The Four of Us (2 page)

‘But if it's in such a lovely area there'll be visitors – tourists. I could perhaps take in bed and breakfast guests …?'

‘You could indeed – particularly as Ruthven is situated only a short distance from the coastal footpath, in an area designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.' The horn-rims came off yet again. ‘I take it that you are considering accepting the offer your aunt has made you?'

Primmie thought of the beautiful Lizard. She thought of the wonderment of living so close to the sea.

‘Oh yes,' she said to Marcus Black as he continued to regard her with interest, toying with his glasses. ‘I'm going to move into Ruthven. I'm going to move into it just a soon as I can.'

Primmie eased her Vauxhall Corsa on to the A38, glad to have Exeter behind her. She wasn't in a hurry. The journey she was taking was the most exciting journey of her life – and it was one she wanted to savour. As she thought of how she had always wanted to live in the country, she was seized by a memory from the past, a memory so strong and so totally unexpected that for a second or two she was robbed of breath.

Petts Wood. It hadn't been real country, being a leafy suburb of Bromley in Kent, but to a girl born and brought up in a Docklands council house it had seemed like country. The garden had been vast and beyond the garden had been a golf course, and beyond the golf course trees and yet more trees. She had been eighteen. Eighteen and in love and naively certain that the garden – and the golden-haired man it belonged to – were going to be hers to love and to cherish for as long as she lived.

Regaining composure with difficulty she drove through the village of Dean and then, at the sign indicating Dean Prior, she slowed down. One of her favourite seventeenth-century poets, Robert Herrick, had been the vicar of Dean Prior and she wanted to look at the church.

As she parked in front of St George the Martyr in the spring sunshine, she was overcome by a glorious sense of freedom. With her heart singing like a lark's she stepped from the car, locked the door behind her and walked towards the church gate, well aware that the only one of her children who would understand the impulse that had made her stop was Lucy. Lucy was always doing things on a whim, chasing whatever rainbows came her way. And not only would Lucy have understood why she wanted to make a little pilgrimage to the church Robert Herrick had been vicar of for over forty years, she would also have understood why she hadn't had a second's thought about seizing the opportunity to enjoy a completely different lifestyle in a completely different part of the country to that in which she had always lived.

‘Go for it, Mum,' is what Lucy would have said. ‘You only live once, so take a few risks. Enjoy yourself. What have you got to lose?'

As she walked through the deserted church she knew she had nothing to lose. Millie, Joanne and Josh would probably not make the trip from London to Cornwall as often as she would like them to do and she would, of course, miss them, just as she would miss her friends and neighbours.

She came to a halt in front of the beautiful stained-glass window that commemorated Robert Herrick's incumbency from 1629 to 1674, her eyes overly bright. No matter how much she would miss her Rotherhithe friends, she wouldn't miss them in the way that, for nearly thirty years, she had missed the friends of her youth.

The garden at Petts Wood was once again so vivid in her mind's eye that she could practically smell the scent of the old-fashioned roses and taste the lemonade that regularly, in summer, stood in a thermos on the low table near to the deckchairs. And she could hear the laughter – her own always a little shy, especially when Kiki's father was present; Kiki's laughter, rip-roaringly unrestrained; Artemis's clear, flute-like laugh, as ladylike as everything else about her; Geraldine's laughter husky and unchained.

Then she thought of Destiny and, even at a distance of thirty years, pain knifed through her, its intensity so deep she could barely breathe. She closed her eyes, wondering if the real reason she had wanted to visit the church was because she had wanted to come and say a prayer for Destiny.

Some minutes later, when her eyes were again open, her hands still tightly clasped, a voice said from a few feet away from her: ‘Can I help you? Would you like to sit down?'

She turned to see the vicar. ‘No,' she said, feeling apologetic for having aroused his concern. ‘I'm not ill. I was engulfed by a memory that is very painful. It took a few minutes to get over it, that's all.'

He nodded sympathetically. ‘I'd like to quote some Herrick that would comfort you, but I'm afraid he was a great melancholic. All that springs to mind is the third verse from
The Night-piece
.

Let not the dark thee cumber:
What though the moon does slumber?
The stars of the night
Will lend thee their light
Like tapers clear without number.

She managed an unsteady smile, knowing he was trying to be kind, knowing that Herrick's
Epitaph Upon a Child That Died
would have been far more truly apt.

In another half an hour, at the wheel of the Corsa, she was crossing the bridge over the Tamar, in Cornwall at last. She had been before, of course, but not for many years. When the children were young, they had visited Land's End and Penzance and had driven across the Lizard to the most southerly tip of the country, Lizard Point. And now incredibly, unbelievably, she was going to live there – if not exactly on Lizard Point, then close to it.

Joy fizzed in her throat as, a little later, she drove into St Austell. It was now nearly three o'clock and she hadn't eaten since leaving home at eight. At the first signpost for a car park she turned in, well aware, as she parked, that with the passenger seats and the roof rack stacked high with luggage and household possessions she looked as if she were doing a moonlight flit.

The nearest pub to the car park was the King's Arms and she strolled inside and ordered herself a tomato juice and a Cornish pasty. Only when she was seated at a window table, the tomato juice and pasty in front of her, did she see the poster on the wall. ST AUSTELL'S GREAT EASTER '60s ROCK REVIVAL WEEKEND – MARTY WILDE – ERIC BURDEN – KIKI LANE. There were accompanying photos running down the right-hand side of the poster. Marty Wilde still had a rumpled farmboy look about him, even though he was now in his mid-sixties and a Londoner born and bred. Eric Burden, too, still retained the mean and moody look that so suited his gravelly voice.

It was Kiki's photograph, though, that riveted her attention. There were only a few months in age between them, yet though she, Primmie, looked comfortably middle-aged – her grey-flecked hair in no particular style, her sweater and skirt chosen for practicality and comfort – Kiki looked nothing of the sort. Her hair was short, spikily gelled and still the same spicy red it had been when they had been at school together. There was a spotted chiffon scarf tied jauntily round her throat and she was wearing a denim bomber jacket, the collar flicked up. There were still hollows beneath her cheekbones, still a look of knife-edged purity about her jaw line. Only the expression in the green-gilt eyes was ages old and world weary.

Aware that Artemis and Geraldine must also occasionally see photos of Kiki in magazines or on posters she wondered if, when they did, their memories also went spinning back through time to when the four of them had been young and inseparable: always together either at school or in the garden of the house at Petts Wood. Not that their memories of Petts Wood would be the same as hers. Even after all these years, a flush of colour touched her cheeks. Even then – even from the friends who had been as close to her as sisters – she had had secrets.

Well aware that no one seeing her now would ever imagine what those secrets had been, she rose to her feet. Easter was well and truly over and Kiki would no longer be in St Austell or even, perhaps, in England, for she remembered reading in one of Lucy's pop magazines that the majority of Kiki's time was spent in America.

She walked back to the car and in another ten minutes was back on the A390, motoring happily towards Truro, her excitement rising as she headed ever deeper towards the toe of Cornwall.

She continued towards Helston and then, before reaching it, turned off on to a B road. The road was pretty and it grew prettier and prettier, winding through first one small village and then another. A right turn and then a left and she was crossing the thickly wooded shores of the Helford River at Gweek, on the Lizard Peninsula proper. She slowed down, taking from the glove compartment the directions that Marcus Black had given her.

Another village and a little beyond it a left turn. She wound her window down, revelling in the smell of the sea, so near yet still out of sight.

To the right of her now was the signpost for Calleloe. The road towards it dipped down steeply and she caught a glimpse of slate-roofed cottages huddled around a harbour. ‘Calleloe is, I believe, where Mrs Surtees did most of her shopping,' Marcus Black had told her. ‘There's a general shop there, a post office, a licensed hotel and a restaurant, two cafés, a couple of craft and clothing shops and a prestigious art gallery owned by an American.'

With her heart beginning to hammer somewhere up near her throat, she ignored the road leading down to the harbour and continued on the narrow road that, from a distance of a quarter of a mile or so, continued to follow the line of the coast. Deep in its chine Calleloe slid out of sight and then, as the road again approached high ground, the trees began to thin and suddenly on the left-hand side of the road was a narrow turn-off and the signpost she had been looking for. PRIVATE. NO THROUGH ROAD, it read.

With knots of nervous tension almost crippling her, Primmie turned left. Head-high hawthorn bushes and tall purple-headed thistles scratched at the Corsa's sides and then, after about fifty yards or so, the road made a final twist and there, on the left-hand side, set in the hedgerow, were rusting double gates. There was nothing else. In front of her the single road ran out over a long, low headland to where, almost at its tip, a small church stood in splendid isolation. Beyond the church there was nothing but marram grass, sea and sky.

On unsteady legs she got out of the car and walked towards the gates.

Only by standing close up to them could she see the faded lettering: Ruthven.

Beyond the gates an unmade track meandered up a slope towards a house that looked nothing at all as she had imagined it would. Instead of being long and low, with pretty whitewashed walls, the house, a farmyard and outbuildings to one side of it, was foursquare and built of sombre Cornish stone. There were green-painted shutters at either side of the long-paned windows and the front door was porched, its roof golden-green with lichen.

She opened the gates wide and walked back to the car. It was nearly six o'clock and the sky was taking on the daffodil light of early evening. She had a couple of hours, perhaps less, in which to do all her essential unpacking and sorting out, for once it was dark her only lighting was going to be the oil lamp she had brought with her.

‘There will be no electricity until you arrange to have it reconnected,' Marcus Black had said, ‘the telephone ditto. You will find the water turned off at the mains when you arrive, unless, of course, you arrange in advance for it to be reconnected.'

Well, that at least she had done. And she would telephone the electricity people in the morning. As the heavily laden Corsa bucketed up the rutted track, she became aware of the two fields, one on either side of her. ‘There's some grazing pasture and a donkey paddock,' Marcus Black had told her and, in her ignorance, she had imagined merely small corners of waste land.

Hardly able to believe the riches that had been heaped upon her, she drove into the cobbled farmyard and switched off the engine.

Immediately half a dozen hens erupted from one of the outbuildings in an agitated flurry. She fought the urge to remain firmly out of their way. If there were hens here, then they were
her
hens, and the sooner she got used to them the better. Who, though, had been looking after them and feeding them?

Taking the bunch of keys he had given her out of the glove compartment, she stepped out of the car and picked her way between the hens towards the house.

The front door was painted a green that had seen better days. On the doorstep was an empty bottle with a rolled piece of notepaper wedged into its neck.

She stretched out her hand.

Dear Mrs Dove
, the note read.
I've looked after the hens and there is a fresh supply of logs and a fire laid. The key left with me, in case of emergency, I have posted through the letterbox. Matt Trevose. PS. The logs are in the woodrick
.

The tension she had felt in the seconds before reading the note ebbed. Somewhere nearby was a conscientious neighbour. Grateful to Matt Trevose for the care he had taken of the hens she took a deep breath, slid the key into the lock and opened the front door.

The stone-floored entrance hall was larger than her Rotherhithe living room. There was a gaily coloured rag rug on the flags, a grandfather clock against one wall, an oak chest with brass corners and side handles against the other. A staircase with wide, shallow treads rose from the centre of the hallway, its faded stair runner held in place by brass rods. On the right of the staircase the hallway was deeper than on the left, running off into a passageway that was blocked at its far end by a door. Other doors, one on the right-hand side and two on the left-hand side, led off the hall.

Leaving the front door open behind her, she crossed the hall and opened the first of the left-hand doors. It was a study with books floor to ceiling on three walls, a small, prettily tiled fireplace and a window that looked out on to a garden. In front of the window and taking up nearly all the available space was an ancient roll-top desk.