Authors: Rachel Hore
When a cracking noise came from the undergrowth, she spun round, all senses suddenly alert. She waited; the darkness waited. It must be a bird, she told herself, but her head throbbed with tension. She was, after all, alone in the remotest part of wild Cornwall in what felt like the middle of the night. And she had a strange sense that someone was watching her.
She looked up at Merryn Hall and shivered. What had she expected to find? A pretty cottage nestling in the manicured grounds of a small country mansion? A warm welcome, old-fashioned country hospitality? In his letter, Patrick had prepared her for something a bit crumbly, but not this . . . It was the desertedness and the air of, yes, of lurking menace, that bothered her.
Who
was
Patrick, come to think of it? A friend of a university friend of her sister Chrissie’s. Someone Chrissie herself hardly saw now and whom Mel had never met.
Scenes from her nephew Rory’s favourite Disney video flashed through her mind. She could be a modern Beauty, coming upon the Beast’s castle in a wilderness, seeking sanctuary and finding something quite different. Though in her elderly leather jacket, mud-splashed jeans, and with her red hair lank, she would hardly be first in line for the part of Beauty.
Feeling braver, she pulled her bag off her shoulder and walked towards the porch, intending to try the bell just in case. It was then she noticed something fluttering against the flaked paint of the front door. Up the steps she pulled a folded piece of paper out from under the brass knocker and pinched it open. A message was pencilled in sloping block capitals:
DEAR MEL,
FORGIVE ME. I WAITED UNTIL SEVEN O’CLOCK BUT NOW I MUST LEAVE TO FETCH MY DAUGHTER. IF YOU DRIVE FURTHER DOWN THE ROAD THERE IS A LITTLE LANE TO THE COTTAGE. THE KEY IS UNDER THE MAT. I WILL CALL IN TOMORROW.
YOURS RESPECTFULLY,
IRINA PERIC
Mel studied the formal phrases, the carefully drawn letters. On the phone, Irina spoke with an Eastern European accent, stressing the first syllables of words and softly rolling her r’s.
The matter drifted to the back of her mind. Her attention was already on climbing back into the car and continuing down the road to find the cottage before she dropped with exhaustion. As she felt in her pocket for her key, she looked up to see the clouds were thinning and a most beautiful moon emerged in a veil of mist to illuminate her way.
It was another twenty minutes before Mel shut the front door of the Gardener’s Cottage behind her and surveyed the pile of luggage sprawled across the hallway. Supper in a moment, she told herself, eyeing the carrier bag containing the small stock of food she had culled from her store cupboard at home. Supper then unpack what she needed for the night. That was all she could face now with her headache taking hold. She was weary, bone weary.
She let out a long breath, then, defying cautious animal instinct, she marched down the hall and began to explore the cottage, turning on all the lights as she went. There was a sitting room to the right of the long hall, before the stairs, a room with a polished dining table and chairs to the left; at the back, a dingy kitchen with a round pine table, beige Formica worktops, a fridge, stocked with dairy products, and a washing machine. Overhead, the strip light flickered and hummed. Turning it on and off several times failed to cure the problem. Beyond the kitchen was a stone-floored bathroom with a white suite but no shower.
Upstairs were two bedrooms and a boxroom. All neat and clean, though the furniture was shabby. Making her way carefully back down the steep staircase with its faded runner she noted the chipped paint on the rough stone wall and saw exactly why Patrick had trouble letting the place. It would be fine for her for the next month. Comfortable, shabby but strangely familiar. Today’s well-to-do holidaymakers demanded modern fittings, fresh paint and shiny new furniture.
Her plan was to spend the month walking in the footsteps of some of the painters who had settled in and around the nearby fishing town of Newlyn and Lamorna at the turn of the twentieth century, surveying the places they had painted, visiting museums and archives and working up her notes into a book she had been commissioned to write. This she would finish on her return to London. It was a chance to immerse herself in her work . . . and to give herself a break from the troubles of the previous year.
The Gardener’s Cottage did feel like home – too much like home, Mel saw as she dumped the bag of food on the kitchen table and opened a wobbly cupboard door to find herself staring at her mother’s breakfast china: white porcelain with tiny hedgerow flowers painted around the rim. She picked up a cereal bowl and turned it in her hands. Every morning of her childhood for as far back as she could remember, Mel had scraped her spoon over this pattern . . . and for an awkward minute she was back with her brother and sister in their cheerfully messy Victorian semi in the leafy suburbs of Hertfordshire, rushing to finish breakfast as their mother, Maureen, smart with suit and briefcase, chivvied them to get into the car
now
or they would have to walk to school.
The Pentreaths’ china bowls were gone now, the house sold, the pain of letting go of their childhood home a further sorrow after their mother’s death nearly a year ago. Mel replaced the bowl and shut the cupboard, leaning against it, as if to lock up the memories. If only it were that easy.
Once again the doubts rolled in. Four weeks in this place, alone with her thoughts, when she was emotionally so fragile – why on earth had she come? Suddenly she longed to be back in her flat in Clapham, looking out on the carefully tended strip of garden where yellow and white spring bulbs would soon be giving way to rich blue ceanothus and purple lilac. Except Clapham didn’t seem right any more either. Her flat hadn’t felt like home since Jake had left. There weren’t enough books to fill the gaps on the shelves, and the pictures he had lifted from the walls had left ghostly shapes behind that shouted their very absence – and his. She knew David had been right – she really did need to get away.
It was three weeks ago that she had been coming out of one of those interminable college faculty meetings in which everything is thoroughly discussed but nothing decided, when the Senior Tutor had caught up with her.
‘Mel, do you have a moment? A quick sandwich, maybe?’ David looked at his watch. ‘I’ve another meeting at two, but . . .’
They wove a way through the stream of students towards the staff café and soon Mel was picking at quiche and salad, trying to inject some life into her voice as she answered David’s routine queries about her work. She mustn’t let him know quite how bored she was with it all at the moment, how colourless was the round of teaching and marking – indeed, how dreary everything seemed. She was wrung out. But he seemed to have read her mind.
‘Mel,’ he said gently. She flinched at his searching gaze, knowing that her eyes were dark-ringed in her tired, pale face.
He smiled, a grizzled, avuncular man, with springy silver hair and lively eyes that belied the fact that he too was feeling the strain. The pressures of providing for increasing numbers of students in cramped conditions and with limited funds were taking their toll on everybody. David was, Mel knew, looking forward to retiring at the end of the summer term, leaving teaching and administration so that he could pursue the historical research he never had time to do.
Now he said, ‘Do tell me to mind my own business, but I was watching you in that meeting back there. You looked as though all the cares of the world were on your shoulders.’
‘It’s listening to John O’Hagen,’ Mel tried to laugh, referring to the Angry Young Man of the Arts Faculty, ‘banging on about union rules again. I know technically he’s right, of course, but we can’t threaten industrial action about every little thing. We have responsibilities. God.’ She rolled her eyes in a sudden flash of anger.
‘Now you’re more like your usual self.’ David reached over and squeezed her clenched fist. ‘A year ago, you know, you would have been talking him down across the table.’
‘I would, wouldn’t I?’ Mel gave him a ghost of one of her most dazzling smiles, then slumped into round-shouldered misery once more. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not very good company at the moment.’
‘You’re always good company,’ said David. ‘But you’ve had a bad year one way or another . . .’
‘It’s not been great, no.’
‘How are the family doing?’
Mel pushed a chunk of quiche into her mouth and chewed, which bought her time to consider the question. ‘I haven’t a clue what my brother William is thinking. He’s always been the sort to get on with things. Shuts his feelings out. It’s much easier to talk to Chrissie, my sister.’ She was silent for a moment, then rushed on. ‘It’s just not fair, though – the cancer taking Mum so quickly. I keep going over what happened. Did we try hard enough to get her the right treatment? Shouldn’t we have noticed earlier that she was so ill? She had been losing weight and getting tired, but I didn’t realise—’
‘You mustn’t feel guilty,’ David cut in, picking his words carefully. ‘It sounded as though there was little you could do with such a virulent form of the disease.’
Mel looked at her plate. ‘That’s what the doctors insisted.’
They both ate in silence for a moment, then David said, almost casually, ‘And then there’s Jake.’
‘And then there’s Jake,’ said Mel, reaching for her water glass and taking a gulp as if it were some nasty-tasting medicine. David knew Jake well. For the irony was that Mel’s ex-boyfriend was also a lecturer in the Arts Faculty – in Creative Writing – and she came across him all the time, at the coffee-machine, by the photocopier, in the café. She had taken care at this morning’s meeting to choose a seat that meant she wouldn’t have to see his face every time she looked up. But even so, she was aware he would be sitting, restlessly doodling crazy cartoon faces on his A4 pad, and she couldn’t block out the lazy tones of his voice, once soft in her ear alone, or his comments, as ever acerbic and to the point.
‘Mel, I’ve a suggestion to make,’ David said suddenly. ‘You’re due a term’s study leave sometime next year, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. It’ll be five years since my last,’ said Mel, who had, like everyone else in the Faculty, calculated to the day when her next paid sabbatical was due.
‘What are you working on at the moment? Have you any plans?’
‘I do, actually. I’ve been researching artists in Cornwall,’ she replied, ‘the Newlyn School of painters at the end of the nineteenth century, and their links with the artists who settled in Lamorna up the coast.’
‘Ah, don’t remind me. Stanhope Forbes – was he Newlyn School?’ David guessed with a look of mild alarm. He was a medievalist and it was a joke in the Faculty that he was only dimly aware of any artefacts that hadn’t either been dug up or handwritten by monks on vellum.
‘Yes, and his Canadian wife Elizabeth. Then there were Thomas and Caroline Gotch . . . Walter Langley. They’re the more famous ones. And then later, in Lamorna, Harold and Laura Knight, Sir Alfred Munnings . . .’
David nodded. ‘I know, the one who painted horses?’
‘That’s right. Grosvenor Press, the art-book publishers, have asked me to write a book about the Newlyn and Lamorna artists and their work. I was planning to finish the research for it over the next couple of months, visit Cornwall for a few weeks after the summer term finishes, and do most of the writing when I get back. The deadline’s the end of the year, you see.’
‘Sounds an interesting commission.’
‘Oh, it is. It’s the women I’m particularly drawn to. They had so much personal and professional freedom, but some of them had to struggle so hard. Laura Knight, for instance, found herself a penniless orphan . . .’ She stopped, realising she was waving a fork around to emphasise her points, scattering crumbs. David was looking at her, a lopsided smile growing on his face.
‘Why don’t you start your sabbatical now?’ he suggested. ‘Take the summer term off, don’t wait until next year. If you combine it with the summer break you’ll have nearly six months’ writing time without distractions.’
Mel’s face lit up for a moment, then the light died.
‘It sounds fabulous,’ she said, ‘but aren’t I supposed to be taking the “Nineteenth-century Painting” seminars next term? And “An Introduction to Modernism”? And who’ll look after my MA students?’
‘Mel, I had an email from Rowena Stiles last week,’ David said, watching her reaction, and Mel couldn’t help frowning.
Rowena had arrived as cover for a term when Mel had been away on compassionate leave eighteen months before. There had been talk about finding her a permanent position, but then she announced she was to follow her banker husband to New York and Mel had been relieved. It was no secret that the two women hadn’t got on.
David continued: ‘She’s back in London for a few months and would be glad to fill in.’
‘You’d already asked her, then?’ she said, sitting up straight in her seat.
‘No, of course not. She had got in touch because she was looking for work. Relax.’
Mel thought for a moment, measuring up the tantalising glimpse of freedom, like a chink of light through a door in a dark room, against the prospect of Rowena taking over her work again. Rowena knew her stuff, all right, but she liked to be in control and had an abrasive manner. Mel was proud of the fact that she herself got on well with her students. Her dramatic red hair and colourful bohemian dress sense gave her a bona fide artistic air, and she was always generous with her encouragement and not too hard on those who delivered their work late. By contrast, they had to watch their step with Rowena. And the latter might not be content just to stand in temporarily this time, once she had got her feet under Mel’s desk . . .
But a whole term off, starting next week when they broke up for Easter? Then the long summer break? It was tempting – very tempting.
‘Rowena does an excellent job, Mel,’ David said firmly. ‘I know she can be . . . assertive . . .’
‘Pushy and manipulative’ are the words you’re skirting round, Mel thought. She wondered what had happened to that hot job at the Manhattan museum Rowena had boasted about? Well, David was right: maybe her students
could
put up with Rowena for a term – and it wasn’t as though she could legally steal Mel’s job.