Gran studied public examination syllabuses and I studied with Gran. I re-entered the public domain only to take my GCSE examinations at the nearest state secondary school. I effortlessly passed all the arts subjects with high grades and managed to scrape through maths. Only in the sciences did Gran’s teaching perhaps not quite pass muster and of course there had been little or no opportunity for practical experiments.
My upbringing was about as sheltered as you could possibly get, I suppose. Yet I was happy enough – except during my time at St Justin’s – if only, maybe, because I knew no better. Gran saw it as her mission in life to look after me and I always liked being looked after.
I accepted that I needed looking after much more than most children. Indeed, I accepted, as I grew older, that I would always need looking after. I never seemed to have the ability to make decisions for myself. I read newspapers and watched TV – our small portable set, which was a reluctant concession from Gran who did not really approve but eventually gave in to my pleas for one on the grounds that there was so much to be learned from it – and as I grew into adolescence realised that I was reaching an age when many young people chose to rebel. I had no such desire. I was contented with my lot. I would not have known how to rebel, or whom to rebel against. Gran was the kindest, cleverest woman in the world, I thought, and I felt so safe with her.
Gran and I had few friends and rarely went out, except to church on Sundays and a fellowship meeting once a week. Gran was very religious and I naturally grew up accepting her standards and beliefs. I certainly never questioned her simplistic conviction that God was as real as she and I were. I think she actually did believe in an old bearded guru sitting on a cloud somewhere up in the sky.
About the only outside influence we had came from the little chapel we were members of, not far from our Hounslow home. Gran was strictly chapel, predictably unimpressed by the pomp and ceremony of the Catholic church and even the Church of England. The pastor was a tall, handsome, rather aloof man called Robert Foster. Gran adored him. He was the only person she had ever met, she told me, who knew the Bible better than she did – and that included an awful lot of clergymen, Gran said.
I was eighteen and had just taken my A levels – English, History, and Art – when I began to realise that Gran was not well. She looked tired all the time and seemed to be in some pain. Eventually she went to the doctor, something that didn’t happen often in our house. Gran usually reckoned that an aspirin and an early night were a cure for almost anything. When she came home after her visit to the surgery – I had not been allowed to accompany her, which was rare because Gran and I usually went everywhere together – she seemed anxious and distracted.
I tried to find out what was wrong but she wouldn’t tell me. The Reverend Foster came to the house, and he and Gran spent more than an hour closeted together. Eventually she came out of the dining room where they had been talking behind closed doors and told me she had something to say.
It seemed she was dying of cancer.
I could barely take it in. Gran was my world. I knew nothing else. Selfishly, perhaps, I didn’t think at first in terms of her pain or even of my own loss. I thought at once only about how I would survive. I simply did not know how to cope without her. But I might have known she would have thought of that.
‘You’re my biggest worry, child,’ she told me. ‘My only worry. I am happy to go to my Maker, I’ve always tried to serve Him and I don’t doubt His promise of eternal life,’ she announced predictably. ‘But you, girl. You need looking after . . .’
Gran paused and the Reverend Foster stepped forward.
‘Robert has agreed to take you on,’ said Gran, clutching the clergyman by the arm and sounding as if she were talking about an old horse or a broken-down motor car rather than a teenage girl. ‘Robert needs a wife and I’m sure you’ll make him a good one. I know he’s twenty-odd years older than you, but I think you will be helped by the stability of an older man.’
I remember gazing at the pair of them in amazement. The whole thing was such a shock. ‘B-b-but, we barely know each other,’ I stuttered.
The Reverend Foster stepped forward and positioned himself directly in front of me. He placed one big hand firmly on each of my shoulders and peered down at me. His eyes, staring directly into mine, were a piercing blue and I was aware of them having an almost hypnotic effect. ‘We will have a lifetime to get to know each other, my dear,’ he said. His voice was pleasingly soft, but I knew from his sermons from the pulpit that it was not always so.
I glanced uncertainly at Gran. ‘I don’t know, I-it’s j-just so much to take in,’ I stammered.
Gran tried to smile reassuringly. She looked so ill and weary. ‘I don’t know what else to do,’ she said, and she spoke very quietly and slowly. ‘I just feel sure it’s for the best.’
I trusted Gran with my life. She seemed to have no doubts. I don’t remember either her or Robert Foster being all that interested in what I thought of the plans they had made for me and I went along with them. I seemed to have no choice. I don’t think I really thought about the magnitude of what I was doing. I had no sense of committing myself to another person for the rest of my life.
Our brief courtship was barely worthy of the name. I only saw Robert Foster when he came to the house and Gran was usually with us. He never took me out anywhere, or introduced me to his friends or family. He did present me with an engagement ring, a single diamond in a narrow gold band, which I thought was rather lovely, and sometimes he brought flowers, although I was never entirely sure whether they were meant for me or for Gran. Everything between us was stiffly formal and distant.
We were married within two months. Gran didn’t have long to live and her last wish was to be at the wedding. This was held at Robert’s church, of course, with his bishop officiating. Gran and I had almost no friends or family worth mentioning, but half the congregation were there to see the pastor wed. I got through the day in a kind of a daze. My wedding dress, traditional ivory white, had been hired for the occasion. Two little blue-eyed blond girls I did not know at all, but who reminded me disconcertingly of Janet Postings and appeared to be of almost exactly matching height and colouring, were my bridesmaids. They had been drafted in from the Sunday School.
‘I’m just so proud and happy,’ Gran croaked.
Even her voice was fading. I suppose that was all I cared about, really, making Gran happy and I hadn’t thought much beyond that. For myself I felt nothing, really, just a great emptiness.
Among strangers and wearing somebody else’s dress I married a stranger. Robert Foster and I had barely been alone together. I had never had even the most casual and innocent boyfriend. I barely knew what to expect even of our wedding night – Gran had been an excellent tutor of Shakespeare, the Magna Carta and trigonometry but, predictably enough, sex education had not featured on her curriculum – let alone our life together.
I just knew that this marriage was what Gran wanted, that she thought it was the right thing to do and she had never let me down. But, of course, she had a blind spot when it came to Christianity and those who represented it. She honestly thought she could do no better thing on earth than to marry off her awkward unworldly granddaughter to a clergyman – and, more than that, the pastor of her own chapel.
The truth was that she had never really looked beyond the pulpit at the man himself. And, slavishly following her wishes as I always had done, neither did I until it was too late.
Gran died within six months of the wedding and after that there was no one in the world for me to turn to apart from my new husband.
And he turned out to be a monster wearing a dog collar.
I dread to think what might have happened to me were it not for Carl.
Six
I could not travel. I certainly could not go abroad. I had never been abroad in my life. I did not even have a passport.
But Carl used to take me with him to his homeland. Through his wonderful stories I
felt as if I had toured the Florida Keys, driven over the Seven-mile Bridge, drunk in the bars of Key West, visited Hemingway’s house, ridden the Conch Train, basked in the tropical sun and even danced in the streets after dark in the hazy hippieland of Carl’s childhood.
Carl had such a wonderful way of bringing it all to life.
He told me stories of how he grew up with the smell of oil paint in his nostrils. From when he was a very little boy he used to sit at his father’s feet as he painted and was allowed to visit the studios of many of the other painters, including Eugene Otto, who became perhaps Key West’s first really well-known painter.
Carl’s childhood sounded so exciting to me, although I knew it had not actually been a very happy one. His father had never achieved the success he hoped for as an artist and as a result – or that was his excuse, Carl used to say – had consoled himself with drink and drugs. As time passed the days spent painting were increasingly replaced by days passed in a drunken drugged haze.
‘What about your mother?’ I had asked him once as we sat together in the little public garden on the cliffside off the road to Hale, where a splendid Barbara Hepworth bronze stands proudly before the backdrop of what must be one of the most beautiful sea views in the world.
Carl’s eyes grew wistful. But he just shrugged. ‘In the beginning she often used to join in. I suppose it was fun to start with, that’s how it is with drugs, isn’t it? She smoked dope, but I never saw her do anything else, not like him . . .’ Carl shuddered. ‘Anyway, it meant I had plenty of time to myself . . .’
Indeed, from what I could gather the young Carl was more or less ignored by both his parents most of the time. He ran free in the streets, learning to cook and fend for himself from an early age, and even, when things got really bad, how to hustle and beg from tourists.
‘I was good at that,’ he told me, smiling.
‘I’m surprised you didn’t turn into a druggie yourself.’
Carl was as reasonable and logical as ever. ‘I suppose you go one way or the other,’ he replied quietly. ‘I’ve known people who regularly smoke dope and even do coke who are just fine. It wasn’t like that with my folks, that’s all . . .’
He didn’t mind telling me tales of the folklore and history of Key West, in fact, I think he positively enjoyed doing so, but when it came to confiding in me about his family that was about as far as he ever went. There was a lot of pain there for Carl.
None the less I knew this unique and crazy city, closer to Havana than Miami, shrouded in history and mystery just like Cornwall, still held a place in his heart, otherwise he could not have made it so special for me.
‘Cayo Hueso,’ he whispered to me. ‘Island of Bones. That’s what Key West was first known as. They reckon the Caloosa Indians used it as a burial ground. From a cemetery to a playground for presidents, that’s Key West. Built by fishermen, poets and pirates, sailors, soldiers, rum runners and treasure salvagers . . .’
‘Treasure salvagers,’ I interrupted him. ‘Is that American-speak for wreckers?’
He grinned. ‘I guess.’
The more he told me about Key West, on the southernmost tip of America, the more it reminded me of Cornwall, on the southernmost tip of Britain.
‘I know,’ he agreed. ‘I think it’s what drew me here, from the moment I came to the UK I knew I wanted to end up here. I can’t explain, just something about this county . . .’ He paused. ‘The people are the same, you know, I swear it.’
I laughed. That could be going too far, I reckoned.
‘No, I mean it,’ he said. ‘There’s the artists and the deadbeats, of course, plenty of those in both places. But Key West folk, they’re different from other Americans, like the Cornish are different. In 1982 Key West declared independence, you know, founded the Conch Republic, created a flag. They celebrate their own Independence Day every year.’
It was my turn to laugh. ‘A joke, I assume,’ I said.
‘Maybe,’ said Carl. ‘But don’t tell me the Cornish wouldn’t be quite capable of doing something like that.’
I had to admit he was probably right. In any case I loved his stories, and I pretended to myself that one day I would be able to go there and see it all for myself, with Carl by my side. I did have good dreams as well as the unspeakably bad ones and Key West often featured in the good ones.
I would picture myself standing on Mallory Dock at sundown, along with the jugglers, mime artists, musicians and the dancing, jostling crowds Carl told me gathered there every evening to celebrate. I imagined myself holding Carl’s hand and drinking exotic cocktails while we watched the sun sink into the Caribbean sea just eighty miles away from Cuba.
I knew why Carl had left his homeland and why he felt he could never go back, but I also realised how much he still missed it. Carl had been married before and his wife had left him for another man. I could not understand how anyone could leave so loving and caring a person as Carl, and I knew that this betrayal still broke his heart. It was, he said, the reason he had sought a new life in a new country.
Simple, straightforward and a big overreaction, some might think. But Carl was like that. I knew well enough the extent of his loyalty, the lengths to which he would go for someone he loved. He would naturally expect that kind of commitment the other way round and for it to last for ever. I knew that was what he expected from me, and it was what I wanted to give him.
Although Carl was so strong in so many ways there was also an insecure side to him, which I believed stemmed from all that had happened to him before our time together. I understood that all right. Few of us can ever truly escape from our own pasts. And how I wished that I could escape from mine.
But Carl had given me a new life, and six years I could look back on with joy. I loved him with all of my heart and mind, and I really would not have known what to do without him there to guide me. Among the sweetest of my memories was the moment when we arrived in St Ives together for the first time. It was a beautiful late-September night and he had driven straight to the harbour. We parked the van and walked to the waterside. The moon had been high and bright, and the sky full of stars. The tide was low and several of the boats moored there had bottomed out and lay crookedly on the sand basin, their masts creating a crazy pattern of angular shadows.
It was almost midnight and St Ives was already asleep. Momentarily the moon was covered by a passing cloud and the sky turned black as coal. I was used to the bustle of London where darkness never really falls and the silence overwhelmed me. Indeed, the sense of peace was such that it felt as if we might be the only two people awake in the whole world.
I breathed in the smell of the sea. You could taste the salt in the air. A slight breeze was blowing inland. It made the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand up and sent a shiver down my spine.
‘My Lady of the Harbour,’ Carl whispered in my ear.
He put his arm round me and I snuggled up to him, unsure of what was going to come next but happy just to be with him.
‘This is the start of our new life,’ he murmured. ‘Tomorrow we will find ourselves a new home.’
As ever, whatever Carl promised seemed to come true.
We slept in his old van, which he had driven all the way from London, wrapped a duvet round ourselves and huddled as close together as we could get on seats divided by a gear lever. We would have been more comfortable stretched out in the back, but the van was stuffed full of our various possessions – mostly things belonging to Carl, like all his painting gear and completed paintings. I had brought little from my previous life except a few clothes – but there was my red bicycle, Gran’s bike, of which I was so proud.
The next day we bought the local newspapers so that we could study the property pages and toured the estate agents.
Rose Cottage, on a hill at the back of the town just off the beginning of the main road out to Penzance, was the second place we saw. Whatever roses it might originally have taken its name from had long gone. It didn’
t even have a garden. The front of the granite-built cottage, its highly suspect roof stained with lichen, veered steeply upwards directly from a narrow cobbled alleyway. The front door led straight into a small, dark living room. Another door, open on our arrival, led into a poky kitchen and through the glazed kitchen door at the rear we could see that there was just a tiny backyard, enhanced only by a washing line and a dustbin rather than the blooming display of roses we had allowed ourselves to hope for. This was not a two-up-two-down. This was a one-up-one-down, with a lean-to bathroom and kitchen tagged on downstairs. The window of the downstairs living room directly faced the living room of the cottage opposite, no more than five feet away. No wonder the rather grimy net curtains looked as if they remained perpetually drawn.
At first glance Rose Cottage, although quite picturesque in its way, did not appear to be a very attractive proposition at all. I had already discovered that this was fairly predictable. Landlords of the better St Ives properties are inclined to prefer to plug in to the lucrative summer market rather than settle for the much lower weekly rent of an all-year-round let.
Carl and I glumly took in the grubby two-seater sofa, an elderly gate-legged table and a collection of four odd dining chairs, about all the room would take, before allowing ourselves, without enthusiasm, to be led up the rickety staircase in one corner.
It was then that everything began to change. Rose Cottage’s only bedroom boasted two windows, a large picture window at the front, which just cleared the roof of the cottage opposite and below – such was the steep slope of the hill on which they were both built.
A Deep Deceit Page 8
