A Rather Remarkable Homecoming

by C. A. Belmond

  But he didn’t exactly jump out of bed. So now I nudged him for real.

  “Get up,” I said. “They’ll stop serving breakfast soon.”

  Jeremy sighed heavily, then rolled out of bed.

  We took our coffee in the downstairs parlor, which was nearly empty, then we hurried out to the parking lot, which was fairly deserted. Jeremy pointed out that the smaller Victorian house next to our hotel had been recently turned into a restaurant called Seaside with Toby Taylor, a celebrity chef we’d seen doing frequent guest appearances on television.

  As we drove down the main street of Port St. Francis, I could see more of the town, now that it was daylight and the sun was shining brightly, burning off the white morning mist that had drifted in from the sea. Directly across the street from our hotel, the old theatre with its ornate trim, large heavy-timbered front doors and faded sign was actually quite beautiful. Nearby was a dusty-red storefront that said Donnegan’s Wines and Spirits; and a tiny pizza place, and a doughnut shop where the doughnuts were made on the premises with a copper machine displayed in the storefront window, so that fresh doughnuts came sliding down the copper chute right in front of you.

  Farther along was a tiny yellow building called Susie’s Ice Cream Parlor, which was not opened yet. There was a shop full of vintage items called The Frantic Antique, which seemed to offer everything from prized period furniture and sharks’ teeth to hand-painted glass kitchen jars decorated by Cornish painters from the 1920s. Nearby there was a village green with a bandstand and climbing roses.

  Sprouting off from the main street were those delightfully funny, crooked lanes that twined up into the hills dotted with tiny whitewashed houses, which had an absurd, perky attitude, as if they had been built to be the homes and workshops of elves, instead of fishermen, shopkeepers and local artisans. As we drove by, I peered up these little side streets and saw signs advertising a bakery, a grocer, a pottery studio and some funky little dress shops.

  Once we passed the main street’s wall of buildings, we could see the open expanse of sky again, and I realized that the entire town overlooked a modest harbor crammed with small fishing boats. From here we finally had a breathtaking view of the great and mighty sea, tumbling upon itself as it rolled from the horizon line and came crashing against the shore.

  Already the fishermen were hauling in crab and lobster and other marvellous fish. On both sides of the harbor were cute little pebbly-and-sandy beaches flanked by astounding black jagged rock formations that had been carved by the last ice age a gazillion years ago B.C. Farther out to sea, a few isolated big black boulders sticking up out of the waves looked like silent, watchful mythological sea-giants who’d surfaced to stare back at the new invaders.

  “I forgot how rugged it is out here!” I exclaimed, twisting around in my seat to take pictures of it all. Gazing at the far-off headlands that jutted out into the misty sea, I could picture ancient tribes of hunters and gatherers chasing rhinos and mammoths and other bizarre animals, leaving behind strange stone markers and arrowheads and flinty tools and animal bones.

  “It’s funny,” I reflected aloud, “but somehow in Cornwall the prehistoric past seems more in the here-and-now than our own present-day does. Why is that?”

  “Because out here, you can’t really control Nature,” Jeremy announced gleefully, accelerating his Dragonetta and veering noisily down the kind of open country road that such sports cars were made for.

  “Did you know,” I said, “that it’s basically all because of Napoleon that these fishing villages became tourist hot-spots?”

  “Why? Did Napoleon hang out here in the summer?” Jeremy asked skeptically.

  “Nope. But because of his wars, the fancy English ladies couldn’t go to France or Italy for their vacations. So they came to the English seaside instead,” I said.

  “Okay, Joséphine. We don’t have much time. What do you want to see first?” Jeremy asked as we passed signs for the hospital and police station, which were just outside of town.

  “There’s a maritime museum that’s got real plunder from genuine shipwrecks,” I said enthusiastically, scanning my guidebook. “Apparently the villagers used to lie in wait for ships that were foundering at sea, hoping the boats would crash against the rocks, so the locals could pounce on the cargo and steal it the minute it washed ashore!”

  “Remind me not to turn my back on the villagers,” Jeremy joked.

  At that moment my mobile phone rang.

  “Harriet here,” the voice chirped. “Did you find your way into town okay last night?”

  I told her that her directions were excellent, and she went on to say, “I know we’re not due to meet until noon, but I’ve just found out that the developers’ men plan to inspect the property then,” she said, and now I sensed something urgent underneath her usual cheery manner.

  “I wanted you and Jeremy to have a chance to look things over privately,” she added in a confidential tone, “because some of your grandmother’s things are still here, and you might want to come earlier to view them without these guys underfoot.”

  I relayed this to Jeremy, who merely swung the car away from the tourist area, and wheeled it in the direction of Grandmother Beryl’s house.

  “We’re coming right now,” I told Harriet, and hastily hung up.

  Soon we were driving along a quieter country lane that wove through pastures and farms on the left side, and coastal property on the right. Here the roadside shrubs and hedges were juicier and prettier and rose very high—with hollyhocks and honeysuckle and other colorful flowering species I couldn’t identify. These, I knew, had been planted by the wealthy Victorians and Edwardians at the turn of the century, who adored gardens filled with exotic plants from Asia and other glamorous corners of the empire. Their proud houses still stood overlooking sequestered bays and sandy coves.

  “This is starting to look familiar to me,” Jeremy announced.

  “Me, too,” I said excitedly, consulting my map again. The left fork of the road veered sharply away, following acres of rolling hills, meadows and farmland.

  But Jeremy slowed the car down and said, “Don’t tell me. It’s a right turn . . . right?”

  The right fork of the road ended quickly here, at a private driveway that we both recognized.

  “This is it!” I announced. “Say hello to Grandmother Beryl’s house.”

  Chapter Six

  The first bad sign was the driveway. There must have been stormy weather recently, because the front yard was littered with fallen branches from old trees, and the drive itself was choked with so many overgrown roots that Jeremy had to stop the car midway and leave it there.

  We got out on foot, but neither my eyes nor my feet could actually find Grandpa Nigel’s fine pebbled driveway, which I’d once pitter-pattered over so delightedly on a bicycle when I visited long ago. It must be buried under there somewhere, but it was completely caked with hardened mud, rocks, twigs, wandering roots and piles of rotting leaves.

  It only got worse as we drew closer to the house. The beautiful roses and rhododendrons that had once neatly and fastidiously bordered both sides of the drive, had by now gone completely wild, becoming a mass of tangled, angry-looking gnarled shrubs, which, when stirred by the wind, seemed to be shaking their blowsy, unkempt heads at us like the three witches of Macbeth.

  “Good God,” Jeremy said in a voice low with fascinated horror. “Look, there’s the house.”

  I stared dead ahead. “Oh, no,” I answered, shocked. “It can’t be.”

  Jeremy took my arm so I wouldn’t stumble, and, very carefully, we made our way up the cracked and broken front path. My horrified gaze focused on the roof—for it was sagging right in the middle, as if it had buckled a bit from backed-up rainwater, and now was collecting acorns and leaves in there as well. Elsewhere, the roof had several missing and broken shingles, like an old man grinning at us with a mouthful of cracked teeth.

  I stared at the peeling paint all around
the doors and the windows, whose panes were dark and dusty, as if the house itself had closed its eyelids in despair. Moss was creeping up like a green tide against the shady side of the house, and on the sunny side there was a thick rope of ivy twining like a boa constrictor around the chimney. Everywhere else were tendrils of vines resembling Jack’s beanstalk gone amuck, threatening to pull down the remaining shingles. Squirrels scampered back and forth across the roof with audacious impunity.

  I wish I could tell you that we’d got the wrong place. But the worst of it was that, underneath all this horror, I could vaguely make out the house of my memory, with its elegant cream-colored stone exterior, and bay windows on either side of the white front door, which had a window at its top that resembled a king’s crown.

  “Is it me?” I asked in a hushed voice. “Do I just remember it wrong? Did I paint this place into something better than it was?”

  “No. It was beautiful once,” Jeremy said, “but now it’s as if it’s got a veil over its face.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “You know about antiques and stuff,” Jeremy said. “Is it too far gone?”

  I pulled myself together and made a more professional assessment of its condition, based on what I’d learned from my historical work on the sets of period films and TV costume dramas. As a kid, of course, I hadn’t known much about history or architecture, so I did not realize that the house was such a pastiche of architectural styles.

  “Looks like it was originally built in the late 1500s,” I told him. “But I would say that it was redeveloped and extended in the midnineteenth century, because there’s a definite Victorian influence here in the windows. But it’s all made of very good materials—local stone and wood that would have been precious even back then. So, no, it’s not too far gone.”

  “Thought so. Foundation looks solid,” Jeremy said, walking across the front of the house, squinting.

  Suddenly the door opened, and a moment later Harriet stepped out, smiling encouragingly. “Hallo there!” she cried out. “You made it!”

  Jeremy was still standing in the tall grass, looking up at the house with a typically English expression of horror mixed with hilarity at the sheer awfulness of the situation.

  “Watch out for vipers,” Harriet teased him. “Haven’t seen one yet, but they do exist in the West Country, and they love tall grass.” Turning to me she said cheerily, “Don’t be put off by the ‘wear and tear’. This house is still a gem and we can’t wait to fix it up again.” I found myself wondering if she was, perhaps, a bit crazy after all. I took a deep breath of apprehension as we walked inside.

  “Now, mind the floors as you come in,” Harriet warned, still cheerful, “for the interior does want a bit of looking after. But fear not. The Legacy Society has restored bigger wrecks than this.”

  We paused in the entrance hall, where I had an even stronger sensation of having been here before, yet in some ghostly, parallel world. For there was Grandmother Beryl’s central staircase, and to the left was her dining room with its mahogany swinging door in the back that led to the kitchen; and to the right of the stairs was the beloved parlor and the window-seat where I’d curled up with a book on that rainy day when Great-Aunt Penelope found me teary-eyed over a sad story. Yet now, everything was covered in a film of cobwebs or spiderwebs or ghost-webs, making it look truly haunted, as if someone had done this on purpose to entertain kids for Halloween.

  It was when we reached the parlor that Harriet said to me, “Your grandmother sold the house with these furnishings in it. I don’t know if anything has sentimental value for you, but if it does, better let me know soon,” she advised. “Because the town administrators are already talking about getting rid of the furniture to make it easier for whoever buys the house.”

  I suddenly pictured a bunch of house-hunters pussy-footing all over the place, snooping in Grandma’s cupboards and laughing at her old-fashioned curtains and possessions. Despite the ramshackle condition of the house, something inside me felt ferociously protective and I wanted to barricade the doors and windows, and fire back at all invaders with a rifle, like a hillbilly refusing to vacate the old homestead.

  So, Jeremy and I dutifully examined the pieces of furniture that Grandmother Beryl had left behind. I recognized the teakwood credenza in the entryway, and the faded chintz sofa in the corner where the ladies had congregated to gab after dinner by the fireplace. Grandfather Nigel’s favorite sea-green upholstered club chair was worn out quite beyond the pale, but I admired the matching beaux arts globe lamps that stood on either side of the parlor’s doorway. Still, everything seemed coated in sad-dust, and smelling vaguely of damp.

  “We just couldn’t pay for the heating of the place,” Harriet said apologetically, as if reading our thoughts. “ ’Specially in the winter, when the north wind blows in from the cold sea, well, you can’t keep office workers warm with only a fire in the fireplace.”

  “So, where are your group’s headquarters these days?” Jeremy asked. He sat down on the window-seat cushion, and a poof of a dust-cloud rose in response, as if it were part of a magic act and he might disappear. Warily, he got up again.

  “In town,” Harriet answered. “In the old theatre.”

  “Oh, yes, we saw it on the way in!” I exclaimed.

  “The theatre’s been closed for years, but we use the offices upstairs,” Harriet said. “In the mid-1800s it was mainly an opera house, where the world’s finest divas and tenors came to sing. Now we’ve got sparrows singing in the rafters, doing Hamlet’s soliloquy, I expect,” Harriet said, laughing at her own joke. Jeremy and I exchanged a look of amusement mingled with despair.

  “Right this way, there’s more to see!” Harriet trilled determinedly, leading us around the first floor’s rooms. Jeremy wore a deliberately neutral expression which he maintained for the duration of the tour.

  As we continued, I noted that the long hallway leading to the back of the house had good hardwood floors, but a few of the panels had buckled, like the roof. At the end of this dark corridor was the sitting room, with Grandma’s old-fashioned black sewing machine still parked in the corner; but this room more than the others bore signs of being an office for Harriet’s group, because there were now metal file cabinets that I had never seen before, and a rickety desk and chair and lamp, and a disconnected telephone so old that it required dialing instead of punching in the numbers.

  We paused at the last room in the back of the house, the kitchen. I recognized the matching cream-colored stove, refrigerator and dishwasher that Grandma must have bought all at once, circa 1965. There was even an old tea towel, neat and unsoiled but coated with dust, folded as Grandma had always folded it near the sink.

  This little item suddenly brought back my grandmother’s presence with a force I didn’t expect, and now I vividly remembered her standing at the table, holding out a basket of assorted berries that my grandfather had picked in honor of my arrival. I could see myself as the little girl I’d been, eagerly reaching out and gobbling the fruit, with the juice dripping on her floor; I had expected a scolding, but Grandmother had only laughed and patted me on the head.

  So without warning I found myself winking back the tears that had taken me by surprise. Jeremy saw the expression on my face, took my hand and squeezed it.

  Harriet either didn’t notice or tactfully pretended not to. “Things really look a lot worse than they actually are. The plumbing is still intact,” she offered. “The electric isn’t so bad now, but of course it’s been turned off. There’s a small basement, but it’s empty.” I was only half listening to her; my eyes were taking in all the signs of mice in the corners, and the sound of those impudent squirrels on the roof above us.

  Then I heard another noise—the voices of men calling to each other. Harriet peered out the window and grimaced. “The surveyors,” she reported. “For the developer. They’re here early. Well, let’s ignore them.”

  But I couldn’t. All through the rest of the tou
r, I peered through every window I passed, watching the men carrying their surveyor’s tools as they tromped around, setting up their tripods and squinting into their instruments, shouting out measurements to each other.

  When we ascended the staircase, it creaked but held firm. On the second floor there was more evidence of spiders spinning their own complicated tapestries in various corners of the two bathrooms and six empty bedrooms. The big green-and-white bedroom was where Grandmother Beryl and Grandfather Nigel had slept in a huge four-poster bed that was no longer there; the two yellow guest rooms were where my parents and Jeremy’s had stayed; and the very feminine violet-colored bedroom with the poufy gauze curtains was where Great-Aunt Penelope had often smoked into the night.

  That left two remaining bedrooms, one pink and one blue, which were little wood-panelled affairs, tucked into opposite sides of the house, each with sloping ceilings since they were both under an eave.

  “I slept in this one,” Jeremy said, smiling as we paused at the blue room where there was a very big, charming, old-fashioned rocking-horse and a complete wooden croquet set. “Penny, you were way down the hall in the pink room on the east end of the house. I used to lie here at night thinking that you would get to see the sun rise before I did.”

  Finally, we went up to the small attic, which contained only some wicker furniture that was too far gone to keep. As we went back downstairs, Harriet said brightly, “Let’s go outside so I can show you the property we added on to this parcel.”

  We walked out the front door and back down the driveway where the surveyor’s car was now parked near ours. Directly across from Grandmother’s original property were green, gently undulating meadows dotted with old, disused stone outbuildings, barns and silos. In the distance was a long line of tall dark evergreen trees, to which Harriet was now gesturing.

  “We helped the town acquire this parcel all the way to those evergreens,” she explained as we tromped forward to get a better view.