The Fire Child (5 page)
Authors: S. K. Tremayne
Lunchtime
I’m lying to my husband.
‘I told you, I’m going shopping. We need some food.’
His sceptical voice fills the car, disembodied. Calling me from London. ‘Shopping in St Just? St Just in Penwith?’
‘Why not?’
He laughs. ‘Darling. You know what they say, the seagulls in St Just fly upside down because there’s nothing worth crapping on.’
I chuckle, briefly. I’m still lying, though. I’m not telling him why I’m shopping, not yet. Not until I know.
‘What’s the weather like down there?’
I gaze through my windscreen as the car rolls along the coastal road. The stunted church tower of St Just is a grey silhouette on a grey horizon. ‘Looks like it’s going to rain. Bit chilly, too.’
He sighs. ‘Yes, the summer’s pretty much over. But it was good, wasn’t it?’ His pause is earnest. Hopeful. ‘Everything is OK now, everything is getting better, with Jamie, you’re feeling better.’
‘Yes,’ I say, and again I lie, and this lie is probably more important. I am certainly not feeling better: I am still thinking of the hare I killed. I haven’t mentioned it, to anyone. As soon as the accident happened, I cleaned the car and quickly disposed of the body,I wiped the blood from my hands, and then I tried to wipe the event from my mind. My first reaction had been to call David, tell him, share the story. But a minute’s thought told me that, no matter how trivially disturbing, it was probably better to stay silent. The moment I broached the subject, even as a passing and frivolous remark – oh your son said
this
and then it really happened, how
funny
, it could appear, to David, that I actually believe his son can foresee events, is clairvoyant, is a Kerthen from the legend. My remarks could make me sound mad. And I must not sound mad. Because I am not mad.
I don’t believe that Jamie has any power. The accident was an uncanny coincidence: animals die on the narrow, rural, zigzagging Penwith roads all the time – badgers, foxes, pheasants, and hares. I’ve seen dead hares before, they always make me sad; hares somehow seem much more precious than rabbits. Wilder, more poetic, I love the fact they live in Penwith. But they do get killed with regularity, as people speed round those granite-walled corners. My encounter on that rainy lane through Ladies Wood was, consequently, Jamie’s anxieties conflating with a simple accident. Yet it still faintly haunts me. Perhaps it was the way the body lolled in my hands. Like a dead baby.
‘Rachel?’
‘Yes, sorry. Driving.’
‘Are you OK, darling?’
‘I’m fine. Gotta find a parking space. I’d better go.’
He says goodbye and says
let’s Skype later
and then he drops the call. I scan the streets for a place to slot my car. It doesn’t take long. It’s never that hard to park here. Remote, regularly battered by the weather, the ‘last town in England’, one of the last places in Cornwall to speak Cornish, St Just-in-Penwith on the best of days has an empty and melancholy feel: bereft of its mines and miners but not their memories. But it is also the nearest town with the shop I need, the nearest to Carnhallow, and I need this shop right now.
Pushing the car door open I sense the inevitable dampness in the air. It is threatening to mizzle: that specific form of fine Cornish rain which is half-mist, half-drizzle. Like a spa treatment, but cold.
The pharmacy is down the fore street, at the corner of which is the medieval church; the central square is eighteenth-century shopfronts and big Victorian pubs – which retain hints of that wealthier mining past, the days of count-house dinners and hot rum punch, the days when adventurers and stockholders would celebrate the boom days of another copper lode, when giddy mine-captains would bring their sweethearts into the saloon to drink their gin-and-treacle.
Crossing the road, feeling the odd sensation that I am being watched, I press the door. It opens with an old-fashioned chime.
The girl at the counter gives me a look. She’s young. Very pale.
Slowly I make my way around the scented pharmacy. The girl is still looking at me, but hers is a warm, friendly glance. I realize with a sense of surprise that she’s almost my age: I spend so much time alone, or with David, I sometimes forget that I am also young. Only thirty.
The beautiful tattoo of a mandala on her neck implies she might be arty, or musical, the kind of friend I would usually make, without a worry, in Shoreditch. Maybe she’s working here to support a creative career; either way she looks fun and alternative. I’d like to go up to her and crack a joke and have a laugh – make a friend. It’s what I would have done in London.
But I’m still struggling to make real friends here, and I’m not sure why. Over the last weeks and months Cornwall, or Carnhallow, or the Kerthens, have somehow muted me. Or maybe it’s Jamie; the boy absorbs my emotions, even if we barely communicate.
The shelves do not have what I want. I am going to have to brave a conversation. With a glitch of anxiety in my throat, I approach the counter.
‘Do you have any um, um, pregnancy testing kits?’
The girl gazes at me. Perhaps she can tell how important this is from the crack in my voice. Pregnancy is my escape from worry and the growing sense of pointlessness: I will become a new mother, meet other new mothers. I will have a proper role and a real job and something extraordinary to give to David and Jamie. I will forget my anxieties. And I will make my husband happy: I know David is very keen for me to fall pregnant.
I am five days late, as I realized this morning, staring in confusion and tingling hopefulness at the calendar.
The girl is frowning.
‘There aren’t any kits on the shelves?’
‘Not that I can see.’
‘Well, uhm. Not sure we have any left. I’ll go check.’
She disappears. Gazing around, I see a poster for some kiddie medicine on the wall. The poster shows a mother with an angelic little baby, superhumanly cute and flawless. The mother has a smile as radiant as the faithful on Judgement Day.
For unto us a child is born
.
‘Here,’ says the shop girl. ‘Had a bunch at the back, must have forgot to put them out on the shelves. Sorry!’
I snap from my daydream. ‘Thank you. Brilliant. Can I take two?’
The girl smiles. Two to make sure you are definitely pregnant. Grabbing my kits, I scoot out into the drizzle and wind. Shoppers in drab hoodies turn my way, as if they have all been there a while, waiting for me.
Look at her.
Skulking around.
Am I pregnant? It is what I’ve wanted, needed, desired, for so long, to make things whole. My heart sings at the idea. A daughter, a son, I don’t mind. And a sibling for Jamie. This will repair the world.
I bring you glad tidings
.
The tension is too much. I can’t even wait to drive home. I’m going to find out this very second. Climbing out of the car again I head for one of those rather handsome old pubs, the Commercial Hotel.
The pub is, inevitably, almost empty. Just one young guy at the end of the varnished wooden bar, staring at a pint of Guinness. He briefly leers at me, then stares at his beer again.
Into the Ladies. I take out the kit, squat on the loo. I pee.
And then comes the wait. I am actually trying not to pray. I mustn’t get my hopes up. But oh, my hopes. My brilliant hopes.
Count the time, count the time, I must number the moments until I can call my husband and sing out the wonderful news, the news that changes everything, the news that will make us truly happy, properly a family.
I shut my eyes, tick off the final seconds, and look down. One line means not pregnant, two lines means pregnant. I need two lines. Give me two blue lines.
I look at the stick.
One line.
The sadness bites hard. Why did I get my hopes up so high? It was silly. We’ve only been trying for a few short months. The chances are fairly low.
Should I even bother with the second kit? I’ve got my answer. One line. Not pregnant. Get on with things …
And yet. Who knows?
I wait, counting the stupid seconds. I look at the stick.
One line. Crossing out my dreams.
Chucking the kits vigorously in the bin, I pause as I exit the toilet, then go to the mirror and give myself a hard, instructive stare. Looking at my white freckled face, my red hair, at Rachel Daly. I must shape up, snap out of self-pity – and count myself lucky. I have a rich, sexy husband, I have a beautiful stepson, I am living in a magnificent house which I truly adore.
And yet it is a house I don’t want to go back to – not yet. Not with all its vastness and silence. Not when I am in this pensive mood. Trying not to think about the hare. That uncanny coincidence. The blood on my hands. Again.
Wandering into the bar, I check the array of drinks: local beers, Doom Bar, St Austell Breweries. But I don’t like beer. Instead I ask the yawning bargirl for a rum and coke. Why not? After all, I am not pregnant.
‘Here you go, my lover.’
I take the drink and sit at a table. The young man is still looking intently at his Guinness, like it is a lap dancer.
Reaching into my handbag, I find my book. It’s a thickish volume about tin mining, sourced from David’s library. David’s rhapsodies on the old mining life have got me interested. This is another way for me to understand my new family. The mine-owning Kerthens.
The book is old and has that annoyingly dense Victorian typography, very difficult to read, but it is full of curious, moving, even sinister vignettes of mining life.
The author toured the West Cornish mines in the 1840s, near the peak of production, and saw the wealth and the energy and the horror. He talks of the suffering and mutilation: the many cripples he met in the villages, men with permanently blackened faces from explosions; men missing fingers or hands or arms from shooting rocks with gunpowder; blinded and broken men being led around the humble Cornish villages by boys, eking out a pitiful living by selling tea, door to door.
In some places, he says, one miner in five died violently. Sometimes they died at each other’s hands: from drunken brawling. The boozy violence of the ‘wild men of the stannaries’ was legendary. In the mid nineteenth century it was said that, in West Cornwall, wherever three houses met together, two would be alehouses.
Yet the author also saw a vivid beauty: how boats would sail up the night-time coast then anchor to gaze in astonishment at the sight of Pendeen and Botallack and Morvellan blazing away on the cliffs without cease, the rising and falling beams of the fire whims, the winding drums of the horse engines, the cries of the landers, the glare from boiler house doors, the crashing of the stamps. And the lights glowing in the windows of the great three-storeyed engine houses, halfway up the cliffs. And then, most magnificent of all, the mighty fires of the smelting houses lit by fountains of molten metal, springing up fifteen feet into the air, then splashing back into the basin, like majestic geysers of quicksilver.
And now, incredibly, it is all
gone
. After four thousand years. The men no longer work half-naked in the terrible heat at the end of undersea tunnels; they no longer climb a mile down ropes, like monkeys, deep into the reek of sulphur; and boys of eight are no longer sent down the pit to produce half the world’s tin and copper and many millions in profit. All that is left is those ruins by the sea, those ruins on the moors, and in the woods. Scorrier, South Crofty, Wheal Rose, Treskerby, Hallenbeagle, Wheal Busy, Wheal Seymour, Creegbrawse, Hallamanning, Poldise, Ding Dong, Godolphin, and Providence.
Gone.
I look up from the book, hoping to see a face, swap just a smile with the bargirl. But now I realize the pub is deserted. The drinker has gone, even the bargirl has disappeared. I am totally alone. It’s like no one else exists.
The house is quiet when I get back. The house is always quiet. The great front door opens and I am greeted by perfect stillness, the scent of beeswax, and the long and lofty New Hall.
Something brushes between my legs and makes me start. It’s Genevieve. Nina’s slender grey cat. Winding between my ankles.
When Nina died David gave her to Juliet to look after in her granny flat, because David doesn’t like cats. But sometimes she leaves Juliet’s apartment and stalks the house.
Bending down, I tickle the cat behind the ear, feeling the bone of her skull. Her fur is the colour of wintry sea mist.
‘Hey, Genevieve. Go catch a mouse, we need the help.’
The cat purrs and gives me a sly, green-eyed glance. Then abruptly Genevieve stalks away, towards the Old Hall.
The silence returns.
Where is everyone?
Juliet is presumably in her flat. But where is Jamie? Heading right, I make for the kitchen, where I find rare human life. It’s Cassie, busy unloading the dishwasher, listening to K-Pop on her iPod. Cassie is young, amiable, Thai, thirty-two. She’s been with the family ten years. She and I don’t interact very much. Partly because her English is still hazy, and partly because I don’t know how to act with her – I don’t know how to deal with ‘servants’. I am of the serving classes. I feel awkward. Better to leave her to it.
But I feel like I need interaction right now.
Cassie is oblivious to me. She has her earphones in as she works and she is cheerfully humming along.
Stepping forward, I touch her gently on the shoulder. ‘Cassie.’
At once she flinches, startled, nearly dropping the mug in her hands. ‘Oh,’ she says, ripping the earphones out. ‘I am sorry, Miss Rachel.’
‘No, please, it was my fault. I made you jump.’
Her smile is soft, and sincere. I smile in return.
‘I was wondering. Do you fancy a cup of tea?’
She looks at me in a friendly, puzzled way. ‘Tea. You want me make you cup of tea?’
‘No. I thought …’ I am shrugging. ‘Well, I thought you and I could chat and, er, y’know. Have a cuppa and a conversation. Girl to girl. Get to know each other a bit better. This house is so big! You can get pretty lost.’
‘Cup … pa?’ Her puzzlement is plain now and tinged with concern. ‘There is problem, you must tell me?’
‘No, I—’
‘I collect Jamie OK. He is in the Drawing Room. But – is a problem? I have done something—’
‘No, no no. It’s nothing. I just, I just, I thought we might …’
This is hopeless. Perhaps I should tell her the truth. Sit her down with the teapot and spill it all out. Confess it all. Confess that I am finding it difficult to find my role. That David’s friends are nice but they’re his friends, older, richer, different. That Juliet is lovely but she is frail and reclusive and I can’t keep intruding on her. That there is generally no one else to talk to, no adult in my days – I have to wait for David to come home to have interesting conversations face to face, or ring up Jessica in London and beg for scraps of gossip about my old life. I could tell Cassie the facts. Tell her that the isolation is starting to gnaw.
But I can’t say any of this: she would find it bizarre. So instead I give her a big fat smile and say, ‘Well, that’s great, Cassie. Everything is totally good. I wanted to make sure you’re OK, that’s all.’
‘Oh yes!’ She laughs, lifting up her earphones. ‘I am fine, I happy, I OK, I have a new song, I love Awoo, you know? Lim Kim!’ She laughs again, and then she warbles a couple of lines, ‘
Mamaligosha, Mamaligotcha
…
alway Mamaligosha!
Help me work. Miss Nina she used to say I sing too much, but I think she make a joke me. Miss Nina was very funny.’
Her earphones are replaced, she smiles again, but her smile is a little sad now, and maybe sharper at the edges. As if I am something of a disappointment after Nina, though she is far too nice to say this.
Again, the awkwardness returns. Cassie is waiting for me to go, so she can finish her chores. I return her fading smile, and then – defeated – I leave the kitchen.
There isn’t much else for me to do. The house looks at me in derision.
Why don’t you do some restoring? Buy a carpet. Make yourself useful.
I stand like a frightened interloper in the hall. I must go and see Jamie, check on my stepson.
I find him soon enough, in the Yellow Drawing Room, sitting on the sofa. He does not respond as I open the door, does not move a millimetre. He is still in his school uniform, and he is intently reading a book. It looks serious for his age. A lock of dark hair falls across his forehead, a single dark feather on snow. The beauty of the boy is saddening, sometimes. I’m not sure why.
‘Hello, how was school?’
At first he barely moves, then he turns my way, and frowns for a second, as if he has heard something rather puzzling about me, but hasn’t entirely worked it out. Yet.
‘Jamie?’
The frown persists, but he responds. ‘It was OK. Thank you.’
Then he goes back to the book, ignoring me completely. I open my mouth to say something but realize I have nothing to say to my stepchild, either. I am flailing here. I don’t know how to reach out, to find common ground, to form the vital bond: with anyone. I don’t know how to talk to Cassie and I don’t know what to say to Jamie. I might as well talk to myself.
Lingering by the bookshelves, I strain to think of a subject that might engage my stepson, but before I do, Jamie speaks.
‘Why?’
But he isn’t speaking to me. He is staring at the large painting on the wall opposite the sofa. It is a huge abstract, a column of horizontal slabs, of hazy, throbbing colour, blue over black over green.
I don’t especially like this painting; it’s the only one of Nina’s purchases of which I disapprove. The colours are beautiful and I’ve no doubt the painting cost thousands – but the colours are evidently meant to represent the coast, here, at Morvellan: the green fields, the blue sky, the black mine houses between. It has a dominant and foreboding quality. One day I will move it. This is my home now.
Jamie is still staring, rigidly, at the painting. Then again he says, to himself, as if I am not in the room, ‘Why?’
I step closer. ‘Jamie, why what?’
He doesn’t turn my way. He keeps talking into nothing. ‘Why? Why did you do that?’
Is he lost in some deep daydream? Something like sleepwalking? He looks perfectly conscious. Alert even. But intently focused on something I cannot perceive.
‘Ah. Ah. Why. There will be lights in the Old Hall,’ he says. Then he nods as if someone or something has answered his question, and then he looks at me – not directly at me, but slightly to my right – and he smiles: a flash of surprised happiness. He smiles as if there is someone nice standing
next
to me, and then he goes back to his book. Reflexively, I snap my head right, to find the person who makes Jamie smile.
I am staring at the wall. At empty space.
Of course there’s no one there. It’s only me and him. So why did I turn my head?
Part of me, abruptly, wants to flee. To run away. To get in my car and drive as fast as possible to London. But this is ridiculous. I am merely spooked. The hare, and now this. It is unbalancing. I’m not going to be scared by an eight-year-old boy, a soulful stepson with traumas. If I leave the Drawing Room now I will be admitting defeat.
I must stay. And if we cannot talk we can at least sit in companionable silence. That would be something. I can read in here, as he is reading. Let stepson and stepmother read together.
Crossing to the bookcase on the further side of the Drawing Room, I check the shelves. Jamie turns the pages of his book, his back to me. I can hear him flick the pages, quickly quickly.
There is a section here of Nina’s books that I have not read: tall, authoritative books on historical furniture, silverware, embroideries.
I pull out one book,
The Care and Repair of Antique Furniture
, flick through it and replace it, not sure what information I am seeking. Then I try another:
Regency Interiors: a Guidebook
. Finally, I choose a third:
The Victoria and Albert Catalogue of English Woodwork, Volume IV
. But when I pull the book from the shelf, something very different comes with it, flapping to the floor.
A magazine.
It looks like a gossip magazine. Why would it be kept here? Amongst Nina’s books?
Jamie is still deep in his reading. His capacity for quiet concentration impresses me. He gets it from his father.
Sitting down in one of Nina’s beautifully reupholstered armchairs, I scan the cover of the magazine and my question is answered. The magazine is dated from eight years ago, and right there, at the very top, is a small box. With a photo of a glamorous couple. David and Nina.
My heartbeat quickens. I read the caption.
Nina Kerthen, eldest daughter of French banker, Sacha Valéry, proudly shows her new baby, with her husband, Cornish landowner, David Kerthen.
We take a look inside their historic home.
Briskly I flick through the pages. Find the relevant section.
The article’s prose is silly celebrity journalese, venerating David and Nina for simply being rich and good-looking, aristocratic and lucky. The world ‘elegant’ is employed in almost every paragraph. It is froth and nonsense.
So why did Nina keep it? She was highly intelligent: she wouldn’t usually read this stuff. My guess is that she kept it for the photos, which are good. The magazine got a proper professional to do the job. There are some night-time exteriors of Carnhallow, showing the house glowing in the dark nocturnal woods like a golden reliquary in a shadowy crypt.
The photos of David and Nina are also impressive. And one, in particular, compels. I pause as I look at it, biting my own hair, thinking, reflecting.
This photo shows Nina, in a summer dress, sitting in a satin armchair, in this very room – the Yellow Drawing Room – with angled knees pressed together. And in this one singular picture she is holding baby Jamie. This is the only photo where we see their son, despite the promise of the magazine cover.
At her side, David stands tall, slim, and dark, in a charcoal black suit, with a protective arm poised around his wife’s bare, suntanned shoulder.
The photo is mysteriously perfect. I feel a sudden and powerful twinge of jealousy. Nina’s shoulder is so beautiful and flawless. She is so immaculate, yet decorously sensuous. Suppressing my envy, I scrutinize the rest of the image. The baby is, for some reason, barely visible. You can only just tell that it is Jamie, lying in his mother’s suntanned arms. But you can very clearly see a tiny fist, reaching from white swaddling.
If my heartbeat was quickened before, now it beats faster still. Because I am getting the sense I am staring at a clue, maybe even a distressing or important clue. But a clue to what? Why should there be a clue at all? I have to fight down my bewilderment. Regain my rationality. There is
no
mystery, there is
no
reason for me to be frightened or jealous. Everything is explained. Jamie is getting better, albeit slowly. We had a good summer. I will get pregnant. I will make friends. We will be happy. The dead hare was a coincidence.
‘What’s that you’re reading?’
Jamie is standing beside me. I didn’t hear him move.
‘Oh,’ I say, with a flash of startled embarrassment, quickly shoving the magazine between two books. ‘Only a magazine. Nothing important. Have you finished with your book? Do you want something to eat?’
He looks unhappy. Did he see the magazine in my hands? See his mother? It was daft and wrong of me to read it in here, in front of him, the grieving child. I won’t do that again.
‘Tell you what, I’ll warm up some of that lasagne, from yesterday, remember? You said you liked it.’
He shrugs. I babble on, eager to make the most of this conversation, however staccato. I can make us all a family.
‘Then we can talk, talk properly. How about a holiday next year? Would you like that? We’ve had such a nice summer here, but maybe next year we could go abroad, somewhere like France?’
Now I pause.
Jamie is frowning intensely.
‘What’s wrong, Jamie?’
He stands there, black and white in his school uniform, looking at me, and I can see the deep emotion in his eyes, showing sadness, or worse.
And then he says, ‘Actually, Rachel, you should know something.’
‘What?’
‘I already went to France with Mummy. When I was small.’
‘Oh.’ Rising from the armchair, I chide myself, but I’m not sure why; there is no way I could have known about their holidays. ‘Well, it doesn’t have to be France, we could try Spain, or Portugal maybe, or—’
He shakes his head, interrupting. ‘I think she has been staying there. In France. But now she is coming back.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Mummy! I can hear her.’
He is obviously troubled: the terrible grief is resurfacing again. I respond, as softly as possible, trying to find the right words, ‘Jamie, don’t be silly. Your mummy is not coming back. Because, well, you
know
where she is. She passed away. We’ve all seen the grave, haven’t we? In Zennor.’
The boy looks at me long, and hard, his large eyes wet. He looks outright scared. I want to embrace him. Calm him.
Jamie shakes his head, raising his voice. ‘But she
isn’t
. She’s not
there
. She’s not in the
coffin
. Don’t you know that?’
A darkness opens.
‘But, Jamie—’
‘They never did. They never found the body.’ His voice trembles. ‘She isn’t in that grave. They never found her. Nobody has ever found my mummy. Ask Daddy. Ask him. She isn’t buried in Zennor.’
Before I can reply, he runs out of the room. I hear his footsteps down the hall, then the same light boyish steps, running up the Grand Staircase. To his bedroom, presumably. And I am left here alone, in the beautiful Yellow Drawing Room. Alone with the intolerable idea that Jamie has placed in my mind.