Cottage by the Sea (16 page)

   For the first time in her adult life, Blythe read far into the night, slept late, and went on long treks along the coastline paths that were maintained in a pristine condition by The National Trust.

   Before long she had devoured Daphne du Maurier's 1936 novel
Jamaica Inn,
a full-bodied romance featuring lonely moors, Cornish smugglers, and an inn of evil repute. In early June Luke drove her over to the Fowey Estuary region, less than an hour away, to catch a glimpse through the trees of the manor house and estate at Menabilly, the setting for the mysterious house Manderley in du Maurier's classic tale,
Rebecca. When Blythe returned to her cottage, she read th
e novel far into the early hours. At its riveting conclusion she closed the book with a snap and almost blurted out her thoughts:
The novel was better than the movie!

   
Movies…

   She mustn't think about the movies, she cautioned herself.

   She was deeply thankful, she acknowledged as she smoothed the palm of her hand over the leather binding of the du Maurier novel, that she had neither the occasion nor the opportunity to see films or television during her first weeks in Cornwall. She was certain that such things would inevitably remind her of Chris and Ellie. And the mere thought of Chris and Ellie and the infant that would soon be born to them was enough to cause a setback in her "recovery" campaign, as she had begun to think of her simple life during the soft summer days that were floating by.

   As time went on, Blythe's erratic sleeping habits, along with the soporific sea air, made her so drowsy by late afternoon that most days she stretched out on a chintz chaise facing the coastline and dozed for an hour or two.

   One morning three weeks after Blythe's arrival in Cornwall, Luke stopped by the cottage to deliver a letter postmarked "Jackson, Wyoming."

   "I thought it might be important," he said, preparing to set off in the direction of his car, which was parked in the grassy field next to her abode.

   "Hold on a sec," Blythe said quickly, ripping open the envelope. "If nothing else, I owe you a cup of tea. C'mon in." She glanced at the first few lines of the letter and suddenly sagged against the doorjamb.

   "What is it?" Luke asked quietly. "Bad news?"

   Blythe continued to stare at the familiar scrawl. Finally she said, "My father's getting married again," and walked back into the cottage.

   "Ah… well… that can sometimes be very tricky business, can't it?" he sympathized, following her through the door.

   "'To a real estate lady in Jackson named Bertha Pyle,'" she quoted from the letter. Her eyes scanned the bottom of the page and she blurted incredulously, "He's actually done what he threatened—put the ranch up for sale. He's moving into town for good!"

   "Selling up… after all those years the place has been in your family. What a shame."

   Blythe pointed to the top of the second page. "He says he's deeding ten acres to me and ten acres to my sister 'on opposite sides of the Snake River,'" she read, and gave a short, sarcastic laugh. Then her eyes glued to one sentence as her mouth settled into a grim line. Next she glanced at her watch and then looked over at Luke. "After we have a cup of tea, would you let me use your telephone?"

"Dad? This is Blythe! In Cornwall. England. I got your letter."

   There was a long pause on the other end of the line. She imagined her father covering the phone and mouthing her name to the "real estate lady from Jackson" who had obviously been the one to suggest her sixty-two-year-old father sell the ranch.

   "Blythe!" The senior Barton sounded happy to hear from her. "How's it goin'?"

   As far as Blythe was concerned, the past year was one for the record books! Her grandmother died, her husband left her for her sister, and now her childhood home was on the auction block and her father was acting like an idiot over some slick-talking saleswoman, anxious to parcel out the Double Bar B into ranchettes!

   "I'm fine," she answered calmly. "Congratulations are in order, I see."

   "That's right," he replied. "We eloped last Friday. To Mexico."

   "Wow…" Blythe breathed. She wondered if Ellie had steered the happy couple toward the same wedding chapel that she and Chris had used. "Well… congratulations again to you and your bride."

   "Well… thank you. I'll pass that along to Bertha."

   Pause.

   "Look, Dad," Blythe said crisply, "I thought before anything out there was a done deal, I'd offer to buy the ranch myself. Thanks to my sister, I'm pretty rich these days."

   "Too late," her father said cheerfully. "Signed the papers yesterday."

   "You did?" she gasped, barely keeping her response from sounding like a coyote's wail.

   "Yep. Some rich Wall Street fella who's been comin' out for years to that dude ranch in the next county. You got any objections?"

   "Well… I-I just wanted to discuss a few things with you… you know… before everything was final…"

   "It's final. Already filed at the county seat. Your deed and Ellie's too. Thought it best neither one of you owned the whole place."

"Oh."

   "You got the parcel at the bend in the river… where we buried Mom and Matt… and Grandma, okay?"

   Blythe felt tears sting her eyelids.

   "That's very sweet of you, Dad," she managed to say. "That was my favorite spot."

   With the portion of her brain that wasn't feeling like an abandoned child, Blythe knew that her father had every right to do as he pleased at this stage of his life. He'd been a slave to the Double Bar B all his adulthood, doing his level best to continue as a rancher in a vastly changing economy. Herding dudes instead of cattle just wasn't Will Barton's thing. A widower for the last twenty-four years, he earned whatever rest and joy he could get. If Bertha Pyle had helped him achieve it—so be it.

   "Well, then…" her father said after an uncomfortably long pause, "I guess that's about it. This call's costin' you a mighty mint."

   "As I said before, I can afford it."

   "Look, Blythe," Will Barton said gruffly, "I'm… I'm sorry for the fix you're in. But just remember one thing. You're a lot stronger'n Ellie. You gotta take that into account."

   
Why?
Blythe wanted to scream.

   And before he could say anything else or she could burst into tears, she blurted out, "I love you, Dad," and quickly bade farewell. "You take care now. My regards to your new wife."

Soon after this conversation took place, Luke began to make a habit of swinging by the cottage several times a week around noon in his battered Land Rover with the offer of a lift into Gorran Haven or Mevagissey for lunch and various shopping expeditions. Blythe invariably accepted his invitations, grateful for any activity that kept her occupied.

   Once a week, at least, he would choose a coastal village to show her.

   "Are you of a mind for crab sandwiches today?" he inquired one morning before whisking her off to Polperro, a nearby fishing hamlet that clung to a rocky cliff and was steeped in smuggling lore.

   The owner of Barton Hall kept a fourteen-foot sailboat on a trailer rig behind the pony stable and, on sunny days, took her to Portholland or Portloe, tiny seaside villages whose harbors were so small and treacherous, even motor crafts had to wait for calm seas before trying to pass the jetties.

   On one of their weekly outings Blythe summoned the nerve to ask Luke why his Land Rover had so many dents crimping all four fenders.

   "Mother," he pronounced with an amused smile. "Before she left to live with my sister in Canada, she ran the estate for a few years after my father passed away. To her exceedingly genteel way of thinking, it was impolite to constantly sound one's horn, so I'm afraid her method of creeping forward to make her way through a knot of sheep put rather a lot of wear and tear on our car. Ah! Here we are," he announced, pointing through the windshield at the entrance to Trelissick, an immense garden adjacent to the charming King Harry Ferry river crossing and maintained by The National Trust. "Tea first?"

   As the mild summer days drifted by, Blythe was amazed to discover that her existence in Cornwall had become a total reversal of the way she and Christopher had lived, especially when they had been working together.

   During those brutal months of full-scale production, she had hardly slept for days at a time. She was usually up before dawn, seeing to it that the interior sets were in place, or that the exterior shots were properly "dressed" before shooting began in the early-morning hours. There were wardrobes to coordinate, sketches to be made, workers to supervise, plus the constant pressure of anticipating total disasters, or at the very least, major changes in the shooting schedule due to bad weather, script revisions, or temperamental actors.

   As she thought back on those years, she realized that her job as Chris's wife included an equal number of responsibilities off the set.

   "Darling, have the car pick me up at five thirty, will you?"

   "You said you wanted the driver at five."

   "Well, I've changed my mind."

   As usual, she had reached for the phone.

   "Where's my bloody shirt?"

   "What shirt?"

   "The one I wear with my bloody tuxedo!"

   "I had it delivered yesterday. It's in your closet."

   "Well, I can't find it in my closet!"

   "Have you looked?"

   "Could you look, darling? I'm having a bath."

   She had donned her robe and let Chris sink into the waiting tub.

   "Did you get the airline tickets?"

   "I put them in your briefcase."

   "Am I on the aisle?"

   "I requested it."

   "Well, did I get it?"

   "Look on your boarding pass."

   "I can't find it. I've got to call Michael. Be an angel…"

   She had, of course, found the tickets where he'd stashed them in his desk drawer. He was on the aisle. In first class.

   Finding time to get a haircut herself, or to slip away for lunch with her women friends, became nearly impossible. Eventually the friends had fallen by the wayside, and she kept her hair shoulder length to eliminate frequent trips to the salon on Rodeo Drive.

   When she allowed herself to consider the sexual component of their marriage, Blythe's musings had a tendency to put her in a deep funk. On many days in her first weeks in Painter's Cottage, she stared for hours at the English Channel outside her windows. As she sipped a mug of tea, she sometimes allowed her thoughts to recall the marathon of carnal exploits Chris had apparently committed in his director's trailer on the studio's back lot, to say nothing of Ellie's Santa Monica loft.

   During the last year of her marriage Chris and her love life had been erratic, to put it mildly. For months now she had tried to identify the moment when it had all begun to change. She recalled those grueling trips, flying back and forth from Los Angeles to Jackson… her fatigue and worry about Grandma Barton's agonizing decline… Chris's total absorption with preproduction for
In Kenya.
And later… his affair with Ellie. Why hadn't she figured out what was going on much sooner?

   Was there something wrong with her… some terrible lack? Blythe wondered, gazing out to sea. Were Ellie's legs that much trimmer than hers? Was her sister's matching 36-C bust somehow more enticing than hers? Or was the second Mrs. Barton-Stowe's chatter about illustrating bunnies and balloons and "little engines that could" more scintillating than the conversations she'd had with Chris about multimillion-dollar film budgets and the nefarious habits of studio executives?

   Granted, Ellie's most recent series of children's books had been moderately successful, and her long-term future in her field had finally shown some promise. However, the fact that Blythe's career as a production designer in the glamorous world of feature films was a soaring success had only stoked the fires of her sister's perpetual discontent. Ellie's successes were never enough, in her view, and her resentment of Blythe had been palpable for years.

   When Blythe's thoughts careened in these unhealthy directions, her antidote during the first month she spent in her coastal retreat had been to undertake another hike along the cliffs.

   And as she began truly to rest and relax, a weight that she could only identify as the "It's Always Something Reflex" simply melted away.

   "I tramped seven miles yesterday," she announced proudly to Luke as she climbed into the front passenger seat of his wheezing four-wheel-drive vehicle late one morning on a day in mid-June. "I did the shorter National Trust walk along the South Coast Path from Hemmick Beach, around Dodman Point, and on to Gorran Haven. From there I took the road back to the cottage through Boswinger."

   "Good heavens!" he said admiringly. "You should be more than fit enough by now for that pony trek I proposed a while back."

   "Different muscles," she replied, and immediately changed the subject. "What's our itinerary today?"

   "Just a jaunt into Mevagissey, I'm afraid," he replied. "I'd like to be back home by noon before my son arrives from boarding school. Would you join us for luncheon?"