A Rather Remarkable Homecoming (6 page)

“Thanks,” I said, and we headed for the elevator.

Our room was on the next level up, and the polished but irregular floor boards creaked beneath our tread as we went down the corridor. Jeremy had booked the biggest suite, and we entered a small but cheery sitting room where we deposited our bags.

“Got a fireplace in the bedroom,” Jeremy reported, for he was in there ahead of me, and was already wandering around in search of a corkscrew for the bottle of wine he’d brought with us.

“Mind if I shower first?” I asked.

“Go ahead,” he said. “They’ve got nice bathrobes in there. But no corkscrews anywhere!”

“Open it with your teeth if you have to,” I joked, as I stepped into the big old-fashioned tub with the shower overhead. I was so grateful for the reviving hot shower, even if the plumbing did groan alarmingly and the pressure rose and fell without warning.

By the time I emerged, pink and moist in a fluffy bathrobe, Jeremy was busy in the sitting room, arranging the table with the help of the girl from downstairs, who’d brought up the supper tray herself. She reached into her pocket for the coveted corkscrew, and handed it over to Jeremy with another admiring smile.

As soon as she left, Jeremy poured out the wine and we clinked and took a sip before he darted into the shower. When he reappeared in his bathrobe, we collapsed gratefully on the sofa to explore the tray of food.

“Smoked salmon, some ham, assorted cheeses and pickles, and a few odd greens and tomato,” Jeremy reported. It was all serviceable enough, and I was so weary that I was just glad not to be in motion anymore. My head was still whirring.

“Let’s sleep till noon,” Jeremy advised.

“We have an appointment with Harriet to see Grandma’s house tomorrow,” I reminded him. “Harriet’s a busy lady, you know.”

Jeremy was still slumped against the back of the sofa and said nothing. “You’re falling asleep sitting up!” I exclaimed solicitously. “Go on to bed. I’ll clear up.”

He was too weary to do anything but trot off obediently. A second later, I heard a plaintive, exhausted snore. I couldn’t help but smile in sympathy.

“My hero,” I said softly, turning out the light.

I
woke to the sound of gulls cawing in the distance above the harbor, and for awhile I just lay there, absorbing the feeling of the sea and the cliffs all around me. Then came the usual bustling sounds when innkeepers politely but deliberately wake you from your slumber: the rapid tread of the maids as they set about their work with clattering carts, and the other guests hurrying to get to breakfast, showering and rushing out of their rooms and slamming doors.

I turned around in the bed and stared at Jeremy hopefully. His eyes were slammed shut.

“Poor guy,” I murmured aloud. “He’s plumb worn out from all that tough driving he did to get us here. He’s entitled to sleep late, I suppose.”

A good wife would just let him snooze and have his breakfast later . . . wouldn’t she?

But I couldn’t help shamelessly bouncing onto the bed beside him, hoping he’d feel my eager, impatient presence. He did, and opened only one eye.

“You awake?” I said pleasantly in a daytime voice.

He shut the solo eye. “No,” he sighed.

“Aw, c’mon,” I said encouragingly. “It’s another rare and wonderful sunny day outside. Everybody else is up and at ’em already. Breakfast is buffet only. Let’s not be last on line.”

Jeremy rolled over and, still without opening his eyes, said, “What time is it?”

“Nine fifteen,” I said severely. “We’re supposed to meet Harriet at noon. That doesn’t give us much time for sightseeing.”

“S’all right. Seen it all before anyway,” Jeremy mumbled.

“Well,
I
haven’t,” I said. “
Some
of us didn’t spend every privileged summer of our lives out here. Some of us don’t even know what a Cornish pasty tastes like. Some of us want to see the fine bone china they make out here. And the fishing boats hauling in their fresh catch. And the cheddar cheese that is actually made in a real place called Cheddar. And the local ale from pubs that still brew it on the premises—”

“All right, all right,” Jeremy groaned, sitting up now with both sleepy dark blue eyes wide open, and his dark brown hair appealingly rumpled.

But he didn’t exactly jump out of bed. So now I nudged him for real.

“Get
up
,” I said. “They’ll stop serving breakfast soon.”

Jeremy sighed heavily, then rolled out of bed.

 

We took our coffee in the downstairs parlor, which was nearly empty, then we hurried out to the parking lot, which was fairly deserted. Jeremy pointed out that the smaller Victorian house next to our hotel had been recently turned into a restaurant called
Seaside with Toby Taylor
, a celebrity chef we’d seen doing frequent guest appearances on television.

As we drove down the main street of Port St. Francis, I could see more of the town, now that it was daylight and the sun was shining brightly, burning off the white morning mist that had drifted in from the sea. Directly across the street from our hotel, the old theatre with its ornate trim, large heavy-timbered front doors and faded sign was actually quite beautiful. Nearby was a dusty-red storefront that said
Donnegan’s Wines and Spirits
; and a tiny pizza place, and a doughnut shop where the doughnuts were made on the premises with a copper machine displayed in the storefront window, so that fresh doughnuts came sliding down the copper chute right in front of you.

Farther along was a tiny yellow building called
Susie’s Ice Cream Parlor
, which was not opened yet. There was a shop full of vintage items called
The Frantic Antique
, which seemed to offer everything from prized period furniture and sharks’ teeth to hand-painted glass kitchen jars decorated by Cornish painters from the 1920s. Nearby there was a village green with a bandstand and climbing roses.

Sprouting off from the main street were those delightfully funny, crooked lanes that twined up into the hills dotted with tiny whitewashed houses, which had an absurd, perky attitude, as if they had been built to be the homes and workshops of elves, instead of fishermen, shopkeepers and local artisans. As we drove by, I peered up these little side streets and saw signs advertising a bakery, a grocer, a pottery studio and some funky little dress shops.

Once we passed the main street’s wall of buildings, we could see the open expanse of sky again, and I realized that the entire town overlooked a modest harbor crammed with small fishing boats. From here we finally had a breathtaking view of the great and mighty sea, tumbling upon itself as it rolled from the horizon line and came crashing against the shore.

Already the fishermen were hauling in crab and lobster and other marvellous fish. On both sides of the harbor were cute little pebbly-and-sandy beaches flanked by astounding black jagged rock formations that had been carved by the last ice age a gazillion years ago B.C. Farther out to sea, a few isolated big black boulders sticking up out of the waves looked like silent, watchful mythological sea-giants who’d surfaced to stare back at the new invaders.

“I forgot how rugged it is out here!” I exclaimed, twisting around in my seat to take pictures of it all. Gazing at the far-off headlands that jutted out into the misty sea, I could picture ancient tribes of hunters and gatherers chasing rhinos and mammoths and other bizarre animals, leaving behind strange stone markers and arrowheads and flinty tools and animal bones.

“It’s funny,” I reflected aloud, “but somehow in Cornwall the prehistoric past seems more in the here-and-now than our own present-day does. Why is that?”

“Because out here, you can’t really control Nature,” Jeremy announced gleefully, accelerating his Dragonetta and veering noisily down the kind of open country road that such sports cars were made for.

“Did you know,” I said, “that it’s basically all because of Napoleon that these fishing villages became tourist hot-spots?”

“Why? Did Napoleon hang out here in the summer?” Jeremy asked skeptically.

“Nope. But because of his wars, the fancy English ladies couldn’t go to France or Italy for their vacations. So they came to the English seaside instead,” I said.

“Okay, Joséphine. We don’t have much time. What do you want to see first?” Jeremy asked as we passed signs for the hospital and police station, which were just outside of town.

“There’s a maritime museum that’s got real plunder from genuine shipwrecks,” I said enthusiastically, scanning my guidebook. “Apparently the villagers used to lie in wait for ships that were foundering at sea, hoping the boats would crash against the rocks, so the locals could pounce on the cargo and steal it the minute it washed ashore!”

“Remind me not to turn my back on the villagers,” Jeremy joked.

At that moment my mobile phone rang.

“Harriet here,” the voice chirped. “Did you find your way into town okay last night?”

I told her that her directions were excellent, and she went on to say, “I know we’re not due to meet until noon, but I’ve just found out that the developers’ men plan to inspect the property then,” she said, and now I sensed something urgent underneath her usual cheery manner.

“I wanted you and Jeremy to have a chance to look things over privately,” she added in a confidential tone, “because some of your grandmother’s things are still here, and you might want to come earlier to view them without these guys underfoot.”

I relayed this to Jeremy, who merely swung the car away from the tourist area, and wheeled it in the direction of Grandmother Beryl’s house.

“We’re coming right now,” I told Harriet, and hastily hung up.

Soon we were driving along a quieter country lane that wove through pastures and farms on the left side, and coastal property on the right. Here the roadside shrubs and hedges were juicier and prettier and rose very high—with hollyhocks and honeysuckle and other colorful flowering species I couldn’t identify. These, I knew, had been planted by the wealthy Victorians and Edwardians at the turn of the century, who adored gardens filled with exotic plants from Asia and other glamorous corners of the empire. Their proud houses still stood overlooking sequestered bays and sandy coves.

“This is starting to look familiar to me,” Jeremy announced.

“Me, too,” I said excitedly, consulting my map again. The left fork of the road veered sharply away, following acres of rolling hills, meadows and farmland.

But Jeremy slowed the car down and said, “Don’t tell me. It’s a right turn . . . right?”

The right fork of the road ended quickly here, at a private driveway that we both recognized.

“This is it!” I announced. “Say hello to Grandmother Beryl’s house.”

T
he first bad sign was the driveway. There must have been stormy weather recently, because the front yard was littered with fallen branches from old trees, and the drive itself was choked with so many overgrown roots that Jeremy had to stop the car midway and leave it there.

We got out on foot, but neither my eyes nor my feet could actually find Grandpa Nigel’s fine pebbled driveway, which I’d once pitter-pattered over so delightedly on a bicycle when I visited long ago. It must be buried under there somewhere, but it was completely caked with hardened mud, rocks, twigs, wandering roots and piles of rotting leaves.

It only got worse as we drew closer to the house. The beautiful roses and rhododendrons that had once neatly and fastidiously bordered both sides of the drive, had by now gone completely wild, becoming a mass of tangled, angry-looking gnarled shrubs, which, when stirred by the wind, seemed to be shaking their blowsy, unkempt heads at us like the three witches of
Macbeth
.

“Good God,” Jeremy said in a voice low with fascinated horror. “Look, there’s the house.”

I stared dead ahead. “Oh, no,” I answered, shocked. “It can’t be.”

Jeremy took my arm so I wouldn’t stumble, and, very carefully, we made our way up the cracked and broken front path. My horrified gaze focused on the roof—for it was sagging right in the middle, as if it had buckled a bit from backed-up rainwater, and now was collecting acorns and leaves in there as well. Elsewhere, the roof had several missing and broken shingles, like an old man grinning at us with a mouthful of cracked teeth.

I stared at the peeling paint all around the doors and the windows, whose panes were dark and dusty, as if the house itself had closed its eyelids in despair. Moss was creeping up like a green tide against the shady side of the house, and on the sunny side there was a thick rope of ivy twining like a boa constrictor around the chimney. Everywhere else were tendrils of vines resembling Jack’s beanstalk gone amuck, threatening to pull down the remaining shingles. Squirrels scampered back and forth across the roof with audacious impunity.

I wish I could tell you that we’d got the wrong place. But the worst of it was that, underneath all this horror, I could vaguely make out the house of my memory, with its elegant cream-colored stone exterior, and bay windows on either side of the white front door, which had a window at its top that resembled a king’s crown.

“Is it me?” I asked in a hushed voice. “Do I just remember it wrong? Did I paint this place into something better than it was?”

“No. It
was
beautiful once,” Jeremy said, “but now it’s as if it’s got a veil over its face.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“You know about antiques and stuff,” Jeremy said. “Is it too far gone?”

I pulled myself together and made a more professional assessment of its condition, based on what I’d learned from my historical work on the sets of period films and TV costume dramas. As a kid, of course, I hadn’t known much about history or architecture, so I did not realize that the house was such a pastiche of architectural styles.