The Girl Who Came Home to Cornwall

by Emma Burstall

After leaving her hired Polo in the car park at the top of South Street, she strolled towards the steep, well-hidden set of steps that she’d taken previously. This time, the walk seemed less far and before she knew it, she was opening the garden gate at Kittiwake and rapping loudly on the front door with the brass knocker shaped like a scallop shell.

  It took Simon a little while to answer and when he finally appeared, she was disconcerted to find him looking surprised and, frankly, not especially pleased to see her.

  ‘Oh!’ he said, scratching his head, shrugging one shoulder and jerking his chin in the opposite direction, all at the same time. ‘It’s you!’

  He was in an old brown sweater with a couple of large moth holes on the front, creased beige trousers and well-worn tartan slippers. His thick tortoiseshell glasses were smudged and his chin was covered in dark stubble.

  Chabela guessed that he must have been reading or doing other close work because behind the spectacles his eyes seemed to have disappeared into the sockets and his black pupils had shrunk to pinpricks.

  ‘Sorry, am I early?’ she asked, unsettled by the less than ecstatic reception.

  Simon was standing very stiff and upright, like a Buckingham Palace guard, but then all of a sudden a look of recognition crossed his features, his shoulders relaxed and the frown melted away.

  ‘Of course! I invited you!’ he exclaimed, as if it were a revelation, and he stepped back and motioned for her to go inside. ‘I’ve been marking Year 11 French homework. I’d completely forgotten about our arrangement.’

  Chabela offered to return at a more convenient time, but he wouldn’t hear of it, instead leading her into his kitchen at the back of the cottage. There, he filled the kettle and popped some teabags into a large green ceramic teapot.

  He didn’t ask her to sit down but she did so anyway, pulling out a chair and settling at the table, which was strewn with red exercise books, some in neat piles while others were open and covered with red pen marks.

  ‘That’s Rafael Oliveira’s,’ Simon commented, noticing her gaze falling on one particularly battered book that seemed to have a muddy footprint on the open page. There were so many red corrections that the original handwriting was scarcely legible.

  She started. ‘Rafael? I know him! I was working with him today!’

  When she explained about his job at the café, Simon clicked his tongue.

  ‘If he spent a bit more time studying instead of earning beer money, he wouldn’t get so many detentions. Look at the state of that homework. It’s a travesty!’

  Simon’s face had turned quite red and he sounded so outraged that Chabela wanted to laugh, but managed not to. She decided that she wouldn’t mention Rafael’s hangover, not wishing to get him into any more trouble.

  Once Simon had made the tea, she took her mug into his front room while he went to fetch something from next door, returning shortly after with a large, dark blue, hardback notebook. Then he sat down opposite her, as before, and started scanning silently through the first few pages.

  Chabela sipped her tea and tried to wait patiently, hoping that he wouldn’t notice her leg jiggling up and down with frustration. It was a relief when he finally looked up and cleared his throat.

  ‘I spoke to Rick yesterday,’ he said ponderously. ‘As I suspected, he was very helpful. He gave me the name of a woman in Redruth, who runs the Cornish-Mexican Society. That sounds grander than it really is. In fact it’s just her and a few distant relatives of miners who emigrated from Cornwall to Hidalgo in the nineteenth century.

  ‘The society was founded some years ago by this woman’s father, whose relative had lived for a period in Real del Monte. The father wanted to keep alive the connection between the two mining communities, here and in Mexico. When he died, his daughter took up the baton.’

  Simon went on to explain that he had managed to contact the Redruth woman and by a tremendous stroke of good luck, it turned out that her father had heard of Rodrigo Penhallow from Mexico. They had even shared some correspondence in the 1990s.

  Chabela felt her pulse quickening because, of course, Rodrigo was the name of her grandfather on her father’s side. She had a million questions but Simon was on a roll and she didn’t want to interrupt.

  ‘This Redruth woman – Yvonne, her name is,’ he continued. ‘She sounds quite elderly but she’s all there, mentally I mean. Anyway, she went off and dug out a letter from Rodrigo. It transpires that he was the grandson of one James Penhallow, originally of Tremarnock, who emigrated to Real del Monte in 1854 and made a fortune in mining.’

  ‘Goodness!’ Chabela’s eyes were like dinner plates. ‘I can’t believe it!’

  Simon looked up briefly and nodded before consulting his notes once more.

  ‘This much we now know,’ he went on seriously. ‘James Penhallow married a Mexican girl called Jacinta and they had two children, Helen and James Junior, born in 1865. When the children were still quite young, tragedy struck. James Senior was accompanying a wagon train carrying silver bars to Mexico City when he was set upon by a large group of bandits and killed.

  ‘That’s terrible!’ Chabela, who was beginning to feel quite invested in the story, felt a catch in her throat.

  Simon nodded again. ‘And there’s more.’

  Not long after James Senior’s death, he said, Jacinta, now a wealthy woman, had married a Mexican called Santiago Gonzalez. According to Rodrigo, Gonzalez had insisted that from then on, his stepchildren be known as Iliana and Jaime Gonzalez, the Spanish versions of their forenames.

  ‘Gonzalez forbade them or their mother from mentioning James Senior or Cornwall ever again. It was only after their stepfather died that the children reverted to their original surname of Penhallow.’

  ‘He sounds mean,’ Chabela said darkly, thinking about the selfish way her own mother had behaved when she had divorced Chabela’s papa, preventing any contact between father and daughter.

  ‘I suspect he wasn’t very kind,’ Simon agreed. ‘Rodrigo said that the marriage wasn’t happy. I don’t know what happened to Jacinta, but James Junior went on to have three children, one of whom was Rodrigo…’

  Chabela let out a squeak; she couldn’t help it. She could sense the net closing in and her pulse started to race again.

  ‘And Rodrigo had a son?’ she said breathlessly.

  Simon looked pleased with himself. ‘Indeed he did, called Hector. And Hector, as we know, married a woman called Catalina and they had a daughter – Isabela.’ His eyes twinkled as he spoke the name.

  ‘Rodrigo said it was a source of regret that when Hector and Catalina separated, she forbade him from having any contact with Isabela, or Chabela, as she was known. Rodrigo only met his granddaughter one time, just after she was born.’

  This news, coming all at once, so surprised and moved Chabela that for a moment she was speechless. It felt to her like a grand reunion, filled with joy but also tinged with regret and sadness for the time lost. Perhaps this was what adopted children experienced when they finally met up with their birth mothers. It felt a bit like coming home.

  All through childhood, through her whole life, really, she’d felt alone, with no father or paternal grandparents, no siblings and precious little contact even with her mother’s side of the family.

  By hook or by crook she’d carved out a good existence for herself, but there had always been something lacking, some space in her soul that nothing and no one seemed able to fill, not even Alfonso.

  Although she’d never meet Rodrigo, James Junior or any of these other ancestors, still, she felt that already they provided some insight into who she was and why. Now that her appetite was truly whetted, she wanted to know more.

  ‘I can’t believe Yvonne has all this information about my family that I never even knew existed.’

  All of a sudden, tears welled up and before she knew it, they were dribbling down her cheeks. Soon, the dribble turned into a deluge. It was as if all the sadness, isolation and longing that she’
d kept buried for so long had come rushing to the surface and nothing and no one could keep it down any longer.

  Her shoulders shook and she was so racked with sobs that she didn’t even notice Simon get up and move over to her side of the room, where he stood like a spare part, staring at her in dismay and confusion.

  So lost in sorrow was she that it was only when she felt a tentative pat on her shoulder and a desperate voice whispering, ‘There, there,’ that she remembered where she was.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she managed to blurt, in between the tears. ‘I don’t know why it’s upset me so much.’

  Opening her swollen eyes just a little, she noticed Simon’s feet, in tartan slippers, shuffling this way and that, as if he didn’t know what to do with them.

  ‘Do you have a hankie?’ she managed to ask at last, wiping her wet nose with the back of a hand. It didn’t do any good, because the weeping wouldn’t stop.

  She was vaguely aware of the slippers vanishing and when they reappeared, a large box of man-size tissues was thrust onto her lap. Grabbing a wodge, she blew her nose unceremoniously.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said again, managing to peer up at her host at last. Her face burned as if she’d been stung by nettles and she could barely see out of her sore eyes.

  All she could tell was that he was excruciatingly uncomfortable, hovering over her anxiously and looking for all the world as if he’d rather be anywhere but here.

  ‘Can I get you a drink – whisky or something?’ he asked desperately. He looked tremendously relieved when she nodded.

  Alcohol seemed to do the trick because after taking a few sips, she felt slightly better and, little by little, the crying abated.

  As she sat there, huddling over her glass and contemplating what had just happened, she felt exposed. It was as if she’d lost several layers of skin after baring her soul to this relative stranger.

  For the first time, he settled next to her, perching uncomfortably on the edge of the sofa as if he might need to bolt at any minute. She thought that he might start to probe a little, to try to find out what lay behind her outpouring of seemingly disproportionate distress – that’s what she would have done – but he didn’t.

  Instead, he fiddled with the cuff of his sweater, pulling at a loose thread, and she wondered idly if the whole garment might start to unravel, which would be strangely symbolic, somehow.

  ‘Um, do you feel better?’ he asked hopefully after a few moments and she said she did, more to put him out of his misery than because it was the truth. Emotional literacy clearly wasn’t his forte.

  ‘Look at the sunset!’ he said suddenly, and she turned and followed his gaze out of the window that faced the ocean.

  She almost gasped, because in the time that she’d been weeping, the sky had turned from pale blue, studded with clouds, to an orangey red so bright that it almost hurt her eyes.

  ‘Wow!’ Without thinking, she rose and walked over to the window, aware that he was following close behind. It was as if they were both being pulled by an invisible force.

  Beyond the garden, the cliff edge and the darkening beach, it was hard to tell where the sky ended and the water began. There was a kaleidoscope of colour, like a tangerine dream, that seemed to hit all the senses and leave her reeling.

  ‘This is what it’s all about,’ he said quietly, ‘don’t you think?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ She was puzzled.

  ‘I mean, the past is gone and who knows what the future holds? All we have is this moment, right now. Enjoy it.’

  Something in his words resonated with her. Taking a deep breath, she let her eyes, her whole body melt into the scene and the warmth and beauty of the blood reds, golds and burned oranges seemed to touch her soul.

  For a few blissful minutes she felt fully connected to the earth below her feet, the air around and the sky above. Alfonso seemed like nothing but a distant irrelevance.

  When the colours finally started to fade and darkness encroached, she turned back towards the room and watched Simon move swiftly away. Shadows fell over the walls and furniture and as he stood by the door, waiting for her, she shivered suddenly, aware only of a feeling that it was time to go but that she didn’t want to leave.

  ‘Thank you for your help,’ she said, picking up her jacket and her bag and trailing behind him down the hallway.

  For some reason, she thought that this might be it; that he’d done all he could for her.

  ‘I still owe you a meal,’ she said, scrabbling around for an excuse to see him again and kicking herself inwardly for sounding a bit desperate.

  ‘You do.’

  To her relief, when she looked at him his eyes were troubled but gentle.

  ‘I’ll have a think about where we go from here with our Penhallow investigation.’

  She was glad about the ‘we’; it reassured her.

  He offered to walk with her across the cliff to the steps that led into the village, at least, but she didn’t need it, now; she was all right on her own.

  When he opened the garden gate for her, he hesitated for a moment and she wondered if, this time, he would kiss her on the cheek. But he shook her hand instead and strode back into the house so fast that anyone watching might have thought that he couldn’t wait to say goodbye.

  Chapter Ten

  Liz stood with her foot on the bottom of the extension ladder while her husband started to climb. Their cottage wasn’t very tall, which was just as well considering Robert’s aversion to heights; he’d managed to conceal it from most people, but Liz knew the truth.

  ‘Well done, not much further,’ she said encouragingly, as he gripped the sides of the ladder so hard that his knuckles turned white. Around his waist was a belt to which he’d attached a black pistol.

  It was actually a BB gun, firing plastic pellets, but it looked like the real deal. It had been purchased especially, the aim of the mission being to scare, not kill.

  ‘I feel like I’m scaling Everest,’ Robert moaned, stopping for a moment to take a few deep breaths. Then, ‘Shit!’

  He leaned back suddenly, causing the ladder to wobble, and Liz’s heart flew into her mouth.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she started to cry, but the question died on her lips because a big fat gull appeared from nowhere and swooped almost across his path, its wings spread wide. From where Liz was standing, it looked positively prehistoric, like a feathered pterodactyl complete with razor sharp talons.

  While it was diving, its friends, invisible behind the chimney pot, launched into a cacophonous screeching. Robert ducked, then started to descend rather more quickly than he’d managed to go up.

  ‘Jesus!’ Liz said, once he’d safely reached the bottom. Her heart was beating loudly in her chest. ‘That was scary. How many of them do you think there are?’

  Robert, who’d turned quite pale, narrowed his eyes and glanced up.

  ‘No idea. Quite a lot. The buggers saw me coming and prepared to attack, I know they did.’

  Just as he spoke, another bird, high above, let out a squawk and a gooey splat landed on the toe of his boot, followed by a second, a few feet from Liz’s shoe.

  ‘Right, that’s it!’ Robert was incandescent. ‘This is war!’

  He marched back into the cottage, leaving Liz alone for a few moments, and reappeared in a bright yellow hard hat, which he’d bought for safety reasons when the Secret Shack was being ripped apart and renovated.

  On his hands were some strong leather gloves and he’d also found his thick, green, military-style jacket. All he needed was some camouflage face paint and he’d be ready for combat.

  ‘Are you sure you want to go up again?’ Liz asked anxiously, because she knew that this was his worst kind of nightmare. ‘Maybe we should call the council? They might frighten them off for us instead?’

  Her words fell on deaf ears, however, and Robert shook his head.

  ‘I’m angry now,’ he muttered, pulling back his shoulders and jutting out his chin. ‘I’ll
show them who’s boss.’

  His bravado didn’t fool her for a second.

  ‘Be careful,’ she begged, as he started to ascend once more, this time with the BB gun wedged in his jacket pocket. ‘I’m too young to be a widow.’

  A Winkle in Time was closed on Mondays, which meant that, technically, Robert was off duty. In the early days of marriage, he’d kept this time free for Liz. She’d treasured their walks along the cliffs, pub lunches and lazy afternoons, while Lowenna napped and before Rosie returned from school.

  Sometimes they’d draw the curtains and hop into bed themselves, giggling like naughty children as they dived under the covers. Now, though, Robert usually went over to the Secret Shack on Mondays or did his paperwork. At least he left Bag End a little later than normal, though, which was why he’d picked today for Operation Seagull.

  Up he went, rung by metal rung, while Liz looked on in trepidation. When he finally reached the last few steps, he was able to rest his knees on the edge of the guttering and lean across the slates, which had been warmed by the sun.

  Craning his neck in the direction of the chimney pot, he gave a shout.

  ‘I can see it!’ He turned his head slowly towards Liz and called again, ‘There’s a nest! It’s big!’

  ‘Any eggs yet?’ she shouted back.

  ‘No!’ came the reply.

  That was one good thing, anyway. Liz didn’t like to think of upsetting any offspring, hatched or not. She’d rather shoo the prospective parents off before they could reproduce.

  She wanted to know how many gulls Robert could see, but her yells were drowned out by another volley of screeches, which seemed to go on and on. When they finally died down, she tried again.

  ‘Can you see the husband and wife? It sounds like they’ve got the whole family up there – uncles and aunts and everything!’

  Robert didn’t respond, but raised a hand in the air to indicate that he wanted hush. Then, very carefully, he ascended two more steps, until he was almost on the very last one. Even Liz, who didn’t mind heights, felt giddy.

  She held her breath as she watched him lower himself flat against the roof, elbows first, followed by his trunk and tummy, so that he was almost spread-eagled. Then he reached around to pull the BB gun out of his pocket.