I Do Not Sleep (13 page)

‘So, up there on the cliff are some of the most beautiful houses on this part of the coast,’ he said. I caught up with him, interested now. He pointed up to the left. ‘That’s The Watchers, and next to it is Seaways. Did you know that when they built it, they had to use donkeys to pull the stone up the cliff?’

Seaways, a giddily steep rocky climb up from here, looked breathtakingly lovely. I imagined, and envied, the astonishing view of the ocean the house must command.

A few yards further on, Mayhew abruptly stopped. ‘And this, my dear, is Hope. I think it’s just what you’re looking for. It’s not usually rented out, but there are… unusual circumstances.’

And there, a dozen steps up from the coastal path, set back in a lovely garden bursting with summer flowers and shrubs and enclosed by a white picket fence, was a little yellow wooden house. Pale sunshine yellow, built of clapboard, like the oceanside homes in Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod; like a doll’s house, or a child’s painting: the perfect seaside cottage, its door and window frames painted in a soft but jaunty shade of blue-grey, mirroring the clouds and water it so gloriously faced.

My heart stopped.
Oh, yes
, I thought.
Oh yes
.

Chapter Twenty-Three

When I arrived back at Coombe, having told the agent I’d take possession of ‘Hope’, as he’d called it, on Saturday, two days from now, the atmosphere in the old farmhouse was very tense. Adam was barely speaking to me. I realised he’d hoped my property search in Polperro would turn out to be a wild goose chase, that I wouldn’t find anywhere I wanted to rent. He must have told himself it was so late in the season that the probability of discovering an attractive empty cottage was remote. All that would remain, he thought, would be what was left on the scrapheap, too unappealing for me even to consider.

So when Danny and I arrived home soon after midday, my face wreathed in smiles, Adam was seriously put out. Coward that I was, I let Danny tell him we’d found a smashing little place, and I was moving in the day after tomorrow. Adam looked from his wife to his son in disbelief. It was obvious he thought we’d formed a conspiracy to betray him. As Lola, rocking Edie on her hip, looked on anxiously, Adam turned on his heel and walked out of the house.

After his father left, Danny looked upset, and I felt dreadful. Faced with the blank reality of my family’s hurt feelings, my resolution to leave Coombe started to falter. I was aware of how selfish I was being; the euphoria I’d felt when I first saw the little yellow house with its glorious view had been written all over my face when I walked into the kitchen. I realised I was acting like a tremulous newlywed, enchanted at finding my dream home. Something about this cottage called Hope had aroused in me an almost romantic vision of my quest to find Joey.

Analysing my emotions, I knew how easy it would be to call me deluded. And surely heroic flights of fancy had no place in the grim business of rescuing Joey from whatever frightful place he was stuck. Yes, that was it. He was stuck, unable to leave, unable to get back to me.

Lola interrupted my thoughts to say she and Danny were taking Edie out for a late lunch, and did I want to come? I longed to put Edie on my knee and make silly faces at her, listening to her croon and chortle while she grabbed at my nose and earrings. But I knew Danny and Lola would want to talk about me, what I’d told my son on the way to Polperro, so I declined and said I had a longing to go back to Talland Bay, and would they mind dropping me off? I thought I could walk on the beach and visit the old church up the lane. Perhaps that would centre me, and I’d be able to find some peace.

The kids dropped me off at the beach car park, but I decided to walk up to St Tallanus straight away. The eleventh-century church had always held a powerful attraction for me, partly because of its extraordinary location, perched on the cliff top. The sleepers resting in its ancient graveyard were truly blessed to lie amidst such beauty, the sky and the sea sweeping vast and eternal before them.

I didn’t go inside the church today. Instead, I felt pulled to walk among the weathered, lichen-stained gravestones staring out to sea. From here, the rocks on the shore looked a deep, glowing purple. The whole vista was a glorious palette of yellow, blue, green and vivid indigo. I looked down at the graves beneath my feet. Most of them were very old, bearing witness to mothers and babies who had died in childbirth; and to children who’d been snatched from their keening parents at a blisteringly tender age, the inscriptions on their headstones betraying the heartbreak left behind. And yet these simple engraved verses also breathed something else, something more strengthening: a sense of resignation to the inevitable, of serenity and conviction; the devout belief that their little ones were safe in God’s arms; that their early departure from this earth had spared them much hardship, and that, after all, they were better off with the angels.

That serenity was what I’d wanted for Joey. However terrible his fate, however shattered my heart, if I could only have visited his grave in this beautiful place, brought flowers, talked to him, I would have felt soothed, comforted. The knowledge of his presence, resting beneath my feet, might have been almost enough; a sad but peaceful resolution to a beloved life.

I’d never been a regular churchgoer, but I’d had a quiet faith until Joey disappeared, a typical educated middle-class belief in goodness, kindness, benevolence. A muddled sense that if you did your best, behaved well, and genuinely tried not to hurt anyone, then you were on the right side. Do as you would be done by, and all would be well.

Afterwards, shouting at God in bitter anguish, I asked Him how He could expect me to believe in a deity who inflicted such barbarous cruelty on children and parents throughout the world, in war or through simple tragedy? In other words, I reacted like every other victim of a terrible disaster. ‘Why me? Why my child?’ And I wouldn’t listen to those who tried to counsel me by asking ‘Why not?’

And yet, as I stood in the graveyard at Talland church, my weeping eyes raised to the soaring sky, something began to happen to my body. It stilled. My heart, initially beating fast and furious with anguish, slowed down. Without any conscious effort, I was filled with a deep sense of peace. And I became conscious of light stealing into my body, and a strong awareness of grace granted from – somewhere, some place way beyond me. I was calm, suddenly and completely. Here, in this holy place where so many souls lay at rest, I was receiving a message. And although I heard no words, no heavenly visitations, no glorious visions and neither sight nor sound of Joey, I knew I’d been heard, that my instincts were sure. I knew I was absolutely right to be searching for my son.

Filled with a calm certainty, I left St Tallanus and walked down the steep lane to the beach, listening to the tiny stream of water that dribbled down the hill to my left, running constantly past wall and hedgerow. All Celtic churches were built near running water, the staff of life; also the weapon of death. However you looked at it, water was key here – the most important single element in Cornwall’s past, present and future.

Down on Talland beach, sitting at a wooden table in front of the little café, watching the children shrieking with their happy parents as they paddled in the wavelets of that oh-so-deceptively calm and pretty sea – the same sea that could rise like an ogre if it wished and swallow those little mites whole, leaving their parents bewildered and bereaved – I shook myself into practicality. I ordered tea and a sandwich from the boy helping out the owners, kept my eyes on the car park and waited for Danny.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Late that evening, as the roses in Coombe’s small courtyard smelled their sweetest and lengthening shadows crept towards the front gate, I stood in the porch and worried about Adam. He was still out, and hadn’t called all day. I could tell Danny was bothered at not being able to reach him on his mobile, but Lola was reassuring about the lousy signal down here and said Adam just had a lot to think about, and would be back soon. Lola had a wonderful knack of normalising things. It was impossible to panic when she looked you in the eye and spoke in her low, soft voice. Danny smiled and kissed her. They went upstairs to bathe Edie and put her to bed, and I felt so grateful to have such a strong, sweet daughter-in-law. She was a loving presence in the house, constantly helping us all to keep calm and positive, even though the stress levels in our holiday home were palpable.

Later, as I stood at the door, she came down again and said she and Danny were going to have an early night. Would I be all right waiting for Adam on my own? I said I’d be fine. Then she kissed me and said if I felt at all lonely, I must knock on their door and she’d come down and join me for a drink. There was no false pity in her voice, no obvious anxiety about my state of mind, just warm kindness. When I thought about the derogatory way in which some of my female colleagues talked about their daughters-in-law, the bitchy claims that their sons could have done so much better, I knew the Gabriel family had scooped the jackpot. Kind, wise and beautiful; that was Danny’s Lola.

I closed the front door and went into the kitchen. I stood by the table and stared through the window into the back garden; another soft warm night. This long stretch of golden weather had gone on for a couple of weeks now. Even in Cornwall’s sunny microclimate, where palm trees grew in every garden, this was unprecedented. It would surely break soon and we’d have a tremendous storm. I shivered. I’d be in my little yellow house the day after tomorrow. Would the weather turn while I was there? How would it feel to be alone in an unfamiliar place, the sea heaving and thrashing outside my window, the skies cracking and splitting above my head?

I made myself a gin and tonic and stepped through the kitchen door into the garden. At once I remembered the night, such a short time ago, when I had done just this, and heard Joey calling to me. That, I said to myself, had been the start of the journey I needed to take. That night in this silvery garden was why I took off for Jamaica Inn the next day, some strange impulse driving me there to gain knowledge of my son’s fate. Instead what I found waiting for me was half an hour of theatrical horror in a misty, muddy garden, pursued by an animated scarecrow. I wanted to laugh now, but I couldn’t. The sheer evil of that hallucination was with me still.

Tonight, I thought, would be different. I wouldn’t panic, I would try hard to relax and breathe deeply. The feeling of peace and lightness, of stillness, which had crept into me that afternoon in the graveyard at Talland church, was still with me. I sat on the stone bench and sipped my drink. Night-scented stocks filled the air with heady, insistent perfume. Silvery shadows stretched in the moonlight beneath the trees. I felt dreamy, tranquil; on the edge of a great adventure, calm and hopeful. Drowsily, I gave thanks to the sleepers resting quietly in their graves at the church for letting me share their peace that day. I stood up from the little bench and sat on the warm grass. Hugging my knees, I looked up at the black sky, pregnant with millions of tiny shining stars.
Soon
, I thought, sleepily.
Soon. Very soon
.

The hillside was suffused with a pale golden light. From the gravestones all around me streamed bright ribbons of starlight, twinkling and pulsing, as if all these loving monuments had become sentient beings. And in among the stones darted soft white drifts of air, barely visible until they moved, always swiftly, up and down, swirling round trees and bushes, sometimes getting snared as they caught on the branches. There was a feeling of gaiety in the air, a sense of celebration; of welcome.
 

A tall priest I’d never seen before walked silently towards me. He stopped just a few steps away, bowed his head. And then I saw what he saw. A void, a dark deep hole in the grass. It was a freshly dug grave, and the priest was here to conduct a burial. Behind him walked a small procession. Leading it was a polished wooden coffin, its lid crowned with a mass of white roses. Like the ones climbing round the door at Coombe, I thought drowsily. Carrying the coffin were four pallbearers, tall men in dark suits and black ties. Without surprise, I realised that the two men bearing the front end of the casket were Adam and Danny. Behind the coffin was a small cortege of mourners. I recognised Lola, holding Edie close on her hip. Next to her, to my astonishment, walked Ben. Behind him were a man and woman I didn’t know, holding the hands of a young woman between them. She had red hair, and the lights kissed her face with kindness. She laughed at the darting flickering flames, which danced like the guttering gleams of a Christmas candle, joyful and gay; she let them tease and tickle her eyes and mouth. Then came Queenie in a smart black hat with a feather, next to an elderly man who shuffled sorrowfully along. He didn’t look well; his face was white and gaunt. The playful white lights in the graveyard darted quickly round him, as if they were trying to comfort him. No, that wasn’t quite right. They weren’t trying to comfort the old man, they were trying to cheer him up. They brushed like will o’ the wisps around his head, touching his face with mirthful jollity.