The Memory Garden (10 page)

‘What are you going to do with it? Live here?’

‘You’re certainly as direct as your sister,’ Patrick commented.

Mel had to laugh. ‘I love her dearly, but she’s not forward about holding back, is she?’ she said, having frequently fallen victim to Chrissie’s interview technique.

‘Well,’ said Patrick, ‘if you must know, I’m still thinking about it.’ He suddenly looked at his watch. ‘Look, I’d better get on. There’s a surveyor due any moment to advise me whether the place is about to fall down. See you soon.’ He started to walk away. Then checked himself and turned around. ‘Tell you what, are you busy this evening? Come and have a drink about six. Uncle Val left rather a good cellar.’

Feeling annoyed and slightly crestfallen, Mel watched Patrick disappear around the side of the Merryn Hall. He hadn’t noticed her at all, not the real Mel, but had fallen into that easy trap of misjudging someone because they appeared familiar. When he looked at her, he saw not Mel but Chrissie, she was sure of it. She thought of all those times as a teenager when she had had to interrupt callers midflow who had mistaken her voice on the phone for her mother ’s or for Chrissie’s. As she grew older she became more resigned to the family likenesses. But at that age she had rebelled, wearing outrageous clothes and choosing troublemakers for friends.

Now she looked down at her well-cut jeans and buttondown shirt and picked up the fork with a sigh. Patrick hadn’t appreciated her efforts. All her pleasure in the garden was spoiled . It was a pity. Before Patrick had interrupted, she had been happily comparing her situation to Irina’s, congratulating herself on having discovered a task that cheered her up, freed her from herself. Oh well.

She really ought to sort out some of the notes she had made yesterday. Jabbing the fork back into the soil, she went inside. Then, as she switched on her laptop she remembered Patrick’s invitation. And despite everything, she looked forward to seeing him again.

‘I’ve never been given flowers before. Especially from my own garden.’

For a moment Mel worried that she had made a mistake in presenting him with the narcissi, but a look of shy delight dawned on Patrick’s face and all was well. The flowers’ fragrance filled the gloomy hall. Jake, a man of grand gestures, had taught her about the joy of giving and receiving unusual presents, once giving her a couple of live crabs which she proved too squeamish to cook!

‘And here’s a vase,’ Mel said now, passing Patrick a glass carafe she had found at the back of a cupboard.

‘Great, I wouldn’t know where to look for one here,’ he said, taking it from her. ‘There are these babes, of course.’ He nodded at a pair of large brass jars on either side of a console table, one of which was doing service as an umbrella-stand.

‘I wonder how long it is since the garden grew flowers grand enough for those,’ said Mel, imagining the lush displays that must have decorated the rooms in the heyday of the house and garden. She looked around the high cold hall, feebly lit by its single electric chandelier, noticing how the yellowed paint peeled off the walls. A spindle-railed staircase ran gracefully up one side to a small viewing gallery.

‘So elegant,’ she murmured, aware he was watching. ‘What horrors did your surveyor unearth?’

‘I’m glad to say the place won’t fall down tomorrow. There are a few small problems with tree roots, and a new roof is in order, but I can deal with those. Quite a relief, I can tell you.’ He smiled and she realised that he was certainly more relaxed, friendlier than he had been that morning.

‘I can imagine,’ she said.

‘Come through to the kitchen a moment and I’ll get us a drink. Do you like claret?’

As Patrick decanted the pungent contents of a dusty bottle and located two glass chalices, Mel unwrapped the flowers and splayed them in the carafe on the kitchen table. Then she followed him through to the drawing room, which looked out onto the garden at the back. A wood fire crackled beneath a marble mantelpiece, the scent of the smoke not quite masking a sinister whiff of damp. She gazed around her. The room was an unhappy mixture of decorative styles. Chipped anaglypta wallpaper gave off a ghastly pale-green glow in the early-evening light. Around the fire huddled a modern reclining armchair and a pair of baggy sofas patterned with huge roses.

Patrick noticed her interest.

‘I’ll show you round later if you like,’ he said, putting down the bottle and glasses on an ugly tiled coffee-table. ‘But it’s warmest in here. Try Uncle Val’s throne,’ he said, gesturing to the armchair. ‘It’s really very comfortable.’ He set a glass of wine on what was probably a plant stand by her side and settled into the sofa opposite.

‘Here’s to Val,’ he said, raising his own glass to her, ‘and to you, of course. I’m glad you’ve come. I don’t get many visitors.’ He gulped at his wine, too quickly.

He looked tired, Mel noticed, and sort of sad.

‘And are you finding here a good place to work?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Did I tell you anything in my emails about the book I’m writing?’

‘Only that it was about the local artists.’

‘It’s all about the Newlyn and Lamorna Schools.’

She told him how she had visited some of the locations they painted and discovered some papers in the Morrab Library. ‘A diary and a memoir. A local history expert in Newlyn has given me some other leads. What I need to do is visit St Ives and have a chat with an art historian who knows the period well. Guy called Jonathan Smithfield.’

‘Where are the main archives?’ asked Patrick, lifting his glass to admire the effect of the firelight shining through the ruby wine.

‘Oh, all over the place. Cornwall, Birmingham, London, America. All much easier to track on the Internet these days, of course.’

‘The Newlyn Group has been written about a lot, am I right? I vaguely remember going to an exhibition round here years ago.’

‘Yes, but they’re not fashionable now. They were into social realism – the kind of Victorian painting of ordinary working folk with a moral. You know, stoicism in the face of tragedy, the glorification of hard work and suffering.’

‘Ah, yes, fishermen’s wives sobbing in the dawn because their men have gone down in the storm.’

‘Exactly.’ She was gratified that he pretended to have at least some interest in her subject. ‘Dozens of artists came to Newlyn in the last quarter of the nineteenth century,’ she went on, ‘and many settled for some years, made it their home.’

‘How does this tie up with the ones who came to Lamorna?’

‘That was a bit later, really. There was Samuel Birch, a man from a fairly humble background, who came here in the early Edwardian era. He became known as Lamorna Birch to distinguish him from another Samuel Birch.’

‘I’m sure Uncle Val used to talk about him. He married a local girl, didn’t he?’

‘Yes. And then there were the Knights – Harold and his wife Laura. Laura is the better-known painter. And Alfred Munnings joined them at one point.’

‘Oh, yes. The bloke who painted horses.’

‘That’s right. A larger-than-life character, by all accounts. The locals were shocked by his raucous behaviour. But there were others, too. Many of them started off in Newlyn but came to Lamorna as well. Even Augustus John visited later on.’

‘But no more maudlin moral tableaux?’

‘No. This generation was more influenced by French Impressionism. They wanted to capture the beauty of the area. Theirs were happy pictures, often with a holiday mood.’

Patrick reached for the bottle to top up their glasses. ‘I think I know the sort of thing,’ he said. ‘And what angle particularly interests you?’

‘The women, I suppose. The obstacles they had to deal with to become successful painters. I’m still fine-tuning my arguments,’ Mel said. ‘Are you sure I’m not boring you?’

‘Not at all. It’s fascinating.’

Mel plunged into an explanation of her theories about the women painters, the subjects they chose to paint, their relationships with the men and how they had different obstacles in pursuing their careers.

‘Some of them came from quite privileged backgrounds,’ she said. ‘Nineteen hundred was still a time when it was very difficult for a woman of no means or social standing to develop artistic talent, unlike some of the men – Lamorna Birch is a great example of a man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Laura Knight was left in near poverty after her mother died, but she was a middle-class girl with education and connections. She still needed enormous determination, though, to become a painter.’

‘Sometimes a working girl became a model and married the painter,’ Patrick suggested.

‘Well, yes,’ she said, ‘that did happen. But of course,’ she added quickly, ‘the husband might not encourage her talent, and then children would start to come along. She would have to be very strongminded to practise her art in that case. She would have to make sacrifices.’

‘And you?’ Patrick said, leaning forward and carefully placing his wine glass on the table. He sat back, his hands clasped behind his head, and considered her seriously. ‘Do you make sacrifices? Chrissie told me you work much too hard.’

‘I enjoy my work,’ Mel replied. ‘It’s challenging and creative. So what else has my wretched sister been telling you?’

‘Nothing terrible, I assure you,’ he teased.

‘What about you, what is it you do?’ she said. Somehow he had got away with asking all the questions.

‘I sell inventions.’

‘You’re an inventor?’ She looked at him with curiosity.

‘Not exactly. My partner and I run a website for inventors. We help them sort out patents, which is a complex business, and try to find firms to develop and manufacture their ideas. We take a cut if it works out.’

‘What inventions have you sold?’

‘Quite a range, really. A new kind of rotary clothes-line, ergonomic chairs, gardening tools. There was a children’s toy that was a nice little earner a couple of Christmases ago – a remote controlled cat that climbed curtains.’

‘I remember – it was cute. My boyfriend’s kids had one. Ex-boyfriend, I mean.’ She stared at the ugly whorls on the carpet to hide her confusion. Boxing Day, three Christmases ago, the four of them together in Jake’s flat, little Freya bouncing with excitement as she ripped brightly coloured paper off present after present, her laughter at the antics of the funny little robot cat.

‘. . . plenty of less interesting things, too,’ Patrick was saying. ‘Widgets that reduce friction in engines, new types of packaging. And a lot of ideas that waste time and never come to anything.

‘How long have you been going?’

‘Five or six years. It started when Geoff and I were at uni. We had a deeply boring job picking blackcurrants one summer, and we thought up a gadget to help. In the end, about eight years ago, we got a manufacturer to take it up, but he ripped us off, designed his own version and did very well with it. Never gave us a penny. We didn’t want that to happen to other people so we started up the business as a sideline. It just grew and grew. On the whole I like the job. I was in high finance before and, quite frankly, I was getting burned out. It’s flexible, there’s some travel involved and you never know what you’ll be dealing with next. It’s amazing trying to gauge which idea is going to take off. But Geoff’s pulling out now, selling me his share of the business. I’ll be free to do what I want with it.’

Mel nodded. ‘Will you need to be up in London all the time?’

‘That’s one of the things I’m considering. I’m going to keep my flat in Islington, and I can always travel up when I need to. But I want to take advantage of the break and get this place sorted out.’

‘Chrissie said you have family down here.’

‘Yes, my parents live outside Truro. My brother and I were brought up on the family farm, but neither of us wanted to work on the land – Joe’s a schoolteacher locally – so Dad sold the lease when he retired.’

‘And Uncle Val?’

‘Ah yes, dear old Uncle Val. Look.’ Patrick fetched a framed black and white photograph from a table by the window. ‘I found this in his bedroom after he died. It must have been taken in the early 1960s. He was around thirty-seven or thirty-eight then.’

Mel took the picture and angled it towards the light. It was of a fleshy, youngish man, half-turned to the camera, caught mid-conversation at a party. He had a wing of dark, jaw-length hair and sideburns, and was bringing a glass of wine to his full, smiling lips. The photograph was signed
Valentine Winter
in a scrawl very similar to Patrick’s own.

‘“Winter” was his stage name. He was my dad’s uncle,’ said Patrick, going to sit down once more. ‘Though there was only ten years between them. He was my great-grandma’s unexpected gift, you see – the much-spoiled late baby.’

‘He certainly doesn’t look like a farmer.’

‘Let’s say he was the black sheep.’ Patrick grinned.

Mel gave a snort of laughter. ‘Nor is Valentine a typical name for a farmer ’s son.’

‘The story goes that he was Great-gran’s last chance at having a daughter. And he was born on the fourteenth of February. The combination was irresistible. It’s hardly surprising he turned out the way he did.’

‘He looks as if he enjoyed life.’

‘Oh, he did when he was young – the original playboy, outrageously flamboyant. The family were scandalised. He started out as a TV actor, and went on to create some very successful comedy series. Made a lot of money out of it. But he developed multiple sclerosis in the late nineteen seventies, gave it all up and moved back to Cornwall. Spent the rest of his life here all by himself. Hardly saw the family or his friends. So sad.’ Patrick dropped another log on the fire, then picked up a poker, crouching down to prod the embers. Mel watched him coax the flames into new life.

‘But he chose to leave the place to you,’, eyebrows raiseder of she pointed out. ‘He must have been fond of you.’

Patrick rose and turned to look at her, the poker still in his hand, the other arm resting on the mantelpiece in a proprietorial manner, as though he belonged.

‘I was always a favourite of his. We understood one another at some level, had the same sense of humour. He could be difficult, bloody-minded, but to me he was always good company. He liked a gossip, and I enjoyed listening to his stories. He didn’t become incapacitated with MS until the last few years. I would drive over whenever I was home and we would look through his scrapbooks and he would talk about the old days. I can show you newscuttings of him with famous people – Barbara Windsor, Joe Orton, even the Beatles. He missed that world, but he hated being ill, losing his looks, growing old. I think he felt ashamed.’