Brodmaw Bay (15 page)

James wondered again what the source of the Penmarrick fortune might have been. He said, ‘I’ve seen no modernist monstrosity.’

‘It was fire-damaged beyond repair and had to be demolished,’ Richard said, ‘about a year after its construction was completed.’

‘I presume with the offending architect inside?’

‘Sadly, no, he was up in London at the time, involved in some professional act of civic desecration.’

Ancestral portraits decorated the dining room walls. And there were the heads of deer with splendid spreads of antlers mounted on shield-shaped slabs of wood. James assumed those predatory subjects of the portraits on the walls had been responsible for turning these unfortunate beasts into trophies. After a chase across Bodmin Moor, perhaps, their shrill horns orchestrating the hunters’ bloodlust as they galloped after their prey through a Cornish mist.

Sandy Denny was singing ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’. It was her own composition, probably her sad and wistful masterpiece. Elizabeth was listening to the song seated on the other side of the table from where James sat, the light going now as the sun descended through the windows of the room looking out over the sea, her hair a russet halo in the last of it.

As if aware of his scrutiny she glanced up at him and smiled. ‘Do you like folk music, James?’ It was the first time she had addressed him by his name.

‘I do,’ he said truthfully. ‘I like the older stuff like this and June Tabor. I also like the newer singers such as Kate Rusby and Kathryn Tickell and Cara Dillon.’

‘All women, I can’t help noticing,’ Richard said.

In his breast pocket, James’s mobile, set on silent, began to vibrate. He looked at the number calling. It was Jack’s. ‘Please excuse me,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ the Penmarricks said in unison.

In the high vaulted vestibule beyond the dining room, the west-facing windows were decorated by stained glass. In the orange strength of the descending sun, mirrored against the polished wood of the walls, the effect was kaleidoscopic and spectacular. In his anxiety over his son, James barely noticed it.

‘Jack? What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ Jack said. He sniffed. ‘I love you, Dad. That’s all. I love you.’

‘What’s happened? Is it the injury? Christ, you’re not bleeding?’

‘No.’

Jack was crying. James was torn between relief that the patchy reception here had allowed the call to come through at all and worry at the substance of it.

‘Is your mum there?’

‘She’s downstairs.’

‘If something is wrong, Jack, speak to your mum. Please. If anything is wrong, just tell her.’

‘Nothing is wrong, Dad. I just want you to know that I love you.’ Something hitched in his throat. To his father, it sounded like grief.

‘I love you too, son. Promise me nothing is wrong?’

There was a silence. Then, ‘I promise.’

When James re-entered the Penmarricks’ dining room, coffee had been served and the Fairports had been replaced by Julie Fowlis. James recognised the song as one from her first album,
Mar a Tha Mo Chridhe
. The title in translation was
As My Heart Is
. Probably because the singer was from the Western Isles and sang in Gaelic, he was reminded of the standing stones on the plateau above them that he had gone to look at the previous day. Seriously concerned about his own son, he was reminded of the girl he had seen up there alone. She could not have been more than ten years old.

‘Do you like this album, James?’ The question came from Elizabeth Penmarrick. The ice seemed to have been broken between them by the unexpected warmth of a shared and fairly esoteric taste in music.

‘It reminds me that I visited your circle of standing stones yesterday. I saw a little girl up there, in school uniform in school time, quite alone.’

Richard had just poured coffee for James. He paused for a beat with the pot still poised in his hands. ‘Are you sure? We only have two schools in Brodmaw and both are vigilantly supervised. How old would you say this girl was?’

‘I’d guess between eight and ten.’

‘Not possible,’ Elizabeth said emphatically, ‘not alone. All the children know their way around the village environs. This is a small locality. But she would not have been permitted to be there alone.’

‘I didn’t imagine her,’ James said. ‘She was wearing a grey pleated pinafore and straw hat. It had a hatband the same purple as the short jacket and ankle-length socks she had on.’

Elizabeth stood with a backwards shriek of chair legs on waxed parquet. She ran more than walked towards the door to the vestibule. ‘I need some air,’ she said into her own wake.

‘You’ve just described an eight-year-old girl wearing the uniform of St Anselm’s Primary School,’ Richard said, sipping coffee.

‘Well,’ James said, ‘there you go.’

Richard looked at him coolly over the rim of his cup. ‘St Anselm’s closed its doors for the last time in
1961
,’ he said.

Olivia Greer could hear Jack crying in his bedroom through the wall that divided it from hers. Her bedside clock told her that it was shortly after ten. That was very late, to her, with the next day a school day. She was supposed to be asleep by eight thirty except on Friday and Saturday nights when she went to bed at nine and on holiday when sometimes she stayed up outrageously late. That was her mum’s description. ‘You shouldn’t be up, Livs,’ her mum would say, looking at her watch in a foreign restaurant or on a foreign street. ‘It’s outrageously late.’

She would have liked to go and comfort Jack in the way that he always comforted her when she fell over and grazed a knee or banged her elbow or, most recently, when she had been upset by a bad dream. She loved her brother and the sound of his sobs was itself upsetting. It was shocking, too. Jack was brave and did not often cry. She could not remember the last time she had heard him do so. She wanted very much to go and climb into his bed and cuddle him and say the kind things that would make him feel better. But she did not dare.

She did not dare move or even properly open her eyes. Her eyes were not open. Neither, though, were they quite shut. They were open only to the sly point she opened them to when she cheated at hide and seek and secretly watched the person trying to find a hiding place through blurry lashes.

She was secretly watching now. She was secretly watching the girl standing in shadow to the left of her bedroom door, watching her. The girl was very still and pale and dressed in a school uniform from a school Olivia did not think was local to where she lived. She recognised all of those, knew by sight their colours and crests. This girl’s uniform was not one of them. In the murk of her room, through the curtain of her lashes, she was pretty sure of that.

Olivia was not exactly frightened. The girl by the door did not look fierce or unfriendly. She did not look at all like someone intent on harming her. There was the question, though, of who she was. There was the question too of how she had got there.

Olivia had heard of having imaginary friends. She had never had an imaginary friend of her own. Perhaps that was what the girl watching her from beside the door was. But she thought it best to be cautious and pretend to be asleep. She did not really see how a friend could be termed imaginary if you could see them well enough to describe them. It kind of did away with the need for an imagination.

Had she imagined a friend, she thought she would have imagined someone really exotic and strange. She would have dreamed up a friend who dressed like Pocahontas or wore a suit of armour or had wings like an angel. At the very least, she would have Rapunzel-length hair. This girl just had a straw hat with a purple band. The only unusual thing about her was that her feet, in their leather shoes, did not seem quite to rest on the floor.

She thought that maybe she was just dreaming the girl. It was best to think that, quite comforting, really. The problem with it was Jack’s sobs coming through the wall. Olivia sometimes had quite convincing dreams and the bad dreams were the most convincing of all. But the sobbing from Jack’s room was a detail she could neither ignore nor consign to a dream. It was a detail too far. She knew in her heavy heart that her brother’s sorrow was real.

Eventually, her eyes really did close. The tiny muscles around them grew tired from squinting and she relaxed them and the rest of her relaxed too and she fell asleep. When something woke her, something that felt vaguely like a breath of breeze, the figure by the door had gone and she was alone in the room. She was glad. She felt relieved. And she was glad that the sorrowful noise from her brother’s room had stopped and the house was silent. She thought that it must by then be what grown-ups called the small hours. The world seemed very still. She descended into peaceful slumber for the remainder of the night.

Chapter Five

Jack did not feel like making his usual home alone joke the morning after calling his dad in Cornwall. He was tired, for one thing, and too irritable as a consequence to want to joke around. Plus the joke had been going on for a year, ever since his parents had first started to trust him in the house on his own for short periods. It was getting stale. There was the fact that his mum was only going to be the fifteen or twenty minutes it took to ferry Olivia to school. It was not a period of absence worth remarking on, was it? And finally there was the feeling that joking around with his mum was not something he really had the heart for. He was far too angry with her to bother.

She paused at the kitchen door with Olivia, waiting for him to say it as he stirred his cornflakes and milk into mush. But he did not say it. Instead he looked at his mum trying to see her not as his mum but as Robert O’Brien might. She was dressed in jeans and a white shirt and a short black jacket made of thin leather that was very soft to the touch. She was slim, quite tall and smelled of Jo Malone perfume. She had lovely hair and sparkling eyes and a very nice smile if she was pleased with you.

She jangled her car keys, impatient for the joke that would not come. Jack thought that his mum was glamorous. That was the word. She was pretty, but there was more to her than prettiness. She had this confident, successful thing going on and she was stylish too. She was glamorous, his mum, there was no doubt about it. And he was disgusted with her.

Actually, what he felt was worse than disgust. The word to describe what he felt was one he understood the meaning of but had never had a context for in his own life, not even when that gang had beaten and robbed him on that bus; not even when he had seen his own face in the mirror for the first time after the damage the tyre iron had done to it. What Jack felt, stirring the breakfast mush in his bowl, was the feeling of dismay.

‘Do yourself a favour,’ his mum said, ‘say goodbye to Mr Grumpy.’ He did not respond. She reached for an apricot from the fruit bowl on the surface next to her and made as though to throw it at him. He did not react. He was not willing to be playful. ‘Suit yourself,’ she said. She dropped the apricot back into the bowl and turned with Olivia and left.

After she had gone he went to his room and switched on his computer and googled Robert O’Brien. He was a pretty famous guy. He was pictured quite a lot astride the motorcycle he had parked outside their house the previous day. It seemed to be sort of his trademark. There were some pictures of him windsurfing with sunglasses on and his long hair gathered in a ponytail. He was in good shape, athletically built. He looked very fit and also very vain.

He did not much look like a writer. But then what did writers look like? They did not look much like William Shakespeare or Charles Dickens any more. Robert O’Brien wrote mostly children’s stories. Chris Ryan wrote stories for kids; Jack had read a couple of them, and he didn’t look like a writer at all. He looked like a Special Forces soldier who had killed people, which is what he was and exactly what he had done.

Appearances were deceptive. Jack’s friends described his dad as a computer geek. On paper that was what he was, too. He was a software designer. But Jack could not imagine anyone less geeky than his dad. His dad was a brilliant driver. He could fix anything from a car engine to a hi-fi amplifier. He could swim two lengths of an Olympic pool holding his breath underwater. After a row with the builders, he had fitted their kitchen himself, cutting and smoothing and polishing the granite with power tools he’d got from a hire shop. He had no interest at all in sport. But that did not make his dad a geek.

Jack groaned and switched off his computer. He heard the front door open and then close behind his returning mum. What was she playing at, going to bed with a tosser with a ponytail? On paper, Robert O’Brien was an impressive sort of bloke. He was good-looking and successful. But he had sounded like a creep, wheedling yesterday at the door. And his mum was married and was deceiving his dad and acting like her own children didn’t matter to her. They were supposed to be going off to enjoy a new life together but they weren’t even really together as a family, were they? Was O’Brien going to tag along? Would he turf up on his Harley in his sunglasses and his ponytail? They were going to live at the seaside. He’d enjoy the windsurfing, wouldn’t he?