I Do Not Sleep (17 page)

Oh, say can you see/By the dawn’s early light?
the doorbell chimed patriotically.

The Charmer had arrived.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

We had dinner at the small kitchen table. Len was indeed a true gentleman, as Queenie had promised. He was an impressive sight. When he came through the front door, drenched and covered in fisherman’s oilskins, I was struck by his height. Six foot three at least, I thought. And he was shrunken now by age, so he must have been at least a couple of inches taller in his prime. But he walked slowly, shuffling out of the night into our warm, golden room. He was old; a man of great age; possibly in his nineties? I wondered how far he’d walked in this transport-less village to get to my house. I knew he lived locally, but it was a bad night, and Polperro was hilly and long.

Len told us tales about previous Cornish storms: families trapped in caves on the beach, foolish tourists out fishing in rock pools who ignorantly failed to monitor the tide and the relentless lowering of the sky. They survived, though, these naive out-of-towners; rescued by local expertise and diligent lifeboat volunteers. He talked about floods, and seaside houses destroyed by water. I suppose you could say his stories were a bit gloomy, especially as the rain was still crashing on the roof with no immediate promise of respite.

And yet, his voice was so gentle and rumbling soft, his manner so humorous and warm, that he transformed these perilous adventures into arcane fairytales, always with a happy ending. I liked Len a lot. Queenie was right. He was a sweetie.

After dinner we went back to the sitting room. I offered Len some wine. He shook his head, saying that like all true Cornishmen he drank only whisky and beer. I had neither, but he said not to worry, and produced a hipflask from his pocket. ‘Never leave home without it,’ he twinkled, ‘unless I’m going to the Blue Peter.’

‘Well, you’ve certainly drunk us dry there before, Len,’ said Queenie in a hearty voice, and I could tell she was egging him on, encouraging him to unleash his old Cornish ‘charms,’ or ‘spells’, whatever you wanted to call them.

I fetched a glass and a jug of cold water from the kitchen. He accepted the first, but declined the water. ‘You only want to drink a good malt straight, my dear,’ he said, and poured the Scotch into the heavy glass. He patted his pocket again, brought out a pipe and asked if I’d mind if he smoked. I felt totally nonplussed. I couldn’t let him light up inside; this was not my house, and a notice by the door stated unequivocally that guests were requested not to smoke. I stumbled apologetically that smoking was not allowed in here, but he gracefully gestured towards the porch. ‘Oh, don’t be silly, Len,’ said Queenie disapprovingly. ‘It’s pouring down. You’ll catch your death.’

Len smiled, cocked his head, and raised his fingers to his lips in a shushing motion. We listened obediently. The spew of pelting rain seemed to pause, take a breath. The heavy splashing drops receded, like the fading soundtrack at the end of a movie. A minute later, there was absolute silence. The rain had gone. Len opened the front door to a moonlit night. The clouds had disappeared. The stars crowded round the moon like a milky shawl, pulsing tentatively, trying to magnify their brightness, infants in cross competition to impress their silvery mother. The wind had dropped. The night was warm. Cornwall had imperiously changed its mind. Summer was back.

Queenie looked at me significantly. She whispered, ‘See, Molly. That’s what Charmers do. They can control the weather.’

‘Pity he didn’t do it earlier,’ I replied cynically. ‘He could have saved us a hell of a day.’ Queenie actually stuck her tongue out at me. We were regressing into childhood by the hour.

We walked out onto the porch, Queenie bringing tea towels to dry off the chairs. I brought out the cushions I’d hastily removed the previous evening when the storm began to crackle in the distance. Len sat down with his Scotch and lit his pipe. Queenie and I poured more wine, and settled on the porch with sighs of contentment.

‘Cornwall is so amazing,’ I sighed. ‘Just when you least expect it, everything is perfect again.’

Len turned to look at me, and leaned deeper into his chair. I’d left the front door open, and the soft candlelight and fierce blaze of the fire looked safe and welcoming behind me.

Lulled by the moonlight and the wine, I snuggled back into my cushions and asked, with the faintest hint of insolence, ‘So. What’s a Charmer, Len? Are you a sort of magician, or a white witch?’ I smiled.

Len puffed on his pipe, silent and perfectly at ease. He raised his eyebrows at me and I immediately felt a fool.

I finished my attempt at conversation; Len sipped his whisky, and Queenie began a sort of formal, self-conscious introduction. This seemed ridiculous, since we’d all just shared supper, but I soon realised it was necessary for both of them. Queenie was cross with me for being sceptical and needed to bolster her friend’s credentials. And Len? Well, Len just needed to drift for a moment, zone out; as I watched him smoke, his eyes contentedly closed, I tried not to think about school kids, students, Ben and my boys, puffing on spliffs, turning on and tuning out. But Len needed no illegal substance, just his tobacco and Scotch. He sat on the porch, wheezing slightly, smiling gently, rocking back and forth on his chair.

Queenie said, apologetically but also full of self-importance, that she’d told Len about Joey and his accident – also that his body had never been found.

She’d told him about me too, my anguish; my conviction that my son wasn’t dead, and my belief that he was begging me to find him; that Joey was not at the bottom of the sea, but trapped in a place from which he was desperate to escape.

I felt a bit upset. Joey’s accident and my grief were hardly news, and yet I felt the story was mine to tell, not Queenie’s.

From Len there was more silence, more rocking and supping. I wondered if he was getting drunk. I looked at Queenie, raising my eyebrows and signalling that I was not enjoying this. She shook her head, raised her fingers to her lips and mimed
Shh!

‘Look, Queenie,’ I said quietly but truculently, ‘all I want to know is what exactly is a Charmer? You’re the one who keeps telling me about them, and to be honest I’m still none the wiser.’

‘Molly,’ said Queenie, trying to sound lofty but starting to get annoyed, ‘You’ve been coming down to Cornwall for years. Surely you know what Charmers do?’

‘Actually, no, I don’t. I’m sorry, Len. I don’t want to be rude, and it’s lovely to meet you. But to be honest, this is all getting a bit much. Queenie’s right about one thing; I’m desperately unhappy about my son Joey. I’ve never been back to Cornwall since he disappeared, but my family persuaded me to come here this summer. It was meant to be a healing process, but for me it’s turned into a nightmare. Since I came here, he’s come back to me – he needs me; I have to find him, and if I don’t, well, I think I shall probably lose my mind.’

Queenie opened her mouth again, but Len stopped her speaking with a peremptory gesture.

‘Molly,’ he said, and his voice was gentle. ‘You say your family meant this stay to be a healing process. Well, they call the likes of me “Charmers”, and that’s what we do. We cure. We have a gift, God-given, not magic or witchcraft but holy, which tells us what to do to stop people hurting. Not just people, mind you; animals too. There are those who say we cast spells, or charms, to end suffering or bad luck. And yes, I suppose it’s all a little medieval; we use stones, bits of material, people’s hair, whatever, to help the spell along. We write down incantations too; the power of language to soothe suffering humans has always been very strong. But to be honest, although I’ll do all of that to make people feel better, I know that some of us, just a few, are rooted not only in nature, but in something else, something just as profound, every bit as fundamental, and yet more difficult to understand. The supernatural, we’d call it. And I don’t mean witchcraft, although the old belief in Wicca, using nature’s own magic to help prevent misfortune, is at the root of what we do.

‘The point is, Molly, that we try to help. And I’d like to help you.’ Len paused and poured himself more whisky from his hipflask.

‘Of course,’ he continued, ‘I remember what happened when your son’s boat was found wrecked near Looe. Everyone was talking about you, how you were staying in your boy’s cottage in Polperro and used to walk the coastal path every day, down past Talland beach, and on over the path to Looe. Do you remember that?’

‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘That time is just a blur to me. I do vaguely remember walking every day, as if I was possessed, but not where I was going to, or why.’

‘Do you remember the place you always used to stop?’

I shrugged. ‘No. Well, I suppose Looe, to get a cab back to Polperro? It’s a long walk there and back.’

‘Yes, it is. But no, you never even went into Looe, and you always turned straight round after you’d finished looking at… the place you sought, and walked back to Polperro. The whole trip took you at least a couple of hours, depending on how long you stopped.’

‘Stopped where?’ I asked sharply. I knew this was important.

‘You stopped at a place on the footpath where you could get a good view of the island. Looe Island, just a couple of miles offshore from the mainland. You really don’t remember?’

‘No. I’ve never heard of it.’

Queenie leaned forward. ‘Oh, Molly, you must know Looe Island. You can’t miss it.’

My heart began to thump. I tried very hard to remember an island near Looe. For the life of me I could not.

‘What’s it like?’ I asked.

‘It’s small,’ Len said, ‘only about a mile in circumference, twenty-two and a half acres in all. It’s very ancient; geologically the rocks in the area were laid down some three hundred and fifty million years ago. It has a very interesting history.’ Len paused. ‘It’s also known as St George’s Island. But its original name, back in the earliest times, barely remembered now even among folk who’ve lived here for generations but fortunately passed down in ancient scripts, is the Island of St Michael of Lammana. That dates back to the thirteenth century.’

Lammana
. The name wound its way through my head. I felt absolutely rigid with terror. My head ached, my stomach filled with sourness. I wanted to vomit. And then there was clarity; and I found I knew.

St Michael of Lammana was the place I dreamed about, the place from which Joey’s desperate voice called.
Mother. Mother. Find me. Find me
.

I asked Len to excuse me. I needed to go to bed. Would he mind leaving? He said he needed to show me the island; it was the right thing to do, he told me, the only way forward. To persuade him to go, I agreed he should meet me here at the cottage tomorrow morning after breakfast. I watched him leave. When he got to the bottom of the steps he turned, saying goodbye with a slight wave. The porch light caught his face, and in that moment I knew I’d seen him before. His eyes, his mouth, his shuffling walk, were infinitely familiar to me. And yet I was sure I’d never met him, or laid eyes on him before this night.

I found myself shivering as I watched him walk away down the path. I closed the front door. Queenie was still there, pouring more wine, in the sitting room. She gestured that I should sit by the fire, and reluctantly I obeyed. I was glad she was there; I was spooked, and her presence was a comfort.

The old grandfather clock, sturdy and strong, struck the hour with its mellow chime. Eleven o’clock. I couldn’t believe we had been talking for four hours. The whole evening seemed like a dream; I couldn’t remember what I’d said, or what Len had tried to tell me. My head was as muddy and confused as it had been in my haunted sleep at Coombe.

Queenie told me gently that I needed to go to bed. I was all too willing, and yet I wanted her to leave first. It was clear from the way she was fussing around me that she intended to stay. There was a comfortable spare bedroom, and I could tell all too easily she had her eye on it. I felt a bit weak, but determined she should leave me alone. I didn’t need a nanny on this strangely eventful night. I needed to be in a quiet, solitary bower, all humans banished. All I wanted was to wrap myself in a dream and see Joey.

Eventually, Queenie got the hint and prepared to go home to her cosy house next to the Blue Peter, telling me she would be back with Len in the morning to take me to the island. She closed the front door. I heard her footsteps leaving the porch, and twitched the front curtain. I watched her turn right and walk sturdily towards the village. I felt both sorry and relieved to see her go.

I went up to bed and fell instantly asleep. All I dreamed of was last night’s storm. It crashed around the house, and in my sleep I watched through the bedroom window. The sea was black and grey, the lightning crackled and shot out bolts of broken silver. The waves were terrifying, high as mountains. And bobbing around on the tumultuous ocean were dozens of boats, small, fragile, completely unequal to this massive Atlantic tsunami. One by one, the boats disappeared; they broke up, shattered like matchstick toys as the waves devoured them, and I saw them sink down to some dreadful fate, to be swallowed up for ever by this inexorable and merciless emperor of death.