The Christmas Angel (8 page)

Perhaps he’ll send another text; perhaps she’ll email him later on, just something casual. Dossie begins to dress, humming beneath her breath.

‘What are you doing?’

Rupert slides the mobile into a small compartment in his briefcase and zips it shut.

‘Just checking messages,’ he calls. ‘This snow is going to be causing lots of problems. I shan’t be able to get out this morning. And you won’t be able to get home.’

She comes carefully down the steep narrow staircase wrapped in a thick long dressing gown, huddling the collar up around her neck. Her morning face is slightly shiny and pallid, her brow creased into an expression of faint dissatisfaction: Kitty has never been a morning person.

‘Lucky I kept the wood-burner going overnight,’ he says. ‘I should go into the sitting-room if I were you. It’s cosy in there. I’ll bring some coffee in.’

She gives a little unsmiling nod and he goes back into the kitchen, slightly irritated that she’s taken it into her head to pay this flying visit, but far too experienced to show it. The important thing is to keep the mood light. Kitty has a sixth sense where other women are concerned and there must be no hint of his lunch date with Dossie. Yet he can’t quite keep himself from smiling as he finds the percolator and makes coffee: Dossie sounds rather fun and he is looking forward to meeting her. But not today.

Kitty turns her head as he carries in the coffee. ‘I still think
it
’s crazy that you bought this place,’ she says. ‘Honestly, it’s miles off the beaten track.’

He passes her the mug of strong, black coffee. ‘You know why I bought it,’ he answers, perching on the chair opposite. ‘I bought it because the owner was in trouble and needed to offload it quickly. I got it very cheap and I should be able to turn it round and sell it on and make a nice little profit.’

‘In this market?’

‘OK,’ he says easily, smiling at her, ‘then I’ll rent it out until the market improves.’

She sits back in the corner of the shabby armchair, drawing her long legs up beneath her, folding her thin elegant hands around the mug. He sees that she is pulling herself together, shaking off the grumpy early morning mood that reflects the uncomfortable night on the second-hand bed. He wonders why she’s made the sudden dash down to see him and hopes it isn’t going to become a habit. After all, he gets up to Bristol twice a week. The truth is that he’s begun to enjoy his semi-bachelor existence, though he won’t let her guess this.

She makes a little face at him. ‘It’s just so silly to be so far apart. After all, we don’t need to be, do we? There’s plenty of room at the flat and Mummy would love to have you there.’

She’s wheedling now, regretting her grumpiness. He watches her, still smiling, thinking, as he always does, how ridiculous it sounds to hear a grown woman calling her mother ‘Mummy’. One day soon Mummy will leave her darling daughter a beautiful ground-floor flat in Sneyd Park in Bristol, some very valuable ‘pieces’ and a comfortable bank balance. Not that it matters: he has plenty of money of his own, though most of it is tied up in property. Still, it’s a comforting prospect. One can always do with extra
security
. The cottage has been a bit of a bolt hole from the restrictions of the flat: a good excuse to get away from the invalid atmosphere.

‘It’s serving a turn,’ he shrugs. ‘You don’t really want me in the flat in Bristol all the time while you’re looking after your mother and it’s keeping me busy.’

She glances around the small room, at the temporary shabby furniture, and he almost laughs aloud at her expression of distaste.

‘Come on, love,’ he says. ‘I warned you what it was like here. Anyway, you know perfectly well how uncomfortable renovating a house can be in the early stages. We’ve done it often enough.’

‘It’s different now,’ she argues. ‘I’ve got used to the comfort of the flat.’

He shrugs, bored with this increasingly familiar argument which leads nowhere. He might point out that if she were with him they would have made the cottage much more comfortable but some instinct tells him to stay cool; not to press her. Her determination to visit despite his attempts to discourage it has surprised him – and slightly unnerved him.

‘I have to finish the cottage,’ he points out reasonably. ‘It’s my job. It’s what I do.’

She sits with her head bent, watching the flames through the glass door of the stove.

‘Well, you don’t have to do it for much longer,’ she says. ‘It’s time we relaxed a bit and enjoyed ourselves.’

He feels a thrill of fear at the prospect of being joined at the hip to Kitty in the Bristol flat with her elderly mother, who suffers from aortic stenosis, and no work to which he can escape, no excuses of meetings. He’s done very well since he came out of the army and started his restoration company. It
owns
a great deal of property, including five cottages down on the Roseland Peninsula. Her father respected him, no doubt about that, though he was always slightly cautious about his, Rupert’s, background: good schools, good regiment, yes, but there was something indefinable that unnerved that unimaginative old stalwart of Bristol’s merchant aristocracy. He’d been wary of this ex-army officer’s approaches to his little princess: he’d glimpsed that odd, passionate, creative streak that made Rupert a perfectionist in his work and meant that a beautifully finished product was much more important than simple profit.

Rupert grins to himself, remembering the predictable old fellow who was so anxious for his precious daughter’s financial wellbeing. His wife – whose life was full of good works, charity lunches and photographs in
Country Life
– was an easier prospect. Flustered and flattered by compliments, charmed into approval of this young man’s absolute need to create something beautiful, she’d added her persuasions to Kitty’s passionate appeals and they’d carried the day.

‘What are you grinning at?’

He laughs aloud. ‘I was just thinking about your dear old dad. He didn’t get it, did he? My theory that each old house has a soul that has to be consulted before you can start work on it? It made him nervous. He never really reckoned me, did he?’

‘Of course he did,’ she says quickly. ‘Don’t be silly.’ But she smiles too, remembering those earlier days and the excitement of slowly drawing out the character of each cottage, and he sees the pretty, sexy Kitty with whom he’d fallen in love back then. With her short bed-rumpled hair and the glow of the firelight on her pale skin she suddenly looks
younger
, more vulnerable, and he is pricked by affection and desire.

He stands up, still laughing. ‘We’d better get some clothes on …’ He hesitates, eyebrow quirked. ‘Unless you have any better ideas?’

She hesitates but glances at the window. ‘I thought you said the farmer might come down to see how you’re coping.’

He shrugs. An untimely visit from the farmer wouldn’t faze him but Kitty is already clasping her dressing gown around her and standing up.

‘I think we ought to get dressed,’ she says firmly. ‘Thank God you’ve got the shower working. I’ll go first.’

‘OK,’ he says lightly, and follows her up the stairs.

The narrow alleyways are full of streaming golden sunlight. It gleams on old wet cobbles, slants across slate-hung walls, slides into a secret corner where a tub of pansies shelters beside a cottage door. Janna passes like a shadow down the steep hill; beneath a tiny, pointed slate roof with a crooked chimney; past uneven whitewashed granite walls; below the slits of windows peering slyly down. Far beyond the uneven, lichen-painted roof-scapes, seen in glimpses between angles of jutting walls, the sea rocks placidly, its back turned to the land as if sleeping between the rise and fall of tides.

Janna slips into a passage that leads uphill again towards gorse-covered cliffs and the small Norman church perched halfway up on a grassy plateau. Father Pascal’s cottage is the last in a row of tinners’ cottages, next to the churchyard wall, and kept by the Church as a ‘house for duty’. He moved into it from his parish rectory near Padstow when he retired, and he takes services in the little church next door – which
is
now served by a team ministry – and anywhere else where he might be needed.

From his upstairs study window, Father Pascal watches Janna appear from between two cottages and begin to climb the stony lane. He likes it here in Peneglos amongst the odd mix of villagers: locals, who try to wrest a living from the hostile countryside or the sea; incomers, who come looking for a quieter, more peaceful existence, and the second-homers, who appear and disappear like small bands of swallows, following the sun. He walks between them all, maintaining a delicate balance, smoothing ruffled feelings, softening antagonisms, diluting prejudices. He loves them, and despairs of them, and supports them. A Breton by birth, with an English mother, he feels at home on this rocky, turbulent coast where every other village honours a saint: a misty land, where the borders between myth and legend and reality are not distinct.

When his father, fighting with the French Resistance, was killed at the end of the war, he and his mother returned to England to live with her family between Penzance and Zennor and, ever since, he’s had a deep passion for his mother’s birthplace. Named for the great French mathematician and moralist, he was quite at home amongst the children of fishermen and miners, who called him ‘Frenchy’ but accepted him as one of their own. His black eyes, and blacker hair, were not remarkable amongst these Celtic people who lived for centuries at the mercy of Spanish invaders, smugglers and seafarers.

Now, he sets aside the homily he’s been preparing and descends the narrow, steep staircase. He opens the door into his little parlour and hastens to put another log into the small wood-burning stove. The cottage has no heating,
apart
from this stove and the old Cornish range in the living-room-kitchen across the passage, but he is content. Between them they warm the two rooms above – his study and his bedroom – though the bathroom built over the scullery extension at the back of the house is generally freezing.

Here, close to the sea, the snow has disappeared, though there are still problems upcountry. The gullys and alleyways have been awash with snow-melt, the rivers flooding on their descent from the high moors to the sea, but now the paths are clear at last and he smiles with pleasure at Janna, as though he has been separated from his friends at the convent for many months instead of little more than a week.

As usual, she has an offering for him: a small posy of snowdrops and jonquils. He takes them with delight as she slips past him into the warmth of the parlour. He shares with her a deep joy in the wild things the countryside shelters and they spend happy moments together checking a rare flower or some small bird against one of his many reference books. He takes the posy into the kitchen, finds the little vase he uses for such a tiny bunch and brings it back to the parlour.

Janna is standing before the fire, looking round her. For once the narrow shoulders are relaxed, her face peaceful. She’s told him many things in this room: about Nat, her very dear friend, who is gay and who has now found a partner so that she is a little less able to be so completely at home in his cottage as she was once. She misses Nat and the special friendship they had, though she still stays in touch and visits him and his partner. She’s explained about her upbringing as a traveller; how her father abandoned her mother before she, Janna, was born, and how her mother became addicted to alcohol and drugs. He knows all about the years of being fostered and how she ran away over and over again to try to
find
her mother, and how her family are so scattered now that since her mother’s death she’s been quite alone. It was then that Janna started travelling again and came by strange ways to Chi-Meur. And now she is happier than she’s ever been before.

It was he who suggested that her father might be Cornish, that she belonged here just as he did, and that it explained her love for the place and this odd feeling that she’d come home. She shook her head uncertainly. Her mother was from around Plymouth way, or so she’d been told, but it might be possible …

Perhaps, he said on another occasion, perhaps her father hadn’t known her mother was pregnant; that he might not have gone if he’d realized. Or perhaps he’d panicked at the prospect of such responsibility. After all, they’d both been so very young and he’d probably been a wild, free spirit looking for adventure abroad and he’d had a terror of commitment. This struck a chord with Janna, just as he knew it would, and removed a little of the pain. She began to imagine her father rather differently from the heartless philanderer that had always been her concept of him, and was allowing a small area of doubt to creep around and soften that idea of him. But it would be a long and painful process.

As Father Pascal places the flowers on the small bureau he makes a little prayer for wisdom, for guidance, and turns to smile at her and gestures to one of the wooden-framed armchairs.

Janna sits down quickly, still clutching her long woollen coat around her. She loves this room: the bookcase reaching from ceiling to floor filled with the warm, glowing bindings of the books; the paintings and drawings that are fixed to every spare inch of the cream-washed walls. Everywhere she
looks
is colour and warmth: gold-leaf on soft brown leather, and the crimsons, greens and blues in the bookcase, where the books turn their colourful backs on the room; delicate watercolours and charcoal sketches and bold splashes of thick oil paint. Yet there is peace too.

She looks at Father Pascal with a kind of relief: his presence here all among his paintings and books is necessary to her. There is security here, but the sense of security comes from the man himself; from something he carries within himself. As usual he is all in black: a black roll-neck jersey and old jeans, and thick woollen socks on his feet. He looks like an artist or a jazz musician, yet there is this natural air of authority and of confidence.

‘I’ve moved back into the caravan this morning,’ she tells him triumphantly. ‘I slept in the house when the snow came because Mother Magda was worried about me being outside but we’ve got guests arriving later on today so I’ve gone outside again.’