The Four of Us (3 page)

The second door on the left led into a sitting room. There was a chintz-covered sofa, a Victorian armchair and a glass-fronted display cabinet filled with china. A glorious Persian rug, its once vibrant reds and blues gently faded, graced the wood floor. There was another rug, white sheepskin, in front of the fireplace, which, much grander than the fireplace in the study, had a bed of knotted newspapers topped by fire-lighters and logs in its grate. The door on the opposite side of the hall led into a dining room, the door at the end of the passageway into a kitchen.

It was upstairs that the surprise came – though not in the bedroom that had clearly been Amelia's. There, the walnut bedroom suite looked ancient enough to have belonged to Amelia's mother, the overall heaviness redeemed by the golden light flooding in through the south-facing windows.

The surprise was in the other three bedrooms. Instead of flower-patterned wallpaper and muddy cream paintwork, one room was painted a pretty lavender-blue, another was painted shell-pink and the third had walls of pale mauve. The furniture in each room – wardrobe, dressing table and beds – was stripped pine, the curtains and bedding beautifully coordinated to the colour of each room's walls.

It was the beds, though, that were the real mystery. Each room held three. A bunk bed and a single bed.

There were no personal items in the rooms, no framed photographs or articles of clothing. Bemusedly she wondered if Amelia had been renting out rooms to bed and breakfast guests. Looking at the bunk beds, it seemed highly unlikely. Tourists would no doubt put up with many minor inconveniences, but hauling themselves up into a child's top bunk bed was surely not one of them.

Wondering if the answer was that Amelia had bought the furniture and furnishings cheaply, as a job lot, she surveyed the bathroom. A chipped white porcelain bath stood in lonely splendour on ornate claws. The lavatory had a mahogany seat and an overhead cistern. The pedestal hand-basin looked as if it had come out of the Ark with Noah.

She didn't care. Deeply satisfied with all she had seen she went back downstairs, eager to get on with the task of carrying as much as possible from the car to the house before night fell.

Two hours later, as darkness closed in, she was comfortable for the night. None of the mattresses was damp and she had carried a sleeping bag, pillow and duvet in from the car and laid them on Amelia's bed. Though one of the other bedrooms also looked out towards the headland and the sea, the window in it was smaller than the one in Amelia's room. In Amelia's room the window was wide and deep with a comfortable window-seat, and it meant that when she woke she would be able to see the view out over the headland to the English Channel.

With her most important chore out of the way she carried a cool-box from the car boot into the kitchen and, removing a bottle of milk and a packet of biscuits from it, gave herself a fifteen-minute rest break. Afterwards she lit the fire Matt Trevose had laid for her and the oil lamp she had had the sense to bring with her.

For the remainder of the time until it grew too dark to continue she ferried her belongings from the car into the house.

With the fire crackling and the lamp glowing, it had been an enjoyable task. Now, having allowed the fire to burn out, she was in pyjamas and dressing-gown and, utterly exhausted, the duvet round her shoulders, was seated in the window embrasure of what had been Amelia's bedroom, a tumbler of whisky in one hand.

The oil lamp she had brought upstairs with her lit the room with a soft glow. Outside, the darkness of the headland was so deep as to be impenetrable. Never before had she slept in a room from which streetlights could not be seen. It was a moment she had braced herself for – a moment when she had expected to feel panic-stricken and nervous. She didn't. The whisky was warming, the light from the oil lamp comforting. She was in her new home and on the verge of a completely new way of life. It was a marvellous feeling – a feeling unlike any other she had ever known.

Still curled in the window-seat, deeply happy and utterly content, she watched as stars began pinpricking the darkness, and then, climbing into bed, she closed her eyes and slept.

When she woke it was to the sound of rain falling against the windows. There were no other sounds. Previously when she woke, there was always noise. The distant roar of traffic from the constantly busy Jamaica and Lower Roads, the sound of people talking as they walked past her front door on their way to the nearby train station and of children chattering and squabbling as they made their way to school.

This morning, there was only the sound of the rain. She opened her eyes. There
was
another sound. A sound so alien it simply hadn't registered on her consciousness. Excitement coiled deep within her as she realized what it was. For the first time ever, she was lying in bed in her own home, listening to the sound of the sea.

Ten minutes later she was downstairs and in the kitchen, eager to start the day. It was a large room and, even though the sky was overcast and there were still flurries of rain against the windows, it was full of light.

Last night when she had been in the kitchen, she had been too busy finding room for all the boxes she had brought in from the car to take anything more than a cursory glance round. Now she took stock, and liked what she saw.

It was quite obviously the heart of the house. As well as a small deal table beneath one of the windows there was an enormous oak refectory dining table and, adjacent to the Aga, a rocking chair. On the far wall was a tall dresser crammed with crockery and on the quarry-tiled floor were rag rugs, similar to the one in the spacious entrance hall.

She poured herself a glass of milk and drank it, gazing through a window that looked out over a vegetable garden towards an orchard. Hardly daring to hope that the orchard, too, was hers, she began making a mental list of all the things she needed to do, beginning with the need to drive into Calleloe and make arrangements for the telephone and the electricity to be reconnected.

Another thought intruded. Did she need to feed the hens or would Matt Trevose be arriving any minute to do so? And how had Matt Trevose known of her impending arrival? And her name?

Right on cue, there came a short, sharp knock on the front door.

She crossed the stone-flagged hall and opened the door, a smile on her face.

Just as Ruthven had not looked as she had expected it to, neither did Matt Trevose.

For some reason she had expected him to be elderly. Instead, he was, at a rough guess, only a few years older than herself. He wasn't very tall, five foot eight or nine, but beneath his fisherman's jersey he still had a good pair of shoulders and he still had a thick pelt of hair, shot through with silver.

‘Mrs Dove?' he said, an attractive Cornish lilt in his voice.

‘Yes.' She held out her hand. ‘And you must be Mr Trevose. Please come in.'

‘D'you mind if I come in via the side door? My boots are a bit dirty for front entrance halls.'

He was wearing mud-splattered Wellingtons, well-worn jeans tucked inside them.

Five minutes later he was standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking indecently at home.

‘I can't offer you a cup of tea,' she said apologetically. ‘All I can offer is a glass of milk and a couple of biscuits.'

‘Thank you.' He stared in disbelief at the number of framed paintings and prints that leaned against every available surface.

‘I like pictures,' she said unnecessarily, pouring milk into a glass and emptying a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits on to a plate. ‘I didn't really have the wall space for them in my home in London – they always looked a bit cramped. Now, though, in this house, they are going to look splendid.'

‘I'll have to introduce you to my friend Hugo. He owns the art gallery in Calleloe.'

Remembering that Mr Black had said that the art gallery was very prestigious, Primmie said, ‘I think your friend's artworks may be a little out of my league. Most of my pictures are cheap Athena reproductions. I want to thank you for looking after Amelia's hens for me. I didn't know about them and haven't a clue how to look after them.'

‘Then you'll have to learn.' There were webs of laughter lines at the corners of his eyes. They were very nice eyes, amber-brown and full of good humour. He drained his glass of milk. ‘Would you like to walk out to the grazing pasture and the hen arks now?' he said, putting the empty glass in the sink.

‘I'd love to. Is the grazing pasture one of the fields on either side of the track? And is the orchard beyond the vegetable garden part of Ruthven as well?'

‘Yes, to the first question, and if, by the orchard, you mean Amelia's motley collection of old apple trees, yes again.' He hooked his thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans and she noticed there was no wedding ring on his square, work-hardened hands.

Cross with herself for having registered the fact, she said, ‘If it's so muddy outside, should I be wearing Wellingtons, too?'

‘Yes. And if you don't have a pair, don't worry. Amelia kept a pair under the bench, in the porch leading to the side door.'

As they walked out of the kitchen towards it, she said, ‘How did you know about me? Your note was addressed to me by name. Did Amelia's solicitor contact you?'

‘Yes,' he said, as she dragged a pair of battered Wellingtons into the light of day. ‘And Amelia asked me if I'd keep an eye on things until you arrived.'

Making a mental note that her aunt's relationship with him was one of real friendship and not just ordinary good-neighbourliness, Primmie squeezed her feet into Wellingtons that were a size too small.

‘And can you tell me about the logs for the fire? Does a supplier deliver them every month?'

‘There's a wood supplier in Calleloe,' he said, opening the porch door. ‘Though the logs now in the rick are logs I sawed myself at the end of last year.'

Moments later they were squelching across the still wet grass of the field he had referred to as the grazing pasture. In one corner of it were two long, triangular wooden and wired structures.

‘This is the best time of day to collect the eggs,' he said as they reached them. ‘And you need to do it every morning, because these hens are very good layers.' He squatted down in front of the first of the arks. ‘See this sliding door here? It allows you to reach into the nesting boxes. Let me show you.'

For ever afterwards, she was to remember that morning as being one of the most memorable of her life. For one thing, it was her very first morning at Ruthven, for another, it was the day she and Matt made friends and lastly, but by no means least, it was the day she lifted a warm, brown-speckled egg from out of a nest-box for the first time.

That afternoon she drove down into Calleloe. It was an enjoyable trip. She exchanged pleasantries with the postmistress, who cheerily gave her twenty-pence pieces for pound coins so that she would have enough of them for her telephone calls. Then, with arrangements for electricity and telephone reconnections all in place, she strolled down the main street towards the harbour until she came to the large double windows of the Hugo Arnott Art Gallery.

There was only one picture on display in the first window and it stopped her dead in her tracks. In a heavy ornate gold frame, set on an emerald-green silk-covered stand, was a large oil painting of four young women in a garden. The style was Impressionistic, full of light and pastel colour, the period – if the girls'ankle-length, broderie-anglaise-trimmed white dresses were anything to go by – was Edwardian. Three of the girls were seated on a wide garden swing. Two had their arms round each other's waists, the third, holding on to the rope of the swing, was resting her head against her hand.

The fourth girl was standing looking towards the three of them, a pale blue sash around her narrow waist, a wide-brimmed straw sun hat held low in one hand.

With her throat dry and tight, she saw that the painting was titled
Summer Memory
.

Foolishly, she felt tears prick the back of her eyelids. She, Kiki, Artemis and Geraldine could never have looked so sublimely languorous when enjoying the summer sunshine in the garden at Petts Wood, but it was the four of them nevertheless. The two embracing girls, heads close, one golden-haired, one titian-haired, were, for her, Artemis and Kiki. The girl resting against the rope of the swing, looking coolly and clearly out of the frame with steady dark eyes was, surely, Geraldine. And she, Primmie, was the girl a little apart from them – the girl who looked somehow younger than the other three – the girl with the blue sash and the sun hat.

The tears continued to prick and she blinked them away, suddenly conscious of the people passing to and fro behind her on the narrow pavement. It was a stunning picture and she wanted it more than she could remember wanting anything. It wasn't priced, and she could well imagine why.

Not going into the gallery to ask the price, knowing it would be way beyond her means, she turned away from the window and went, instead, into the general clothing store opposite and bought herself a pair of very sensible and inexpensive green Wellingtons.

All the way home, the picture haunted her. Had the young women, so at peace together in the sunlit garden, been real people, and, if so, what had happened to them? Had they been sundered apart as she, Kiki, Artemis and Geraldine had been sundered apart?

As she stowed away clothes and books – and as she discovered to her delight that the electricity had been reconnected – her thoughts refused to leave the past and when, just after three o'clock, the phone rang and she answered it to a male voice saying, ‘Just confirming your reconnection, Mrs Dove'she knew exactly what it was she was going to do next.

She was going to put one of her leaving presents to good use. It was a laptop computer given to her by Josh, who had bought it cheaply from a friend. With excitement coiling deep in her tummy she hoisted it from the bubble-wrapping it had travelled to Cornwall in and, with a mug of freshly made tea beside her, set about registering on the Friends Reunited website.