by Nicola Upson
Still breathing hard, Josephine said: ‘Don’t worry about that. I’m glad you’re all right – but why would you want to pretend something like that?’
‘I wanted to know how my brother feels,’ she said earnestly. ‘Everyone keeps saying he’s at peace and nothing can hurt you when you’re dead, and I just wanted to make sure they were telling the truth.’ There was such a powerful combination of logic and impossibility in the reasoning that Josephine did not even begin to argue. ‘It’s a nice idea,’ Loveday continued, standing up and brushing the sand off her skirt. ‘Just being quiet, with no one shouting or crying. I think I’d like that a lot.’
The remark was made without any sense of self-pity, but it told Josephine more about Loveday’s short life than half an hour of conversation could have done. ‘Do people often shout at you?’ she asked.
‘Not at me, but they shout at each other all the time, and that’s worse. You’re the lady staying with Mr Motley, aren’t you?’
‘Yes – how did you know?’
‘Because you’ve got a funny accent. My sister said you come from somewhere strange.’
Josephine could not help but laugh at this innocent betrayal of a passing insult. Clearly Morwenna was no more enamoured of her than she was of Morwenna. ‘Your sister’s absolutely right,’ she said. ‘Scotland is a very strange place indeed.’ She held out her hand and Loveday shook it solemnly. ‘I’m Josephine and you must be Loveday. Shall we go and sit somewhere safe while the tide comes in? I’ve left my things up on the cliff, so I must go and get them.’ Loveday said nothing, but followed her back up the beach. ‘I met your sister last night,’ Josephine said. ‘She was out near the Lodge looking for you. That’s why I was so worried when I saw you this morning. You have been home, haven’t you? Morwenna does know you’re all right?’
‘Yes, but she was tired so I didn’t get into too much trouble. Anyway, I only went to the church to see Harry.’ It took Josephine a second or two to realise that Loveday meant Harry’s grave. She remembered what Ronnie had told her about the bluebells, and tried not to show how unsettling she found the girl’s preoccupation with her dead brother. ‘Christopher was in the graveyard, too,’ Loveday added. ‘But he didn’t see me.’
‘Who’s Christopher?’ asked Josephine, who was beginning to think that everybody on the estate must have been roaming around outside last night. Were beds and firesides out of fashion in Cornwall?
‘He’s my friend, but he and Harry don’t get on. They had a fight and Christopher got really angry because Harry told him to leave me alone. I think he must have gone to the grave to say sorry.’
‘Why didn’t Harry like Christopher?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps he thought I’d tell Christopher all our secrets, but I’d never do that.’
‘Did you and Harry have lots of secrets?
Loveday’s face lit up with a smile. ‘Loads. He knows everything. Some of them are better than others, of course, but I’d never tell anyone, not even Christopher. I promised Harry, and he’d be sad if I broke my promise. What about you? Do you have a secret with someone?’
‘People my age are full of secrets,’ Josephine said, ‘but they’re not as much fun when you’re older. They’re usually things you’d rather forget about, and you certainly wouldn’t want anyone else to know about them. It’s not like when you’re young and you can share something with one special person.’
‘Oh, I’ve got secrets with other people, too,’ Loveday explained proudly. ‘Christopher’s shown me things that I mustn’t tell Harry or Morwenna about, and Morwenna tells me that I mustn’t talk about the family to anyone else. It gets complicated, doesn’t it, trying to remember who knows what? Sometimes it’s easier not to say anything at all, just to be sure you don’t make a mistake.’
Loveday had a knack for expressing the complications of life in very simple terms, Josephine thought, and the sense she spoke was a long way from Ronnie’s assessment of her. It sounded as though she’d had to deal with grown-up pressures from a very young age, but she still articulated them as a child, with a directness which was alien to adult ears; she hadn’t yet learned the tricks of evasion and pretence that most people adopted, but that certainly didn’t make her odd or stupid – and it could prove invaluable if there really was a mystery surrounding Harry’s death. ‘When I was your age, the fun was trying to guess other people’s secrets,’ Josephine said. ‘Do you ever do that? I bet you’re good at finding things out.’
The girl smiled again. ‘Morveth always says I’m clever,’ she said. ‘She says I see more than other people because they’re all too busy to notice. We play a game sometimes – I tell her things I’ve seen, and if I find them out before she does, she gives me a book.’
How very enterprising of Morveth, Josephine thought, reluctant to call it exploitation when she was doing exactly the same thing herself. A girl with the face of an angel and a reputation for being fanciful would be the perfect informant. ‘And what sort of things have you found out?’ she asked, hoping that Loveday would not swear her to secrecy as well. She wanted to be able to tell Archie anything that the girl told her, but she could not betray her confidence with a clear conscience.
Loveday thought for a moment, and obviously decided to trust her. ‘I know that Mrs Jacks hides money from her husband,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen where she keeps it, buried in the garden, and she only ever goes there when she knows he’s out in the woods somewhere.’ With a bit of luck, the woman would be saving to leave, Josephine thought; perhaps she should ask Loveday to add something to the pot on her behalf. ‘Mr Caplin steals pheasants from the pens and sells them to the gypsies in Helston,’ Loveday continued, ‘and – you won’t say anything about this one, will you?’ Josephine’s heart sank, but she shook her head. ‘Good. Well, Mr Motley isn’t as happy as he pretends to be. He always cries when he comes to the churchyard with the flowers for his wife.’
The last revelation came as no surprise to Josephine: even without Ronnie’s comments in the car, she would have recognised in William that part-absent quality which was obvious in people who carried their grief with them, even in happier times. It had been there in her own father ever since her mother’s death twelve years earlier. Her promise to Loveday was safe, but she still had not touched on anything that could relate to Harry’s death. She decided to try a more direct approach. ‘When my sisters and I were all living at home, we hated it if one of us had a secret that the others couldn’t guess.’
‘We’re the same,’ Loveday agreed, as Josephine had hoped she would. ‘I used to be so jealous of Harry and Morwenna when I was little. They were always telling me that I was too young to play with them, and it didn’t seem fair that there were two of them and only one of me. I wanted a twin, too. But then they fell out, so Harry tells me his secrets instead. That makes Morwenna really angry.’
She could hardly blame Loveday for the note of satisfaction in her voice: it was difficult to be one of three children, and allegiances could be cruel and short-lived. ‘When did they fall out?’
‘They stopped hanging around together so much before my parents died, but I don’t remember them arguing as much as they have done lately. They’ve been shouting all the time – well, whenever I was in bed and they thought I couldn’t hear them. In the end, Morwenna used to lock herself in her room so that Harry couldn’t get in to talk to her.’
What had happened to sour things between the twins so badly, Josephine wondered? Siblings grew apart all the time, but there was obviously more to this than a straightforward change of heart. Had Morwenna been afraid of Harry for some reason? ‘What were they shouting about?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know – I always put my head under the pillow when it started. People die when they’ve been shouting, and it frightens me.’
‘Loveday, what do you mean?’ Josephine asked gently. ‘Who else has died?’
‘My parents. They shouted a lot before the fire.’
‘At each
other?’
‘Yes, and at Morwenna and Harry and me, and even at Morveth when she came round to see us. It was horrible when they died, but at least the shouting stopped for a while. Then it started all over again, and Harry died.’
Loveday was upset now, and Josephine was reluctant to push her any further. ‘Has the shouting stopped again?’ she asked.
‘Yes, most of the time, although Morwenna’s always watching me as if I’m about to do something bad. Sometimes she’s really nice to me and we’re friends, and the next minute she acts as though she hates having to look after me at all.’
Josephine found this easier to understand than the rift between the twins. The plight of the oldest daughter was something that she and Morwenna did have in common, and she knew what it felt like to want to be free of someone, no matter how much you loved them. In her case, the responsibility was for her father. They got along well, and these days it suited her to be able to spend long periods of time at home writing, especially as she had the money to make sure that someone else kept an eye on him whenever she was away, but she had always resented the assumption that it would be she who gave up her first career to return to Inverness. Like Morwenna, she had been just a young woman when – still grieving for her mother and with a very bad grace – she had gone back home to Scotland to run the household, so she sympathised with the other woman’s situation: the difference in age between Morwenna and Loveday meant that a central part of the older sister’s life would have to be sacrificed, and those glorious years of freedom between childhood and marriage would never be hers. ‘Sisters are funny creatures,’ she said to Loveday. ‘I bet Morwenna’s as angry with herself as she is with you, so try not to take it personally and don’t be too hard on her. She’s got a lot to think about.’
They were back on the cliff-top now, and Josephine gathered up her things. Loveday looked intently at her notebook. ‘What are you writing?’ she asked.
Josephine glanced down at the depressing ratio of ink to paper. ‘It’s a mystery story,’ she said, ‘but as you can see, I haven’t got very far with it yet.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Good question. I don’t really know yet, but I dare say there’ll be secrets in it.’
‘Have you written many books?’
‘One mystery and two other novels, but I’ve done some plays as well.’
‘My brother was supposed to be in a play tomorrow, but now Nathaniel’s going to be him instead.’
‘Are you going to see it?’
‘Yes, Morwenna’s promised to take me. It’ll be nice to see Nathaniel, but I’m not supposed to talk to him any more.’
‘Why not?’
‘Morwenna says he’s a bad influence because he makes up stories and fills my head with things that aren’t true.’ She thought for a moment and looked again at the notebook. ‘Does that mean you’re a bad influence as well?’
‘Oh, I should think so,’ said Josephine, laughing as they started to walk back towards the estate. ‘But don’t worry – I doubt that anything too terrible will happen to you.’
‘It’s not fair, really, because Morwenna makes things up. She told everyone that she was at home on the morning of Harry’s accident, but that was a lie.’ Josephine tried not to look too interested and let Loveday go on. ‘I went out the night before because they were shouting again, and I fell asleep in the stables. When I woke up, it was just starting to get light and I ran home thinking I’d be in terrible trouble, but there was nobody there. Morwenna didn’t come in until later. She looked in on me and I pretended to be asleep, but I could see she’d been crying. She told people she was in bed all night, so that was a story, wasn’t it? It’s not as interesting as Nathaniel’s stories, but it’s still made up.’
‘I’m sure she had her reasons,’ Josephine said, although she hardly liked to imagine what they could be. Why would Morwenna lie, when she could have easily said that she was worried about Harry and went to look for him? What was she doing that she didn’t want anybody to know about? Was she protecting someone or could it be that she wanted her brother dead? She thought again about the locked door and, for some reason, the image of Beth Jacks’s bruised and beaten face came back to her. Morwenna had told Loveday not to talk about the family, as if there were some source of shame that she didn’t want people to know. Perhaps Harry was violent towards her. Had Morwenna suffered for years and finally snapped? She was trying to think of a harmless way to ask Loveday if her brother ever hit her sister, when the girl tugged at her sleeve and pulled her off the main path and through the lych gate to the church.
‘Thank goodness I remembered,’ she said. ‘I borrowed a candle from the altar last night for Harry, and I’ve got to put it back before the fat man notices it’s missing.’
‘The fat man?’
‘The vicar – Mr Motley’s brother. They’re not at all alike.’
‘I’ll wait here for you,’ said Josephine, who had no desire to start rescuing stolen goods from graves at this hour or any other.
‘No, don’t be silly. Come and look at the flowers.’
Reluctantly, Josephine followed. She had been brought up to despise the conventions of mourning, in a family which preferred to keep its grief private and understated, and she certainly had no wish to intrude upon anyone else’s. She knew it was an attitude which people found hard to understand – when her mother died, her father’s discreet instructions in the newspaper that there were to be no flowers, no cards and no mourners outside the family had been viewed at best as selfish, at worst as cold and unfeeling – but she could not help how she felt. The only time she had ever wavered and had a sense of that need to shout goodbye in public was when Jack had been killed in the war and buried under French soil along with thousands of others. Perversely, the fact that his body was forever lost to her made her crave the physicality of a funeral – the tears and the black and the sound of earth on wood. Back then, she would willingly have ordered the flowers, sung the hymns and wept with strangers, but it was not to be, and she had never since felt the need to mourn in that way.
Nothing that she saw on Harry’s grave changed her mind. She admired the flowers for Loveday’s sake, and praised the workmanship that had gone into the carving of the horseshoe, but was glad when the girl picked up the ivory pillar candle and headed back towards the church. It was cold and dreary inside, and the waves streaming past on either side as the tide came in gave the building an unnerving, claustrophobic feel which was entirely at odds with the expansive beauty of the day outside. Josephine stood by the old rood screen, staring into the Moorish faces of the apostles, and waited while Loveday set about her task, talking all the time as she did so.
‘I’d have been in such bad trouble if I’d forgotten to do this,’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘The vicar’s so mean about buying things for the church, but that’s only because he wants to spend the money on himself. Nathaniel says that he’s no better than a common thief.’
Nathaniel would do well to learn some discretion, Josephine thought. He should keep his jackdaw-like chatter for the play if he wanted to make his way in the Church. Once again, she felt a reluctant sympathy for Morwenna and her efforts to look after her sister.
‘Everybody knows he’s got his fingers in the collection,’ continued Loveday, undaunted by Josephine’s lack of encouragement. ‘I told Morveth that, but it didn’t get me a book. But Nathaniel says there’s something more serious going on, as well. He’s trying to find out what it is.’
At last the candle was positioned to Loveday’s satisfaction, and she came back down the aisle. Josephine turned to follow her out, but a movement in the vestry caught her eye. The door was ajar, and she could see a figure – obviously the fat man – standing quietly in the shadows, listening intently. Loveday’s words had rung bright and clear through the empty church, and it would have been impossible for him to miss anything of what she had said. Josephine put a protective arm round the girl’s shoulders and
ushered her quickly from the church. It seemed that Nathaniel would be learning his lesson sooner rather than later, and she certainly wouldn’t want to be in his shoes when the Reverend Motley caught up with him.
Morveth Wearne slowed her pace, as she did instinctively each time she approached Helston’s poorhouse. The Union stood imposingly at one end of the main street – hardly a matter of civic pride, but still managing to dominate the buildings nearby. Part home for the elderly, part hospital, part refuge for the lost, its stigma loomed as large in the local psyche as the physical structure did over the townscape, and the solidity of its dark, forbidding walls seemed to mock the more fragile cottages and shops which stood around it. Morveth crossed Meneage Street and knocked at the gatehouse, returning a cheerful greeting from the owner of Poltroon’s Garage as she waited to be admitted. She was a familiar figure in this part of town: her mother had taken a job at the Union shortly after it was built, and Morveth had been coming here for as long as she could remember, reading to the elderly, teaching the younger children as best she could, and – when extra help was needed – assisting at births and in the laying out of the dead. She was one of the few who could come and go at the Union as they pleased, and for that she never ceased to be grateful.
She heard bolts being drawn back on the other side of the gate and a well-known face appeared in the gap, smiling when he saw who it was. Isaac – no one knew any other name for him – had arrived at the Union more than twenty years ago and, in all that time, Morveth had never seen him look any different from the way he did now – cheerful, proud of the duties with which he was entrusted, and dressed in a collarless shirt and waistcoat, trousers which were too big for him and tied at the waist with a piece of cord, and an old tweed jacket. Everyone assumed he was a vagrant but his past was a mystery; the only sure thing was that Isaac was one of the rare people whom this managed and ordered life seemed to suit, and God only knew what that said about his previous existence. He greeted her with a small bunch of bluebells, and, before moving on, she spent several minutes admiring the circular flowerbeds and close-cut lawns which he kept immaculate throughout the year. As she went through the inner archway into the main grounds, passing a toy pram on the cobbles which formed a small playing area for the matron’s young daughter, she could not help but contrast this deceptive scene of happy domesticity with the reputation that the Union had outside its four walls: the luck which brought people here took many forms, but the misery was universal; it was the last resort, a shameful confirmation that you had nothing and no one left – in this world, at least.
