The Shell Seekers (19 page)
She said, "I've just had the most wonderful idea." i "What's that?"
"Antonia can come and live with my mother."
If she expected instant enthusiasm from him, she did not get it. Hank considered this at some length before asking cautiously, "Will she want to?"
"Of course. I told you, she loved Mumma. When she left Ibiza, Antonia didn't want her to go. And how much better, when she's only just lost her father, to have a few weeks of quiet and recovery with somebody like my mother before she starts hiking the streets of London trying to find herself a job."
"You've got a point there."
"And on Mumma's side, it wouldn't be like having a housekeeper, it would be like having a friend to stay. I'll suggest it today. See what she thinks. But I'm certain she won't say no. I'm almost certain she won't say no."
Solving problems and making decisions invariably revitalized Olivia, and all at once she felt better. She sat up, pulled down the sun-screen, and inspected herself in the mirror set in its back. She saw her face, still deathly pale, and there were smudges, like bruises, beneath her eyes. The dark fur of her coat collar emphasized this pallor, and she hoped that her mother would not remark upon it. She put on a bit of lipstick and combed her hair, then folded back the sun-screen and turned her attention to the road ahead.
By now they had come through Burford, there were only three miles or so to go, and the way was familiar. "We turn right, here," she told Hank, and he swung the car into the narrow lane, signposted "Temple Padley," and slowed down to a cautious crawl. The road climbed, twisting up the side of a hill, and at its summit the village came into view, nestled like a child's toy in the dip of the valley, with the silver waters of the Windrush, like a ribbon, winding by. The first houses came to meet them; golden stone cottages of great antiquity and beauty. They saw the old wood church, sheltered by yews. A man was driving a flock of sheep, and outside the pub, which was called the Sudeley Arms, cars were parked. Here, Hank drew up and turned off the engine.
Slightly surprised by this, Olivia turned to look at him. "Are you by any chance feeling in need of a drink?" she asked him politely.
He smiled and shook his head. "No. But I think you would prefer to have a little time with your Mother alone. I'll get out here and join you later, if you'll tell me how to find her house."
"It's the third one down the road. On the right, with a pair of white gates. But you don't have to do this."
"I know." He patted her hand. "But I think it would make things easier for both of you."
"You're very sweet," she told him, and meant it.
"I'd like to bring something for your mother. If I suggested to the landlord that he sell me a couple of bottles of wine, would he oblige?"
"I'm sure, particularly if you tell him they're for Mrs. Keel-ing. He'll probably flog you his most expensive claret."
He grinned, opened the door, and got out of the car. She watched him cross the cobbled yard and disappear through the entrance of the pub, cautiously ducking his tall head beneath the lintel. When he had gone, she undid her safety belt, slid behind the driving wheel, and started up the engine. It was nearly twelve o'clock.
Penelope Keeling stood in the middle of her warm and cluttered kitchen and tried to think what she had to do next, and then decided there was nothing, because all that could be was already accomplished. She had even found time to go upstairs and change out of her working clothes and into others suitable for an unexpected luncheon party. Olivia was always so elegant, and the least one could do was to tidy oneself up a bit. With this in mind, she had put on a thick cotton brocade skirt (much loved and very old; the material had started its life as a curtain), a man's striped woollen shirt, and a sleeveless cardigan the colour of crimson peonies. Her stockings were dark and thick, her shoes heavy laceups. Gold chains were slung about her neck, and with her hair newly dressed and a bit of scent sprayed about her person, she felt quite festive and filled with pleasant anticipation. Olivia's visits were few and far between, which only made them all the more precious, and ever since the early-morning telephone call from London, she had been in a flurry of preparation.
But now all was ready. Fires lighted in the sitting room and the dining room, drinks set out, wine opened to chambre. Here, in the kitchen, the air was filled with the scent of slowly roasting sirloin, baking onions, and crisping potatoes. She had made pastry, peeled apples, sliced beans (from the deep-freeze), scraped carrots. Later, she would arrange cheeses on a board, grind the coffee, decant the thick cream she had fetched from the village dairy. Tying on an apron to protect her skirt, she washed up the few pieces of kitchen equipment that stood about, and set them in the rack on the draining board. She stowed away a saucepan or two, wiped down the table with a damp cloth, filled a jug and watered her geraniums. Then she took off her apron and hung it on its peg.
Her washing machine had stopped churning. She never did a wash unless the day was good for drying, because she had no spin dryer. She liked laundry to be hung in the open air, giving it a delicious fresh smell, and making it infinitely easier to iron. Olivia and her friend would be arriving at any moment, but she collected the big wicker basket and emptied the tangle of damp linen into this, and, with it hitched up onto her hip, she went out of the kitchen, through the conservatory, and into the garden. She crossed the lawn, went between the gap in the privet hedge and so on to the orchard. Half of this was no longer an orchard. She had created a marvellously prolific vegetable garden, but the other half stayed as it had always been, with gnarled old apple trees, and the Windrush flowing silently beyond the hawthorn hedge.
A long rope was strung between three of these trees, and here Penelope pegged out her washing. Doing this, on a bright fresh morning, was one of her deepest delights. A thrush was singing, and at her feet, thrusting through the tufty damp grass, bulbs were already beginning to shoot. She had planted these herself, thousands of them; daffodils and crocus and scylla and snowdrops. When these faded and the summer grass grew deep and green, other wildflowers raised their heads. Cowslips and cornflowers and scarlet poppies, all grown from seed that she had scattered herself.
Sheets, shirts, pillowcases, stockings, and night-dresses flapped and danced in the thin breeze. When the basket was empty, she picked it up and made her way back to the house, but slowly, in no hurry, visiting first her vegetable garden to check that the rabbits had not been feasting on the young spring cabbage, and then back to pause by her little tree of Viburnum Fragrans, its twiggy stems smothered in deep pink blossom that smelled, miraculously, of summer. She would fetch her specat-eurs and clip a spring or two, to scent the sitting room. She moved on, with every intention of going back indoors, but was diverted once more. This time by the delightful prospect of her house, set back beyond the wide, green lawn. There it stood, washed in sunshine, against a backdrop of bare-branched oak trees and a sky of the most pristine blue. Long and low it lay, whitewashed and half-timbered, with its netted thatch jutting out over the upstairs windows like thick, beetling eyebrows.
Podmore's Thatch. Olivia thought it a ridiculous name, and she felt embarrassed every time she had to say it; she had even suggested that Penelope think up some other name for the old place. But Penelope knew that you couldn't change the name of a house any more than you could change the name of a person. Besides, she had found out from the vicar that William Podmore had been the village thatcher more than two hundred years ago, and the cottage was named for him. Which settled the matter then and there.
Once, it had been two cottages, but it had been converted into one by some previous owner by the simple expedient of knocking doorways in the dividing wall. This meant that the house had two entrances, two rickety stairways, and two bath-rooms. It also meant that all the rooms led into each other, which was inconvenient if you happened to crave a bit of privacy. So, downstairs were kitchen, dining room, sitting room, and then the old kitchen of the second house, which Penelope used as a garden room, and where she kept her straw hats, her rubber boots, her canvas apron, flowerpots, trugs, and trowels. Over this was a cramped apartment filled with all Noel's belongings, and then, in a row, three larger bedrooms. The one over the kitchen was her own.
As well, dark and fusty beneath the thatch, a loft ran the length of the roof, and this was filled with everything that Penelope could not bear to throw away when she finally departed from Oakley Street, and for which there was no space anywhere else. For five years she had promised herself that this winter, she would clear and sort it all out, but each time she climbed the wobbly steps and had a look around, she became disheartened by the enormity of the task and feebly put it off for a little longer.
The garden, when she came here, was a wilderness, but that had been part of the fun. She was a manic gardener and spent every spare moment of her days out of doors, clearing weeds, digging beds, harrowing great loads of manure, cutting out dead wood, planting, taking cuttings, raising seeds. Now, after five years, she was able to stand there and gloat over the fruits of her labour. And did so, forgetting Olivia, forgetting the time. She often did this. Time had lost its importance. That was one of the good things about getting old: you weren't perpetually in a hurry. All her life, Penelope had looked after other people, but now she had no one to think about but herself. There was time to stop and look, and, looking, to remember. Visions widened, like views seen from the slopes of a painfully climbed mountain, and having come so far, it seemed ridiculous not to pause and enjoy them.
Of course, age brought its other horrors. Loneliness and sickness. People were always talking about the loneliness of old age, but at sixty-four, which admittedly was not very old, Penelope relished her solitude. She had never lived alone before, and at first had found it strange, but gradually had learned to accept it as a blessing and to indulge herself in all sorts of reprehensible ways, like getting up when she felt like it, scratching herself if she itched, sitting up until two in the morning to listen to a concert. And food was another thing. All her life she had cooked for her family and friends and she was an excellent cook, but she discovered, as time went by, an underlying penchant for the most disgusting snacks. Baked beans eaten cold, with a teaspoon, out of the tin. Bottled salad cream spread over her lettuce, and a certain sort of pickle which she would have been ashamed to set on her table in the old days of Oakley Street.
Even sickness brought its own compensations. Ever since that small hiccup of a month ago, which the stupid doctors in-sisted on calling a heart attack, she had become, for the first time in her life, aware of her own mortality. This was not frightening, for she had never been afraid of death, but it had honed her perceptions, and reminded her sharply of what the Church calls the sins of omission. She was not a religious woman, and she did not brood on her sins, which had probably, from the Church's point of view, been legion, but she did start counting up the things that she had never done. Along with fairly impractical fantasies like trekking the mountains of Bhutan, or crossing the Syrian desert to visit the ruins of Palmyra, which she accepted now that she would never do, was the yearning desire, almost a compulsion, to go back to Porthkerris.
Forty years was too long. That long ago, at the end of the war, she had got into the train with Nancy, said goodbye to her father, and left for London. The following year the old man had died, and she had left Nancy in the care of her mother-in-law to travel to Cornwall for his funeral. After the funeral, she and Doris had spent a couple of days clearing Cam Cottage of his possessions, and then she had had to return to London and the pressing responsibilities of being a wife and mother. Since then she had never been back. She had meant to. I'll take the children for holidays, she had told herself. Take them to play on the beaches where I played, to climb the moors and look for wild-flowers. But it had never happened. Why had she not gone? What had happened to the years, speeding away as they had, like swiftly flowing water pouring under a bridge? Opportunities had come and gone, but she had never grasped them, mostly because there was no time, or no money to pay for the train fares; she was too busy running the big house, coping with the lodgers, bringing up the children, coping with Ambrose.
For years she had kept Cam Cottage, refusing to sell the house, refusing to admit to herself that she would never go back. For years, through an agent, it had been let to a variety of tenants, and all this time she'd told herself that one day, sometime, she would return. She would take the children and show them the square white house on the hill with its secret high-hedged garden and the view of the bay and the lighthouse.
This went on until finally, at a time when she found herself at her lowest ebb, she heard from the agent that an elderly couple had been to see the house, and wished to buy it for their retirement. They were, as well as elderly, enormously wealthy. Penelope, struggling to keep her head above water, with three children to educate and a feckless husband to support, found herself with no alternative but to accept their massive offer, and Cam Cottage, finally, was sold.
After that, she didn't think any more about going back to Cornwall. When she sold Oakley Street, she made a few noises about going to live there, fancying herself in a granite cottage with a palm tree in the garden, but Nancy had overridden this suggestion, and perhaps, after all, it was just as well. Besides, to give Nancy her due, as soon as Penelope had set eyes on Podmore's Thatch, she knew that she didn't want to live any-where else.