I feel for a light switch. There is no light switch. I feel the walls of my self-control begin to crumble.
Pull yourself together, Becky, the voice of my mother chides me gently.
Sitting in the dark on the cold Bakelite seat, watched by myriad arachnid eyes, I curse my impulsiveness. It appears I have travelled not just three hundred miles, but three hundred years back in time.
3
THE NEXT MORNING I ROLL OFF THE BED IN THE LEAST mildewy of the upstairs rooms, pad to the window and pull back the heavy curtains, expecting to look out into a grey landscape and lashing rain. Instead, I feel the sun on my face, like a benediction. Sea and sky fuse at the distant horizon. Spangles of light glitter like spilled treasure, undulating with the rolling of the waves. Far out, a single crabber ploughs across the bay, as squat as a child’s toy. To the east, St Michael’s Mount, misty as legend, a barely sketched Disney castle rising out of the sea.
This is the Cornwall I have always imagined. The sense of wildness and isolation, of fairy tale and possibility. There is a luminous quality to the air as if everything has been renewed overnight. No smell of diesel fumes or frying onions from the kebab shop, no rumble of buses or aeroplanes. No shouting neighbours or wailing children, no booming bass from the flat upstairs. Nothing but the cry of a solitary seagull perched on the hedge in the lane below.
When it lifts off into the blue air I see what appears to be the top of a gate, an indentation in the hedge below the house. I wonder what it opens onto?
Filled with sudden energy, I pull on jeans and trainers to go with the T-shirt I have slept in and run downstairs. Even the outhouse holds no horrors for me. I leave the door ajar and sit there with sunlight angling across my thighs, looking out at tumbles of red and orange nasturtiums, their peppery smell scenting the air. I wash my hands in the scullery, wiping my hands dry on a tea towel, and dash out of the front door, through the debris of the collapsed porch and down the steps, and across the narrow track where the taxi dropped me the previous day – and yes, there it is! Strangled by weeds and brambles, but tantalizingly present, a little wooden gate, its paint flaking charmingly.
The latch is rusty but lifts cleanly from the keeper. Great whorls of convolvulus and goosegrass wind in and out of the strakes. I pull them away by the handful and run my hand over the carved top bar wonderingly. Beyond it, steep earth steps, just visible between overgrown vegetation, lead down to the sea.
I slip through the gate and turn to click it shut, and as I do my eye is caught by a series of oblique squares – diamonds one inside another, like a string of eyes – that have been cut all the way down the open side, giving the plain back a rich artisan touch. The house has no indoor bathroom, indeed no luxuries at all, yet someone has lavished attention on a little rustic sea gate! It is a delightful incongruity.
The pitch of the path is fearsome, but I odge down on my haunches, brushing nettles aside with my feet as I go, steadying myself by catching hold of exposed twists of hawthorn roots, and finding them polished as if from long use as handles. I think about the people who have used this path and these roots before me – Olivia as a child, her parents, their parents. And my mother. For among the other papers I found near Mum’s armchair were other letters from her cousin, reminiscing about Mum’s childhood holidays in Cornwall, how she had stayed here at Chynalls with Olivia and my grandparents. How Mum’s father was related to Olivia’s mother in some way: a branch of the family that lost contact, if Mum and I are the only ones left to whom the old lady can turn. I can imagine women bundling up their skirts, crabbing down just as I am, picnic baskets balanced in their laps, while their children scramble towards the sea, as nimble as monkeys. As I touch the rocks and roots, I imagine my mother touching them as she must have as a child, and a lovely arc of connection runs through me like electricity.
At last the vegetation gives way to bare cliff and I can see a tiny cove embraced by two arms of rock beyond which the surf boils and bashes. A moment later I am down on the pebbles, looking out to where white-gold sand is buffered by wave-smoothed boulders littered with strands of bladderwrack and kelp. I breathe in the sharp, clean air, gaze out at the sparkling sea. It is as if the world is saying: time for a new start.
Taking off my trainers, I walk to the lace-edged water and am briefly shocked by the cold, then enjoy the sensation of the waves as they withdraw, sucking the sand from between my toes. A boat heads eastwards beyond the necklace of rocks, trailing a cloud of white gulls. It could be any time, and no time. I am in the moment, and life is good.
I walk up the beach to poke between the pebbles and seaweed, picking up a pretty stone or a piece of cloudy green seaglass, finding conical spiral shells of purple and pearly white; little round winkles as bold as brass and gold as gorse; blue-black mussel shells paired like dark angels’ wings, and once a tiny white cowrie, no bigger than the nail of my little finger, the curve of its delicately corrugated lips leading into rosy depths, like a secret smile.
In the rock pools translucent shrimps dart out of fissures towards curtains of green weed, chased by little blennies. Anemones as round and shiny as jellies cluster below the waterline; colonies of barnacles encrust the sides. I take a lone limpet by surprise, moving it a couple of millimetres before its great yellow foot clamps down to anchor it fast. It occurs to me that the last time I played like this – happily, purposelessly absorbed – I was a child.
At last, my stomach growls, desperate for coffee and toast. I decide to walk down into the village to buy provisions, and see if Eddie has called me back. The thought brings with it a dull pain. He has not answered my many calls, maybe has not even listened to my message, though I checked my phone all the way down on the train. I know he must be busy, finishing his pots, head down in the studio. When he works it is with total focus. I love to watch Eddie work: his skill and artistry make my heart swell with pride. And when his hands caress the clay as the wheel turns I remember the way those hands have touched my body, though not always with such care. Is it possible to feel jealous of clay?
I brush the sand off my bare feet, put on my trainers and walk back towards the earth steps. And that’s when I see it: another gate made of iron bars set into the cliff at the back of the bay. I crunch up the shingle and see that behind the gate is a cave. I press my face to the rusty bars, but the darkness beyond is forbidding. It must go right under the road. Maybe even under the house. Perhaps there’s a secret entrance from the cellar? All manner of fantasies fill the darkness beyond: smugglers and pirates, excise men and revolutionaries. Echoes of Moonfleet, Jamaica Inn and Poldark.
I expect the gate’s latch to be fused by rust but it rises smoothly and I step into the cave. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I make out rock walls a metre or so apart, a sandy floor. Using my hands to guide me, I move inside. The chill strikes through to my bones.
Further in there is a pinch point, then the cave widens again. It’s dark this far in, but I can feel barnacles to waist height so the sea must come in this far. I will just go a little further, I tell myself, see if the cave comes to a natural end. The cave begins to slant uphill. I pass my hands up and down the rock walls as I go and soon come to a point where I find no barnacles. Well, at least I won’t drown, I think, only half amused. I shuffle carefully, but rock strikes my shin. Reaching down, I find a void above it, then more rock. Steps? I stand up on the first step, find the level of the second with my hand and the riser of the third. Reaching overhead to make sure the roof of the cave won’t brain me, I move up again, and again. The steps seem to go up for ever. I think about turning back.