Angel With Two Faces (15 page)

Jacks opened the back gate and walked up the long, narrow garden to the house. There was a light on in the kitchen and,
through the window, he could see his wife pouring some water from the kettle into the sink, turning her face away from the rising steam. She turned round quickly when she heard him at the door, and her expression surprised him; he was used to fear, but this was more like guilt. He saw her glance involuntarily towards the small, square table in the centre of the room, and the look on her face was immediately explained. She opened her mouth to speak, but seemed to realise that lies were pointless; she had not had time to wash away all evidence of her visitor, and he knew what the two cups meant, placed one on either side of the familiar Bible. How dare she invite someone into their home and talk about their marriage behind his back? He didn’t have to try too hard to guess the identity of the caller, either: he had seen pity in the curate’s eyes whenever he looked at Beth in church, but he never dreamed that Shoebridge would be stupid enough to try to do something about it. The anger came back, as sudden and uncontrollable as it had been in those early days, and his wife seemed to recognise the difference. The terror in her eyes only enraged him more.

He was across the room before she could move, and grabbed her hair with one hand and her jaw with the other. The deep cut on her lip, which had not had a chance to heal, opened again with his touch, and he smelt the sharp, metallic scent of blood as he put his face close to hers. ‘Confessing on my behalf, were you?’ he asked, and pulled her away from the sink, kicking her legs from under her so that she fell backwards on to the floor. He knelt above her and she started to fumble with his belt, hoping to divert this new violence by re-enacting past humiliations, but he pushed her hands away in disgust. Reaching across to the table, he tore some pages from the Bible
and shoved them hard into her mouth. As she choked on the paper, struggling to breathe, he turned her over and pressed her face into the cold, rough flagstones. If he didn’t have to look at her, he could almost believe that she was Morwenna.

Archie turned the Norton away from the main road, taking a narrow, winding lane which followed the soft undulations of the countryside and enjoying a freedom which he could never find in London. His home county might be famed for its seas, but it was these quiet, inland gems that he most loved her for: the peace of the lake; the rolling hills which formed a backdrop to the village, with Breage Church resting gently on the horizon; the sunrise across the fields on the way to Camborne – all these were ordinary miracles of which he could never tire. He pulled in to a farm gate for a moment and looked out over countryside which was a hundred shades of green, from darkest gorse to pale, sunlit grass. Cornish granite hedges criss-crossed his view, dividing the landscape into small, irregular sections and giving cows and sheep much-needed protection from the wind. To his right, a flock of lapwings rose as one from a ploughed field and he watched as their slow, flapping wing-beats took them leisurely further inland. For work and for pleasure, he had visited some of the finest rural areas that England had to offer, but nothing resonated more intensely with him than scenes such as this – partly, no doubt, because he was born here, but partly because the unrelenting drama of the sea made this mild-tempered, forgiving countryside all the more precious.

He kicked the motorbike into life again and moved off, through the village of St Buryan and steeply down into
St Levan, then past the headquarters of the Eastern Telegraph Company and on towards the coast. The Minack Theatre – named after the enormous rock on which it sat – lay just a few miles short of Land’s End and a few feet above the Atlantic, enjoying all the excitement and danger that such a location offered. Archie parked at the makeshift entrance near Minack House and made his way down the steep slope of a cliff. Almost immediately, he had his first glimpse of the white, shell-strewn sands of Porthcurno to the east and, with a few minutes to spare before his two o’clock rehearsal, he paused again to savour the view. The bay was a brilliant blue in the afternoon sunlight, with the majestic cliffs of Porthgwarra and Nanjivey stretching out to the west. As dramatic as the scenery was, though, this wild and lonely cliff was the last place in the world where anyone would expect to find a man-made stage. It must have taken extraordinary imagination and vision even to conceive of the idea, he thought, let alone to make it happen, but Rowena Cade had decided that come hell or high water – and both usually did, at least once a summer – she would have a theatre in her back garden.

As he continued down the cliff, and Miss Cade’s vision became his, he thought again how surprisingly natural the whole thing seemed once you got used to the idea. The stage was a beautiful stretch of greensward, bordered on either side by granite outcrops which formed natural wings, and, along the cliff edge, by recently constructed balustrades and walls with a solid stone throne on a dais as centrepiece. The natural curve of the slope had been carefully tiered and turfed to provide the seating, giving the audience a perfect view of the play of the moment as well as uninterrupted sightlines across some of the finest cliff scenery in Cornwall.

‘Archie! Over here.’ He looked to his right and acknowledged Lettice’s wave. She and Ronnie were both on their knees on the grass, in apparent supplication to the robed figure who stood above them on a stool. It was impossible for him to tell who it was because of the heavy cowl that draped the monk’s face, but it amused him to see his cousins in any sort of pious position, and he couldn’t resist making the most of it.

‘I thought the rest of the world knelt to you as far as theatre was concerned,’ he said mischievously. ‘Surely you’re not losing your touch?’

Ronnie, her mouth full of pins, was unable to offer any of her usual tart retorts, but Lettice smiled good-naturedly. ‘Actually, you’re not as far off as you may think,’ she said. ‘We could do with a bit of divine assistance, as it happens, and I’m never too proud to beg.’

‘I think it’s called praying, dear, when God’s at the other end of the call,’ Ronnie said as she placed the last of the pins in the hem of the habit. ‘Although I’ve never been too sure of the difference.’ She patted the monk’s thigh in a less than sacred fashion. ‘There you go, Brother – all done. Take that off again and we’ll get it sewn up for you. It’s not the place to trip over your skirt.’

The monk removed its hood and Archie was surprised to see that the brother in question was a woman – the costume had made it impossible to tell. He recognised her vaguely as one of the young farmers’ wives from the estate, and she smiled at him shyly before slipping behind one of the rocks to change.

He sat down on the grass next to Lettice and Ronnie and lifted his face to the sun. ‘I’m not looking forward to getting into one of those,’ he said. ‘Don’t monks have a summer wardrobe?’

‘You don’t have a wardrobe at all at the moment,’ said Lettice, unscrewing the top of a thermos flask and pouring three cups of strong-looking tea. ‘That’s what I meant about divine assistance – we haven’t got a costume for you.’

‘I thought you said Nathaniel’s would fit with a few minor adjustments?’

‘It would have done – you’re only slightly broader than him – but he can’t find it anywhere. Says he’s sure he left it in the vestry after the fitting but now it’s nowhere to be seen. It must have been put into the laundry by mistake.’

‘But he’s a curate, for God’s sake,’ Archie said, bewildered. ‘Surely you’re not telling me that he can’t lay his hands on a cassock?’

‘Oh, Archie – don’t be silly,’ said Lettice, a little impatiently. ‘You can’t just wear any old thing – it’s got to fit in with the scheme of the play.’

‘Quite right,’ Ronnie said, tongue in cheek. ‘Just think of what the critics would say – not to mention the
Anglican’s
Weekly
.’ She received a glare of reproach from her sister, and added: ‘Lettice has a point, though. You’re the narrator and you’re on stage all the time, holding the thing together, so you’ve got to look the part.’

‘And we’ve still got time to run you something up from scratch if we get on with it now,’ Lettice said, reminding Archie of the spirit which had taken his cousins to the top of a very slippery profession. ‘When Janet’s hem is done, everyone else will be sorted. You’ll have to do the dress rehearsal in your own clothes, but come up to Minack House when it’s finished and we’ll have something for you. Rowena’s put her work room at our disposal.’

As the girls went off up the cliff, laden with everything they
needed to perform the impossible, Archie finished his tea and watched the bustle of activity on stage. Jago Snipe had arrived now and was setting about the unenviable task of unloading scenery from his van at the top of the cliff. He watched as the undertaker carried the simple refectory benches which Archie had seen in his workshop down the narrow path to the stage, putting them in place one by one under Morveth’s direction. He was a strong man, more than used to lifting heavy wood, and he made the shifting of the scenery look easy, but there was a poignancy to his solitary task – a task which he seemed to be pursuing with a fierce concentration, as if it could take his mind off the fact that his son was supposed to be helping him. Where
was
Christopher, Archie wondered? He had been sincere in his reassurances to Jago the day before: a lot of missing-person cases had come his way in the course of his career and, while some of them had ended in tragedy, many had concluded with nothing more serious than an embarrassed son or daughter returning home, hungry and contrite. From what Archie had seen of him, Christopher was not the sort of boy who had either the courage or the selfishness to stay away for long, but he had been brought up to respect life and death and, if Jacks was to be believed, Archie wasn’t surprised that guilt over his part in the last morning of Harry’s life – as childish and out of character as it had been – would sit heavily on his conscience.

A steady trail of people made its way down the cliff, indicating that the bus laid on by Poltroon’s, the local garage, to transport villagers and estate workers to and from the Minack had completed its first journey. The early arrivals were those involved in the production, either as cast or crew, and Archie was surprised to see that Joseph Caplin and Kestrel
Jacks – neither of whom he would have had down as aspiring entertainers – were among the crowd. Clearly William’s powers of persuasion were not confined to family, he thought wryly as he got up to join everyone.

‘You can have half an hour to settle in, and then I want you all back here in your costumes ready to start,’ Morveth was saying, and he was amused to note that she had not lost her touch: most of the villagers – himself included – had been taught by Morveth Wearne at one stage or another, and they filed off now as dutifully as they had ten, twenty or thirty years ago in the playground.

‘This brings back a few memories,’ he said, and she smiled warmly at him.

‘As far as I remember, drama was never your favourite subject, so it’s nice of you to help us out now.’

The ‘us’ wasn’t intentional, he knew, but the idea that he was an outsider doing a favour struck him all the more forcefully for the casual way in which it had been expressed, and he was irrationally irritated by it. ‘It’s the least I can do while I’m at home,’ he said, unable to avoid placing a slight emphasis on the final word, ‘and some would say I’ve chosen drama for a profession.’

Morveth did not flinch at the rebuke, and seemed amused rather than embarrassed by his offence. ‘Then come home more often, Archie,’ she said, with that quiet way of defusing any antagonism which had served her so well in teaching. ‘Hasn’t anyone told you that resting is part of the job?’

Suddenly, he felt like a petulant ten-year-old, inclined to unreasonable tantrums, and could only smile in defeat. ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ he said, ‘but only if you don’t put me through this again. What do you want me to do?’

‘Well, I gather your costume’s still to come, so you’ve got some time while the others get changed. Why don’t you make sure you’re familiar with the stage? You’ll be standing there,’ she continued, pointing to a circle of grass, stage right, which stood about a foot higher than the rest of the performance area, forming a natural platform, ‘and you won’t be going backstage like the others, so you don’t need to worry about all the entrances and exits, but I promised Miss Cade faithfully that everyone would know what was safe and what wasn’t. After last year…’ She tailed off, knowing that the story was legendary enough for her not to have to repeat it. ‘If there’s any time left, have a look through the script – but don’t worry too much. We’ll have long enough to run through it carefully.’

Morveth disappeared to make sure that everyone had found their costumes, and Archie walked over to the rear of the stage. He was familiar with the Minack, having been to the productions which his cousins had taken part in, and he knew what to expect when he looked over the balustrade, but the sudden drop to the rocks below still made his heart stop. About eight feet beneath him, there was a narrow path – accessed by two sets of steps – which ran behind the stage area and which the actors used for most of their entrances and exits. Beyond that path, and with only a fragile-looking wire fence in between, the ground simply fell away into nothingness. He leaned further over and looked down into the zawn, a rift in the cliffs which – at high tide, as it was now – was filled with an angry, churning sea. No wonder the balustrade and pillars had been added, he thought; the stage must be eighty or ninety feet above the rocks, and an actor making a wrong move or getting carried away with his performance faced a perilous fall. Apart from anything else, it wasn’t good for the nerves of an
audience to spend the entire performance in fear of an unscripted accident. As he watched, thinking how easy it was to become mesmerised by the motion of the waves, a woman of about forty with a shock of untidy brown hair – already dressed as a pilgrim for one of the crowd scenes – descended the steps to his right and walked quickly along the backstage path, apparently oblivious to the steep drop at her feet. She stopped immediately below him, where a recess directly under the balustrade offered actors a welcome spot of shelter to await their cues, and took out half a dozen lanterns, which she placed at regular intervals along the edge of the path.

‘Billy,’ she called back over her shoulder to a middle-aged man in a flat cap, whose tanned, muscled arms wouldn’t have looked out of place on someone ten years younger, ‘I’ve put the lanterns in place. Check they’re working when you have a minute, will you?’

‘Right-o, Miss Cade,’ the man said, and set about his task immediately.

Archie watched as the pilgrim went back up the cliff, stopping occasionally to pick up a bit of litter or a stray stone and shadowed by a pair of King Charles spaniels. What an extraordinary woman Rowena Cade was, he thought – he looked forward to meeting her later. Now, he still had a few minutes to spare, so he decided to climb up into one of the granite outcrops that formed the wings and see what the view was like from there. He hadn’t got far before he realised that someone else had had the same idea. Nathaniel was sitting with his back against an enormous boulder, out of sight of anyone on stage or in the auditorium, holding the jackdaw costume which should have been Harry’s and which he was now due to wear. Unaware that anyone was watching, the young curate lifted the
black silk cowl to his lips and held it there. It was a moment of absolute tenderness, and it told Archie more about Nathaniel’s feelings for Harry than words could ever have done. He realised that he was intruding, but knew also that to turn and leave without being noticed would be difficult. Before he could resolve his dilemma, Nathaniel glanced up and saw him.

‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ Archie said, noticing how tired the curate looked. ‘I’ll go back down and leave you on your own.’ Nathaniel’s face was pale against the dark material and, although he appeared startled at first, he seemed to relax a little when he saw that it was Archie who had discovered his hiding place.