Authors: Rachel Hore
‘Jake! Why don’t you find another agent if you’ve gone off Sophie,’ Mel said. Jake had given her the script to read at the same time as his agent. Privately she was in agreement with Sophie but she certainly wasn’t going to say that to Jake. The prose style was brilliant, inventive, playful, the plot ingenious. But was it a little in love with itself? And were his characters – the novel was a satire about the contemporary arts scene – merely talking heads, vehicles for his opinions?
‘No,’ he said, slamming his fist against the wall. ‘It’s the best agency for me. She can damn well just send it out to publishers. Then we’ll see who’s right.’
In the event, however, Sophie and Mel proved to be right. All the publishers Sophie submitted it to sent fulsomely polite rejections. A printed set of them from Sophie’s over-assiduous assistant landed on the mat in Kennington amongst the Christmas cards.
But I would be glad to see anything else that Jake Friedland writes in the future
, was a common theme.
And just to make everything worse, it was then the letter arrived for Mel from Grosvenor Press saying that they had read an article she had written for the
Journal of Art History
and inviting her to submit a proposal for a book for their prestigious series about British painters. Mel, of course, was delighted to comply.
Jake entered a deep, black depression.
It was the week before Christmas but Mel hadn’t the heart to plan much. This Christmas would be the first without her mother. Would it be forever a season of sadness? She was dreading the day itself, to be spent at her sister’s house with William’s family invited as well. Jake was taking Anna and Freya home to his parents and frankly, she was relieved.
The week after Christmas, however, she could take the atmosphere no longer.
‘Jake, you’ve got to cheer up,’ she said one evening as he slouched morosely around her kitchen after supper. He made no reply. She tried a different tack. ‘I know you’re disappointed. You’ve worked so hard.’
He turned and looked at her. His eyes glittered, opaque, unreadable.
‘On the book, I mean,’ she added, desperate now. It wasn’t fair. Why should she put up with this moodiness day after day, week after week, deliberating about every word she said, watching her every move in case she accidentally annoyed him. Anything could make him snap at her these days. A flash of anger crazed through her. She snatched up a mug from the draining board. Its silly laughing pig design mocked her. In a sudden movement she smashed it down on the floor. The pieces flew up around them.
‘Mel!’ They stared at one another in mutual shock. Jake put his finger to his cheek and touched blood.
‘Sorry,’ she shouted. ‘Sorry, but I can’t stand it. It’s not fair, what you’re doing. I’m only trying to help. I can’t live like this any longer.’
He came and put his arms round her and hugged her tight. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he mumbled into her hair. ‘I’m being a bear, aren’t I?’
She pulled away and looked up at him. ‘I love you, but I need to know,’ she said, ‘if we have a future together. I hate this hanging on, not knowing. And children. I would like to have a baby, Jake, you know that. With you. I don’t want to leave trying until it’s too late.’
The expression of stubbornness that crossed Jake’s face, the set look of his mouth, made her wish she had kept her mouth shut.
For a month Jake made an effort to be more cheerful, but Mel knew that his distant politeness hid unfathomable depths of misery. Somehow their life together carried on as it had done for the last few years, but it was as though they were going through the motions in their relationship. Then one night Jake just didn’t come back after a party at his old newspaper offices.
She knew at once what had happened and confronted him.
‘It didn’t mean anything. She’s not important, I’ll never see her again,’ he said, but they both knew what it meant. He had taken an axe to their relationship because neither of them could otherwise make the break.
Two days later, he piled his possessions in the back of his car, kissed her with such intensity it took all her will not to plead with him to stay, and went back to Kennington and, she imagined, the first chapter of a new novel.
The next hardest thing was visiting Anna and Freya at their home to explain. She could still see them, she insisted, but although they hugged one another and made promises, all three of them knew it would never be quite the same. And for the second time in a year, Mel went into mourning.
I must write to them sometime, Anna and Freya, Mel thought that evening as she waited for the shop lasagne to heat up in the oven. She ate it at the kitchen table with a novel propped up in front of her. Later, she tried to watch a crime drama on television but, tired of the interminable commercial breaks, switched it off. She sat, curled up in an armchair, wondering what to do next. Ring Chrissie, she decided, reaching out for the phone.
‘It’s weird,’ she told her sister in answer to the questions Chrissie fired off. ‘I’d forgotten how dark it gets in the country. It’s really cut off. And this place, it’s quite spooky. Did Patrick tell you anything about it?’
‘Not really,’ said Chrissie. ‘His family are from Cornwall, like Mum and Dad. The great-uncle left the house to Patrick when he died last year. Patrick says he doesn’t know what to do with it, whether to sell it or keep it and move down there.’
‘Move? What did you say he did for a living?’
‘He runs some Internet business with a friend. Is he down there yet? He goes a lot at weekends, he said.’
‘No. At least, I haven’t seen him. What’s he look like, anyway?’
‘Mmm . . . tallish, dark reddish hair. Friendly but, I don’t know, doesn’t say a lot about himself. Not a city type, more of a jeans and sweaters man, if you know what I mean.’
‘What, with reindeer on like Mark Darcy in
Bridget Jones
? Sounds okay.’
‘Now, Mel, don’t go getting ideas. He’s got a girlfriend and I think it’s serious.’
‘I only meant it as a joke.’ Spotting Mel’s ideal man was a game of Chrissie’s Mel always refused to play. Because Chrissie was cosily married with children she wanted Mel to be happy in that way, too. At the same time, interestingly, Chrissie hadn’t seemed all that regretful when Mel broke up with Jake.
Now Mel changed the subject. ‘So it’s Portugal tomorrow?’
‘Tuesday, for two weeks. I can’t wait. Oh, I’ve emailed you our contact numbers.’
‘Thanks. Well, have a fantastic time. Bring me another piece of that pretty pottery.’
After Mel had put down the receiver, she sat for a moment, wondering about Patrick. What would he do, living down here in the back of beyond? She hoped, when he arrived, that he wouldn’t be the kind of landlord who hung around, interfering. She might be lonely, but she needed the time to work.
She forced herself to plug in her laptop to check she could get a connection. Everything worked beautifully. No point in looking at her college webmail, it would only disturb her, seeing life go on without her. She logged on to her personal email. There was just the promised message from Chrissie and one headed HI FROM THE BIG SMOKE from her friend Aimee, who had been away on a school trip when Mel left.
Hope you’ve got there safely and that the place is OK. What’s it like and are there chocolate croissants within fifty miles? Sorry I didn’t see you before you left but we didn’t get back from Paris until late Thursday. It went all right – none of the little darlings fell off the Eiffel Tower or into the Seine, anyway. There was only one really bad moment. A little tearaway called Callum Mitchell managed to open a bottle of wine in his dormitory on the last night. Fortunately we confiscated it before too much harm was done, but I had to have a quiet word with his dad. Funny how parents never quite believe it when you tell them that their precious kids have misbehaved. I have to say it was odd visiting the sights with a rabble of fourteen-year-olds when the last time it was just me and Mark. Ho, hum, mustn’t dwell on the past. Let me know how you are.
Hi, Aimee
, Mel wrote back.
A journey from hell, but I got here. Lamorna is very beautiful, but oh so remote, and no sign of my landlord yet. I think it could get very lonely here, especially in the evenings, but I’ll cope. It’s a more manageable sort of loneliness than in London where you feel miserable because you’re convinced that everyone else around you is having a better time than you are. Here there’s no one and nothing except cows f
Glad Paris went well – I think you’re an absolute angel to give up your holidays for the kids and hope the next time you go it will be with someone special – even if it’s only me!
Much love, Mel.
She closed the laptop and looked at the clock. Half-past nine. What should she do now? Why was it that lack of deadlines and appointments could sap your energy so?
She sighed and stood up, thinking she should finish unpacking, then noticed that one of the watercolours on the wall was askew. She went over to straighten it. It was one of the roses. She stared at it, seeing what she had missed before, that there was a small honey bee visiting one of the blooms. The artist had carefully reproduced the fine sticky hairs that picked up pollen and the veined gauzy wings.
Yawning, she went out into the hall and dragged the remaining holdall upstairs, where she turned on her radio to ward off the darkness and the ringing silence.
***
He found me in the garden. Frightened the life out of me, though I have a right to be here. I was doing no one any harm and it’s my time off to do with as I please. I tried to shield the paper from him, but he laughed and threw himself down beside me. ‘Show!’ he commanded , and for certain he is a charming one, for I dropped my hand. He took the paper and gazed for a long time at the flower I had drawn. It was of a rose, white and heavy, at that lovely last moment of fullness before it turns and the petals dull and go brown. He looked up at the bush, searching for the flower. ‘It’s good,’ he said after a moment, ‘but where is the bee? You’ve forgotten the bee!’ I laughed, and realised then that I must have been holding my breath, because laughter was such a relief. I looked and , yes, there was a honey bee climbing over my rose, burrowing into the yellow heart. ‘Really, though, it’s good,’ he repeated, returning the drawing to me and jumping to his feet. This was the first time he has spoken to me alone, and I was so overcome I could not say a word, only watch him walk away with that light step of his. But I have painted in the little bee, and whenever I look upon it, I will think of him.
***
April 1912
’Ee mustn’t mind Cook,’ plump Jenna puffed as they climbed the back stairs. ‘She’s in a paddy ’cos there’s ten for dinner tonight and the missus do ask her to make some fancy mess with the lobsters. Ee best be keeping out of her way. Oh!’ She stopped and clapped a dimpled hand to her mouth, though her eyes twinkled with mischief. ‘Sorry, I forget. Cook’s your aunt, ent she?’
Pearl, dragging her luggage up behind, looked up and smiled at the mock-stricken face above. This had to be a test. She was torn between the knowledge that her future wellbeing in this household might rest on keeping on Aunt Dolly’s good side and the desire to be liked by this cheerful young woman, who must be about her own age, eighteen. But tact had always been a well-oiled part of Pearl’s armoury. ‘She’s not really my aunt, I just call her that.’ She didn’t bother explaining that her relationship with Dolly, her stepmother Adeline’s sister-in-law, was so tenuous that, in fact, she had only met her ‘aunt’ two or three times, on rare occasions when they had come across one another in Penzance on market-day. Even then, Dolly’s attention had been on Adeline; she had until now taken little notice of Pearl.
Pearl Treglown had learned early to keep her thoughts to herself. No one could see into her mind and tell her not to be so saucy. Which is what would usually happen if Pearl stopped work to wonder at the shiny scales of the mackerel she was gutting or asked too many questions about one or other of the regulars at the inn that her stepmother couldn’t – or more likely wouldn’t – answer. Yet in the last month, Pearl had been delivered answers enough to make her head fair spin – and to questions she had never dared to ask before in all her eighteen years. Such as who her true parents were and why Adeline Treglown (whose husband, Cook’s brother, had died several years before Pearl was even born) had raised her. And whether she would have to spend the rest of her life drawing jugs of ale and dodging the advances of sweaty sailors in the smoky saloon bar of the Blue Anchor when she had dreams and ambitions far beyond the fish-stinking quays of Newlyn Harbour.
She had discovered the answer to this last question the hard way today, as, after a rough hug and a warning to ‘behave yourself’ from Adeline, whey-faced and thin from her illness, she had allowed Mr Boase, the weatherbeaten Head Gardener from Merryn Hall, to help her into the back of his trap. There she sat clutching a parcel of books and a shabby holdall containing the rest of her worldly goods, wedged in by several empty baskets and a large slatted crate from Penzance market in which clattered several angry crabs and two lobsters. She was, Adeline had told her, to travel the few miles from Newlyn to Lamorna to be a housemaid at Merryn Hall, where Aunt Dolly was cook. Further than Pearl had ever travelled in her life before.
‘That’s your bed there, and your uniform,’ Jenna said, recovering her breath from the climb. They were standing in a sparsely furnished attic room with a sloping ceiling and bare-plastered walls. The late-afternoon sun poured warmth through the single sash window. ‘And you can put your clothes in them drawers there. I be getting back now before Cook kills me.’ And she galumphed down the wooden staircase again.
Pearl gazed around her new bedroom. Her room at the inn had overlooked a dark back street and smelled of mildew, winter and summer. Here, at least, it was dry and bright. But, though Jenna had laid out a few things of her own on the other drawer chest – a hairbrush, an animal of some sort roughly carved in wood, a small sewing box – this room was impersonal, so clearly just a place to sleep. Suddenly, it was all too much for her. Here she was in a strange place, starting a new life, and with so many anxieties and regrets crowding in, all she wanted was to throw herself down on her rickety iron bedstead and weep.