The Sea Gate

by Jane Johnson

As they turned down the lane towards Raginnis, they found the road blocked by a knot of official-looking camouflaged vehicles and Estelle swore in vehement French, which Olivia mentally noted down for future use. ‘Now what?’ her mother said crossly, and drew the car up closer to find out.

  A tall man in battered corduroys and a holed jersey detached himself from the crowd and loped over to them. ‘Afternoon, missus,’ he said.

  ‘Good afternoon, Jago. What’s going on?’

  ‘POWs, Mrs Kitto. They brung a contingent of ’em over from St Columb to work on the farm, now the Ministry’s demanding higher yields.’

  ‘Prisoners of war?’ Estelle looked aghast. ‘Working in the fields? Won’t they escape?’

  Jago laughed. ‘We’ll keep a good eye on them, don’t you worry. Where they going from here at the end of the world? They going to swim to France?’

  ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ Estelle said shortly.

  Olivia thrilled at the idea of foreign prisoners, beaten enemy combatants, captured by their own troops. ‘Can I see them?’ Without waiting for an answer, she flung the passenger door open and ran to where armed soldiers were ushering a small group of men in khaki fatigues out of the trucks.

  If she had been expecting horns and hooves or any other denominators of otherness, she was to be disappointed: they looked much like any men, if a bit thinner and shabbier. The POWs looked around at their new surroundings with little interest, and Olivia could hardly blame them for that; they were vanquished and far from home and the Roberts’ farm was a sprawling, untidy affair with a big open farmyard strewn with rusting machinery, an austere farmhouse (since the farmer’s wife had died it was a bleak place) and a series of ruinous barns and outhouses that ran with rats. Bad luck for them if they were being accommodated there, and knowing how mean Farmer Roberts was, they surely would be. No doubt they’d be tasked with hunting and killing the rats, too. She remembered watching Leo and Nipper and the others baiting lengths of drainpipe with poisoned meat, and bludgeoning the creatures they caught, and shuddered.

  Now the last of the prisoners climbed down out of the truck and paused to look around him, taking in the rolling farmland, the distant sea, and the group of onlookers. His skin was a rich chestnut brown and his eyes were bright with curiosity. Olivia sucked in her breath as his gaze passed over her.

  ‘Oi, Darkie, get along!’ One of the guards gave him a whack with his rifle and shoved him in the direction of the other POWs. ‘You ain’t here on holiday!’

  A moment later they were herded through the gate and out of sight, and soon after that the soldiers returned to their vehicles and drove off towards Porth Enys. Olivia got back into the car.

  ‘Don’t go running off like that!’ Estelle said fiercely. ‘You’re not a little girl any more. I don’t want you spending time on the farm now, not with those men stationed up here. You must be careful, do you hear?’

  Olivia nodded, but she knew she’d disobey.

  *

  Back at the house they were eating a supper of cold cuts from the previous day’s extravagant roast dinner – ‘a final blow-out!’ as Tony Kitto had triumphantly declared, slapping the illicit cut of beef down on the marble slab in the scullery – when the phone rang in the hall. Estelle put down her knife and fork with exaggerated care and said to Olivia, ‘Go and see who that is, will you? Call me if it’s your father; otherwise say I’m not here.’

  Olivia belted down the corridor and grabbed the receiver. ‘Good evening,’ said the telephonist at the other end of the line. ‘Is that Penzance 272?’

  Olivia confirmed their number and accepted the incoming call. ‘Hello?’ she said into the hissing vacuum. After a long moment a female voice said, ‘Hello, is that Chynalls? Is Mrs Kitto there? Mrs Estelle Kitto?’

  ‘I’m awfully afraid she’s out,’ Olivia lied under instruction, in her best telephone voice. ‘Might I take a message?’

  There ensued another long silence. ‘And when is she likely to be back?’

  ‘Oh, not for ages I shouldn’t think.’

  ‘I see.’ A sigh. ‘I was told to ring this number, by Mr Kitto.’

  ‘By Daddy?’ Olivia felt herself go hot, then cold. ‘I mean, by Captain Antony Kitto? Are you sure? Is he all right? Has something happened to him?’

  ‘Something’s happened all right, but not to him,’ the other voice said coolly. ‘Look, tell Mrs Kitto we’ll be on the train to Penzance tomorrow.’

  ‘What?’ said Olivia, shocked into rudeness. ‘I mean, I beg your pardon? Who’ll be on the train?’

  ‘My name is Mrs Ogden, Winnie Ogden, and I’ll be bringing Mary on the midday train. It’s all arranged. I would give you a number for Mrs Kitto to call back, but there’s nothing much left of the house, you see.’ She gave a mirthless laugh.

  Olivia frowned. ‘Sorry? Which house? Where are you?’

  ‘Exeter, dear. Didn’t you hear the news? We took a terrible bombing the day before yesterday.’ The voice on the other end of the line – Winnie Ogden’s (what an awful name) – said with a trace of exasperation, ‘Anyway, please just tell Mrs Kitto it’s the midday train. Have you got that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Olivia uncertainly, and the line went dead. She stared at the black Bakelite receiver, then dropped it back into its cradle as if it had bitten her.

  Her skin prickled. Some deep-seated instinct told her that she had just stumbled upon the cause of her parents’ rift this morning, and that her mother was not going to be happy with the message she was about to relay.

  Feeling oddly unsteady on her feet, Olivia made her way back to the kitchen, rehearsing her words, gripped by dread that her world was about to change for ever.

  5

  Becky

  BACK AT CHYNALLS I LAY THE LIST ON THE TABLE UNDER the sharp eyes of the woman in the portrait, who is quite clearly, now I have met her, a younger version of Olivia. I regard the strong-jawed young woman blocked out in bold oils with unexpected affection. In the space of a short hospital visit she has wormed her way into my heart.

  ‘I promise,’ I tell her aloud, ‘to do whatever I can for you.’

  I have made a big decision on my way back from Truro. Whatever it takes, I must help Olivia get home. I cannot have her wither away in a hospital as my poor mother did. I wonder how I am going to explain my prolonged absence to Eddie. And then I note that it is not the absence itself that concerns me. Which is in equal measure interesting and disturbing.

  I look at the list again. It is daunting.

  BRICK UP THE CELLAR (TOP PRIORITY)

  FIND LOCKET

  GIVE GABRIEL REGULAR EXERCISE

  BILLS and BANK

  INDOOR BATHROOM

  DOWNSTAIRS BEDROOM

  The first item seems an odd requirement, but Olivia was insistent. ‘And DON’T let anyone poke around down there.’ I am going to have to find the world’s most incurious builder.

  Numbers five and six are obviously the most vital tasks to be undertaken in order to get her home, but they are oddly not her first concern. Number three should be fun… not, and as for the locket, it came back into the conversation again and again. Olivia has described it for me in great detail: engraved and with a secret catch on the back that I am not, under any circumstances, to press. I wonder why, then, she has told me about it. Occasionally, while we discussed something else, she would pat her bare neck and give a little wail – Oh, where is my locket? – as if for a few peaceful minutes she had forgotten all about it.

  It seems the easiest thing to start with. I go from room to room looking for it. For a time I get distracted – unusually, there is a lot of rather good original art on the walls of the house. In the room Olivia has been using as a bedroom there is a striking semi-abstract seascape depicting a line of silver light trapped between dark sea and dark sky as if marking a break where the fabric of the universe has split apart. I look at it for a long time, feeling a degree of connection. It has been executed with a great deal of texture, the wr
inkled waves delineated by precise strokes of a palette knife, and a minuscule boat is breasting those textured waves, dwarfed and swamped by them. My heart clenches and tears fill my eyes.

  On the opposite wall is a painting of a dark headland against a tumble of clouds, brooding and pent-up, a landscape waiting for a storm to hit. It’s not a very restful picture. I’m not sure I’d want it in my bedroom.

  In Gabriel’s room, miraculously spared from his own abstract displays, there is a large painting of the bay beyond the house, the tranquil symmetry of sea and sky punctuated by the presence of a trawler making its way out to the fishing grounds. It has an eerie quality to it that I can’t quite pin down.

  Two ghostly spaces on the opposite wall mark where pictures were hung for a long time, then taken down, fairly recently, given the deeper colour of protected wallpaper from their faded surroundings.

  I resume my search for the locket upstairs. In the front bedroom that I am using I open the top drawer in the dark wood chest against the wall and am almost knocked sideways by the smell of camphor. Inside is a collection of mothballed jumpers, thermal vests and pairs of hand-knitted socks.

  In the wardrobe, I find tweed jackets, shirts and slacks, a pile of practical, flat-soled shoes, garments so sexless as to be ungendered. On top, there is a hat box, but when I lever the top off, I find it empty. In the drawer of the bedside table is a collection of notebooks, biros, a pair of reading glasses in a tooled leather case, batteries, a light bulb, a ball of elastic bands, and a string of dark red beads. The latter I pull out for a closer look. Despite the quest for the locket, Olivia Kitto doesn’t strike me as the sort of woman who bothers with feminine fripperies. Is it a necklace? It is too short to go over any but the tiniest head. A bracelet? It slips over my hand and sits prettily though too loosely on my wrist, the silk tassel that joins the ends hanging down in an ornamental but impractical fashion. I turn my hand, admiring the warmth of the colour against my pale skin, and wonder what it is. When I lift my hand I become aware of a faint smell: spicy, a little resinous. I close my eyes and breathe it in. Sandalwood? Is it a keepsake from a foreign trip? Or a rosary? The word pops into my mind. Rosaries are prayer beads, aren’t they? Could Cousin Olivia be Catholic? I’ve seen no Bible or prayer book anywhere, though I scanned the bookcases with some care, fascinated by her eclectic library. I have always associated Cornwall with Nonconformism – Methodists and chapel folk, sternly opposed to louche behaviour, adornment and anything foreign. Apart from anything else, given Olivia’s use of bad language it seems rather unlikely. Whatever it is, I like the silky feel of the beads against my skin. It feels comforting, like a human touch.

  In the back bedroom the chests and cupboards are bare and the room has a cold and melancholy feel to it, as if it has not been occupied for decades, since some long-ago tragedy. At the door, I catch a whiff of perfume. Je Reviens, the sort Mum wore. I experience a thrill of recognition, followed by something that may be dread. Prickles run down my back. I turn around, gripped by the sensation that someone is watching me, but there’s no one there. The scent has faded now, even when, like a dog, I sniff the air. I must have imagined it, been subconsciously thinking about Mum. But Mum has been here, several times: in her letters Olivia called it ‘your second home’ and said she was always welcome ‘if things get too difficult to bear on your own’. There was no date on that particular letter. I wonder now if it referred to the divorce or if it were more recent and that maybe Mum had confided her illness to Olivia. How strange and upsetting that she may have discussed it with a distant relative and not me.

  The box rooms are packed with old furniture and boxes containing old clothes, old curtains, National Geographic magazines. No locket.

  Down I go again. The bureau in the reading room is stuffed with paperwork. I riffle through it and extract the obvious official letters and demands, of which there appear to be an alarming number. I feel my stomach tightening, even though these debts are not mine. When you have been poor, the sense of impending financial disaster is never far away.

  In the little drawers of the bureau I find two beautiful fountain pens, bottles of ink, a packet of charcoal sticks, hard wax and a heavy little paper-embossing press. A sheet of paper on which Olivia has written her name again and again and again, with very slight variations. Was she having some sort of identity crisis? Paperclips and old stamps. No locket.

  Gabriel eyes me warily from his cage as I stalk around the sitting room, searching on the bookcase, the television table, the coffee table, behind the television. He bobs on his perch and whistles at me. ‘Messy moose key!’

  ‘Messy, certainly.’

  I go back into the old woman’s temporary bedroom and hunt under the camp bed and through the pile of blankets and clothing, making a mental note to take them all to the cleaners as soon as I have transport. I lift the hurricane lamp. Nothing. The table on which it is set is made up of a metal tray balanced on a chunk of wood. Putting the lamp to one side, I remove the tray, and find that the table-stand is carved on one side with a rough face which gazes up at me out of blind eyes. There is a kind of primitive power in the raw simplicity of its carving. When I turn it round I find it bears a second face, this one high-cheekboned with a long, straight nose and solemn, heavy-lidded eyes. Its expression is quizzical, the lips turned up in a slight smile. The face on the other side is more dour, the brows drawn together, the lips turned down. Is one face male, the other female? Or are the carvings two aspects of the same person? Turning it upside-down, I find the base is hollow and stuffed with paper, but something in its depths rattles. Did Cousin Olivia stash her precious locket in here and forget where she’d put it? I draw out the crumpled-up newspaper and something drops with a thud to the floor.

  But it isn’t Olivia’s locket. It is a large iron key.

  I weigh it thoughtfully in my hand, wondering if it has always been inside the table-stand and I am the first in decades to disturb it. It’s a fanciful thought, but it’s that sort of key. Something about it – its age, the manner in which it has been so carefully hidden – sends a shudder of sensation up my neck, as if I am being watched again. I feel compelled to put it back, and this I do, stuffing the bits of newspaper in after it.

  The tassel of the bracelet caresses my hand, as if it approves.

  I am just setting the hurricane lamp back on top of the table when I hear voices, shocking me to the gut. Running out into the corridor towards the sound, I find a pair of large middle-aged men in grubby puffa jackets and baggy jeans taking up a great deal of room in the hallway.

  ‘Ma sent us up to see what you wanted doing.’

  Rosie’s sons.

  I stare past them into the garden, searching for the words to get them out. Saul – the thinner of the two, by a shade – turns to follow my gaze, then grins at me. His teeth are yellow and uneven and his fingers are stained with nicotine: I can smell stale smoke on him at several paces. ‘Maybe rebuild the porch, huh?’ he says hopefully.

  ‘I think just clear it away.’

  They look disappointed.

  Ezra stares around the hallway with the sort of expression garage mechanics take on when about to tell you your big end has gone. ‘This place is going to take a heck of a lot of work to put it on the market.’

  ‘It’s not going up for sale,’ I say shortly. ‘It just needs a bathroom putting in downstairs for when Olivia comes home.’

  Ezra sucks his teeth. ‘Bathroom won’t come cheap. It’ll mean plumbers and qualified electricians and all.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘It’s a big job.’

  The two men exchange an unreadable glance. Then Saul says, ‘I’m sure we can find plumbers and electricians and all.’ He grins at me. ‘Ma’ll never let us hear the end of it if we don’t give you some help. She said to be sure to see what we can do. Olivia’s practically family.’

  ‘I’ll need to get several quotations. It’s not my money and it’ll need signing off. In considerable detail.’ This pair
strike me as back-of-the-envelope men, however good their intentions.

  Ezra shrugs. ‘Better have a good look around then.’

  Olivia’s instruction gnaws at me, but it would be rude to throw them out when they’re trying to help. ‘OK,’ I say, and they march past me, leaving a smoky trail in their wake: not just cigarettes, but the sweet whiff of something more herbal.

  They spend half an hour poking around desultorily, making no notes, taking no measurements. Ezra opens the sitting room door and recoils. ‘Fucken hell.’ He closes it again quickly.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I say with a sigh.

  In the kitchen I suggest I may put a modern cooker in.

  Saul raises an eyebrow. ‘Ma cooks for Miss Olivia. She likes the old range. ’Tis proper Cornish.’

  ‘It would be easier – for the carers, you know, and for me too.’

  ‘You going to live here, then?’

  It seems too complicated to explain that I’ll be here while the renovations are being carried out and when Olivia comes home: it’s all so nebulous. I am noncommittal. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Bit isolated, isn’t it?’ Ezra says. ‘Bit lonely for a woman on her own.’

  His jowly face is impassive, his tone flat. It’s an echo of what his father said yesterday: they have probably talked about me.

  ‘Olivia seems happy here.’

  ‘Well, she ent really alone, is she?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  From the drawing room there comes a sudden shriek, then a long whistle, followed by a squawk of, ‘Messy moose key! Blaaack!’

  The two men take no notice.

  ‘Besides,’ I go on, ‘it’s so beautiful here, this stretch of coastline. I love swimming, and walking. I can’t wait to get to know it better.’

  Saul shakes his head. ‘You be careful. Cliffs round here are unstable. Half soil, half stone. Water gets into the soil and they slip, don’t they? Coast path is a nightmare. Some woman fell down it last year, just before Kemyel.’

  Ezra nods. ‘Broke both legs. Had to send in the air ambulance.’