The Four of Us (56 page)

‘I wonder if you can help me?' a voice no older than her own, and with a transatlantic twang in it, said to Peggy Wainwright.

Primmie sighed and tried to control her impatience. She should have realized he was a tourist by his overcoat, which, though shabby and none too clean, definitely had a look of American tailoring to it. His hair, too, was worn longer than any local man would have worn it. It had obviously once been fair, but was now so streaked with grey as to be almost white. Even though his shoulders were stooped, now that she'd heard his voice she mentally revised her assessment of him as being ancient. He was probably no older than Matt.

Deeply grateful that Matt was so physically fit and still so attractive, she'd stopped listening to the conversation taking place in front of her, and it was only when Peggy Wainwright said, ‘Ruthven? Did you say it was Ruthven you needed directions to?' that she snapped out of her reverie.

‘Yes. I'm trying to trace an old friend. Her name is Primmie. Her married name is, I think, Primmie Dove. Dove was part of her email address. When I knew her, though, her surname was Surtees.'

Blood began beating thunderously against Primmie's eardrums. It couldn't be. This almost frail, unkempt figure in front of her could not possibly be the Francis Sheringham who, when last she'd seen him, had looked like a courtier of Charles II. Common sense told her he wouldn't still look as he had all those years ago, but he couldn't possibly have changed so much. No one could.

‘Well, aren't you in luck!' Peggy said to him gleefully. ‘Because Primmie Dove is standing right behind you in the queue!'

In a moment that seemed to Primmie to take for ever, the figure in front of her turned round.

She was wrong in thinking that no one could possibly change so much. His hair at the front was even thinner and more lacklustre than the hair on the back of his head. His eyes were bloodshot, his skin dull and heavily lined. But it was Francis. Without a shadow of doubt, it was Francis.

‘Primmie? Dearest, dearest Primmie! I'd forgotten how wonderfully efficient British post offices could be. Ask for a name and they produce the person instantly.'

She began to laugh, weak with relief that beneath the physical wreck he had become, the old charm and sense of fun were still there; dizzy with relief that she had found him.

‘Oh, Francis, thank God you're here!' Uncaring of the number of people queuing behind her, she threw her arms round him, hugging him tight. ‘Geraldine needs you so much, Francis. She needs you more than anything else in the world.'

His drew away from her, his face suddenly drawn, the skin tight over his cheekbones. ‘Geraldine's here? In Calleloe, with you?'

‘Yes. And don't run away, not until I tell you why she needs you.'

He waited – as did the rest of the queue and Peggy Wainwright.

‘She needs the bone marrow of a close blood relation, Francis – and you're the closest blood relation she has. It doesn't necessarily mean that your bone marrow will be the match she needs, but there's a chance it will do. And it's the only chance Geraldine has got, Francis. Without a bone marrow transplant, she will die within the next few months. So you do see why I had to find you, don't you? You do see why it was so important that you came?'

Once out in the street, he said tautly, ‘What is Geraldine suffering from? Is it leukaemia?'

‘Not exactly, though it's similar. It's something called aplastic anaemia. Her bone marrow is failing to produce blood cells and platelets.'

‘What the devil are platelets?'

‘They're something in the blood that helps form clots to stop bleeding.'

As he mulled this over in sombre silence, Primmie ignored the grocers and walked him across the road to the car park.

‘Did you drive here?' she asked.

‘Not a hope. Money isn't exactly coming out of my ears, Primmie. I got the cheapest flight I could get – Air India – and then a train to Helston and a bus from Helston to Calleloe.'

They'd reached the Corsa now and, as she unlocked the driver's door, he paused by the other side of the car. ‘And to make the flight even cheaper, I bought a single. It was all I could afford.'

Their eyes held over the car's roof. ‘You went to such lengths in response to an email from someone who, over thirty years ago, was only a casual friend, without even emailing back to find out why you were so needed?' she said, deeply moved.

He shot her a rueful smile. ‘I did it because you said it was a matter of life and death, Primmie. And in the days when I knew you, I never knew you to exaggerate – and anyway, you were never just a casual friend. During the last thirty years I've had a whole barrowful of casual friends and you have nothing in common with any of them. You were always a real friend. I don't think you'd know how to be anything else.'

They got in the car, and not until he'd fastened his seat belt and the engine was engaged did she say, ‘There's something you have to prepare yourself for, Francis. Kiki is living in Calleloe. She's at Ruthven now.'

He sucked in his breath, slamming his hand down hard on the dashboard like a driving instructor giving a learner emergency-stop practice. ‘What the hell, Primmie! I'm not prepared for a confrontation with Kiki!'

‘Neither was Geraldine when Kiki first showed up here.' Primmie continued driving uphill, out of Calleloe. ‘It took a little time for their relationship to shake down into their old friendship, but it's done so. Things may be awkward between you and Kiki to begin with, but she's indifferent to the past and, under the circumstances, I think you'll find that you can tolerate her presence.'

She turned left on to the main road that was signposted Lizard Point.

‘She's given up the rock-star scene, is heavily into writing a book and is living with someone I like very much. He's a local builder, much younger than her and one hundred per cent genuine. I think it's safe to say that she's changed since living in Calleloe. The old self-obsessed Kiki isn't half as much in evidence as she used to be.'

Francis didn't respond, but she could sense his tension.

As they drove the heavily wooded road towards the turn-off for Ruthven, she said, ‘Where were you last living in America, Francis? What have you been doing? Why did you never return to England?'

‘Thirty years in three minutes, Primmie? It's a bit of a tall order.'

He fell silent and she didn't push him. At last he said, ‘For the last three years I've been living in Wisconsin, making a living by being a gardener. As to why I never came back …' He looked away from her and out of the window to where the coastline was visible through the now thinning trees. ‘At first, after my break-up from Kiki, it simply wasn't an issue. I was into hard drugs and no way could I ever have put in an appearance at Cedar Court. The whole thing was out of control. It was out of control for years. The late 1970s to the early 1990s were a wasteland of addiction: first cocaine, and then heroin. It was self-destruction on a massive scale. Someone I met who knew me from London said they'd heard my father thought I was dead. It seemed the kindest way to leave it.'

‘And now?' Primmie slowed down and turned off on to the single-track road that led across the headland.

‘I don't know. I never wanted saddling with the responsibility and the debts of Cedar Court when I was young and fit, so I sure as hell don't want saddling with them now. If that issue could be resolved, I'd quite like to see the old man again. I know he's still alive. I used to anonymously check every year.'

‘And family? Did you ever marry and have children?'

‘God, no. My only experience of ever living with anyone for any length of time was with Kiki and that put me off the idea of long-term relationships for life. I was never marriage material, Primmie, though I was too young to realize that way back in the days when I intended marrying Geraldine. In 1992 I met someone who took me out of the gutter and helped me turn my life around. It was a sexual relationship I was totally committed to.' There was the merest pause and then he said, ‘He died five years ago.'

She turned her head briefly from the track ahead of them, and as their eyes met he knew that she wasn't shocked – or surprised.

‘Since then I've simply managed as best I can. No drugs, not even anything soft. No close friends either, more's the pity.'

‘Did it never occur to you to contact Geraldine?'

‘After what I did to her? Destroying her life's dream of having children who would be born and raised at Cedar Court – and of one of them inheriting it? I wouldn't have insulted her by even trying to contact her. I used to read the
International Herald Tribune
in order to keep up with the news in Europe and every so often I would see her photograph in the gossip column. She was always attending some embassy banquet or other on the arm of an ambassador or millionaire steel tycoon. So I'd bin the paper and get on with self-destructing – apart from this last few years when I'd bin the paper and get on with manuring a rose-bed or mulching clematis.'

Primmie drew to a halt at Ruthven's gates. ‘Let's walk up to the house, not drive, and then I can introduce you to Maybelline, Black-Hearted Alice and Ned, en route.'

‘Who are they?' he asked, vastly relieved at having a little more breathing space before the cataclysmic experience of being reunited with Geraldine. ‘The local Mafia?'

Primmie giggled. ‘Maybelline is a very gentle, very docile Jersey cow. Even if it has never occurred to you to fall in love with a cow, you will fall in love with Maybelline. Everybody does. Black-Hearted Alice is a nanny goat. The idea was that she'd be an extra attraction to the children-in-care I intend giving holidays to, but I came a cropper. One look from Alice's malevolent yellow eyes and no child in their right mind goes near her. Ned is a donkey. Matt and I bought him from a donkey sanctuary last September.'

‘And who,' he asked, as they walked up a track flanked by a paddock on one side and grazing pasture on the other, ‘is Matt?'

Primmie came to a halt at the paddock gate.

‘Matt is my very special friend,' she said, her dancing eyes leaving him in no doubt as to the nature of the friendship. ‘And now I think it would be a good idea if I left you here, whilst I break the news of your arrival to Geraldine. Ned is over there, in the far corner, but he'll be ambling over here any minute now to see if you have anything for him.'

Francis registered that the small donkey that had been head down, foraging in the long grass at the foot of the fencing, was now looking alertly across at him.

‘What do you mean “break” the news to Geraldine that I'm here?' he asked, alarmed. ‘Surely she knows you were trying to contact me?'

‘No. Incredibly, it never seems to have occurred to Geraldine that, being her cousin, you are possibly the best chance of a bone marrow transplant that she has. And truth to tell,' she added, alarming him even more, ‘I suspect Geraldine is of the same opinion as your father. I think she thinks that you are dead.'

When she entered the house by the side door, walking through the porch and directly into the big live-in kitchen, she was relieved to find Geraldine on her own.

‘Kiki's Harley is in the yard, so I'm assuming she's still here,' she said, as Geraldine automatically pushed the book she had been reading to one side and rose to her feet to make Primmie a cup of tea.

‘She's in the sitting room, sulking because Brett is doing mega high roof work in Truro and says it's too dangerous for her to be working alongside him.'

To prove her point, as she finished speaking the sound of Jerry Lee Lewis's ‘Whole Lotta Shaking Going On'suddenly blasted into life in the sitting room.

‘Where's the shopping?' Having filled the kettle, Geraldine registered that Primmie was unladen.

‘I got diverted. I've got your chocolate bar, though.' She fished it out of her coat pocket and put it on the kitchen table. ‘I have some news for you, Geraldine. It's pretty momentous so take a few deep breaths will you? I don't want you collapsing on me.'

Geraldine put the kettle down on the Aga with a clatter. ‘Destiny? There's news? You've found her?'

‘No.' With great difficulty Primmie steadied her voice. ‘No, Geraldine, but I've found someone else. Francis is down by the paddock, talking to Ned. I think he'd like you to join him.'

For a terrible second she thought she'd misjudged the blunt way she'd broken the news. Geraldine gave a small, animal-like moan, her face – always pale – draining almost to translucence.

‘If you'd like me to go with you …' Primmie began uncertainly.

She needn't have bothered.

‘Oh … my … God! Oh, my
dear
God!' Geraldine pushed herself away from the Aga and shot past Primmie at the speed of light.

‘Francis!' Primmie heard her calling as she ran across the yard and on to the track leading down towards the paddock.
‘Francis! FRANCIS!'

Primmie stood for a moment or two, waiting for her heartbeats to approach something like normality, and then walked out of the kitchen, down the corridor and into the sitting room.

Kiki was slouched in the wing-chair, a trousered leg slung over one of its arms, looking as mutinous as a teenager.

Primmie turned the volume down so that Jerry Lee Lewis, instead of blasting their eardrums, could hardly be heard.

‘What is it, Prim? You've got your “I've Got News For You” expression on.'

‘That's because I have.' She hesitated for a moment, praying that she was right in her assumption of how Kiki was going to take the news. ‘As well as trying to find Destiny, I've privately been trying to find someone else, Kiki.'

Kiki shifted her position in the chair, her cedarred hair catching the February sun streaming through the window.