‘I’ll need a map-reader,’ I said.
I looked at the group still milling on the pavement by the front van. Tyler was nowhere near, but Jim was on the edge again, watching. ‘Jim, I bet you’re good with maps. Would you mind coming with us? I’d like company in the front to tell me where to go.’
He nodded, picked up his bag and walked over. ‘Where is it?’
‘On the seat, with Dr Loxton’s directions.’
Loxton emerged from the Gatehouse accompanied by one of the porters with two wooden crates on a trolley, one considerably larger than the other. He stopped as he passed, head tilted, as if to ask whether I’d produced a full complement yet. Jesus!
But I only nodded. ‘She’s here. Some confusion or other.’
‘Good, good. You’ve got Hugh, just in case? So we’re all set?’ He was watching the wine being loaded; maybe that would take the edge off his irritation.
‘Think so. We’re seven, so you should be six. Tyler might like to join you in the front, if that’s okay.’
Loxton glanced at the group on the pavement.
Something compelled me to explain: ‘You must remember him teasing about that American thing, at the briefing.’
‘Ah – “seeing the sights”. We’ve heard that one before. Beware of granting favours! Shall I lead?’
To begin with, it was a relief to have Loxton in front of me. The minibus wasn’t hard to drive – it was similar to the van Dad and I had hired to move my things down from York – but I didn’t know the way and was easily distracted. Jim was a good navigator but spare with words, which was helpful. Mostly we were silent.
When Loxton’s steady pace and his fastidious changing of lanes became monotonous, Jim and I resumed our tentative forays into chat. This was such hard work that I stopped asking questions and talked about my own family, hoping to draw him in. Gradually he interposed the odd aside suggesting a frugal upbringing in Cardiff with no father in evidence; an allusion to a girl he knew – a friend of his sister – whom he saw when he went home.
We kept going like that for a couple of hours, until Somerset, where Loxton was in the habit of breaking the journey at a favourite lay-by – one of those long cul-de-sacs that offer the illusion of a country lane. We got there exactly when he said we would, Loxton indicating in such good time that I could hardly have missed it – no need for theatrical signals from his crew.
As we drew up behind them, Eddie hopped towards us on one sneakered foot, dangling a long scarlet sock in our direction, the other foot naked. He was sporting a cap, like they wear for American football, tilted over the face. It looked ridiculous but he clearly didn’t think so – he almost pirouetted.
I opened my door and waited. Over by the other van Tyler and Barnaby watched together, arms raised to shade their eyes, sleeves dropping back to bare their wrists – Barnaby’s still tanned, Tyler’s with that honeyed hue.
‘Did you see my traffic light?’ Eddie stuck his hand deep in the sock and spread his fingers. The wool was ribbed, soft and still rather new-looking, with a thin grey band at the top. ‘Rather fine, isn’t it? If only I had my green ones,’ he continued, ‘I could give you the go-ahead too, but they’re packed.’
He rubbed his bare foot against the other leg as he looked to the passenger side. ‘How’s our rally driver, Jim? She doing okay?’
Where did such people come from? He was insufferable! And because of the draw, they were going to be sharing!
Jim looked nonplussed at the comment, the freckles draining of colour. ‘Why wouldn’t she …’
Behind us, the van began decanting noisily. I chucked the keys onto the dashboard and put out a hand to muffle the clatter.
Jim tried again. ‘On your tail all the way, mate. We’ll beat you yet!’
Eddie toyed with the sock, throwing it between his hands, then hopped once more to maintain his balance. ‘In your dreams, boyo,’ he said.
Rupert arrived by the bonnet and studied Eddie’s bare foot. It was slender, almost feminine, with very long toes. Eddie wiggled them coquettishly.
Chloe pushed Rupert and his shrug away. ‘Dig the red sock!’ she said and pulled it off Eddie’s fingers, holding it swaying above her feet. ‘It looks just my size. Lend them to me?’ And she ran off up the slope, a flash of red at her side.
Jim watched as Eddie, still one-legged, hopped after. ‘Dickhead,’ he muttered, and thrust the map into the glove box.
We ate lunch amidst the birdsong, sitting in the sun on the grass verge – an irregular line of blobs against the greenery that was broken periodically when the students helped themselves to more food or stood to watch the gulls in the newly ploughed field.
I’d fleetingly imagined a picnic in wicker baskets laid out on tartan rugs, but Loxton’s version, prepared by the kitchen staff, was more austere, consisting of pungent cheese and pickle sandwiches together with a choice of Scotch egg or chicken and ham pie. The savouries must have been familiar to the students. Tyler, who was funnier than I’d expected, said you could tell the day of the week by the chutney that surfaced in Hall at lunchtime, Saturday’s having the sweet taste of slowly sautéed onion to welcome the weekend. He also claimed they’d invented the nickname ‘Peggies’ for the eggs, which had an unusually thick crust of home-made breadcrumbs. Gloria began to explain for my benefit, stopping abruptly when Loxton came over to refill our beakers. I never heard the conclusion.
Next to her Rupert lay back on the bank like a male model – hands locked behind his head, elbows making a bow with his shoulders, velvet jacket gently puckering – discussing the smell of the great outdoors with no one in particular. When Loxton announced we should be making a move, he settled further into the long blades, ignoring the packing up that was going on around him.
Loxton looked at me. ‘Might I have a word?’
He stepped a few paces away and stared down the empty tarmac. There was a pause while he dabbed at some loose chips with the toe of his shoes.
‘It didn’t occur to me to think of it,’ he said, nodding towards the students. ‘The men can sort themselves out, but I think the women …’
What was he talking about? My mind drifted about its mooring, considering the options; then the rope tightened. Ah, the men must have relieved themselves behind a succession of hedges, but the ‘gentler sex’ could not. Poor Loxton, embarrassed by normal bodily functions – how would he cope in a house full of women?
‘Of course! Though we’re quite capable of holding our bladders, you know – you have to be very good at it in College if you’re in the wrong spot.’ I thought of the older staircases, known as ‘Hell’, which were notorious for a deficit of female loos; those with new facilities were ‘Heaven’. Maybe Loxton hadn’t picked that up.
‘A stop at the next service station?’ I suggested.
Loxton looked vague.
I shouldn’t have teased.
Jim had loosened up over lunch. We chatted our way happily through Devon, crossed the Tamar Bridge talking about the wonders of Victorian engineering, and continued as we drove over a new landscape of generous curves dotted with sheep. The meadows were now the colour of moss – brilliant green with a russet dusting – and the contours were like those in a basket of apples writ large, a jumble of rising and falling mounds.
He mentioned the laid slate walls interwoven with ivy and bramble, whose base disappeared into the moss as if into a drift of green. He’d repaired dry-stone walling on the Gower the previous summer, he said, to supplement his grant: it was heavy, windy work but satisfying; a good wall might stand for centuries. We contemplated this revelation companionably.
‘You’re in danger of losing him,’ he said, as we pulled away from a roundabout, his tone suggesting that he too saw the possibilities.
Soon, Loxton’s light blue van was far behind us. Ahead, tufts of gorse emerged from the hedgerows, occasionally dusted with vivid sulphurous yellow, and the trees thinned.
We drove across the bottom of the moor
as instructed, taking in the scrubby patches that peppered the slopes – in the distance the gorse now like a dark spattering of sheep droppings; in the foreground the long, yellowing grass tufty and doughy, like the dunes on the coast at home; only very small trees. I wound the window down to sniff the air.
‘Is this Bodmin?’ Lyndsey called out from the back.
In the mirror I could see Gloria and Rupert glance out and then resume their flirtation in a conversation about Benazir Bhutto’s farewell debate at the Oxford Union the previous week; Chloe, who was now next to the window, was dozing against the glass. Behind them Lyndsey sat forward, holding onto the back of the seat in front and craning past Hugh, all eagerness.
‘Isn’t it glorious? Haven’t you always longed to see the moors here? If I were out there I’d run around with my arms aloft, like this, and I’d twirl and twirl …’ And then she was off, hands wafting above her head, saying something obscure about du Maurier to a shaking of the head from Hugh. Impossible to hear the words above the chatter in-between.
We began our descent towards the coast. Another brief patch of moorland, more pastoral than before, and we went steeply into another town.
‘Not far now,’ Jim announced to the mirror as we left the buildings behind. ‘And we’re still ahead of Dr Loxton.’
The road followed the line of a small river, gradually descending to its level. Steep fields came down on one side; on the other was a low wall and beyond it the stream. Daffodils appeared on the slope – great drifts of them.
By now we were all looking out of the windows, taking in the sombre greys of the stone buildings lifted by white-washed houses with slate roofs. Mevagissey was not as I’d expected; too big for a village but small and tight-knit for a town. There were glimpses of boats at the ends of the side alleys as we drove through, but we didn’t get the measure of the setting until we were above the bay and could look down to the harbour and across to the surrounding hills. Mevagissey had the air of a place created by tossing boulders into a valley and seeing where they settled: dwellings jammed against each other, streets irregular and narrow – everything lined up in a jumble to face the water, focused on fishing.
I slowed by an imposing Georgian building with a soaring flagpole: almost the kind of ‘sight’ that Tyler might have wanted to see.
‘What do you bet that was once the harbourmaster’s house?’ I said to no one in particular, looking up at the confident granite façade with its three tiers of windows decreasing in height as they ascended – an orderly hierarchy neatly expressed in the scale of the slate lintels, softened by the white columns and architrave of the doorway and the dentils under the roof. It comfortably dominated the street.
‘Hugh, didn’t Dr Loxton say the harbourmaster built here before he bought the spit of land with the chapel?’
But Hugh had forgotten the details, beyond the fact of a seafaring career that had culminated in considerable wealth, and nobody else could recall what had been said.
We carried on up the hill, leaving behind the view of the bay. The bungalows gave way to pastureland as the road turned inland and the sea stretched out again in the distance, beyond the soft undulations of the clifftop.
Then, just as Jim touched my arm and pointed, Hugh called to me to ‘stop driving like a mad woman’ or we’d miss the turning.
It wasn’t much more than a farm track – a raised strip of earth flecked with a gravel of sorts setting out across the turf. The surrounding ground would be a mess in wet weather; someone had paid, and people had toiled, to make it passable. Astonishing, what people had done to tame the landscape. I opened the window to listen for the sea and marvelled.
‘I thought he said it was grand,’ said Rupert, as we moved off towards the horizon.
‘No, you wanted it to be grand!’ The bench behind me shook as Gloria pummelled him, laughing.
There was clearly an attraction, or maybe they were already going out; both ‘blessed’, they would make what Mum called ‘a handsome pair’. We hadn’t allowed for lovers; was that what the Dean had been getting at?
Lyndsey piped up. ‘You’re missing a breathtaking view: look at that! Don’t you want to be out there with the birds?’
We were nearing the high point on the far side of a short bay. Along with a gust of wind came the sound of gulls calling and a faint smell of seaweed. In front of us the track swooped back on itself and down into a bowl alongside a small ragged beach and then swept up the slope on the other side towards a brief ribbon of green above the pink-tinged grey of the rock face. Just before the ribbon narrowed there were a few pine trees to the rear and, on the near side, in the midst of the expanse of green, a large square house not unlike the one we’d just seen, surrounded by shrubs, standing proud of a smattering of smaller buildings, some whitewashed, some in the same pewter stone. At the extremity of the point, just beyond the last of the trees, was another white rectangle – a small chapel edged with grey quoins. Everywhere the woodwork had been painted a jaunty blue, the roof tiles were uniformly slate, the planting was shades of bottle green. Someone had chosen a harmonious palate, which blended the buildings seamlessly into the hues of landscape, sea and sky.
Carreck Loose – ‘Grey Rock’. It was a fitting name.
I thought we knew what to expect, but this wasn’t it: even Jim was straining forward at my side; the back of the van was a babble of exclamation.
For a start, the track had turned back into a drive – mossy down the middle, and definitely in need of attention at the sides, where grass encroached on the sparse gravel, but still suggestive of a certain grandeur, whatever Loxton had said. It swirled into a green-tinged turning circle edged with primroses and daffodils in front of a shallow portico where the house faced the sea, the circle clearly built at a time when carriages did nothing as mundane as to take the short route to the stables. That explained the side track we’d passed, I thought: it must lead to the buildings at the back.
Then there was the house itself – a thundering imposition on the landscape, whose scale, proportion and sheer nerve suggested a confidence we’d long lost. It completely dominated the grouping and more than held its own in the craggy landscape despite the majesty of the rock face below.
And the views! The outlook from the front rooms, facing south, was clearly going to be breathtaking. Even those at the side would have their bit of coastline.
I hadn’t thought through the implications of arriving first: we’d all assumed Loxton would do the honours. Now it struck me as inconvenient as well as unkind to have beaten him to it: we couldn’t get in. Hugh wasn’t there to ask – he’d set off across the grass in the direction of the tiny chapel, with Chloe and Gloria mucking about alongside him, Lyndsey somewhere behind. It was Jim who stood with me by the front door amidst the bags, uncertain of the form, his tough-boy glower suddenly at odds with the setting, while Rupert tilted a few flowerpots in case there was a spare key.
The three of us did a quick circuit outside the house, taking in the area of mown grass and the occasional massing of pompom palms that continued round to the north-west until the ‘lawn’ – more like a gently sloping meadow – petered out into shorter shrubbery. From there we could see through to a tennis court and the end of the low stone building we’d spotted from the track, which Jim soon established as the old stables and coach house. On the other side of the courtyard was the mirroring pair of cottages, painted white but empty, with the back route coming in between some old greenhouses at the rear. Rupert admired the way the arrangement framed the extension at the back of the house: it would all be very pleasing, he opined, if it weren’t so weather-beaten. I disagreed, thought it pleasantly relaxed just as it was. And I liked the shaded aspect further round to the east, where there were pines and another patch of shrubbery – you got an enticing glimpse of the rocky outcrop with the chapel. But it was cold. Soon we were at the front door again.
Still no sign, not even of Martin. We tried the windows, but most were shuttered and,
where not, the deep beds, sprouting bulbs between bare sculptural forms, made it impossible to see in. Even the modest conservatory at the end of the extension was unrevealing: really a large porch with a few pot plants and some ailing Lloyd Loom furniture. So we retreated to the terrace and sat contentedly with the others where the crazy paving caught the afternoon sun. A sense of collective ownership began to develop, with ideas about walking the green ridge, of playing football where the slope levelled out, even of tennis by the outbuildings. Rupert said he would work in a front room – he’d imagine Edwardian house parties and taking tea on the lawn. Gloria was right: he was the one with the grand ideas.
Eventually Loxton’s van moved serenely across the brow of the field on the skyline in front of us. It delved silently into the gulley and soon we heard the crunching of gravel.
When we got to the front of the house, Loxton’s team had already disappeared inside, but Rupert wasn’t to be hurried. He made us stop to enjoy the flagstoned hall, bisecting the house from front to back, which had a shabby splendour, and the scale of the mahogany stairs, with their square turn. I was more taken with the old portraits, their puckered canvas loose in elderly gilt frames – wanting to know who they were and which, if any, was the harbourmaster himself.
That was when Tyler appeared, collecting a bag or something, catching the end of my speculations. What had I said? It mattered that it shouldn’t be stupid.
But Tyler didn’t seem to have noticed. ‘Good paintings!’ he said, glancing round. Then, indicating a three-quarters view of an elderly woman: ‘She’s nearly as bad as that woman in Hall. Just better dressed.’
The Reading Party Page 7
