Authors: Rachel Hore
‘She is expecting us, though?’ Mel asked.
‘Oh yes, I had a word with Cyril, her husband. Dear Cyril. Doesn’t say much, though.’
Unlike Carrie, who had talked non-stop the whole of the hour’s drive from Lamorna to this little hamlet outside Truro where Jenna’s daughter lived. Carrie had described Norah’s three, now middle-aged children, and recounted the names and exploits of their own grown-up sons and daughters until Mel’s head spun. She then told Mel about her upbringing in Penzance, where her father had worked as a railway guard, and about her dead husband Neil, over whose memory death had cast a golden glow. Mel thought he sounded a quiet and malleable foil to Carrie’s considerable energetic presence, the backroom boy in the hotel where Carrie played front-of-house. But like the leitmotif in a piece of music, her attention periodically returned to her son Matt.
‘I worry so much about him,’ sighed Carrie. ‘He lets life drift by. He’s a good boy, coming home the way he does, but he has no sense of purpose. Doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. I suppose it’s partly my fault. I always organised everything for him, you see. He was my only one. And so when Neil died he was all I had left. Oh, you need the middle lane here, sorry, my love.’
Mel swerved right on the main road, cutting up a shiny navy saloon car which hooted urgently. She was feeling vaguely guilty about Matt, whom she had hardly seen in the last few weeks. Carrie chattered on.
‘He misses his father, of course, though he doesn’t say so. Neil was a good man, but he wasn’t firm enough with Matt. Never made him take responsibility for anything. They used to potter about together. Neil did all the hotel cooking, you see, and Matt would help him. And they’d go fishing together when Neil had a couple of hours off.’
‘I’m sure he’ll find something to interest him,’ Mel said, feeling compelled to comment when Carrie drew breath. ‘What about his photography? I thought his pictures were very good.’
‘Oh, that’s just another hobby,’ moaned Carrie. ‘He’s never wanted to make a career out of it. It’s just something else he fits around all the other things he does, the diving, the water-skiing. What happens when he gets married and has children, I ask you? How’s he going to pay for everything?’
Mel laughed. Was Carrie, like Irina, another over-ambitious mother? Or was it mere concern to see one’s child settled and secure. Maybe she wouldn’t understand the Carries and Irinas until she had a child of her own. If she ever did . . . She slowed behind a trundling farm vehicle and even Carrie fell silent as they watched fruitlessly for the chance to overtake. But Mel’s mind was ticking over.
She was half-glad she had never had this parental pressure. Her mother was a strong example to her daughters without trying too hard, unlike Carrie; a strong, positive person who knew what she was good at and what she needed to do. Mel remembered some words of a conversation she had had with her mother when Maureen lay in hospital after an early bout of exploratory surgery.
‘I was never concerned over Chrissie and William,’ Maureen had told her. ‘William was like his father – knew what he wanted to do and got on with it. And Chrissie – she sails through life. It was you, Mel, wanting so much to try things but anxious about them, lacking in confidence. I’m so glad you found something that suits you, dear.’
What is it that makes us so different, one from another, even within the same family, Mel wondered. And how much can we really blame our parents, as Carrie was now blaming herself.
Again, she was surprised by that image of her father lifting her up as a toddler, high in the air. Then he had gone.
They had visited their father regularly in his new life. A weekend once a month, a two-week holiday with him and his new wife Stella every summer until they were teenagers and could refuse to go. When had she last seen him, come to think about it? Christmas. And before that, at her mother’s funeral. He had come without Stella and stood alone, away from the large family party in the church as though afraid someone might hiss at him to go away, say that he was unwelcome. Though they would never have done that. Mel knew that his guilt at leaving them all still weighed him down. Because of this guilt he had never reforged his relationship with his children – it had never been natural again.
Yet there was William, turning into a carbon copy of their father, without any seeming awareness about it. Strange really, since William’s relationship with his father was formal at best. Did William still see the man as a role model, or was this singleminded determination to become a surgeon, his brilliance at chess, his tendency to live on his nerves, merely to do with DNA? Let’s hope that the likenesses didn’t apply to William’s attitude to marriage, thought Mel, picturing his sweet caring wife, who had given up her own medical career to bring up their children.
Carrie was quiet still and Mel wondered whether she hadn’t responded enthusiastically enough to what she had been saying.
‘I’m sure it will work out for Matt. He seems such a nice, talented person,’ she said. She pictured his neat tanned features, the quirky mouth, twisted in a perpetual smile, the short sleek hair and his lean, graceful body, and remembered the way he had looked at her that day she had got together with Patrick. Matt would be all right.
She glanced at Carrie. Why was the woman looking weirdly at her?
‘I’m sure that is what he thinks about you, my dear,’ said Carrie gently.
Mel gripped the wheel tighter. ‘Really?’ she said faintly.
‘He’s become very fond of you.’
‘I’m sure not. I’ve hardly seen him recently.’
Carrie must have absorbed her meaning because she said, ‘There’s no hope there, then?’
‘No,’ said Mel.
‘Oh. Well, don’t tell him I talked to you about it.’
He’d be absolutely mortified, thought Mel, herself red with embarrassment. Just at that moment the farm vehicle pulled into a layby and she relieved her feelings by slamming her foot down on the accelerator and roaring past.
‘Watch out, you’ve missed the turning,’ cried Carrie, then as Mel slowed down to turn round, ‘oh no, you’re all right. It’s coming up.’
The subject of Matt’s lovelife, it seemed, was closed.
As they drove into deep country they passed a sign to a National Trust garden.
‘Matt was telling me about all your work on the Merryn garden. Norah would be interested to hear about that. Will he open the place up, do you think?’
‘Open it? You mean to the public?’
‘There’s several that do in Lamorna. There’d be a lot of interest. Brings visitors to the area, that sort of thing – with the right advertising, of course. I’d support it – keep leaflets in the hotel. And he’d need permission for the developments, of course.’
‘What developments?’ Mel was lost.
‘You know, a tea room and a car park. Lavatories.’
‘I don’t think he’s anywhere near that stage yet,’ said Mel, bewildered.
‘That was the road to Norah’s,’ said Carrie suddenly, as they shot past a narrow turning.
‘Don’t know that I’m going to be much use to you, dear,’ said Norah, looking Mel up and down in an admiring fashion as they sat drinking coffee in the front room. She had a high-pitched voice cracking with age. ‘My mother’s been dead these twenty years now.’
Mel put down her cup and leaned forward. ‘I’m trying to find out anything I can about an artist I’ve come across,’ she said, speaking clearly for Norah. ‘At Merryn Hall, where I’m staying, there are some paintings signed with the initials P.T. I’m sure the artist was in some way connected to the house and that they were made shortly before the First War. That’s when your mother was in service there, wasn’t it?’
Norah frowned. ‘One of the family was a painter, my mother used to say. Master Charles, she called him.’
‘I’ve learned a little bit about Charles Carey,’ said Mel, nodding, and told her about what she had found in the archives. ‘But the only person I’ve discovered with those initials, P.T., was another of the maids. It seems a bit unlikely, but I thought I’d ask if your mother ever talked about her. The name was Pearl Treglown.’
Norah thought for a moment then muttered, ‘Pearl. That might be right. Was it Pearl or something else?’ She made to get up, but her dog, an elderly Jack Russell called Sinbad, was sitting on her feet and she said, ‘If you wouldn’t mind, dear. A thin white book. It’s on the top shelf over there.’ She waved her hand towards a tall bookcase with glass doors. ‘Next to the big red dictionary.’
Mel opened one of the doors and read along the spines. ‘Do you mean this one?’ She held up a large white-covered paperback with a linocut print of a fishing boat on the front. It was called
Voices of West Cornwall
and bore the logo of some small local publisher. Though tempted to open it, Mel dutifully passed it into Norah’s outstretched fingers, closed the bookcase and sat down again.
Norah seemed to take for ever, fumbling in her cardigan pocket for her glasses case, having difficulty finding the page she wanted. Finally she got there and frowned as she drew a finger down the text.
‘Ah yes, here it is. Pearl. You look, dear. The print is stupidly small. They came to see Mother, ooh, when was it?’ Her hand wobbled as she passed the book to Mel.
Mel kept her finger in the page Norah had found while she checked the book’s date of publication. ‘1972,’ she said.
It was a collection of oral history and the blurb on the back explained that the purpose of the publication was to record the experiences of those who could remember the First World War and before. She turned to the page Norah had found and started to read.
Jenna Cooper, née Penhale
I went to be kitchenmaid at Merryn Hall in 1907 when I left school. I was only fourteen but back then that’s what you did and my mam couldn’t afford to keep me home seeing my pa was ill with his heart and she had my brothers and sisters to feed. I missed home at first but I saw them all every Sunday on my afternoon off. They were kind to me at Merryn. There was always something interesting going on – people coming and going and parties and whatnot. My word, though, the work was hard in those days.
Who else was employed? Well, Mrs Roberts the cook, of course, then when I first started there was a butler, Mr Richards, but he retired and after that they had a footman, Jago, who I think had a bit of a soft spot for me. There was a housemaid to do upstairs. First that was Joan until she went to South Africa to marry her boy and we never heard from her again. After that came a girl from Newlyn, Mrs Roberts’s niece, Pearl. She was an orphan, down on her luck, but nice, had a bit about her. I remember she liked drawing . . . flowers and such, and we shared a room till she went and married.
It was a good life. The food was better than at home and more of it, but there’s no doubting the work was much harder than it is today. Mondays were worst, but Fridays we had to scrub and blacklead all the fireplaces and polish the brass and copper till it shone like Dagwell. I left just before the war broke out when I married Tom. He had come up to me after chapel one Sunday and told me I had a nice singing voice, which I’m not boasting if I say I did. His dad farmed in Buryan parish and I started married life in his family’s farmhouse and I didn’t see people from Merryn after . Then the war came and nothing was the same . . .
Mel sat poring over these precious scraps of knowledge. Pearl liked drawing . . . flowers and such . . . It was really the piece of information she had come to find, wasn’t it, and yet it seemed so scanty. How would a housemaid have found the time to draw, let alone the mental space or the energy to exercise her talent? How would she have afforded materials even? And what was Pearl’s background, that she was ‘down on her luck’? Whom did she marry and what happened to her then?
After a while, she became aware of the curious eyes of Norah and Carrie upon her.
‘Well?’ said Norah. ‘Any help, is it, the book?’
‘Oh yes .’ Then, of course, Mel had to explain it all to them both . ‘Can you think of anything else your mother said about Pearl?’ Mel asked Norah, who thought for a moment before shaking her head.
‘She only started to talk about those times when she was quite old,’ she said. ‘When the lady came who wrote that all down for her. She was proud of being in that book, you know.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Mel. ‘But if Pearl is the artist I’m searching for, I need to know more about her. For this book I’m writing, you see.’
Norah Varco sat silently for a moment, thoughts passing across her wrinkled face as Sinbad, at her feet, whimpered in his doggy dreams.
‘There’s something,’ she said finally. ‘It’s a long way back, but when I was a child we lived in Buryan and there was a boy at the school who lived at Merryn. I’d have to think of his name. No, I can’t remember now, but maybe it’ll come.’
Mel thought this sounded a long shot. ‘Never mind,’ she said, and scribbled on a page she then tore from her notebook and gave to Norah. ‘Here is my number where I’m staying. If you think of anything else useful, I’d love to hear from you.’
***
March 1913
Pearl looked around swiftly to check no one had seen her, then rapped on the stable door and called, ‘Sir, it’s me,’ in a low, urgent voice. Hearing a muffled response, she gripped her sketchbook under one arm, hauled the double-door ajar and slipped inside, pulling it shut behind her.
She stood in the coolness of the stable, her eyes adjusting to the patterns of light and shadow.
It always surprised her every time she saw it, Charles’s studio. From the outside it was just another ordinary stable in the block, with the doors of a small hayloft visible above. Inside, it still smelled like a stable, of earth and leather, hay and the sweet, not unpleasant, hint of manure. But this was now overlaid with a strong odour of linseed oil. Against the wall rested several canvases wrapped in brown paper – finished paintings, Pearl knew, destined for an exhibition in Truro that she would never see. And at a workbench at the back of the room Charles stood measuring canvas from a roll across a wooden frame the size of Aunt Dolly’s favourite tea tray.