The Girl on the Cliff
Read The Girl on the Cliff Online
Authors: Lucinda Riley
The Girl on the Cliff
PENGUIN BOOKS
Chapter 1: Dunworley Bay, West Cork, Ireland
Chapter 9: West Cork, Ireland, August 1914
Chapter 23: Dunworley, West Cork, Ireland
Chapter 30: Dunworley, West Cork, Ireland, 1970
Chapter 44: London, One Year Later
PENGUIN BOOKS
Lucinda Riley was born in Ireland. She lives in Norfolk with her husband and four children. Her last novel,
Hothouse Flower
, was selected to be part of the Richard and Judy Book Club and has since become an international bestseller.
For Stephen
‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’
F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby
I am I.
And I will tell you a story.
The words above are the most difficult for any writer, so I’m told.
Put another way: how one begins. I have plagiarised my younger brother’s first attempt at storytelling. His opening line has always stuck with me for its simplicity.
So, I have begun.
I must warn you that I’m not a professional at this. In fact, I can’t remember when I last put pen to paper. I’ve always spoken with my body, you see. As I can no longer do that, I’ve decided to talk with my mind.
I’m not writing this with any intention of presenting it for publication. I’m afraid it’s more selfish than that. I am at the stage of my life everyone dreads – that of filling my days with the past, because there is little future left.
It is something to do.
And I think that my story – the story of me and my family, which began almost a hundred years before I was born – is an interesting one.
I know everyone thinks that about their story too. And it’s true. Every human being has a fascinating existence, with a big cast of good and evil characters in each.
And almost always, somewhere along the way, magic.
I am named after a princess in a famous fairy tale. Perhaps that’s the reason I’ve always believed in magic. And as I’ve grown older, I’ve realised that a fairy tale is an allegory for the great dance of life we all undertake from the moment we are born.
And there is no escape until the day we die.
So, Dear Reader – I can speak to you as such because I must presume that my story has found an audience if you are one – let me tell you mine.
As many of the characters died long before I was born, I will do my best to use my imagination to bring them back to life.
And as I sit here mulling over the story I will tell you, which was handed down to me by two generations, there is one overriding theme. It is, of course, love, and the choices we all make because of it.
Many of you will immediately think I refer to love between a man and a woman, and yes, there is plenty of that. But there are other precious forms which are equally powerful; that of a parent’s love for a child, for example. There is also the obsessive, destructive kind, which wreaks havoc.
The other theme in this story is the vast amount of tea people seem to drink – but I digress. Forgive me, it is what people who feel old do. So I shall get on with it.
I will guide you through and interrupt when I feel it is necessary to explain something in further detail, for the story is complex.
I think I will begin, to complicate things further, somewhere towards the end of my tale, when I was a motherless child of eight years old. On a clifftop overlooking Dunworley Bay, my favourite place in the world.
Once upon a time …
Dunworley Bay, West Cork, Ireland
The small figure was standing perilously close to the edge of the cliff. Her luxuriant, long red hair had been caught by the strong breeze and was flying out behind her. A thin white cotton dress reached to her ankles and exposed her small bare feet. Her arms were held taut, palms facing out towards the foaming mass of grey sea beneath her, her pale face looking upwards, as if she were offering herself as a sacrifice to the elements.
Grania Ryan stood watching her, hypnotised by the wraith-like vision. Her senses were too jumbled to tell her whether what she was seeing before her was real or imagined. She closed her eyes for a split second then reopened them and saw that the figure was still there. With the appropriate messages sent to her brain, she took a couple of tentative steps forward.
As she drew nearer, Grania realised the figure was no more than a child; that the white cotton she was wearing was a nighdress. Grania could see the black storm clouds hovering out over the sea and the first salt-water droplets of impending rain stung her cheeks. The frailty of the small human against the wildness of her surroundings made her steps towards the child more urgent in pace.
The wind was whipping round her ears now and had started to voice its rage. Grania stopped ten yards from the girl, who was still unmoving. She saw the tiny blue toes holding her stoically to the rock, as the rising wind whipped and swayed her thin body like a willow sapling. She moved closer to the girl, stopping just behind her, uncertain of what to do next. Grania’s instinct was to run forward and grab her, but if the girl was startled and turned round, one missed footfall could result in unthinkable tragedy, taking the child to certain death on the foam-covered rocks a hundred feet below.
Grania stood, panic gripping her as she desperately tried to think of the best way to remove her from danger. But before she could reach a decision, the girl slowly turned round and stared at her with unseeing eyes.
Instinctively Grania held out her arms. ‘I won’t hurt you, I promise. Walk towards me and you’ll be safe.’
Still the girl stared at her, not moving from her spot on the edge of the cliff.
‘I can take you home if you tell me where you live. You’ll catch your death out here. Please, let me help you,’ Grania begged.
She took another step towards the child, and then, as if the girl had woken up from a dream, a look of fear crossed her face. Instantly, she turned to her right and began to run away from Grania along the cliff’s edge, disappearing from view.
‘I was just about to be sending out the search party for you. That storm’s blowing up well and good, so it is.’
‘Mam, I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve lived in
Manhattan for the past ten of those,’ replied Grania drily as she entered the kitchen and hung her wet jacket over the Rayburn. ‘You don’t have to mind me. I’m a big girl now, remember?’ She smiled as she walked towards her mother, who was setting the table for supper, and kissed her on the cheek. ‘
Really
.’
‘That’s as maybe, but I’ve known stronger men by far blown off the cliff in a gale like this.’ Kathleen Ryan indicated the wildness of the wind outside the kitchen window, which was causing the flowerless wisteria bush to tap its twiggy brown deadness monotonously against the pane. ‘I’ve just made a brew.’ Kathleen wiped her hands on her apron and walked towards the Rayburn. ‘Would you be wanting a cup?’
‘That would be grand, Mam. Why don’t you sit down and take the weight off your feet for a few minutes, and I’ll pour it for both of us?’ Grania steered her mother to a kitchen chair, pulled it back from the table and sat her gently on to it.
‘Only five minutes, mind, the boys will be back at six wanting their tea.’
As Grania poured the strong liquid into two cups, she raised a silent eyebrow at her mother’s domestic dedication to her husband and her son. Not that anything had changed in the past ten years since she’d been away – Kathleen had always pandered to her men, putting their needs and desires first. But the contrast of her mother’s life to her own, where emancipation and equality of the sexes was standard, made Grania feel uncomfortable.
And yet … for all her own freedom from what many
modern women would consider outdated male tyranny, who was currently the most content out of mother and daughter? Grania sighed sadly as she added milk to her mother’s tea. She knew the answer to that.
‘There you go, Mam. Would you like a biscuit?’ Grania put the tin in front of Kathleen and opened it. As usual, it was full to the brim with custard creams, bourbons and shortbread rounds. Another relic of childhood, and one that would be looked on with the same horror as a small nuclear device by her figure-conscious New York contemporaries.
Kathleen took two and said, ‘Go on, have one yourself to keep me company. To be sure, you don’t eat enough to keep a mouse alive.’
Grania nibbled dutifully at a biscuit, thinking how, ever since she’d arrived home ten days ago, she’d felt stuffed to bursting with her mother’s copious home cooking. Yet Grania would say that she had the healthiest appetite out of most of the women she knew in New York.
And
she actually used her oven as it was designed for, not as a convenient place to store plates.
‘The walk cleared your head a little, now did it?’ ventured Kathleen, making her way through her third biscuit. ‘Whenever I have a problem in my mind to be sorted, I’ll be off walking and come back knowing the answer.’
‘Actually …’ Grania took a sip of tea, ‘I saw something strange, Mam, when I was out. A little girl, maybe eight or nine, standing in her nightie right up on the cliff’s edge. She had beautiful long, curly red hair … it was as if she was sleepwalking, because she turned to look at me when
I walked towards her and her eyes were –’ she searched for the right description – ‘blank. Like she wasn’t seeing me. Then she seemed to wake up and scampered off like a startled rabbit up the cliff path. Do you know who she might have been?’
Grania watched the colour drain from Kathleen’s face. ‘Are you OK, Mam?’
Kathleen visibly shook herself. She stared at her daughter. ‘You say you saw her just a few minutes ago on your walk?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mary, Mother of God.’ Kathleen crossed herself. ‘They’re back.’
‘Who’s “back”, Mam?’ asked Grania, concerned by how shaken her mother seemed to be.
‘Why have they returned?’ Kathleen stared off through the window and into the night. ‘Why would they be wanting to? I thought … I thought it was finally over, that they’d be gone for good.’ Kathleen grabbed Grania’s hand. ‘Are you sure ’twas a little girl you saw, not a grown woman?’
‘Positive, Mam. As I said, she was aged about eight or nine. I was concerned for her; she had nothing on her feet and looked frozen. To be honest, I wondered whether I was seeing a ghost.’
‘You were of a fashion, Grania, to be sure you were,’ Kathleen muttered. ‘They can only have arrived back in the past few days. I was coming over the hill last Friday and I passed right by the house. It was gone ten in the evening and there were no lights shining from the windows. The old place was shut up.’
‘Where would this be?’
‘Dunworley House.’
‘The big deserted one that stands right on the top of the cliff up past us?’ asked Grania. ‘That’s been empty for years, hasn’t it?’
‘It was empty for your childhood, yes, but –’ Kathleen sighed – ‘they came back after you’d moved to New York. And then, when the … accident happened, left. Nobody thought we’d be seeing them around these parts again. And we were glad of it,’ she underlined. ‘There’s a history there, between them and us, stretching back a long way. Now,’ Kathleen slapped the table and made to stand up, ‘what’s past is past, and I’d be advising you to stay away from them. They bring nothing but trouble to this family, so they do.’
Grania watched her mother as she walked over to the Rayburn, her face set hard as she lifted the heavy iron pot containing the evening meal out of one of the ovens. ‘Surely if that child I saw has a mother, she would want to know about the danger her daughter was in today?’ she probed.