Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (37 page)

‘Only in a good way, I hope.’

‘It’s not as if anyone’s going to try to drag her back to my – our – parents. But I’ll have to tell them, obviously. Apart from everything else, they’d love to know they’ve got grandsons. That’s how they’ll want to think of your boys. Do you think Rose will let them?’

‘She’ll come round, I’m sure, now that we’ve got this far.’ Michael was turning abruptly into a gateway; the tyres crunched gravel. ‘Here we are. Trelissick Lodge.’

They were in the driveway of a half-tiled Victorian house set among pines. Michael turned off the engine, and said, ‘I’ll come in with you, say hello to Mary. It’s been quite a day for you, hasn’t it, one way and another?’

‘You could say that. Thank you for all you’ve done.’

‘It’s a huge relief, to tell you the truth. I can’t tell you how much. I’m so glad you got in touch.’

He sat silent for a moment, Anna beginning to sense how much his devotion to Rose had cost him – as if Rose, typically, had handed over her burden of guilt for him to carry. If, that was, she had ever felt guilt.

‘Does she ever—?’ Anna began, but Michael was out of the car now, going to the door. Mary, a woman in her fifties, answered his ringing. After arranging to collect her after breakfast tomorrow, Michael gave Anna a kiss and a hug, with far more warmth than Rose had so far shown.

Showing the way to a large and rather fussily furnished room, Mary was inclined to chat, but Anna wanted to be alone now, to assimilate all that had happened and to think about the big new questions that buzzed around her head. She dumped her bag on a chair and opened the window to let in cold air. At once she was struck by the utter quietness and darkness outside. She was used to that at Rowan Lodge, but this felt different, with the sea less than a mile away; there was a faint saltiness on her lips, on her skin. She was looking, she thought, downhill towards the cove, but could make out only garden trees, dimly lit by solar lamps on the drive. She thought of Rose, moving around the cottage, looking through an open door to check that Euan was peacefully asleep, then getting into bed with Michael. Would they talk quietly together; would Rose be open with him now, and if so, would she express fear, or disappointment, or panic?

And where was Zanna now, Rosanna? This other half-sister, conjured from nowhere, who had walked into Rose’s life with such dramatic results? Shivering now, Anna closed the window and drew the curtains. She remembered what her father had told her: that her mother had given the name
Rosanna
when someone asked about her children. Anna had thought at the time that the name Rosanna was a muddled conflation of her name with Rose’s. But now …

Her mother had had another baby. Anna struggled to believe it. And if it were true, her father knew nothing of it; she felt certain of that.

How could anyone keep such a secret? What had it done to her mother, concealing such a huge thing for most of her adult life? And had she gone on meeting Zanna, quite unsuspected, for the twenty years of Rose’s absence? Had she known of Zanna’s unannounced visit that day, and kept it from the police, from Dad, from everyone? Secrets had bred secrets, spreading like a virus. And that made it unfair, surely, to blame Rose, who had been caught up like Anna in a suffocating mesh, but had found her own way of breaking free.

Earlier, at Cove Cottage, they had eaten their meal in a book-lined room between kitchen and sitting room, the four of them, knees almost touching under the small table, passing salad and granary bread to accompany the spiced chicken dish prepared by Rose. Only now did Rose ask Anna some of the things Michael had already asked on the train: what did she do? Was she married?

‘I live with my partner, Martin,’ Anna found herself saying; perhaps to have something to show Rose, an indication that she too was loved and wanted.

Had
been.

‘Oh, and how did you meet him? What does he do?’ Rose asked.

When Anna explained that Martin was a financial adviser, she saw Rose dismiss him in an instant. Not interesting enough for her consideration.

Anna thought: I’ve always put Rose first. I’ve let my idea of Rose shape my life, my idea of what I want.

‘If you’d like to phone Martin, Anna, please do,’ Michael told her. ‘You won’t get a signal on your mobile.’

Anna thanked him, but said that there was no need. Now, though, lying in bed with the light on, her mind was too active for sleep. Wondering what Martin might be doing, she pictured him watching TV alone, a late film perhaps, or something he’d recorded; he was rarely in bed before midnight at weekends. What would he be thinking?

She’d have to stop this. It was no longer any business of hers, what he did and didn’t do.

Tears sprang to her eyes now, tears of weariness and a sense of both the shock and the anti-climax of this strange day that had carried her from place to place and now left her alone and flat. The gap between expectation and reality was too wide to be filled. Always, over the years, she had had a sense of being owed something big enough to compensate for the emotion she’d invested in Rose, and the need to find her, or at least find out what had happened to her – to have something to fill that void. She had imagined that her reward for faith and persistence would be handed to her all at once, like a lottery winner’s cheque. Now the gap had stretched too wide to be filled.

Anna wept quietly for the loss of Rose, and of herself. She wept for the girl who had spent half her life in waiting.

In the morning Anna saw the cove properly in daylight, saw the curve of granite cliffs that enclosed it in a horseshoe shape, the coastal path rising on either side; she saw distant light on the sea, rays slanting between clouds. The sea towards the horizon dazzled and held the eye with its shifting and glancing colours. Seen from above, the cove was a tricky exercise in perspective drawing, with its odd angles of roofs and chimneys and steps cutting down steeply between houses, the lane winding round to sweep to a halt by the little quay.

She wanted to see Rose’s paintings; to interpret and compare, finding herself lacking, no doubt, in comparison, glad of the ready excuse that she hadn’t painted for years. When she mentioned that she’d like to see them properly, Rose unlocked the studio and turned on the heater. ‘Here it is. See for yourself,’ she said offhandedly, then made a desultory effort at sorting through papers and sketchbooks on her desk, occasionally glancing up to see what Anna was looking at. There were landscapes and seascapes, some in watercolours, most in acrylics. Anna preferred the odd little glimpses: a half-open garden gate, a clump of thrift clinging to the cliff, a rowing boat pulled up to rest on a pebbled shore. Then there were seabirds, all done in watercolours, looser in style. Gannets, purple sandpipers, oystercatchers with startling red-orange bills against their pied colours. Backgrounds were washed in, lightly indicated: lichen-coloured rocks, clumps of samphire, wet sand washed mirror-smooth or marked with the tread of webbed feet. They were proficient but unremarkable. To Anna, Rose’s story needed a more dramatic outcome, worth the cost to everyone concerned: she ought to be a Barbara Hepworth, a Gauguin, producing ground-breaking work rather than pleasant souvenir pictures of the kind seen in countless shops and galleries along the coast. Anna felt, illogically, as if Rose had snatched the privilege of being an artist, taken the one chance available, and set up a cosy little industry. Through Anna’s mind floated the more dramatic colours and forms of the work she’d once imagined herself producing.

‘You can have one, if you like, to take away with you,’ Rose said, not looking up.

‘Can I? Thanks.’

It was the
take away
that echoed, as if Rose couldn’t wait to get rid of her. Anna fought back
Stuff your pictures
, deciding that a gift from Rose was the very least she deserved – some kind of proof that she existed, perhaps. She spent some while before choosing turnstones: two plump birds, at rest by a humped rock; behind them, waves washing in, creaming into patterns of foam. Like all the paintings it was signed
Rosalind Sullivan
, a name that was beginning to mean something in Anna’s mind. Only now did she notice that there were no people in Rose’s work.

Rose sealed and taped it in bubble-wrap for Anna’s journey home, then suggested that they should go for a walk while the weather was fine. ‘You’d better borrow my walking boots. We’ve got the same sized feet – at least we used to have.’ She looked momentarily discomfited by this
we
, by this admission of former intimacy. ‘You won’t get far in those heels.’

Anna pushed her feet into Rose’s boots, spreading her toes, adjusting to the indentations of different feet.

On the cliff-path, Anna’s black coat billowed and flapped, and her red scarf flew out like a banner. With Rose, Michael and Euan, she walked head down into strong gusts from the west, picking a way up the steep path, scrambling over boulders, standing like figureheads to look down into the next bay and the steel-grey sea, with waves breaking into white crests, far out. That meant it was rough today, Euan told Anna, with the air of imparting expertise.

‘I don’t know how you can live in London, Anna.’ Rose’s words were whipped away into the wind. ‘I couldn’t stand it.’

It was the kind of remark Anna had come to see as typical of her: exasperating but true. Anna thought how cocooned Rose was here, if she could be cocooned and at the same time exposed to the Atlantic – so removed from cities and commerce and the need to earn a living; because surely, unless Rose’s paintings were far more successful than Anna had reason to suspect, she couldn’t support herself by her earnings or contribute a great deal to the family finances. Yet Anna did agree.

‘I don’t know how to live in London, either.’

‘Why do you, then?’

‘Well – because it’s convenient, I suppose. Has been, anyway.’ Anna paused; she would have to abandon the fiction that she was living happily with Martin, and wished now that she hadn’t mentioned his name. Then she saw that Rose wasn’t listening, wasn’t really curious. Convenience had never been much of a priority for Rose: her own, or anyone else’s.

Time was running out. They had lunch at a pub in the next bay before walking back, gusted and buffeted, the wind behind them now; Rose called a warning to Euan not to go too close to the cliff-edge. Anna had spent very little time alone with Rose and saw now that she wasn’t going to; that Rose had, possibly, engineered the windy walk and the pub lunch with other people around them precisely to prevent Anna from confronting her with things she preferred not to examine.

‘You must come again, and stay longer,’ Michael said. ‘You and Martin.’

‘Oh yes, do,’ Rose echoed; but already Anna knew that if they met again it would be at her own or Michael’s instigation, not Rose’s.

It was Michael who drove Anna to Penzance station. Outside the cottage, Rose hugged Anna and said, ‘Thank you for coming.’ She seemed to mean it.

‘Do you still paint, Anna?’ Michael asked, in the car. ‘You were so good.’

‘No, I … gave up.’

The truthful answer would have sounded feeble.
I stopped because of Rose. I haven’t painted since the sixth form. Rose was always ahead of me. Always better. Always showing me what I couldn’t do. I could only copy, and fail.
To avoid explaining, she said, ‘What about you? Why physics?’

‘Study it or teach it?’

‘Well, either. Both.’

‘Because the laws of physics are the foundation of the universe,’ he said. ‘The laws of matter and energy, time and space. Physics explains everything.’

‘
Can
everything be explained?’

‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘If only we knew what questions to ask.’

On the train Anna leaned against the seat-back and closed her eyes. Rose was receding faster than the train could travel, growing smaller and smaller as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Much farther, and Anna knew she would doubt that she had met Rose at all. In her bag the small turnstone painting, cushioned in its bubble-wrap, signed with Rose’s new name, was the only real evidence; she had to restrain herself from taking it out and tearing off the wrapping to convince herself.

How did Rose do it? – inspire such devotion in the men who loved her? First Jamie Spellman, openly declaring his love; then Michael, shaping his life and career around her peculiar needs, commuting to Plymouth each day so that Rose could stay in her remote sanctuary with sea and birds for company. Rose seemed to command unquestioning loyalty, and love far more extravagant than Anna felt
she
would ever have or deserve.

I’ve made such a mess of my life, Anna thought. Failed at everything.

Pale moorland rose now on either side, flashes of farms and church spires, a river; already the countryside looked less distinctively Cornish, and Rose was left behind. As soon as Anna had a signal for her mobile she tried calling, got voicemail, and left a text message instead:
Found Rose. On train back to London.

Chapter Twenty-five

Sandra, 1968