘Hello there, Judith. You're late tonight.’

‘We had the school party.’

‘Lovely!’

The last bit of the journey was the shortest possible walk, because the station stood exactly opposite the bottom gate of the Riverview House garden. She went through the waiting-room, which always smelt distressingly of lavatories, and emerged into the unlit lane that lay beyond. Pausing for an instant to let her eyes get used to the darkness, she realised that the rain had stopped, and heard the wind soughing through the topmost branches of the pine coppice that sheltered the station from the worst of the weather. It was an eerie sound, but not a frightening one. She crossed the road, felt for the latch of the gate, opened it, and went into the garden and up the steeply sloping path, which rose in steps and terraces. At the top, the house loomed darkly before her, with curtained windows glowing in friendly fashion. The ornamental lantern which hung over the front door had been turned on, and in its light she saw an alien car parked on the gravel. Aunt Louise, come, no doubt, for tea.

A big black Rover. Standing there, it looked innocent enough, harmless, solid and dependable. But any person who ventured onto the narrow roads and lanes of West Penwith had reason to be wary of its appearance, because it had a powerful engine, and Aunt Louise, good citizen that she was, regular churchgoer and pillar of the golf club, underwent a sort of personality change the moment she got behind the wheel, roaring around blind corners at fifty miles an hour, and confidently certain that, provided she kept the heel of her hand on the horn, the letter of the law was on her side. Because of this, if her bumper grazed another person's mudguard, or she ran over a hen, she never for a moment considered the possibility that the fault might be hers, and so forceful were her accusations and admonitions that the injured parties usually lacked the guts to stand up to her, and slunk away from the encounter without daring to claim damages or demand reparation for the dead chicken.

Judith did not want, instantly, to be faced by Aunt Louise. Because of this, she did not go in through the front door, but made her way around to the back, through the yard and the scullery and so into the kitchen. Here she found Jess sitting at the scrubbed table with her crayons and her colouring book, and Phyllis, in her afternoon uniform of green dress and muslin apron, dealing with a pile of ironing.

After the cold outside, and the damp, the kitchen felt blissfully warm. It was, in fact, the warmest room in the house, because the fire in the black-leaded, brass-knobbed Cornish range never went out. Now it simmered, causing the kettle on the hob to sing. Opposite the range a dresser stood, arranged with a motley of meat platters, vegetable dishes, and a soup tureen, and by the side of the range was Phyllis's basket chair, in which she collapsed whenever she had a moment to get the weight off her legs, which was not often. The room smelt pleasantly of warm linen, and overhead hung a pulley, laden with airing laundry.

Phyllis looked up. ‘Hello there. What you doing, sneaking in the back way?’

She smiled, showing her not very good teeth. She was a flat-chested and bony girl with pale skin and straight mousy hair, but had the sweetest disposition of any person Judith had ever known.

‘I saw Aunt Louise's car.’

‘That's no reason. Have a good party, did you?’

‘Yes.’ She delved in her coat pocket. ‘Here, Jess,’ and she gave Jess a bag of sweets.

Jess looked at them. ‘What are they?’

She was a beautiful child, chubby and silver-blonde, but dreadfully babyish, and Judith was constantly being exasperated by her.

‘Sweets, of course, silly.’

‘I like fruit gums.’

‘Well, look and see if you can find one, then.’

She pulled off her coat and her woollen hat and dumped them on a chair. Phyllis didn't say, ‘Hang them up.’ Sometime, she would probably hang them up for Judith herself.

‘I didn't know Aunt Louise was coming for tea.’

‘Telephoned, she did, about two o'clock.’

‘What are they talking about?’

‘Nosy Parker.’

‘Me, I suppose.’

‘You, and that school, and lawyers and fees, and half-terms and telephone calls. And talking of telephone calls, your Aunt Biddy called this morning. Spoke to your mother ten minutes or more.’

Judith perked up. ‘Aunt Biddy?’ Aunt Biddy was Mummy's own sister, and a favourite of Judith's. ‘What did she want?’

‘I wasn't eavesdropping, was I? You'll have to ask your mum.’ She dumped down the iron and began to do up the buttons of Mummy's best blouse. ‘You'd better go through. I've laid a cup for you, and there's scones and lemon cake if you're hungry.’

‘Starving.’

‘As usual. Didn't they feed you at the party?’

‘Yes. Saffron buns. But I'm still hungry.’

‘Off you go then, or your mother will be wondering.’

‘Wondering what?’

But Phyllis only said, ‘Go and get your shoes changed, and wash your hands first.’

So she did this, washing her hands in the scullery, using Phyllis's California Poppy soap, and then, with some reluctance, left the snug companionship of the kitchen and crossed the hall. From beyond the sitting-room door came the low murmur of female voices. She opened the door, but silently, so that for a moment the two women remained unaware of her presence.

They sat, Molly Dunbar and her sister-in-law Louise Forrester, on either side of the hearth, with the folding tea-table set up between them. This had been laid with an embroidered linen cloth and the best china, as well as plates containing sandwiches, an iced lemon cake, hot scones spread with cream and strawberry jam, and two kinds of biscuit — shortbread and chocolate.