In a Kingdom by the Sea

by Sara MacDonald

  The thing that prevents smug middle-age and makes me wistful is the fact that we have never been a close little family unit of four. We have not had that intimate and unique bond that Dominique and I had when we were small, growing up with Maman and Papa in Cornwall. I wanted us to be like that, a family that makes everyone else into an outsider.

  I wanted Mike to be as protective of his boys as Papa was with Dominique, and me. I would love him to listen to them a little more and lecture them a little less. I would like him to accept Matteo’s non-academic choices and to spend more time with both of them, but it is not going to happen. Family life has changed; the world is faster. I am not Maman, either. Dominique and I never had an instant meal or un-ironed school uniform. Or, most terrible of all, Maman would never have forgotten a sports day because she was having a personnel crisis at work.

  I watch Mike as he leans towards Jacob and Nick. The three of them have all climbed the corporate ladder together. He cannot resist telling them about his phone call from the headhunter.

  Jacob whistles. ‘Pakistan Atlantic Airlines, Karachi?’

  ‘You do know that Karachi is one of the most dangerous cities in the world?’ Nick says. ‘I know someone who refuses to work anywhere in Pakistan. You should check how safe it is to be out there before you even consider it.’

  ‘PAA is based in Toronto, so if they want a European director for crisis management, why not pick a Canadian?’ Jacob asks.

  ‘The Karachi to Heathrow flight in particular is haemorrhaging money …’ Mike says. ‘So I suspect they are interested in anyone who might have some influence in obtaining slots at Heathrow.’

  They all laugh. Slots at Heathrow are like gold dust.

  ‘Apart from the obvious dangers, Pakistan will be a minefield!’ Jacob warns. ‘I bet one of your remits is to discover how much corruption is going on.’

  ‘Of course it will be.’

  ‘Rather you than me,’ Nick says. ‘I can see it might be a good career move, but personally, I wouldn’t be up for all the stress and cultural pitfalls …’

  ‘I bet they are tempting you with an enticing salary,’ Jacob says.

  ‘They are, but I never go anywhere just for the money. It’s the challenge of turning round a failing airline.’

  Nick raises his glass to Mike. ‘I know. Go for the interview. You can’t make a judgement before that. Good luck, mate. Happy birthday!’

  Jacob raises his eyebrows at me. ‘Bit hard on Gabby if you disappear again so soon, isn’t it?’

  ‘My clever wife has her own successful career,’ Mike says smoothly. ‘She is used to me disappearing. She knows I’m not ready to turn a challenge down yet. Anyway, I’ll have to check a lot of things before I agree to anything. Now, who needs a refill?’

  Kate and Emily follow me back into the kitchen. Dominique has stayed there, sitting on a kitchen chair, knocking back the red wine.

  ‘How do you really feel about Mike going for a job in Pakistan?’ Emily asks. ‘Karachi isn’t exactly a safe city for women. Will you be able to even visit him?’

  Dominique has ears like a bat. ‘Karachi!’

  I stall her. ‘Mike’s been approached for a possible job out there. It’s not worth discussing … It probably won’t happen.’

  I carry plates to the sink, closing the subject.

  ‘How typically Mike. He’s only just got home,’ Dominique mutters under her breath.

  I turn and move the bottle of red wine out of her reach. When my sister goes to the loo, Emily says, ‘Sorry, Gabby, I forgot Dominique and Mike fight over you.’

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s just that Dominique seems to be drinking rather a lot and I don’t want a stand-off on Mike’s birthday.’

  Emily gathers up her bag. ‘I’d put the whole Pakistan thing out of your mind and just enjoy having Mike back, Gabby. Headhunters often get the job spec wrong anyway. I’ll have to go or I will turn into a pumpkin.’

  Kate and I laugh. Newly single Emily is back at home while she looks for another flat. Her mother is driving her mad with her ‘little rule’ of being home by eleven.

  ‘I’ll have to go too,’ Kate says. ‘I promised I’d meet Hugh at his book launch thing at the V&A …’ She hugs me. ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that relationships are better for a bit of absence. I could certainly do with a bit of an absence from Hugh. He expects me to put in an appearance at his book launches yet he wouldn’t think of travelling across London for one of my writer’s thingies …’

  ‘That,’ said Emily, ‘is because men are Very Important, Kate, with very Important Authors and we are just women trying to promote commercial fiction …’

  They link arms and disappear off to the underground together.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I ask Dominique when she comes back from the bathroom. She seems pale and subdued tonight.

  ‘I’m fine.’ She picks up her vast handbag. ‘I was hoping we might go off somewhere together while I was in London but you are obviously taken up …’

  ‘Oh, Dom, sorry, really bad timing. Mike’s just got home and you know how it is …’

  ‘Not really.’ Dominique smiles at me. ‘I’ve ordered a taxi. Give me a ring, darling, if you have time to see me before I fly home on Monday.’

  ‘Of course!’ I say guiltily. ‘Let’s have lunch together. You haven’t told me why you’re in London. You said you were staying with a friend?’

  ‘Well, she’s not exactly a friend. I used to make her clothes when she lived in Paris. She’s asked me to design her daughter’s wedding dress.’

  ‘How wonderful. So, you’re staying at her house?’

  ‘No. She’s put me up in a posh hotel round the corner from her house.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come here?’

  ‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing and you are always so busy with work and I didn’t know if the boys were home …’

  ‘I’m never too busy to have you to stay, you know that.’ But I also know that Dominique will never stay if Mike is here.

  Dominique fiddles with her bag as if she wants to say something.

  ‘Dom? Is something wrong?’

  She shrugs. ‘No. You told me you had a few days off and I thought, maybe, while I was over here, we might get the train and spend a couple of days in Cornwall together. Stupid … a whim. I had forgotten that Mike would be back in London.’

  I stare at her. Dominique has never expressed any wish to go back to Cornwall. At Papa’s funeral she vowed that when the house was sold she would never return.

  ‘What brought this on, darling?’

  The taxi arrives at the bottom of the steps. Dominique does not answer. She hugs me. ‘I must go. Gabby, don’t you dare even think of going out to Pakistan …’

  She runs down the steps and I call, ‘Another time, Dom. Let’s do it another time … Cornwall, I mean.’

  Later that night, when Mike and I have cleared up the debris of the party and are lying exhausted wrapped around each other in bed, Mike whispers, ‘Thanks for such a great birthday … Pity the boys couldn’t be here …’ He buries his mouth in my hair. ‘Love you, Gabs.’

  These are words Mike so rarely says that I am unnerved by the sound and shape of them; I shiver as if a ghost has tiptoed over my grave.

  Mike falls instantly asleep but I lie awake in the dark feeling an odd ennui, probably brought on by the white wine. Or perhaps it is guilt that I never make time for Dominique when she always makes time for me.

  I think of her sitting alone at the kitchen table, steadily working her way through a bottle of red wine, and I feel sad. There have been so many dramas in Dominique’s life that I dread hearing another, but it is no excuse. How did I get so busy that I neglect my sister?

  I lie listening to Mike’s breathing. He will be offered the job in Pakistan. He will accept. We will live apart again. It is how our marriage has always been, but this time unease surfaces. It hums and hovers in the air like a tangible presence, a shapeless dark thing, crouched, w
aiting, just beyond reach.

  Somehow, with one thing and another, I did not manage to meet Dominique before she flew home to her tiny flat in the Parisian suburbs. Mike’s job offer had unsettled me. I hid my disappointment. I did not want to play the martyr. Mike was off to new horizons, but I was still in my familiar role at home and oh, how dull that made me feel.

  I wish I had not neglected my sister. I wish I had not been so preoccupied with Mike that I failed to pick up Dominique’s misery or her desperate need to talk to me. Her drinking, her dark clothes, her sudden wish to go back to Cornwall had all been clues. And I ignored them.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cornwall, 1966

  Whenever I am sad or unhappy I run to Cornwall in my head. I no longer have a home there but I take myself through the rooms of the house where I grew up as if they will still be exactly the same; as if my parents still inhabit the rooms, still roam the garden and orchard full of ancient apple trees.

  I can still hear the sound of the chickens in the long grass and Maman’s cry when the fox got any of them or she spotted a rat near the feed.

  I can see Papa stripped to the waist as he dug out a vegetable patch on a piece of the field next to the house. I can see Maman watching him from under her sunhat and remember the little flush inside me as I sensed, but did not understand, the innuendo of their banter.

  My first memory of our house is standing on the balcony with my father gazing downhill across a field of wild flowers to the sea. There was a mist hanging over the water like a magical curtain and the sea was eerily still, like glass.

  ‘Fairyland!’ I whispered. To a five year old living in a terraced house in Redruth, it was.

  ‘Can you imagine living in this house?’ Papa asked me, sounding excited.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to live with Aunt Loveday. She’s old, Papa, and she smells.’

  ‘That’s not very kind, Gabby,’ my father said. ‘It’s sad. Loveday is too old to live here any more. She can’t cope with all the stairs so she is going to a private nursing home. This house has to be sold to help pay for her care …’

  My father sighed as he looked down at the neglected garden.

  ‘Poor old Loveday. She’s lived here all her life. It is a big thing for her to admit she can’t manage on her own. Now she wants her home to stay in the family.’

  ‘So, are we going to buy her house?’ I asked my father, following his eyes across the jungle garden.

  ‘Maybe, if we can afford to. The house has to be valued first. If we moved here you would have to leave your friends and change schools.’

  I stared out at the sea, blindingly blue below me. ‘I don’t mind. I’d love to live here. We’d have the beach and a garden to play in but Dominique won’t want to move. She’s got so many friends, she won’t want to leave any of them.’

  ‘Leaving some of them behind would be no bad thing,’ my father said. ‘She might make more sensible ones and concentrate on her schoolwork …’

  Loveday’s house was an old and shabby granite house. Once a farmhouse it lay foursquare and solid, facing the coastline. Loveday, a distant cousin of Papa’s, had slowly sold off most of their land but had protected the house by keeping all the surrounding fields.

  Papa pointed to the village sloping off to the right of us. Fishermen’s cottages lay in tiers raised above the water. We could not see the small harbour full of fishing boats from here, or the lifeboat station; they lay out of sight beyond the point, like another little hamlet. On this side of the village there was only the perfect horseshoe cove and the coastal path through fields.

  ‘With a little imagination, this coastline could attract so many more people …’ my father murmured to himself.

  Maman came bustling onto the balcony with Dominique behind her. They were carrying a French loaf, cheese and tomatoes. Maman looked happy. My sister looked bored and sulky.

  Maman kissed the top of my head and said to Papa, ‘I rang the education department at County Hall this morning. There are no staff vacancies in the village school at the moment but I would almost certainly be able to teach in Penzance.’

  She dropped the bread on the table and turned and looked out at the sea, and the garden below. ‘We would be mad not to try to buy this house, Tom, however hard it will be. I could do supply teaching. There will always be work in the shops and hotels in the summer season. I could probably earn more money having two part-time jobs than I do teaching.’

  Dominique rolled her eyes, dismissively. ‘Maman! Are you going to stop teaching in Redruth to be a cleaner like Kirsty’s mum? Just so you can live in this house?’

  ‘Dominique,’ Maman said. ‘I have loved Loveday’s house from the first moment I saw it. I would do any job that brings in money to live here. I do not want to spend my life in a rented house in Redruth with no garden. This might be the only chance Papa and I have of owning a house …’

  ‘But this village is miles away from anywhere,’ Dominique wailed. ‘It’s like a dead place. I won’t have any friends. I like Redruth …’

  ‘In a couple of years you’ll have to change schools anyway,’ Papa said. ‘You’re good at making friends. You’d soon make new friends in the village …’

  ‘It’s a boring, boring village. It doesn’t even have a proper shop …’ Dominique was in a rare bad mood and spoiling the morning.

  ‘Loads of tourists will come to the beach every summer,’ I told her.

  ‘Big deal.’ She flounced off down the steps to the overgrown garden.

  Maman said, slightly deflated, ‘It is a bit off the beaten track, Tom. If we did B&B, would anyone come, apart from walkers?’

  ‘There are plenty of walkers but the village does need a café, a decent pub and nice places to stay to draw more people here. Look, down there to the beach, Marianne … See those little huts by the lifebuoy? The council are thinking of doing those huts up and renting them out. Wouldn’t one of them be the perfect place for a little café? As you say, there’s nowhere to get anything to eat or drink at the moment.’

  Papa laughed at Maman’s face. She was staring out visualizing the café up and running.

  ‘I reckon this little village is going to change dramatically in the next few years. More and more tourists are coming further west. St Ives is getting crowded and too expensive, but up-country people still want to buy second homes, which means plenty of work for a builder like me …’

  My father was waving his hands about and striding up and down as if we already lived here.

  ‘The village would be ruined,’ Maman said, ‘if it was built up and overpriced like St Ives. I love all the fields covered in gorse. Who wants to live near empty houses all winter?’

  ‘No one can sell agricultural land. No one can change the coastline or coastal footpaths. People will always come to walk and how many walkers pass a café if it’s there? I’m not talking about building new houses but renovating old cottages when they are sold off. I’ve heard that the council plan to open craft shops in the old cowsheds in the square as a showcase for local artists, potters and silversmiths and the like. This is the right time for us to buy, my bird. If we don’t take this chance, we’ll regret it for the rest of our lives …’

  My parents went inside arm in arm to make lunch. I stayed outside on the balcony staring out at the sea. The mist was blowing away and little fishing boats were heading out of the harbour, the thud of their engines echoing over the still air.

  A tractor was ploughing up on the hill with a great carpet of seagulls circling behind it. The church bell chimed. I heard Maman laugh inside the house and the deep boom of Papa’s voice. I caught the flash of Dominique’s dress in the orchard. She had climbed into one of the old apple trees and her singing floated out over the garden. I waved and she waved back. I could see she was smiling. I could see she was changing her mind and tasting freedom.

  This was my first memory of the village. A sensation we all had of coming home; an instant connectedness to Loveday’s house t
hat was powerful. The old lady’s life here was ending, but ours was about to begin.

  CHAPTER THREE

  London, 2009

  A few days after our party, Mike flew off to Karachi for his interview with Pakistani Atlantic Airlines. When the phone rang I already knew what he would say. He had been offered the job and accepted on the spot.

  Aware of my silence he said, ‘Gabby, I’m going to have to wait for my visa application to be processed. Even fast-tracked, it will take at least ten days, so we will have time together before I go …’

  I take time off work and Will and Matteo head down from Edinburgh and Glasgow to spend a long weekend with Mike before he leaves.

  ‘FFS, Dad, we’re fighting the Taliban, it’s not exactly the perfect time to head for Pakistan, is it?’

  ‘You’ll get kidnapped … like that journalist, what’s his name … Pearl Someone …’

  ‘Daniel. Daniel Pearl, he got …’

  ‘Shut up, both of you, you’ll worry your mother. Of course I won’t get kidnapped. I’m not a journalist after a story. There are other Europeans working in Pakistan, you know. Oil companies, commercial firms, NGOs. Everyone working out there is given security.’

  The parks are stunning, full of trees with translucent green leaves and picnickers enjoying a hot June. Mike loves to roam London when he is home, so we criss-cross the city like tourists, drink coffee by the Serpentine, dip in and out of galleries, go to the theatre. In the evenings we take turns choosing where to eat and sip cold white wine and beer on shady terraces.

  I cannot remember the last time we all spent time together in London. I let my happiness settle inside me like a precious thing, hardly daring to own it, in case some mean god snatches it away.

  One afternoon Will and Matteo persuade us to take a riverboat down to Greenwich like we used to when they were small. As we chug downriver Mike cross-questions his sons on their career plans.