Postcards from the Past (5 page)

*   *   *

‘Tedn’t nat’ral,’ says old Mrs Probus stubbornly. ‘And I weren’t never no good at spellin’.’

Each chair in the over-crowded living-room of Mrs Probus’ small council flat is occupied by several cats. They lounge languidly, watching Tilly with indifference. A few prowl, rubbing against Mrs Probus’ hair-covered trackies, opening their mouths in tiny mewling cries.

‘The spelling isn’t important,’ says Tilly. ‘Your son wants to hear from you. Of course he does. He wants to know you’re OK. And you like to hear from him, don’t you? Look, he’s left you three messages. You haven’t read any of them.’

Three or four cats circle them, tails waving, whilst Mrs Probus stares frowningly at the screen, peering at the messages, reading each one slowly.

‘’E don’t say nort,’ she mutters at last. ‘Could’ve phoned.’

‘It’s quicker,’ says Tilly coaxingly, scooping up a persistent tabby and stroking it. ‘He can just log in and dash off a quick message to you and be back at work a minute or two later. If he telephoned it would take much longer. And anyway, when he arranged these sessions he told us that you don’t always answer the phone.’

Mrs Probus looks at Tilly mischievously. ‘It do depend on when he do phone, doan’t it? Might be watching
Emmerdale.
Or
Flog It.
Never mind they ole messages, my ’ansome. Shall us ’ave a cuppa?’

Tilly wonders for how much longer she can breathe the pungent, cat-laden air, but grins back at her.

‘Go on then,’ she says. ‘But don’t you tell my boss.’

*   *   *

She phones Sarah from the car where she sits with the window down, gulping cold fresh air.

‘Hopeless,’ Tilly says. ‘You’re going to have to tell her son that she is email resistant and he might be wasting his money. I don’t mind trying, but he needs to know. We sent him a message and I’m sure she’s grasped it – she’s not stupid – but her heart isn’t in it.’

‘He’s feeling guilty,’ says Sarah. ‘He and his wife have divorced and she’s moved down near Penzance. The kids have grown up and left home and he does this long-distance lorry driving and wants to keep an eye on his old mum while he’s away.’

Tilly laughs. ‘I don’t think his old mum wants an eye kept on her. She’s perfectly happy with her cats and the telly.’

‘Very ungrateful,’ says Sarah. ‘I’m off to do the school run. Ben’s bringing a friend home for tea.’

‘OK. I shall head for home after the next appointment. It’s pub night. See you tomorrow.’

*   *   *

Tilly drives home through the lanes, wondering if Sarah’s venture will eventually make enough money to support both of them. It’s fun helping her to get U-Connect up and running, and they’ve both been surprised by the level of the response to their advertising campaign, but can it provide enough money for two people? And does she want to commit totally to it? She prefers to work with a team of people, bouncing ideas off one another, but such jobs are very thin on the ground. She’s been offered more work at the pub. It has an annexe with two self-contained holiday flats and the girl who does the changeover cleaning on Saturday mornings is leaving. The extra money will be very useful whilst things aren’t going quite according to plan, though there aren’t many holiday-makers around at the moment.

Tilly makes a face; her mother is not pleased with her for throwing up her job at the Newquay hotel though she knows that Dad is more sympathetic.

‘Your mum just wants to know that you’re in a secure place,’ he told her when she Skyped to tell them that she’d given in her notice. ‘She worries about you. We’re a long way off and you’re our only chick. Oh, I know you’ve got lots of friends and that you always get a job somewhere, but we really hoped that this was going to work for you.’

‘So did I,’ protested Tilly. ‘I really did. They said they wanted the hotel to be brought right up to date and it was going to be such an exciting project. But they blocked me at every turn. Every suggestion, anything new or fresh was rubbished. They just want a yes man to take the flak. I can’t tell you how frustrating it was, Dad.’

‘I know, but look, Tills, you can’t sleep on Sarah’s sofa for ever. Go and see Dom. He’d love to have you there until you get sorted. Promise you’ll go and see him. Mum’ll feel happier if you’ve got somewhere sensible to stay.’

Despite her protestations that she is quite capable of looking after herself, Tilly is very happy to be with Dom. It was fun at first to stay with Sarah and the boys, and listen to her plans for U-Connect, but not so good once Dave was due home on leave. Anyway, she loves Dom and likes being with him: he’s laid-back and detached, in a good way. And she loves Ed and Billa, too, and the old butter factory. It’s such a romantic story, the way they’re all related, and she’s known them for ever, so it’s like they’re her family. It’s sad for Dom and Ed and Billa that both Dom’s girls have settled in South Africa, in Johannesburg, where Dom met and married their mother, Griet.

‘It’s odd, isn’t it?’ Tilly once said to Billa. ‘That Dom should stay here now he’s retired and Griet’s dead. You’d think he’d want to be near his family.’

‘Dom’s a Cornishman,’ Billa answered. ‘He’s a St Enedoc. We’re his family, too. We wanted him to change his name once we knew who he really was but he was too stubborn. He’s moved around the world so much with his engineering work, but there’s nowhere like Cornwall as far as he’s concerned. Harry’s just like him. He’s a true St Enedoc, young Harry.’

Tilly agrees with this. She is extremely fond of Dom’s youngest grandchild – the only grandson – who comes to stay with Dom whenever he can and loves to surf and sail.

She parks beside the old shed, which Dom uses as a garage, and gets out. A path leads between lilac and hydrangea bushes to the back door where Dom is kicking off his boots. Bessie greets Tilly with delight, and she puts down her bag and bends to kiss her on the nose.

‘Can you smell cat?’ she asks her.

‘Good day?’ asks Dom. ‘Lots of punters requiring your skills?’

He dusts crumbly earth from his dark green corduroy trousers, which are tucked into thick socks, and follows her into the cottage.

‘Pretty good, actually,’ she says. ‘But is it to be my life’s work? That’s what we want to know, isn’t it, Bessie?’

Bessie wags her tail enthusiastically.

‘The question is,’ says Dom, ‘whether there will be enough work for you and Sarah to be able to take a decent salary each. And what happens when she moves nearer to Plymouth? The cottage is only a temporary long-stop, isn’t it?’

‘It’s her mum’s second home. When Dave was posted down from Portsmouth they got a rented house set up near Plymouth, on the edge of Dartmoor, and then the owners changed their minds at the last minute. George was due, so they decided to go into the cottage until they had time to look around for a house nearer to the dockyard. I think that’s on the cards for Dave’s next leave.’

‘And when they go?’

‘We’ve talked about that. We don’t have the sort of client base that is going to keep coming back. Most of the things we’re doing are very short term – learning to Skype or email – and we’ll have plenty of notice when Sarah goes. This was a kind of trial run to test the water. The point is that she can do this wherever she is.’

‘And what about you?’

‘Ah,’ says Tilly. ‘Yes, well, the thing is that even if Sarah moves away I could carry on once we’ve got it all set up. If I want to.’

She smiles at Dom’s expression: it’s clear that Dom doesn’t believe that she’ll want to.

‘I don’t see you as a solo operator,’ he says. ‘You like people around you.’

She nods. This is quite true; she is certainly happier working with a team.

‘I suppose I am working with people. Going to see people like Mrs Anderson and Mrs Probus.’

‘It’s not the same,’ he says. ‘Those are your clients. You can’t kick ideas about with them or let off steam.’

‘I know,’ she answers. ‘The point is that I’m helping Sarah to get started and earning a bit along the way. She’s slightly hamstrung with George so I can be useful there. If something else comes up that’s irresistible then I’ll go for it. She knows the score. Meanwhile I’ve got some extra work at the pub. Changeovers on Saturday mornings.’

Dom fills the kettle. ‘I suppose there aren’t many holiday-makers around at the moment though, are there? No strangers around?’

She glances at him, puzzled by the phrasing of his question. ‘There are always couples having a weekend away, even in February. Or the occasional twitcher. Or really dedicated walkers. The Chough’s been very popular ever since Giles Coren stayed there and did that rave review.’ She glances at her watch. It takes nearly twenty minutes to drive to the pub. ‘I’m going to have to get a move on but, yes, please, I’d love a cup of tea when I’ve changed.’

*   *   *

By eight o’clock the small bar is humming with laughter and conversation. Tilly pauses in her glass-collecting round of the tables and stoops to put another log on the fire in the big granite inglenook. A man is sitting alone at the small table in the corner and he smiles at her as the logs catch into flame and the sparks dance up in the sooty cavern of the huge chimney. He looks slightly unusual, slightly foreign. His deeply scored skin is tanned a pale brown, which sits oddly with his russet-grey thickly curling hair. He wears a black rollneck – cashmere, she judges – and black moleskins quite tightly cut. Resting beside his chair is a bag, a kind of soft leather satchel on a long strap, which is hooked around the arm of the chair. It is an unusual kind of bag for a man to have in Cornwall – more of a London fashion – and she wonders if he is a writer or a musician. She guesses that he’s in his late fifties, early sixties, but he looks lean and tough and a bit edgy. He might be French or Italian but when he speaks he sounds English enough, though she can barely hear his voice above the noise in the bar.

‘Jolly cold tonight,’ he says. ‘We certainly need the fire.’

She smiles at him, nodding, and he smiles back and she notices that his eyes are a bright frosty grey. Suddenly she remembers Dom asking, ‘Any strangers around?’ and then someone calls her name and she forgets all about it.

Later, when she glances across to the table beside the fire, the chair is empty and the man is gone.

CHAPTER FOUR

Ed sits at his desk, checking his notes, comfortable and happy in this room, which was his father’s study. Here, Harry St Enedoc’s presence can still be felt; here he gathered around him all he treasured most that would not be missed in the town house in Truro. His bookcase full of first editions of modern writers, the paintings by local artists that he valued, a little glass-fronted silk-lined cabinet with its three shelves of netsukes, the small tray containing six exquisite miniatures of his ancestors were all placed carefully in this room.

It was here Ed went as a child to grieve for his father; here he tried to recapture those magical afternoons when the two of them shared a private world. Together they looked at the miniatures and Ed would listen again to the stories of each delicately painted face, each history so familiar, yet never stale however often he heard it. He’d stare at his great- – many greats – grandparents and their two daughters and two sons, proud that he so closely resembled the younger son. Sitting with his father in the big armchair he listened to readings from some of the books – Conan Doyle was a favourite, John Buchan another – and was allowed to handle some of the netsukes, those tiny, perfect carvings that were like toys, and make up stories and games around them. These were his own special times with his father, which his mother and Billa never interrupted.

After his father died Ed continued to go to the study. He sat at the desk in his father’s chair and worked as his father had worked before him, channelling his grief and fear into things that could be contained, understood. He made lists, and painted flowers and birds and checked them against the pictures in the encyclopaedias and reference books just as his father had shown him. Glancing up from time to time, certain that his father was just there by the bookshelf, waiting for the comforting hand on his shoulder and the warm breath on his cheek, Ed used all that his father had taught him to come to terms with the terrible finality of death. Everything that represented security was here, in this small room, and whilst that remained intact he could manage. Since all business and family matters were handled from Truro, the study remained a deeply personal and private room that slowly became Ed’s domain … until the arrival of Andrew and Tris.

*   *   *

‘We’ll have to clear out the study so that Tris can have his own room,’ their mother said in that bright voice that she’d begun to use whenever Andrew and Tris were mentioned. It was a voice that implied that things were going to be such fun, and that Ed and Billa must surely be anticipating it with as much pleasure as she was. They’d met Andrew and Tris, now, and the meeting had not been a particularly happy one. Andrew was confident, proprietorial with their mother, who was so nervous that it seemed she might shatter with the strain of it all. Billa spoke only when required and looked awkward; Ed was afraid to appear disloyal to his sister, and to his father’s memory, and felt deeply uncomfortable. Only Tris was at ease. He stared coolly at his putative stepbrother and -sister, stepping forward obediently to shake hands on his father’s instruction, but his look was amused, calculating.

‘Just you wait,’ that look seemed to say.

And they don’t have to wait long.

‘We’ll have to clear out the study,’ said their mother a few days after this meeting, ‘so that Tris can have his own room,’ and now, at last, Ed joined the battle in which Billa had enlisted weeks before.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. You can’t.’

They both turned to look at him: his mother with anxiety, Billa with surprise. Ed didn’t care. He thought about the study; the watercolour paintings, the John Smart miniatures, the netsukes and the books. In the five years since his father died he had added his own treasures: his paints, his books, his model warships. The study was not a big room – it had been the smallest of all the bedrooms – but it was his and he would fight for it.