Charlie (12 page)

Ivor was outside talking to one of the boatyard men when Charlie started to cook. She got out the frying pan, put a lump of fat in it, then dumped in the sausages. It was a great deal harder to peel potatoes than it looked, and she was so engrossed in it that she didn’t notice the kitchen was getting smoky.

Ivor came rushing in, followed by Minnie barking loudly. ‘You’ll set the house on fire! You’ve got the gas on too high,’ he yelled, grabbing the pan off the cooker. ‘My God, they’re burnt to a crisp. Is there something the matter with your eyes and nose?’

‘I was doing the potatoes,’ she said indignantly.

Ivor dumped the sausages into the rubbish bin. Minnie put her nose in after them, but even she moved back in disgust when she saw the burnt offerings. ‘We can’t eat those. Go and get some more,’ Ivor bellowed at Charlie. ‘Be quick before they close.’

While she was gone, Ivor found she had only managed to peel two potatoes, and they looked like a small child’s first attempts, heavily gouged with stray pieces of peel all over them. In a flash he realized it was something she’d never done before, and that shocked him. His first reaction was to do them quickly himself, but after a moment’s reflection he saw that wouldn’t teach her anything.

When Charlie came back five minutes later, he was standing in the kitchen, hands on hips, looking fearsome. Minnie had retreated to her basket as if she sensed trouble. ‘Potatoes take longer to cook than sausages, so you peel those first and put them on to boil,’ he said curtly.

Charlie sullenly returned to the peeling, but she was aware Ivor was watching her closely. ‘What sort of a way is that to hold a potato peeler?’ he asked, coming up behind her and grabbing her hands. ‘This is the way you do it.’

She thought he would get tired of instructing her and take over, but he didn’t, he just stood over her, criticizing the eyes she’d left in, and her slowness. It took her nearly half an hour to peel them all.

‘Have you put salt in?’ he asked as she lit the gas under them. ‘Not that much!’ he yelled as she dug a spoon into the china pot he kept it in. ‘Only a pinch.’

Charlie wanted to cry. He kept shouting at her for not pricking the sausages, for not keeping her eye on the gas under the potatoes, for not turning the sausages, and for scalding herself when she tried to strain the potatoes.

‘You’ve never cooked anything before, have you?’ he said eventually, when she finally admitted defeat and said she didn’t know how to mash potatoes.

‘No, and I don’t want to,’ she said and burst into tears. ‘Mum or Mrs Brown always did it.’

Ivor smiled to himself. He rather admired the fact she’d had too much pride to tell him so in the beginning. He smeared some butter on her scalded hand, but forced himself not to be overly sympathetic. ‘Well, there’s no mum here. You like to eat, don’t you? So you have to learn to cook. It’s as simple as that. So I’m going to teach you.’

He didn’t let her off anything. She had to mash the potatoes, and he stood over her instructing her at each stage. Finally they sat down to eat, but by that time Charlie wasn’t hungry and all Ivor did was go on about how meat had to be cooked gently otherwise it burned on the outside while the inside remained raw.

‘Don’t be so mean to me,’ she burst out eventually. ‘It’s not my fault I don’t know.’

Ivor wanted to laugh. Scowling didn’t suit her, it made her look like a Pekinese.

‘Quite so. But it’s no good just bleating about it, you have to make up your mind to learn,’ he said evenly, reaching over and taking her plate. He cut up her leftovers for Minnie who wolfed them down appreciatively. ‘Cooking’s a skill even the most stupid person can master, and you aren’t stupid, just stubborn. And by the way, your washing-up is hopeless too. So we’ll put that right tonight, we don’t want Beryl sacking you.’

When he finally let her go back to the Victoria at half past seven, Charlie was livid with rage. He had humiliated her, made her burn herself and implied she was worthless. She hated him.

Beryl came into the kitchen later that evening and found Charlie crying as she washed glasses. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

Charlie blurted it all out. To her surprise Beryl laughed.

‘So the old dog’s teaching the new one tricks,’ she said. ‘Can’t say I approve of his brutal methods, but it is pretty shocking that a girl of sixteen doesn’t even know how to peel a spud.’

Charlie cried harder. She had expected Beryl to be on her side. ‘Now, now.’ Beryl put her arms round her comfortingly and drew her against her shoulder. ‘Ivor’s a good man really, just a bit crusty. But he’s right, you must learn these things, or how will you manage when you get a place of your own?’

‘I can’t go back there tomorrow,’ Charlie cried. ‘He thinks I’m stupid.’

‘He doesn’t think anything of the sort, you should have heard him in the bar last night, praising you to the skies. And you will go in there tomorrow, my love. You’ll march in there proudly with your head held high. Ivor will be sorry by now that he was so fierce. Let him teach you to do things, he’s a good cook, nearly as good as me, but I haven’t got the time to teach you. In a few weeks you’ll be laughing about this.’

‘I won’t,’ Charlie said stubbornly. She was embarrassed now that she’d allowed herself to be caught crying.

‘You will when you can cook a whole meal all by yourself,’ Beryl said, patting Charlie’s back. ‘Just you wait.’

Five weeks later, on a wet Thursday afternoon in August, Charlie got off the bus at Kingsbridge. Ivor had given her time off to visit her mother who had recently been transferred to a nursing home there. He said there wouldn’t be any customers because of the rain, and there wasn’t much point in both of them sitting idly watching it from his shack.

Charlie would have much preferred to spend a lazy afternoon chatting with him than with her mother, who was still being extremely difficult, and she’d said so, but Ivor gave her a pretend slap across the bottom and said, ‘Duty comes before pleasure.’

Beryl was right when she’d said that in a few weeks Charlie would laugh at her hapless first attempts at cooking; she did think it was funny now. But then she felt she was a different person now to the snooty, spoilt kid who’d actually expected her employer to cook her a meal every night. Who would have thought that in just five weeks she would have progressed from burnt sausages to making a chicken casserole from a recipe book without anyone standing over her?

She thought she had learned more useful things in a few weeks from Ivor than in her whole time at school. Every day there was something new, whether it was boiling up her white shorts and blouse in a bucket on his stove to get some stains out, sewing a button on, using Cardinal polish on the red tiles on his kitchen floor to make them gleam, or the correct amount of bleach to put down the lavatory to keep it hygienic. In the shop she’d learned the differences between fishing in the sea and fresh water, which bait had to be used depending on what the customer wanted to catch, and indeed how to handle customers and pick up hints from the ones who were experienced fishermen and sailors.

But it was more than new skills she’d learned from Ivor. In his often brusque manner he’d knocked the corners off her, made her aware of her arrogance and the need to look around her and take in how other people lived and learn from them too, because it was unlikely she was ever going to return to her once pampered life.

Although Charlie still yearned for the comfort of her old life, especially when she was tired in the evenings and still had to do two or three hours of washing glasses and clearing up in the pub before she could go to bed, mostly she loved being in Salcombe. If it hadn’t been for the anxiety about her mother, who was still deeply depressed and utterly convinced she would never walk again, and the fact that her father still hadn’t surfaced anywhere, she could have been ecstatically happy.

There was the colourful bustle of the harbour on hot days, the peace and tranquillity on wet ones, walks with Minnie and the joy of bringing order to the cluttered shop. She enjoyed talking to the many children who bought buckets and spades, and flirting with boys who came to buy bait. In the evenings at the pub as she collected glasses, she could moan about the strange habits of tourists with other locals, and late at night Beryl would give her a glass of cider with a dash of lemonade and they’d chat about everything from clothes to the latest news in the papers.

But as each day passed, she saw how much she owed to Ivor. He had so little money – what he made in summer had to last right through the winter – yet he shared everything he had with her, whether it was a catch of mackerel, a cake, or just his time. He made her laugh, he entertained her with stories of when he was in the navy, he listened when she needed to air her fears and anxieties about her parents and the future. His advice and teaching were always practical. But above all he made her feel safe and cared for.

Charlie put the hood up on her raincoat and hurried up Westville Hill towards Franklin House. Mr Wyatt had telephoned her a few days earlier at the Victoria to tell her the almoner at Dartmouth Hospital had managed to get Sylvia into this nursing home.

Wyatt felt it was a good move, easier for Charlie to visit, as it involved only one bus, and a calmer, more pleasant environment for her mother to regain her health. It wasn’t a private home, just a council-run one, but Mr Wyatt had said it was every bit as good.

The last time Charlie had spoken to the surgeon who operated on her mother’s knees, he’d said they were mending well and if only she would do the exercises the physiotherapist had recommended, he saw no reason why she shouldn’t become mobile again. But so far Sylvia wasn’t making any effort, not with the exercises, or trying to accept what had happened to her. She seemed to be almost enjoying her misery.

Charlie’s spirits lifted when she got to the gate of Franklin House. It looked like a big private house with well-kept gardens, overlooking Kingsbridge School. It was painted white and the front door was a cheerful red, which she thought might have cheered her mother too.

A middle-aged nurse answered the door. ‘I’ve come to visit my mother, Mrs Sylvia Weish,’ Charlie said.

‘Come in, dear. I’m Staff Nurse Dodds,’ the woman said with a cheerful smile. She was a big woman with cheeks like russet apples. ‘I’ll take you along to the day room. Your mum’s along there with some of the other patients. Would you like to hang your wet coat up out here? It will be quite safe.’

As Charlie took off her coat and hung it on a row of pegs, she looked around her. The home was as pleasant inside as it looked from without. No grim institutional cream and green paint, but attractive wallpaper and carpet on the floor. It even smelled nice, of flowers, fresh air and polish.

‘This is a lovely place,’ Charlie said. ‘I do hope Mum’s appreciating it.’

Just the slight clouding on the nurse’s face told Charlie this wasn’t so. ‘Don’t tell me she’s being a pain here too?’ Charlie blurted out. It had become increasingly embarrassing to visit Sylvia in Dartmouth Hospital; she had alienated herself from just about every member of the staff with her constant complaints and rudeness.

Staff Nurse Edith Dodds had been working at Franklin House for over ten years. Yet in all that time she hadn’t met any patient who came close to being as difficult as Sylvia Weish. Today was only her fourth day at the home, yet she had already upset just about every member of staff, and most of the other patients. She complained about the food, that her bed was too hard, that the nurses weren’t giving her strong enough pain relief. Another patient in her room snored, she had a crick in her neck from a draughty window, she even accused a nurse of stealing one of her nighties, when in fact one of the voluntary visitors had kindly taken it home and washed it for her.

Edith was aware that Mr Weish was the Chinese businessman who’d mysteriously disappeared, and therefore common sense told her the daughter would have some Chinese characteristics. Yet in her mind she’d pictured the girl as a younger version of Sylvia, and equally difficult.

To be faced with this radiant and polite young girl was quite a shock. She didn’t think she’d ever seen anyone quite as lovely, with her jet-black shiny hair, soft dark almond eyes and golden skin. She was wearing a navy and white mini-dress, and her long slender legs were tanned a dark brown. Edith could imagine what prompted Mr Weish to run away from his wife – she would try the patience of a saint – but she couldn’t imagine any father wanting to leave a daughter like this one.

‘I’m afraid she’s not settling down too well,’ Edith said with some reluctance. She didn’t want to burden such a young girl with more worries. ‘But I’m sure you’ll cheer her up.’

Charlie half smiled. ‘I’ve never managed to do that yet on a visit,’ she admitted, ‘but I can but try.’

Staff Nurse Dodds led Charlie down a wide corridor to a large room at the end of the building. It was almost like being in the garden, for there were large windows on all three sides of the room and the carpet was grass-green. Unlike in the hospital, most of the eighteen or so people in the room were under sixty, three or four probably only in their twenties, about a third male, the rest female. Some were recuperating from operations and illnesses and sat in armchairs and wore everyday clothes; a couple of them had a leg in plaster and sat with it out in front of them on a stool. Then there were three or four, including Sylvia, who were in nightclothes and sitting in wheelchairs. Everyone except Sylvia smiled at Charlie as she walked in. Sylvia pointedly turned her head away.

Since Charlie had taken her mother to task about her appearance in hospital, Sylvia had taken note. She allowed the nurses to wash her hair, she did her nails and her makeup every day. Yet she wasn’t the glamorous woman she had been. Her nightdresses might be exquisite dainty ones from an exclusive lingerie shop, her slippers rose velvet and her dressing-gown silk, but the misery inside her showed in her face. Daily, the lines around her mouth and eyes were getting deeper, there was a grey tinge to her skin that no amount of expensive cosmetics could conceal.