The Mermaid Garden (20 page)

We’ll see you back at one.”

“Whatever. I’m going to change, Rafa. I’ll meet you in the hall in

five.”

Clementine left them on the terrace and found that once she was

alone in her bedroom she was able to breathe again.

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed into the bathroom mirror. “He’s deli-

cious. He’s even more delicious than I recall. And he remembered me.”

She painted her lashes with mascara and covered up the dark circles

beneath her eyes with concealer. “I don’t know why I bother, really.

I mean, he’ll never look at me. Why would he? And he probably has a

girlfriend already. Men like that are usually taken.” She squirted herself with Penhaligon’s Bluebell eau de toilette. Sighing melodramatically,

she watched the excitement stain her cheeks pink.

What will Sylvia say when I tell her that the Argentine I never thought
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I’d see again has come to spend the summer with us? Is it Fate? Am I destined
to fall in love and live happily ever after?

She exchanged her white jeans for a pair in blue denim and chose

a blue Jack Wills check shirt which she wore over a white T-shirt.

She hadn’t yet painted her toenails for flip-flops, so she wore blue

Nike trainers instead, which were very casual. She didn’t want to look

like she was trying too hard, so she left her hair as it was. However,

when she appeared in the hall, Marina wasn’t fooled and she smiled at

her knowingly. Clementine noticed that her stepmother’s cheeks were

also glowing with the same brand of pink, and she pitied her for her

delusion. If Rafa was a little higher than Clementine on the food chain, he was on a totally
different
food chain from Marina, being so much younger. She didn’t mean to feel smug, but smugness crept upon her all

the same.

Both Jennifer and Rose were also in the hall, trying to look like they

had something official to do there, but deceiving no one. They resembled a pair of curious cows with their long eyelashes and dumb expressions,

jostling each other as they moved slowly around the display of lilies.

“Right, ready. Let’s go,” Clementine announced, holding up the car

keys.

“I’m looking forward to this,” said Rafa, following her outside.

She stood in front of her red Mini Cooper, excited that it was just

the two of them. “Are you sure you don’t mind my car?” she asked, un-

locking it with the remote.

“It’s a charming little car. Why would I mind?”

“Dad’s too long-legged for it.”

“Your father is very tall. I am not.”

“Well, isn’t that lucky, then?”

“For today, yes.”

Clementine climbed in, hastily gathering up the empty coffee cartons,

Cadbury’s Flake wrappers, and magazines that had collected on the pas-

senger seat. She tossed them into the back and adjusted Rafa’s seat to

give him more leg room. He sat down, and she felt a sudden prickle of

electricity for their arms almost touched across the hand brake.

“Now for the fun part,” she said, turning the key and pressing a

button on the dashboard. Slowly the roof folded away, leaving them

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drenched in sunshine, the breeze gently sweeping through the car to

carry away the smell of warm leather and any residue of Clementine’s

irritation. Without her family to hamper her, she felt her confidence

grow. “Isn’t this a joy?”

“It certainly is. So, where to first?”

“I’m going to take you on a magical mystery tour.”

“That sounds exciting.”

“It is. Marina can take you to the beach, and Dad can drive you around

so you get your bearings. Jake can take you to the Wayfarer. But I’m not going to take you there. No, I’m going to take you to a secret little place of mine that holds no interest to anyone else in the county but me.”

“They said you didn’t like Devon.”

“They’re right,” she replied, driving up the avenue of pink rhodo-

dendrons. “I don’t like
their
brand of Devon, but I have my own secret Devon that I like very much, and I’m going to show it to you if you

promise not to tell anyone.”

“I promise.”

She glanced at him and he grinned back. “You might even like to

paint it sometime.”

They drove up the windy lanes lined with phosphorescent green

leaves and delicate white cow parsley. The air was rich with the scent

of regeneration and the hedgerows alive with young blue tits and

goldfinches. With the wind in their hair and a sense of elation from

the sight and smell of the sea, they chatted away with the ease of old

friends. He told her of his love of horses and the rides he enjoyed across the Argentine pampa; of the vast, flat horizon that glows like amber

in the dying light at the end of the day and the dawn in early spring,

when the land is veiled with mist. He told her of the prairie hares that play in the long grasses, and the smell of gardenia that would always remind him of home. And he told her of his mother, who worried about

him constantly, even though he was in his thirties, and his dead father whom he still mourned, and his siblings who were so very much older

than he that he barely knew them at all.

By the time they reached their destination Clementine felt like a dif-

ferent person. Her usual defensiveness had been carried off by his en-

thusiasm, and in its place there remained a growing sense of confidence.

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Rafa had lifted her out of herself with stories of his life in Argentina, and she had listened intently, her heart swelling with compassion—

and surprise that he had chosen to confide in her.

She parked the car by the gate at the top of a field and got out. Below them, on the top of the cliff, stood a pretty little church with a turreted tower and gray slate roof.

“Here we are,” she announced. “It doesn’t look like much . . .”

“Oh, but it does. It’s the house that God forgot.”

She smiled, pleased he liked it. “You’re so right. That’s exactly what it is, the house that God forgot, and doesn’t it look sad and forlorn?”

They climbed over the gate and walked down the hill. The grass was

long and lush, scattered with bright yellow buttercups that gleamed

in the sun. Fat bees buzzed around the flowers, and a pair of butter-

flies fluttered about them in a flirtatious dance. As they got closer Rafa could see that the windows were boarded up. The church did indeed

look sad and forlorn.

“No one comes here. Everyone’s forgotten it. You can’t even see it

from the lane. I spotted it from the sea when I went out fishing with

Dad as a child, and it pulled at me somehow. As soon as I could drive

I found it. I’ll show you inside.”

“You can get inside?”

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as they say. Come on.”

She hurried round to the back of the church where a few steps led

down to a little wooden door carved into the stone. “Must have been a

back entrance for dwarfs,” she said with a chuckle. “Or maybe people

were very small all those hundreds of years ago.”

“How old do you think it is?”

“Well, inside, there are tombs of people who died in the thirteenth

century.”

“
Increíble
!” he exclaimed under his breath.

She pushed, and the door opened with a deep groan. Inside, the air

was cold and dank. They left the door wide open to let in the light and proceeded up a windy stone staircase into the main body of the church.

It would have been dark were it not for the holes in the roof and where some of the boards blocking the windows had rotted in the damp and

come away from their frames. They stood in silence and looked around.

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In spite of the cold the place felt strangely warm, as if the air it-

self were made of something soft. The altar was draped in the habitual

white cloth with a mildewed vase sitting empty on the top. The pews

were in their neat rows, made of oak, blackened over the years, and

on the stone beneath them remained a few cross-stitched hassocks for

prayer. On a table by the front door was a pile of green hymn books,

and opposite, a crimson velvet curtain separated the nave from a little annex where the stone font was dry.

“It’s as if they finished a service and left, locking the door behind

them forever,” said Clementine.

Rafa sat on the organ stool and began to play a few notes. The inhar-

monious sound echoed off the walls, unsettling a couple of pigeons that had made their nest underneath the eaves.

“Good Lord, that organ’s out of tune!” Clementine exclaimed, put-

ting her hands over her ears. She stood in the choir stall that consisted of two rows of pews facing each other in front of the altar. “Do you

play?” she asked.

“No. Can’t you tell?”

“I thought it was the organ that sounded dreadful, not you.”

He got up. “So what do you do when you come here on your own?”

“Nothing.” She shrugged. “I wander around and read the inscrip-

tions on the tombstones. The names are wonderful. I stand above them

and wonder whether all that remains of them is beneath my feet, or

whether their spirits are in some other dimension beyond our senses.

I’d like to believe there’s a Heaven.”

Rafa wandered over to a large slab that stood out from the rest by

virtue of its size and the clarity of the words engraved onto it. “Ar-

chibald Henry Treelock,” he read.

“Great name, Archibald.”

“What do you think Archibald might be doing now?”

“My head tells me that dear old Archie is nothing but dust. But

my heart tells me he’s in Heaven dancing a branle with his wife,

Gunilda.”

“I think your heart is right. At least, that’s what my heart tells me,

too. I don’t believe my father is dust and earth. I believe his old body is buried in the pampa but his spirit is somewhere else.” He ran his eyes

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around the church and lowered his voice. “Perhaps he is here with us

now, in the house that God forgot.”

“I haven’t yet encountered death. Both sets of grandparents are alive,

unfortunately. My mother’s parents are very tiresome, but thankfully

they live far away so I never see them.”

“Where do they live?”

“In Scotland with my mother.”

He stared at her for a long moment, frowning. “Sorry, I don’t under-

stand. Your mother lives here with you, no?”

“No, Marina’s not my mother. God forbid! No, my mother lives in

Edinburgh with her second husband, Martin, who’s a fool. Marina is

my stepmother.”

“I thought she was . . .”

“Most people do. But I don’t know why. We don’t look at all alike.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I look like my mother, which is a pity as she’s no beauty. I was taught that beauty comes from within, and I choose to believe it.” She gave a

hollow laugh.

Rafa wandered up the steps to the pulpit. “Does Marina have any

children of her own?”

“No. She’s unable to have children. It’s a very sore point, so don’t ever bring it up.”

“I see.” He put his hands on the edge of the pulpit as if he were a

vicar about to give a sermon. His face looked grave.

“Jake and I are the closest to children she’s ever going to get.”

“You don’t seem very sympathetic.”

“Am I so transparent?” She gave a little sniff. “We’re very different,

she and I.”

“How old were you when she became your stepmother?”

“Three—and I believed she came to steal my father away.”

Rafa descended the little staircase and stood before her. His expres-

sion was so full of compassion she felt a gentle tug somewhere in the

middle of her chest. She hadn’t meant to disclose so much about herself.

“I understand,” he said, and touched her arm. The way that he

touched her and the dark shadow that made his face look so serious

convinced her that he did, indeed, understand.

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“Thank you,” was all she could think of to say.

He smiled gently. “Come, let us go back out into the sunshine. Is

there a beach below? I’d love to see the sea.”

He put his hand in the small of her back and led her past the altar

to the narrow stone staircase by which they had entered. The church

was
her
secret place and she was
his
tour guide, and yet, in that brief moment, she felt as if
he
was looking after
her
. She basked in the new sensation, feeling feminine in a way she had never felt before. Why she had opened up to a total stranger, she didn’t know. Perhaps
because
he was a stranger with no preconceptions about her or her family. Or perhaps because there was something intimate in his soft brown eyes that

drew her out of herself and won her trust.

They emerged into the sunshine like a pair of vampires, blinking in

the glare. The buttercups shone brightly like small sparks of fire, and the air smelled thick with life after the stale smell of decay inside the church. They inhaled with satisfaction and let the warm sun caress their faces. Below, the sea was calm, lapping the rocks in a lazy rhythm as