‘Live in it. Sell it. Burn it to the godforsaken ground for all I care.’
My mother-in-law is the type of woman who chills the air when she enters a room. God knows what it must have been like having her as a mother. Thankfully she refuses to see me. On our first meeting, over tea served from a paper-thin china teapot decorated with gold patterning, she smiled and said lightly, ‘I would have expected Nathan to choose someone quite different. More bookish. Brighter. With a degree in a modern language, perhaps, or the history of art. Still,’ she went on, sipping her tea, ‘one can never know what happens behind a closed bedroom door. I am sure you are excellent at what you do. It’s just a shame my son wasn’t more careful. Shotgun weddings lack class.’
On the rare occasions Nathan needs to see her, he makes the journey to London alone, but never stays more than an hour or two. Serves her right. She’s a stuck-up cow. The only thing I wish is she’d taken her husband’s ghost with her. He’s there wherever I go in the house. As I walk from room to room I can feel him watching me, his face blown apart, an unidentifiable mush leering at me from every corner. I pleaded with Nathan to sell up, but he wouldn’t hear of it. What man wants to live in the house where his father committed suicide?
It’s not all bad. The inside of the house might give me the shivers but I adore the garden. The plot is enclosed by a drystone wall that plays host to an array of colourful flowers between May and October. Beyond the boundary we’re surrounded by farmland and in the summer months, when the cows are on the pasture, I lean on the wall and watch them, content and languid as they graze, flicking their tails at the flies which irritate their gentle eyes. The air hangs with their scent, but occasionally, if I’m lucky, an onshore breeze will bring up the smell of the sea and with it the heady memories of my childhood.
There’s a substantial lawn which takes over two hours to mow. I do it on a Friday because Nathan likes it nice for the weekend. Huge flowerbeds brim over with rhododendrons, camellias, azaleas and agapanthus, and in the far corner is a regimented vegetable patch, put in by Nathan and covered over with netting to keep off the birds. He restored the Victorian greenhouse a number of years ago and now spends his time nurturing his tomatoes and cucumbers, red peppers and courgettes, protecting them from thieving rodents and brushing their skins clean of greenfly and dust. He digs powdered ox blood into the compost and repots the delicate seedlings, handling each one as if made of glass.
Mum and Dad made their first trip to the house soon after we arrived back from our honeymoon in the Dordogne. Mum had dressed Dad in a tie I didn’t know he owned which he apparently kept for funerals and the like. The two of them sat on the edge of the sofa, hands clasped in their laps, spines starched rigid, shifting in their seats like fidgeting children in church. Mum cleared her throat constantly, which made me want to scream, whilst Dad tapped out some sort of SOS in Morse code with his freshly polished shoe, knowing full well the funeral tie was fooling nobody. Despite their discomfort a mantle of pride hung over them both. At one point Mum lost control and a beaming smile erupted on her face as she nudged Dad’s knee and exclaimed in her broad Cornish accent, ‘Oh, Harry, can you believe it? Our melder, lady of the manor!’
I remember being dazed and confused, as if waking from an operation, anaesthesia clogging my veins. Where the hell was I? How on earth had I got there? Stop it, I wanted to shriek at them. Stop being so impressed. You’ve nothing to be impressed by. It was as if I were no longer their daughter, but had emerged altered from a cocoon, an unrecognisable stranger sitting opposite them.
A few weeks later I’d mentioned this to Mum. Her smile, warm and kind, made my heart ache. ‘That’s normal, melder.’ Her voice was silky with love. ‘You are a different person now. You’re Mrs Nathan Cardew.’ Then she glanced at my stomach, which had begun to swell against the cotton of my skirt refusing to stay concealed any longer. ‘And you’ve got the babi to think about now.’
After our walk, I change quickly, drag a brush through my hair, and kiss Cass before walking briskly down to wait for the bus. The bus stop is no more sophisticated than a laminated timetable nailed to a telegraph pole, riddled with woodworm, on the overgrown verge. It’s about a quarter of a mile from the house. I always leave plenty of time to walk down and, as usual, am ten minutes early. I lean back against the telegraph pole and tip my face into the warmth of the sun. For a moment I allow my mind to drift to where it’s desperate to be.
With you.
We are on the beach at Godrevy. The sky is the colour of cornflowers, the wind cold and fresh, the mid-October sunshine is bright. Your hand is warm and holds mine tightly as if you’re worried I might blow away. I’m talking too much. About everything and nothing. Suddenly self-conscious, I stop myself and look up at you.
You smile. Carry on, you say.
I’m not boring you?
Boring me? You laugh and it sounds like music. How could you ever bore me?
It’s low tide. The beach is deserted but for a man sweeping a metal detector like a metronome over the ribbed sand. I can smell the mussel-cloaked rocks. The sea. Drying seaweed. You unpack the picnic you made. Thin squares of electric pink ham on sliced white, spread with margarine.
Mum would call you a criminal for not using butter.
Your sheepish smile melts my heart. Your body is hard and muscular. Not an ounce of fat. The feel of it excites me as I lean against you.
I’m sorry, you say.
It’s delicious, I whisper. Best sandwich I ever tasted.
We talk. Drink Fosters. Smoke roll-ups and kiss. We don’t notice the tide coming in until the sea skims our toes. We’re trapped. We laugh. Jump up. Hold hands and wade through the icy water to reach the path. I stumble, giddy from the lager and kissing, and you catch my elbow.
Saved you, you say.
I miss you.
I had no idea how important these moments would become. At the time it was just a picnic on the beach. With a boy I was falling in love with. Something fun to do at the weekend. We had no idea how fleeting our happiness would be. We took love for granted. We imagined we’d always be free. But now the memory of that picnic on Godrevy is a scrap of precious fabric I cling to like a child with their blanket, comforting and safe, ragged with overuse. I remember the heat of him. I can taste the cigarettes on his breath. As I let his lips linger on mine, my pulse quickens. I recall the smell of him. The feel of his skin against mine. The sound of his voice as he whispered in my ear.
It only takes a moment for grief to take over. My stomach pitches with loss and the image of him dissolves, leaving the space where he was desolate and empty. Regret seeps into every nook of me.
If only I could replay that night. Do things differently. Alter our course.
If only.
I hear the bus wending its way along the lane and push myself off the telegraph pole. It draws to a halt and the door opens with a hydraulic sigh. The driver, who’s been driving this route for years, greets me like a friend. I count my fare out. I no longer apologise for the coppers. He waits patiently as I drop them into the dish and thanks me when I’m done.
I don’t know his name and the only words we’ve exchanged are the occasional comment on the weather and a ‘Happy Christmas’ or ‘Happy New Year’ when seasonally appropriate. I always sit close enough to watch his face in the rearview mirror. He wears his happiness like a medal of honour. Right there, on show, unashamedly proud of it. He is one of those people who whistles a tune. Sometimes he’ll spontaneously smile and when he does, it makes me glow as I imagine he’s recalling something funny or touching. Perhaps he’s thinking of his wife and children clamouring around him when he gets home from shuttling backwards and forwards between Land’s End and Penzance. I imagine he has a simple life. An allotment. A comfortable, threadbare armchair he’ll never throw out. I find imagining this man in a life of contentment comforting. My Tuesday bus journey is something I look forward to. On the rare Tuesdays when there’s an unknown at the wheel, I can become inexplicably agitated, as if my world has tipped and I’m sliding towards the edge.