by Amanda James
‘I’m sure we will.’ My heart thumps, my stomach clenches and then an argument for and against is settled in a second. ‘And thanks so much again. I know you want me to call you Mum, and after what you have told me … I feel like I might be able to before long. I feel so much closer to you now.’
‘Oh, what a lovely thing to say!’ Mellyn’s face lights up and she holds me close. My heart sinks as she does, because it might have been my imagination, but I noticed that the warmth of her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.
11
In the distance, through the margin of grey gauze floating between sky and ocean, I can just make out Godrevy Lighthouse standing sentinel, a white finger pointing skyward as though signposting heaven. I had read a leaflet that I’d picked up in the lobby of Pebble House, which described how the author Virginia Woolf had visited St Ives regularly on holiday as a child and had later written To The Lighthouse. Although it was set in Scotland, the lighthouse in it was thought to be based on Godrevy. Though I’m a voracious reader, I’ve never read it, nor anything of hers. But I’ve always wondered if she borrowed another ‘o’ from somewhere to slot into her surname – just to make it look less canine.
Vigour and energy haven’t been swilling around my body just waiting to be used up lately; I think it’s probably to do with all the upheaval and uncertainty after Mum’s death. In my experience, that type of thing tends to make your limbs heavy and your bottom become irresistibly attracted to comfy chairs. But this morning I leapt from my bed like a March Hare with a head full of adventure and excitement, pleased to find that today my feet had become irresistibly attracted to walking through the still-sleeping town of St Ives to see the sun come up over the Island.
The Island, another leaflet had informed me, was not really an island but a peninsula, complete with a tiny one-roomed chapel and a breathtaking view of the town and beaches. Also, if you were lucky, on a clear day you could see the lighthouse. Dew-soaked grass under my feet, I stand watching the ocean, the sky and the lighthouse. Salt fingers tousle my hair and I hear the chatter of a jackdaw on the chapel roof behind me; I know there is no doubt at all that I am lucky. Very lucky indeed.
Since I had plucked up courage to tell Mellyn that I felt close to her yesterday, and that calling her Mum wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility, I’ve had a light feeling in the centre of my chest. At first, I thought she’d been annoyed because I didn’t call her Mum there and then, but I was mistaken. When she’d come out of the hug, I had seen gratitude and satisfaction in her eyes. She hadn’t made a big thing of it, I think that would have embarrassed us both, she’d just smiled, said thank you again, and then we’d returned to the harbour. We’d gone for a light supper in town and then both of us decided on an early night after all the excitement of the last few days. I had called her Mum in my head a few times and it had seemed a little awkward, but not uncomfortable.
Nevertheless, when I had thought of her in the middle of the night, it was ‘Mellyn’ that my mind preferred to use and not ‘Mum’. I said Mum out loud in the darkness, but instead of Mellyn, I pictured the only Mum I had ever known. Remembering her face made me sad. It was as if I had rubbished everything she’d ever done for me, giving her well-earned title so quickly to someone else even in my mind – to a stranger really.
An impulse to ask for her forgiveness nudged my vocal cords a few times, but when I tried the words on my tongue, they slid back down my throat. In the end I thought it best, for now, to keep calling the woman that had given birth to me Mellyn. Until it felt natural to call her Mum. There’s no rush, is there? Mellyn doesn’t seem to mind, so all is good.
Judging by the way that the grey gauze is lifting on the horizon, tantalisingly revealing the hem of the pink and turquoise sky, I can tell it promises to be another glorious summer’s day. I draw ozone into the depths of my lungs, stretch my arms out to the side and imagine what it would be like to take off from the cliffs and fly over the ocean, and then I turn my back on the lighthouse and walk towards the town.
Mellyn and I had arranged to meet later and have a look around the town properly; I’m particularly looking forward to the Tate St Ives. My stomach has already become used to the delicious cooked breakfast Pebble House supplies each morning and grumbles that it’s time to eat after such an early start. The fresh air encourages its complaints and I quicken my step.
The smell of crisp bacon turns the grumble in my stomach into a roar and I hurry into the dining room and nod to the only other occupant, an older man wearing a sailor’s hat and a jaunty air. ‘In all my twenty years of coming here I have rarely met another early bird. It’s only just gone a quarter past seven,’ he says, and winks a blue eye in a brown weather-beaten face.
‘I thought Rosie might let me have a coffee until the breakfast is officially served at half past,’ I say, smiling. It’s hard not to and it would have been like snubbing Captain Birdseye if I hadn’t.
‘Rosie’s a lovely girl. She’s only been here about two years, but she’s a big improvement on hatchet-face Hilda.’ The wink again. ‘My name’s Frank, by the way.’ He waves a few sausage fingers and has a drink from a white mug with Frank printed upon it in blue letters.
‘Lu,’ I say, and point at his mug. ‘That kind of gave you away.’ Frank looks as if he’s about to say something else but then Rosie comes in with toast rack and a full English.
‘Morning, Lu! You’re here early today. Is Frank being a nuisance?’ Rosie places the food in front of Frank and laughs at his forlorn expression.
I had taken to Rosie immediately upon arrival. She’s a few years younger than me, vivacious, blonde, petite, and permanently rushed off her feet. As far as I can tell she does more than her fair share around the place. The owners, Nadine and Alan, are in charge of smiling a lot and swanning past as if they’re extras in Rosie’s whirlwind production of A Seaside Hotel. She often can look quite serious until she smiles. That smile transforms her face from a cold sprout on the side of a Sunday dinner plate to a strawberry and cream delight.
‘Was I being a nuisance, Lu?’ Frank calls through a mouthful of toast.
‘Not at all, Frank.’ I attempt a wink and Rosie draws a chair up to my table and sits down opposite. She sets her back to Frank and leans towards me, her elbows on the table.
‘Frank’s lovely,’ she says in a low voice, ‘but he does tend to go on. We always serve him breakfast early but don’t tell anyone else. He’s been coming here for twenty years apparently. His wife died about five years ago, but he still comes just the same. Says that’s what she would have wanted, and he feels closer to her when he’s here somehow.’ Rosie turns her bottom lip down.
‘You whispering about me, Rosie?’ Frank’s reedy voice snakes across the room.
‘Me? Never!’ Rosie turns in her seat and puts her hand on her chest as though she’s shocked that he would suggest such a thing.
I picture Frank’s wife as round, jolly, and curly haired. I can’t help but feel sorry that she’s gone, even though I’ve never known her. It’s both lovely and heartbreaking that Frank still comes on holiday to the same place. I expect he must feel closer to her when he’s here because this is a place they would have planned for, looked forward to, dreamed about for the rest of the year. This is a place where they would have laughed the most, been happy.
I sigh. ‘Life can be cruel, can’t it? I mean, why couldn’t fate allow them to be together?’
‘That is a question that only the man himself can answer.’ Rosie points a finger to the ceiling.
‘You mean the boss, Alan? He is privy to the secrets of the universe?’
Rosie’s brow furrows and then she catches the mischief in my eye. ‘Yes, and Nadine is pretty clever too. I mean, she manages to be in charge of this whole place without doing anything at all.’ Her whisper tails into a giggle.
I laugh and nod. ‘I had noticed that.’ Rosie puts her finger to her lips, tips her head to the corridor where Alan can now be heard chatting
to someone, and pushes her chair back. ‘I was wondering, could I get a coffee until it’s time for breakfast, Rosie?’
‘Of course, and I’ll take your order too. I have noticed the way you keep looking across at Frank’s breakfast.’
‘I went for an early walk and now I must admit I’m ravenous.’
Rosie jots down my order and then taps the pencil against her teeth. ‘I forgot to ask, is everything going well with your birth mother?’
I had briefly mentioned why I was here to her the other day and am pleased that she remembers. ‘Brilliant, thanks. We went on a boat trip yesterday and started to get to the bottom of things.’ I can tell that she’s genuinely interested but notice the way she keeps looking over her shoulder, torn between my news and the call of work.
‘That’s great! I’d love to hear more about it all later.’
A passing thought hovers, and most unlike me I go with my instinct. ‘Sure. We could go for a coffee or a drink some time if you like?’ Immediately I regret it. The poor girl must have little free time and she’d not want to spend it with a stranger, would she? Especially not someone like me.
‘That would be nice. I’m fascinated by all that long-lost family stuff. We’ll arrange something later in the week?’ She gives me a warm smile and hurries off.
Being a fairly good judge of character, I realise that she’s genuine, and relief pushes doubt to one side. I remind myself that I’m no longer the ‘horns in’ timid girl I once was. I am changed and changed I’ll stay. Intuitively I know that Rosie is someone I could get on with, given half a chance.
I have many favourite words, and ‘bustling’ is one of them. It describes the harbour area perfectly. The first part of it, ‘bus’, is like the word ‘busy’, and then if you removed the ‘l’ it reads ‘busting’. So, the harbour is bustling, busy and busting out all over with tourists, seagulls, boats, street entertainers, cars sucking in their stomachs to squeeze through the tiny streets, and me, dawdling along, my brain absorbing it all like the skin of a chameleon. I would be more than happy if all the vibrant scenes of the area started running across my body for a while, like a magic lantern show. I stop and glance at my watch. Another twenty minutes before I’m due to meet Mellyn, so I let my feet guide me back into town.
Books had been my friends when others hadn’t been during my schooldays, and this town has one of the loveliest bookshops I’ve yet seen. The St Ives Bookseller looks out onto the cobbled street from two large windows and, as you step through the door, it has the kind of atmosphere that wraps around you like a welcome embrace. It’s light, friendly, and permeating the air, that divine inky fresh smell of new books that to me is better than any perfume.
Floorboards creak underfoot, poky corners hold shelves full of hidden treasures, and a further search reveals the more interesting and quirky features that only old buildings have. I could happily browse here all day, discovering authors new, fondly reacquainting with old favourites, and then, at the end of a shelf, almost hidden by a display, I see To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
I read the blurb and a brief biography and feel regretful and a bit stupid that I had assumed she was some grand prima donna writer putting an extra ‘o’ in her name. On the contrary, she was a feminist free thinker who married the writer Leonard Woolf. As part of the Bloomsbury Group they concerned themselves with democratic politics, art and literature, as well as the structure of sexuality. Sadly, she struggled with mental illness most of her life and, at the age of fifty-nine, drowned herself. I feel incredibly moved as I stand there holding her words in my hands. Perhaps it’s the fact that I had gazed at that beautiful lighthouse that very morning as the sun rose, just as she must have many years ago. I am struck by the fragility of life and how, for some, it becomes impossible to bear.
I hold the book to my chest with one hand and continue to browse, trailing my fingers over the regimented spines, enjoying the feel of the glossy covers and guessing their contents from the clues the titles give me. I’m not really intending to buy, however. I have made my choice.
I think about how the brain, or my brain at least, assumes things from brief snatches of information and creates a whole impression about something, or someone, just as I had with Virginia Woolf. My brain had told me she was an upper-class privileged gadabout who had affairs and knew nothing about the real world. It might have gathered such gossip from not paying enough attention to half-watched documentaries, sixth form English Lit wafflers, or even a few minutes having to listen to a Radio 4 play when driving home from work because Mum had changed channels.
‘A good choice,’ the sales assistant says as she hands me my change.
‘Thanks. I picked it because she spoke to me,’ I say, though feel a bit daft afterwards, but I’m gratified to see that the assistant smiles as if she understood.
‘Can’t say as I’ve read any of hers,’ Mellyn says as I show her my purchase outside the Tate St Ives. ‘Wasn’t she an upper-class twonk who went about being tragic?’
I laugh. It wasn’t just me then. ‘Not quite. I think some people get that impression of her though, if they don’t really know about her life.’
She narrows her eyes. ‘Do you know about her life?’
‘More than I did yesterday. Did you know she used to come here on holiday?’
‘No. So are we going in?’ She nods to the entrance, I think a little impatiently. ‘I’ve never been in here. If it wasn’t for my culture-vulture daughter with her Woolf and Hepworth ideas, I would be looking round the sales and then straight in a pasty shop.’
‘Nothing to stop us doing that later. And the Barbra Hepworth Sculpture Garden isn’t in here – it’s up the road. We could do that another time,’ I say.
Mellyn rolls her eyes and places her hand on her chest. ‘Oh, be still my beating heart.’
I roll my eyes back at her and look at the sweep of steps and beautiful curves of the entrance and then at the beach beyond. ‘Isn’t this a stunning building? And what a location.’
Mellyn shrugs. ‘As I said, culture vulture.’ She walks up the steps.
I smile and follow her inside. I’m hardly a culture vulture, but it’s nice that she thinks I am. I appreciate art and literature, but it’s okay with me if Mellyn isn’t that bothered. So far, I have found we are similar in some respects and very different in others; it makes things interesting. On the boat yesterday, she gave me the choice of what to do today and she promised she wouldn’t moan when I’d made it.
‘You mean that this guy thought it would be okay to make a display from electric lights and call it art?’ Mellyn says aghast and not so quietly a little while later.
A middle-aged couple glare from under frowns and move away from us. Heat creeps along my neck. ‘It’s all to do with the interpretation of the geography and history of this area and … minimalism,’ I say, reading a sign on the wall but not truly getting it myself.
‘Yes, I see that now,’ Mellyn says, nodding and stroking her chin.
‘You do?’
‘No. I think it is the biggest pile of crap and an insult to my intelligence. Let’s go.’
I think she will smile, but her face remains fixed and stony. I follow her into the next gallery and she tuts at each display and strides right through, her whole-body rigid as though she’s had an electric shock. She stops in the next room and glares at the wall.
‘Are they having a laugh?’
‘Who?’ I wish she’d keep her voice down.
‘This lot, charging us to get in here, just to look at something a four year old could do.’ She jabs her finger at the massive canvas in front of us. ‘In fact, that’s an insult to four year old’s.’
People are glancing over again, and I look at my feet. ‘We could give it a bit of a chance,’ I say quietly. ‘Let’s read the sign to see what the artist—’
‘Artist?’ She flings her arms up. ‘Artists are people like Rembrandt and Constable. These people are … well, I don’t know what they are,
but I’m off.’
She stalks towards the exit and I stand watching her with my mouth open. ‘But—’
Mellyn turns and glares at me from the door. ‘But nothing. You stay if you want, but I can’t look at this shit a moment longer.’ Her face is puffed and erupting in red blotches, as though just under its surface a volcano of embarrassment and indignation are wrestling with anger.
I stare at the canvas and listen to her footsteps growing fainter on the stairs. How could such a colourful pattern of whirls incite such anger in person? I realise that this thought is superfluous, placed there by the logical part of my mind as it valiantly tries to douse the raw shock of her words. Following Mellyn outside seems the right thing to do, but I haven’t the faintest idea what I will say when I find her.
A wall separating road from sand curves up the hill to the left of the building and, leaning against it staring out to sea, shoulders hunched, legs rigid, is Mellyn. Long streamers of chestnut hair twirl like batons in the breeze and, as I draw near, I think I hear her say ‘ruined it’ and swear under her breath. I stand a stride away from her, lean my arms on the wall and follow her gaze. The beach looks much as it had yesterday and, on the horizon, a huge ship glides silently by.
‘I was just cursing myself for acting that way in there just now. You must have thought I’d gone nuts,’ she says to the ship.
‘I didn’t know what to think.’ I look sidelong at her profile and see her mouth turn up at the edge.
‘My daughter has impeccable manners. If the boot was on the other foot I’d be demanding answers and not very politely.’
I shrug and speak to the wall. ‘You must have your reasons.’
‘I must have, mustn’t I?’ She sidles along and nudges my elbow. ‘Don’t ask me to give you a coherent explanation though.’ She looks into my eyes, and in hers I think I can detect a mixture of humour and despair.
