The Memory Garden (15 page)

Before long she came to a large cairn, a pile of boulders raised high above the rocky promontory that jutted out into the ocean below. The disturbing feeling came that she had seen it before – of course she had, in paintings. She peered over. To one side a faint path zig-zagged down to rocks now half-covered by the tide.

She sat for a moment in the shelter of the boulders, gazing out across the sea, her eyes instinctively searching for some detail, some solid object on the restless, shimmering surface. How many an anxious woman had waited here over the centuries, watching for the fishing boat or the merchant ship that carried her loved one home, hope failing as the hours passed. She closed her eyes. Or what must it be like up here in a storm, watching a ship being sucked helplessly towards the rocks below, unable to help the screaming, struggling sailors? She shivered and opened her eyes once more, glad of the warmth of the sun on the rocks and the present calm of the shimmering water below.

A yapping noise startled her. Someone called, ‘Hello!’

She swung round to see Matt standing below on the cliff path. An elderly white wire-haired terrier puffed up to snuffle at her feet.

‘Hi, Mel. Sorry about him. Stinker – leave,’ he said sternly, climbing the slope and grabbing the dog’s collar.

‘Oh don’t worry, I don’t mind dogs,’ she said. ‘Is he really called Stinker?’

‘It’s Tinker, really, but you don’t want to be in a closed room with him for long after he’s been at the beer. He belongs to my mum, but she doesn’t have time to walk him. Getting a bit tubby in your old age, aren’t you, Stinker, old boy?’

‘Wonderful up here, isn’t it?’ She turned to look back at the sea.

‘Wait till you see it with lightning flashing through the sky. It’s breathtaking.’

Mel shivered, imagining again the watchers in the storm.

‘Which way are you going?’ Matt asked, casual.

‘Oh, I don’t know, just back to the cove, I suppose. Home.’

‘Why don’t you come with me, try a different route.’ He gestured behind him across the thicket-covered cliff. ‘Through the field there’s a path goes past Mum’s hotel and, if you want a bit of a walk, on up to the Merry Maidens.’

‘The Merry Maidens?’

‘You haven’t seen the Maidens? You should. But come and have some coffee at the hotel first. Mum would love to say hi. She’s always interested to hear what’s going on at Merryn.’

‘We’ve only just met, you and I,’ Mel said, her eyes sparkling, ‘and you’re already introducing me to your mother. Maybe I ought to question your motives, young man!’

Matt smiled uncertainly, and she wondered if she had struck the wrong note. She followed him up the cliff path and inland through the bracken. Tinker lolloped fatly ahead, stopping to bark occasionally at gorse bushes.

‘Why does your mother want to meet me?’ she asked Matt, who had waited for her to catch up.

‘I said, didn’t I? Because of the house – Merryn Hall. She’s always been fascinated by it.’

‘Why in particular? Though I agree, it is fascinating.’

‘Some family reason. Great-great-aunty someone or other used to live there, I think.’ He shrugged. ‘Mum’s gran was one of eight so I get easily confused. You’ll have to ask her.’

‘Matt will fetch us some coffee, if you wouldn’t mind, Matt, my dear. I’ll come and join you both, but I must have a quick word with Chef about tonight’s fish.’

Matt’s mother was in her fifties and as stout as her dog. She had serene dark eyes and her son’s black hair, with hardly a trace of grey, though hers was curly where his was straight. Matt’s delicate bone structure and mercurial movements must have come from some other part of the family, Mel decided. In the proprietorial way she stood in the hotel lounge, hands on hips, and the way she measured every word she spoke, Carrie Price seemed as solid as Cornish granite.

‘Back in a moment.’ Matt twisted away from his mother who was ruffling his hair. He vanished through a door behind the bar. Carrie walked back into the hall like a sailor on a swaying deck.

Mel settled into her comfortable fireside chair and looked around. The hotel was designed like an Edwardian country house, the panelled walls hung with oil paintings of cherubic children and gracious behatted ladies cradling roses. The lights were Moroccan-style lanterns, and two Knole sofas were festooned with embroidered cushions. Old-fashioned genteel comfort.

‘Matt tells me you’re staying at Merryn,’ said Carrie, returning and lowering herself with a little, ‘Oof,’ into an armchair opposite Mel. She had a soft country accent, burring her r’s, unlike her son, who appeared to have exchanged his somewhere along the way for ubiquitous Thames estuary.

‘Yes. I’ve been here a week now. Three more to go.’ And she told Carrie a little about her research.

‘I used to see Lamorna Birch’s daughter about when I was young,’ said Carrie. ‘And Cecily Carey. I remember her, too.’

‘Matt said you had a connection with the family, or the house anyway.’

‘Yes. My mother’s mother had a sister older than her, worked there as a maid. Way back, we’re talking about, before the First War. Before she married. Great-aunt Jenna’s long dead now, of course, but I remember her talking about the parties they had. Lovely affairs, she said, with lights and music and fireworks. In those beautiful gardens.’

‘The gardens must have been wonderful once. What did she say about them?’

‘Oh, I don’t really remember, except there was a cave – a grotto, she called it. Full of candles, it was, hundreds of them, like Christmas.’

‘Lovely. Have you always lived round here, Carrie?’

There was a break in the conversation as Matt emerged from the bar with a tray, and poured them all coffee with hot frothy milk.

Carrie adjusted her cushion and nestled more comfortably into her chair. ‘Phew. What a morning. It’s nice to be waited on for a change. Yes, to answer your question, my dear, I was born up the valley in Paul village. Matt’s father inherited the hotel from his own parents and we’ve been here ever since we married, though Matt’s dad passed on five years ago.’

‘I was born in the Honeymoon Suite, as Mum never tires of telling me,’ Matt put in, rolling his eyes.

‘It was a quiet time of year and I’d always loved that room,’ explained Carrie. ‘Anyway, I heard Mr Winterton had got Merryn, but I haven’t ever met him. Do you know what he’s planning to do with the place? It’s terrible it’s so rundown, such a lovely house.’

‘I’ve only just met him, as a matter of fact. But I believe he wants to live there himself.’ A thought struck Mel. ‘Did your great-aunt ever talk about an artist connected to the house back before the wars? Someone with the initials P.T.?’

‘P.T.? No, that doesn’t mean anything to me. Aunt Jenna used to talk about the family. There were Mr and Mrs Carey and two daughters. Then there was some relation, a young man – the girls’ cousin, I reckon – lived there for a bit, too. But he blotted his copybook somehow. Got sent away.’

‘That’s intriguing, Mum,’ said Matt. ‘What did he do? Catch Aunt Jenna behind the rose-bushes or steal the teaspoons?’ He twinkled wickedly at Mel, who smiled back.

‘No, no, I’m sure it was nothing like that.’

‘I suppose we’ll never know,’ said Matt. ‘Too long ago and everyone dead.’

‘Norah’s still alive – Jenna’s daughter. Not that I see her much. Lives up near Truro. Ah, that was lovely,’ said Carrie, putting down her empty cup. ‘It’s nice to see you, my dear, and I hope you’ll call in again, but I’d better get back to work. We’re full this weekend. Matt, can you stay and wait at dinner?’

‘Sure, Mum, but I won’t stay over. I’m on early shift at the shop in the morning.’

‘I’m always telling him,’ Carrie confided to Mel, ‘he ought to live here. I really need his help, and then, when I retire, this place can be his.’

Behind his mother, unseen by her, Matt grimaced. One would always be second string working for Carrie, Mel imagined.

‘I ought to be getting back myself,’ she said, trying not to laugh. ‘Thanks ever so much, Carrie.’

She walked with Matt out towards the front door and stopped in surprise. A familiar figure now stood behind the reception desk.

‘Irina! I didn’t know you worked in
this
hotel.’ The woman looked tired and her eyes seemed rimmed with red.

Irina looked from Mel to Matt, who was lurking behind, waiting to say goodbye. ‘And I didn’t know you knew Matt,’ she said. ‘I’ve worked here some months. Carrie is kind and allows me to come when I can.’

‘I’ve been meaning to ring,’ said Mel, ‘to see if you wanted to meet up for lunch one day.’

‘I’d love to, but I can’t this week, I said I’d be here. How about the evenings? Maybe you would like to come to supper at my house. Thursday or Friday?’

‘Thursday would be good,’ said Mel. ‘Thank you.’

As she hurried down the steep path to the road she thought about Irina and about the maid, Jenna, and secrets locked in the past. Then she remembered how she had intended to walk on to the Merry Maidens, whatever they were. That would have to be for another day now.

Tuesday was the day Mel had arranged to visit the Cornwall Records Office outside Truro. As she was locking up the cottage, she heard a vehicle bumping down the track, its gears screaming. A small open truck rounded the corner and stuttered to a halt. The man who climbed out of the cab looked as ancient and weatherbeaten as his rusted transport, his square face so brown and wrinkled he might have been the spirit of an old gnarled tree.

‘Lovely morning,’ he said, nodding at her. He walked stiffly to the back of the van, where he lowered the tailgate and hauled out a large battered petrol lawnmower. Mel recognised him suddenly – he had been working in the front garden of one of the houses near the beginning of the village on her first morning.

‘Are you Jim?’ she asked, remembering what Patrick had said.

The man nodded and touched his cap, but he was looking past Mel to the flowerbed she had cleared. A look of concern crossed his face.

‘You’re the one doing that thur?’ he said, suddenly fixing her with watery blue eyes.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Is there something wrong?’

‘No, not wrong,’ he said uncertainly, ‘but thur’s a powerful pile of work you set yourself thur.’ His accent was very thick and Mel had to ask him to repeat himself.

She remembered Patrick saying Jim had worked here previously. ‘Did you know this place when it was a proper garden?’

The man was silent for a moment. ‘Before the soldiers come,’ he said. ‘Parking thur tents on the lawns, trampling everything down. My dad, he wur a gardener hur awhile. Sometimes I do help him.’

‘Was that the last war? What was the garden like before?’ Mel asked eagerly. ‘What do you remember about it?’

‘Well now,’ the old man said, straightening up from his task. He looked out down the garden, lost for a moment in thought. Then he turned and gestured up towards the house. ‘Up thur, see, that wur grass with a sundial. Here, whur you been digging, well that wur flowerbeds, but thur wur a big hedge to hide yur cottage. The soldiers ploughed that up to get their trucks and whatnot past.’

‘It’s all rhododendrons over there, isn’t it?’ Mel pointed over to the far side of the garden where she had buried the mouse.

‘Yus, and further down, laurels.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘There wur a rockery, too, and a kind of cave. But that had been all grown about. The gardener, he wur an old man then and thur wur just the old lady, Missus Carey, and her daughter. When the soldiers took the place they do go to live with the other daughter up Fowey way.’

‘Wasn’t there a pond, with a statue?’

‘Ay, its head fallen off – down thur, see, where thur’s all the trees. Thur was what the old lady called the ravine. Wild as Bedlam. Good place for hiding, though, if you’re a young tacker like I are then. And the gardens at the front, too. A ruddy jungle.’

He sighed and be mower once more as if the memory weighed heavy. Then, one hand on the ripcord, he looked up and said, ‘If you want my advice, you don’t go digging and disturbing. She’s still hereabouts, see. She watches you.’ He shook his head and muttered. A twist of a lever and a tug of the ripcord and the mower leaped into noisy life. ‘Better get on now, my dear,’ he shouted.

‘What did you say?’ shouted Mel. ‘Seen who?
What?
’

But he was engrossed in his task. Mel looked round the garden again, trying to picture it as the old man had described. It was frustrating. She would have to speak to him again. Then she and Patrick could perhaps draw up a plan of how the garden used to be. But what did he mean by, ‘She’s still hereabouts’? Another mystery to join the others.

‘The Careys,’ said the young woman in the Records Office, once she had checked Mel’s registration credentials. ‘Yes, we do have a collection from Merryn Hall. If you’d like to look through the catalogue here . . .’

Over a hundred documents were listed, relating to the history of the Hall since it was built in the early nineteenth century. A large number, it seemed, were property agreements and accounts related to the farm estates. What sounded more relevant was a selection of photographs of the house and gardens and of the occupants. Mel made a note of these, together with the references for the tithe map of 1891 and an Ordnance Survey map of the estate dated 1909. There were also listed several ledgers of household accounts covering the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After a moment’s hesitation, she added the ones that covered 1900 to 1910 to the request for material for her own research, the diaries of a female Newlyn artist from the period.

While she was waiting for the first batch of material to arrive, she had a sudden thought. Perhaps the information she was looking for about P.T. might be found in the 1901 Census. She found a computer station free and called up the site.

There were eleven names for Merryn Hall. The family consisted of Stephen Carey, the head of the household, aged thirty-nine, his wife Emily, thirty-one, and their two daughters Elizabeth, five, and Cecily, three. The staff included a cook, Dorothy Roberts, an unmarried governess by the name of Susanna James, a housemaid, a kitchenmaid, a butler, the Head Gardener, John Boase, and a coachman-cum-groom. There was no one with the initials P.T., no Jenna and no sign of Master Charles, whom the Head Gardener had mentioned in his logbook, or of Jago, come to think of that, whoever Jago was. Mel sighed with frustration. The next census date was 1911 and she knew the information from that wouldn’t be in the public domain until 2011, an arrangement designed to protect respondents’ privacy.