by F. G. Cottam
That night, the Greers went out for a family dinner. James and Lillian told Olivia about the possibility of the move. Like Jack, she must have heard it all before, her father thought, as he described some of the charms of Cornwall. But eight was a vastly less cynical age than thirteen. She seemed intrigued and excited by the scheme.
‘Your dad’s going to take a look, before we commit to anything,’ her mother cautioned.
She nodded enthusiastically, her eyes wide above a broad smile. James thought the dark romance of the west of England was probably appealing to the latent Goth tendencies his daughter’s wardrobe and reading matter had hinted at. She was an imaginative girl. She was also very much at the centre of her own drama. She probably wouldn’t miss her friends as much as he had feared she might. In what he knew of her evolving social life, she led rather than followed. She was not as hostile to her school as Jack was to his. She had not been given reason to be. Nor, though, was she attached to school as emotionally as some children became.
Children were ruthless and elitist in an instinctive way caring adults learned to temper. That was the essence of maturity. But at their ages, among their peers, what mattered about Jack and Olivia was that they were good-looking and skilled communicators and that they each wore fashionable clothes and owned an impressive hoard of cool stuff. They were kids who scored on all counts. And they would be a novelty, wouldn’t they? They would make friends easily. They would have children’s amenability to change. They would probably relocate more painlessly than their parents would.
Olivia turned in as soon as they got back from the restaurant and Jack followed her half an hour later. He had been determined to demonstrate his rank by going to bed later than his younger sister, but by the way he trudged up the stairs, would be asleep the second he closed his eyes.
James took a drink into the study. He looked out of the window. It was never completely dark in central London. There was always some ambient light and with the interior light switched off, he could see the hedges and shrubs at the back of the garden shift and shiver in the night breeze. Lillian followed him in there, reaching her arms around him, resting her head on his shoulder, kissing his ear. He looked from the garden to his desk and the book she had illustrated still open on it, at the picture of the looted church.
‘This move could be the making of us, Lily.’
‘I hope so, darling. You haven’t been happy for a long time.’
‘And you’ve thought about leaving me. You have only stayed for the sake of the kids.’
‘Not entirely. I still love you. But you don’t love yourself. You don’t even like yourself much, James. It makes you hard work, sometimes.’
He nodded at the book on the desk. ‘Have you remembered doing that?’
She laughed softly into his ear. ‘The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker,’ she said. ‘No. I haven’t. It’s very curious. I’m going to have to investigate, see if I underwent any treatment for amnesia in my second year at art school. When do you plan to go? I’ll be very happy to take next week off, if you like.’
‘No pressing deadlines?’
‘I’m on top of things.’
‘You’re always on top of things.’
‘It will be good to have a few days at home, give Jack some motherly TLC. I’m becoming excited about this scheme of yours, darling. We might finally do it, this time.’
His eyes were taken by some momentary movement beyond the window, in the shrubs. But it was surely only the bolt into flight of a small bird or more likely a bat. He put his hands over Lillian’s, which were linked by their fingers around his waist. Her skin was smooth and cool and the touch of her never failed to bring the stir of arousal. Repeating himself, aware he was, he said, ‘It really could be the making of us.’
Chapter Three
It was the Monday before he got the chance really to investigate thoroughly the history of Brodmaw Bay. After dropping Olivia at school, Lillian returned as she had promised she would, to give Jack the motherly TLC she really needed no excuse to lavish on her son. They were an affectionate family, naturally and uninhibitedly demonstrative in their affections for one another. Sometimes, when they watched television together, it looked to James like Jack was welded to his mother. James thought it wonderful. He was just sorry that adolescent self-consciousness would probably, fairly shortly, inhibit his son’s tactile nature. And when it did so, where his parents were concerned, it would likely do so for ever. It was a shame.
Lillian’s return gave James the time to lock himself away in the study and learn about the idyllic settlement beside the sea on the way to capturing their hearts and futures. He planned to drive to Cornwall early the following morning. He would take the family car, their beaten-up old Saab, rather than the Jaguar. The Jag would likely add another ten grand to the speculative value of any property he viewed in the mind of the seller, should he spot somewhere they might like to make an offer for on his trip. He knew enough about the traditional shrewdness with which Cornish folk dealt with outsiders, to guard against that sort of opportunistic profiteering as best he could.
Fewer than four hundred people lived in Brodmaw Bay. It had grown over the years. At the time the Domesday Book had been compiled, it had been a coastal hamlet of sixty souls. So it had not grown that greatly in the nine hundred-odd years since then. Topography determined its physical size. The land rose steeply behind it and its harbour sat at the centre of a claw-shaped breakwater hewn from the coastline by nature. To either side of it, the land receded sharply, isolating the area that could actually be built upon.
Then there was its economy. It survived on what its fishing fleet brought in. The prosperity or poverty of the town was determined entirely by the weight and character of what was landed in the nets. There was no land worthy of cultivation in the area. Thin soil and salt saw to that. There had never been a tin mine in the vicinity worth working. Everything, ultimately, depended upon the catch.
There was some patronage and had been down the centuries. The Penmarrick family were local and very wealthy. The wealth was long established, but its source was obscure. It could not be fish, James concluded, wryly. Crabs and lobsters would always have fetched a fair price at the market towns inland. But not profit on that scale. It seemed to be dynastic wealth. But the Penmarricks held no baronial title bestowed in Norman times by a grateful king. It was a bit of a mystery where the money came from.
He thought that perhaps it originated in tin deposits or land owned elsewhere. It could have been generated abroad at some time in Britain’s imperial past. Maybe a distant Penmarrick ancestor had been a successful mercenary in the pay of the Crown during the century of war with the French in medieval times. Or there was piracy, which had brought immense rewards from about the fourteenth century on. It did not greatly matter. Richard Penmarrick was rich and generous and rightly popular. That was what counted. In Brodmaw Bay, his was a powerful and very influential voice.
The only really unusual thing about the history of this Cornish fishing village was its association with witchcraft. The first trials had come in the aftermath of the Black Death, in the fourteenth century. But they had been followed by a further, even harsher incidence of persecution inflicted by one of the Witchfinder Generals in Cromwellian times. His name had been Jacob Ratch. There were some etchings of the executions, women in the black habits they had been ordered to wear for their interrogations.
The images were grim and pitiful. James thought that the witchfinder must have been very enterprising in his accusations and questioning to find quite so many servants of Satan in such an isolated spot. Either that or the informers who had summoned him had been particularly spiteful and convincing.
Beyond the left claw of the Brodmaw breakwater, there was a shore beneath a cliff. This shore was strewn with boulders. The legend was that these rocks were the litter left by careless giants from a game of quoits played in ancient times. In the witch trials, suspects had been chained to them at low
tide. Cromwell’s man had argued that any woman who survived this ordeal was guilty. The innocent, drowned, would blamelessly ascend to paradise. A total of twenty-eight women drowned chained to the rocks. By the time he read this, James already assumed that Jacob Ratch had probably been clinically insane.
There was a circular plain where the rising land finally flattened to a plateau to the rear of Brodmaw Bay, overlooking it. This grassy circle was marked out by a series of ancient standing stones. There were twenty-one of them and they were evenly placed and dated from the Neolithic period. Nobody knew their exact significance. But they had fostered their own legend over the centuries.
The stones were said to be the remains of a druidic temple dedicated to the summoning of the Singers under the Sea. There were no images of the Singers. But James did not very much like the idea of them. To hear their chorus was to suffer their curse. It delivered madness and death. He could not imagine why even the most self-aggrandising druid would wish to summon them. It sounded a very dangerous party piece. He wondered if the women chained to the rocks on the shore accused of witchcraft had heard their song with the incoming tide.
Brodmaw Bay had been home to two illustrious sons. One had been an early nineteenth-century prizefighter called Gregory Abraham. After beating all comers in Cornwall, he had beaten the Devon and Somerset champions too. He had boxed a champion from Ireland at a sporting club on the Strand. They had fought one another to a standstill over seventy-five rounds. His fame growing, Abraham had boxed an exhibition with Lord Byron, an enthusiastic amateur pugilist. He had retired, prosperous, to run a tavern in his home village.
Then there had been Adam Gleason, a soldier-poet in the Great War who had been killed in 1916. His one volume of verse was still on the West Country A-level curriculum. James thought that Gleason fitted the flower of youth stereotype of Western Front sacrifice very neatly. He had been brave, good-looking and only twenty-nine years old when he met his death on a night patrol in no-man’s-land.
Abraham’s tavern was still open, a pub now renowned for its seafood and run by one of Gregory’s direct descendants. A marble statue of the bare-fisted battler stood outside it, his bare torso mighty above his britches, his hands raised in a guard. It had been built after his death, the money to pay for it raised by generous public subscription.
Not far from the pub there was a high street monument to the Great War dead and, beside it, a bust of Adam Gleason on a plinth. A plaque was screwed to the plinth and into its brass face had been engraved a stanza from one of his sonnets.
In the photograph of this commemorative sculpture James found, fresh flowers sat in a bronze vase before it. They seemed symbolic of a place that cared for its own and its heritage; a place that was confident in its identity, a settlement guided by tradition and continuity in which such contemporary blights as vandalism and graffiti simply did not exist.
Nowhere was perfect. From Brigadoon to Balamory, the perfect place to live was no more than a seductive fiction. But Brodmaw Bay was picturesque of itself and occupied a quite beautiful piece of coastline. It seemed genuinely unspoiled. It was quiet and prosperous. It fitted perfectly their family dream of living somewhere serene and lovely at the edge of the sea. Over the next couple of days, he would discover whether it was also welcoming.
After spending the morning researching Brodmaw, James had lunch with his wife and son. Then he spent an hour invoicing clients and dealing with admin generally, before leaving the house for the fifteen-minute stroll to go and pick up Olivia from school.
It was a hot day. Pollution lay in a shimmer from the road surface to the height of the roofs of the cars gridlocked on the route. Monday traffic throbbing at an angry standstill was so much a part of Bermondsey life he barely gave it a thought, usually. But in the heat he could taste the exhaust fumes, inhaling them as he knew his daughter would have to on the walk back home. He thought of clean sea air and a salt breeze teasing the tresses of Olivia’s lovely auburn hair. It seemed a seductive alternative to their present reality.
Lillian Greer had made the decision to end the affair the moment she had entered the hospital room with her daughter and seen the expression on James’s face as he looked down at their stricken son. She had known at that second that her family was the most precious thing in the world to her and the thing above all else in the world she would fight most desperately to preserve.
She knew that she had come very close to throwing it all away. She had been recklessly indiscreet with a man she could not count upon to behave predictably. Robert was capable, in rejection, of knocking on the door of their home and pleading his case in front of her husband. He was young and headstrong and completely selfish. The youth had seemed a quality attractive at the outset: vital and flattering. But he was too immature to accept the rebuff gracefully. He would plead for another chance. And when it was not given, could easily respond to the fact of defeat with self-destructive spite.
That was why she had agreed to give serious consideration to the Brodmaw Bay proposal so readily. In a more sedate frame of mind she might have taken issue with the Little Englander reaction the assault on Jack had provoked in James. But this was not the time to be philosophical and she was in no position to claim any kind of moral high ground when it came to principles or politics.
She had betrayed her husband and by extension her children too. She wanted to flee the problem, in Robert, she had inflicted upon herself. She wanted to escape to a fresh start somewhere that wasn’t characterised by claustrophobia and deceit and guilt. She thought that the Cornish coast would do very well. It was beautiful and, even better, it was remote. It removed her physically not just from the threat of Robert’s exposure of her adultery, but from the temptation of his company.
She thought about this while she was not lavishing TLC on Jack because he had dozed off on the sofa next to her, halfway through something entertainingly puerile on his favourite television channel. The channel was called Dave. It had been new to her until today. She thought its output a bit pathetic, but not unendurable. It was mostly a very male cocktail of slapstick and testosterone.
Ads for personal injury solicitors and lenders offering unsecured loans between the programmes were a strong clue as to the channel’s intended demographic. But Jack was only a child and had a very good reason for occupying his temporary couch potato role. His resting head had slid on to her lap. She twisted a lock of his hair between her fingers as his father researched a potential new life in the study behind them and she pondered on the affair from which she had yet formally to extricate herself.
She had met Robert three months earlier. He was a successful children’s author. They had an agent in common. He had written the first of a proposed series of books about a solitary, slightly scary young girl who secretly – and sometimes not so secretly – possessed telekinetic powers. In the first story the heroine, a twelve-year-old Irish girl, lived with her parents in the county town of Ennis in Clare in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the second book, she would relocate, in domestic service, to Edwardian Dublin. The third book proposed to take her, still in the service of her wealthy employers, to New York.
Lillian had not known much about Robert O’Brien as an author but she had read the manuscript of the first story and thought it would be a very enjoyable project to illustrate. She had been told that he was thirty, eight years younger than she was. This had not been an issue either way. If anything, she was the more successful name in children’s fiction. She had not known anything about him at their first meeting because, beyond the obvious, she had not needed to.
He came to her studio. He arrived on a motorcycle and when he took off his helmet, a dark mane of hair tumbled about his head and shoulders. He was half-Irish, with a Spanish mother, and the most exotically beautiful man she could ever remember having met.
She had never been unfaithful to James before. And she had not lied, in telling him that she loved him. But he had been difficult over the past couple
of years. She thought that he suffered from depression. It was not so bad that it debilitated him totally. It was not so bad that he was forced to seek medical help. But there was this air of melancholy about him most of the time. And she had come to think it contagious. It afflicted her and it afflicted the children too. She had not realised the extent of the damage it had done to their relationship, how far they had drifted apart because of it, until Robert rode with his dark good looks and humorous dynamism into a life he made her suddenly aware had become more solitary than it should have.
In retrospect, she wished she had considered matters dispassionately at the outset. Had she thought it through, she would not have committed the betrayal. Had she calmly inventoried what she stood to gain from the affair against what it stood to cost her, she would not have gone to bed with Robert. Desire, mingled with a sort of loneliness, had combined to make the temptation strong. But it had not been irresistible and in surrendering to it she had let herself down.
Had she thought about it, she would not have become involved with someone so volatile and needy. The problem was, though, that she had not started the affair thinking about how she would end it. She had started it intrigued, aroused and somewhat intoxicated by the flattering attentions of a beautiful man.
Robert’s flaws only manifested themselves once you were intimate with him. They were partly instinctive, but partly also, she thought, a consequence of things having come so easily to him. He had actually qualified as a doctor. But he had never practised medicine. His first children’s story had been accepted for publication when he was still a student at the School of Medicine at Edinburgh. He had found a popular following straight away. His stories had inspired two successful television series and a feature film that had been a box-office sleeper hit in America.
When a man achieved this sort of success, without much effort, before getting out of his twenties, Lillian discovered in Robert that it did two things. It made him feel he had attributes out of the ordinary. And it led him to believe that he deserved to be treated as someone special. All her instinct and experience with him told her that he was a man who would have difficulty taking no for an answer, because in his adult life rejection was something he had simply never experienced.
