‘Of course not. It was the man French making a pass at Lucille.’
‘Yes … Yes.’ Peter switched on the engine and started the car. He backed carefully out of the car park and headed north. ‘I have to go some way tonight, so I might as well take you farther into town.’
‘Thanks.’
‘D’you know,’ he said after a minute or two, when the traffic had eased off, ‘I’ve always thought you were my nearest rival for Lucille.’
‘Good Lord. What gave you that idea?’
‘Well, I don’t know … Isn’t it true?’
‘I know when I’m out of the running,’ I said. ‘ Lucille fell for you in a big way at the first meeting, and I’ve never been in the hunt since.’
He laughed shortly. ‘But she still thinks I’m a liar and a thief, eh?’
‘She doesn’t want to, my dear man. She’s still madly in love with you, but if you go stalking off in a tizzy without making any attempt to justify yourself, what on earth can she think? In fact you seemed almost to welcome the thing as a trial by faith.’
He stopped with a jerk at traffic lights, and the man behind gave a complaining toot. ‘D’you think it’s my fault, then? Good grief, if you’re in love with someone you don’t believe them cheats and pickpockets at the drop of a hat! What chance is there of making a go of marriage if that’s the only way you can begin –’
‘Oh, I know, I know. But this is a tough age. I understand exactly how you feel, but that doesn’t mean I approve of your sitting back with the sulks and doing nothing to prove your point. Try to think how impossible your story looks from their point of view. Haven’t you got some evidence of ownership of this ear-ring? Didn’t your aunt have some record of it? When did she buy it and where? Have you been through all her things?’
‘No, of course not. It’s not a job I like, prying into some dead old lady’s private life. I never knew her well, Aunt Maud. She was one of those stiff-backed old girls who never let themselves down. But there’s a mountain of stuff …’
‘I know what it’s like. But have a shot. You don’t want to lose a valuable trinket and a valuable woman as well.’
As we accelerated away I saw his face had gone clouded and obstinate again. ‘They’re doubting the trinket; I’m doubting – well … I was ordered out of their house like a common sneak thief. Isn’t it up to them to do the next bit of thinking?’
I sighed. ‘ It seems to me nobody thinks in this. Except perhaps me. But I can’t bring you together. I can’t get you near enough even to bang your heads.’
He let me out at the next tube station.
I saw nothing of any of them for a couple of weeks. I was working hard, and I was putting on the canvas something I wanted to put there. It was exciting and absorbing – one of the fairly rare moments in an artist’s life when there is a fusion between ambition and attainment. Rare, but it makes the rest worthwhile.
Then, just after the impulse had worked itself out, I got a card from Bob Loveridge asking me to go up and see him without delay. When I arrived, boy, they were in a fine state. A letter had come by the morning post. In it was a typewritten message, unheaded and unsigned. It read:
‘It was not the thief’s intention that someone else should be accused of the theft. Enclosed is a pawn-ticket. By taking this to the address given, your ear-ring may, on payment of £25, be redeemed. In future, when people offer to turn out their pockets, ask them also to take off their shoes.’
Over the rest, to coin a phrase, it would be kinder to draw a veil.
I went with Bob Loveridge to this shop in Dulwich, and there the ear-ring certainly was, and Bob coughed up £25, much to the disappointment of the pawnbroker, a Cockney with a fat tight little face that cracked every now and then into a smile that looked as if it was painful. The young man who pawned it, he said, was about seventeen or eighteen and was dressed like a messenger. He would never conceivably recognize him again. The anxiety went out of his smile when we stopped asking questions, but the disappointment remained.
The ear-ring was a bit bent, but otherwise sound enough. The odd thing was that when we got it home and compared it with Peter’s ear-ring they were not an exact match, there being slight differences in the turning of the silver. Whether it was in fact the ear-ring that Pietro the Second carried off to war, or whether it was another one made by the same bright Neapolitan silversmith to sell the same story over again, we never knew. The pearl was a good one and the silver was old. Lucille, after getting her ears pierced, wore them both at her wedding.
Not that she came to that easily. Having let myself in for the dreary job of go-between I carried on, but before the end I began to feel like a U.N. conciliation officer in a border dispute.
Of course Bob Loveridge combined the handsome apologies he made to Peter with an absolute burning determination to smoke out the real thief. The fact that he’d been led to make such a bloomer was an extra goad.
From time to time he could be seen staring broodingly at Violet’s bent back when she came into the room. But actually Nora Mayhew seemed the least unlikely suspect, since she it was who had made the most fuss and insisted on a superficial search being made. We knew she had been in antiques, and Bob dug out the fact that she had once been heavily fined in Italy for attempting to smuggle an old master out of the country without a permit. Captain French’s association with her was cleared up when we found that Mrs Mayhew, who had been a Miss Cohen, was at school in Switzerland with Humphrey French’s mother, who had been a Miss Blomberg, and that they frequently still ski-ed together. This sinister revelation did not help us at all. Nor particularly did the discovery that Humphrey French was heavily in debt – it seemed likely enough in a young soldier who could still afford to cling to old-fashioned habits.
Eventually we gave it up, but the problem still rankled. One of Bob’s favourite questions was why the person who sent it to the pawnbroker had not asked much more than £25 for it, since, if it was someone in the room, or even Violet the maid, they must all have heard Nora Mayhew’s estimate of its value. It didn’t appear to occur to him that perhaps the thief urgently wanted some fairly small sum of money for a limited period and might have pawned the jewel intending later to redeem it and return it in any case. I’ve often wondered how Robert would take such a suggestion.
Anyway my friend in Paris hadn’t to wait for the rent of the studio.
Cotty’s Cove
It was in the seventies of last century that it began, when she lived with her father in the manor of Sawle. It was a grey, quiet time in Cornwall, for the mining slump had taken hold and miners were leaving the country by every ship. Quietness and an uneasy peace were creeping over the scarred countryside, though here and there a chimney still smoked and an engine discordantly clanged.
Her name was Lavinia Cotty and their house was a large one, a thick-set, square-shouldered, low-lying house built of weathered yellow stone and set in a green sandy fold of the hills quite close to the sea. From it you could see the grey cottages of the village climbing the hill-side a mile away.
Mr Cotty had been a widower for twenty years and Miss Cotty a spinster for thirty-five. Great-grandfather Cotty, a tough old man, had built the house and started the family off in roaring good style in the days when Napoleon was still an ambitious schoolboy, but he would not have been pleased now at the sight of either his house or his grandson. One hadn’t the money to maintain the other, and they had reached old age together and would presently tumble down and be decently forgotten.
Miss Cotty was prim and quiet and tall. She had never been good-looking and so had changed very little, there being no special bloom to fade. But she was neat and ladylike and graceful, with a certain restrained charm. She kept the house in some sort of order with one maid; she did a little genteel weeding in the garden, hands carefully gloved; she read poetry – chiefly Mr Tennyson and Mr Wordsworth – and, when her father wasn’t there, a little fiction; she knitted for herself and sewed for the house and h
elped the vicar and visited the poor; she read the local papers to her father, whose eyes were troubling him; and once a month she drove to Truro in the trap, with the maid to carry the larger parcels.
To look at Miss Cotty you would not have guessed at her one indulgence.
From the back door of the house it was a quarter of a mile rather difficult walking across soft, hairy sandhills to the cliff-edge and the sea and a beach of pale golden sand. Down the cliff there was a path and at the foot a cave with an arched roof like a Gothic church.
This was something Miss Cotty had never been able to resist; she came every fine day in the light weather and stayed an hour – or more if she could spare it. It had been an escape ever since her girlhood. Often she didn’t open her book but sat quiet in the sun, with the noise of the sea in her ears, and thought of everything and nothing, drowsy in the sun, and warm and happy and relaxed.
And on good days, when the sea was high enough to cut off this cove from all the others, leaving only a crescent of dry sand, she would go back into the cave and take off her clothes and slip into the bathing costume she had made and would turn quickly and plunge into the sea. And the cold rush of it would catch at her throat and she would give little crows of anguished delight. It was the best thing in the day.
Although hardly anyone ever passed even when the tide was out, she never bathed when there was any way round from the larger bays, and she never got over a half-attractive sense of doing wrong and a fear of being seen. For a few minutes each day she was a child again.
And sometimes on very hot days when the tide was very high she would creep, after putting off her things, to the mouth of the cave and stand naked for a moment just within the eye of the sun, her hands pressed to her temples, shivering with happiness like a flower in the warmth and the light.
After the bathe she would sit and comb her long silky hair until it slithered and shone. Then, very soon, it was time to braid it and pin it up and go home.
She did not bring much on these visits, for she had found a high ledge in the cave where she left the things she needed from day to day. No one took much interest in her absences. Susie was a dull girl and courting. Mr Cotty was short-sighted and gouty and thought only of his own ease. He had long since come to look on his daughter’s liking for lonely walks as a queer habit he could do nothing to check.
One day something took place that changed Miss Cotty’s life. The vicar had been to call and had stayed on and on talking of the over-grown churchyard and the failing-off in the collection, so she had not been able to go for her jaunt at the right time. It was too bad, as the weather had been rough for a week but was now broken and smiling: intense sunshine, brilliant skies and islands of cloud. She hurried down just before seven, knowing she must be back soon for supper. It was June and the days at their longest, but by now the tide would have been ebbing an hour. The sun was full on her cave.
As she reached the last slope of the path she let her weight carry her and reached the sand with a rush of feet. But she stopped there because someone was in her cave.
A man. He was lying there sunning himself, impudent and at ease. She was angry at once. For years she had been undisturbed; people just didn’t come here; it was Cotty land right to the cliff edge; everyone knew that. In this state of the tide the man must have trespassed.
She coughed. He took no notice and made no move. She walked nearer and stopped again. Something wrong. He was asleep – or unconscious – or …
His clothes were wet; round him the soft sand was still dark with it. A young man in blue drill trousers and the rags of a white shirt hanging. His feet were bare. He had a great mane of fair hair all clotted with sand, a straight nose, a young mouth. Hair grew low on each cheek but he had no beard or moustache except for a day or so’s stubble. He was breathing.
Miss Cotty took a step back. Then she turned and looked out to sea, but there was nothing there; nothing but the waves like great white cities and the sun shining on the wet sand.
A sailor? Cast off … living. She looked back at him, and his twisted attitude touched her pity. She knelt on the sand beside him and gingerly, after a close look, pulled his head up to rest on her lap.
It took strength, for he was a big, solid man. The muscles of his shoulder gleamed white through the torn shirt. His head was heavy and the yellow hair clogged and matted and dank. Like the head of a young lion. Flotsam. Something stirred in her. Poor boy … She’d heard of a wreck at Padstow, but surely that was too far. Why was she sitting here? She should run and bring help.
And then the young lion began to stir, and at once she wanted to get up and stand away primly watching. But to drop his head with a thump on the sand would not be the act of a Christian, so she stayed where she was, not sure whether to be alarmed or compassionate.
He opened his eyes. They were large and quite hazel with little flecks of a darker brown floating in them. He stared at Miss Cotty. Miss Cotty blushed. He moved his head again and passed his tongue over each lip.
‘I’m going to be sick,’ he said.
That made her feel no better, nor the event when his prediction came true; but the language was a reassurance because she had thought him a foreigner, probably a Scandinavian. And afterwards, when he was on the mend, she saw he was older than she had thought. Expression always adds age – and sometimes charm.
He spoke fair English with a burr – but not a Cornish burr – and although still very exhausted his story came out at short intervals. It was not the Padstow shipwreck but the King Lear, a fore and aft, for Bristol with grain. She had been badly damaged in the gales of the last few days and had foundered ten miles out. He had been in the water eight hours clinging to a spar, and for a good time before that had touched no food. She brought him two pieces of cake from the ledge and some home-made toffee. It was all there was. He ate the cake slowly and with care, propped up against the rock drying in the sun, while she stood a white shadow at the other side of the cave and watched him. She knew she ought to be getting back.
‘I’m grateful for your help,’ he said. ‘Really I am. Me name’s Stephen Dawe. What is yours, ma’am, if I may ask?’
Miss Cotty told him. ‘ I think,’ she said, ‘if you’re better I’ll go and tell the coastguards. They will see you are well looked after.’
‘How far is the village? Give me time and perhaps I could walk. A mile? Is it more?’
‘A little. It would be unwise to go so far without help.’
To prove her wrong he got to his feet, and at once his legs gave way. With a gasp she ran to him and helped him into a sitting position. For a few moments he lolled dizzily against her shoulder, then he shook his head like a dog and straightened his back and looked at her. She took her arm from round his shoulders and stood up – because his face had an almost frightening closeness. She had never been quite so close to a strange man before. And each time she looked at him he seemed to grow more mature. This was no ship-wrecked cabin-boy.
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Sorry to be so foolish, like.’
The next time he tried he was all right. Much taller than the tall Miss Cotty, she found. Fine broad shoulders and long flanks. There was a tattoo of a speared fish on his left forearm, and his blue trousers had bell bottoms. He was still looking at her.
‘I think,’ she said quietly, ‘the sea is far enough out for us to get round.’
‘Us? You’re very kind, ma’am. If you’d show me and aid me a little to begin you could leave me half-way.’
But the help offered, she would not qualify it. Her father would be furious, but this surely was a fair excuse. The sailor might have lain there for hours, might even have died.
They got on slowly, for he had to rest now and then, while the twilight caught them up like a slow tide. They hardly spoke, because he was too exhausted and she too shy. After a while he did without her arm.
Then, as they came to the inlet round which the village clustered he sighed faintly and sat down on the sand
and said he was done, so she went on ahead. Pink in the face and feeling conspicuous, she found the landlord of the Tavern Inn, and very soon men were carrying Stephen Dawe into the village. She hovered for a few minutes near the tap-room, but when the doctor said he could find nothing much wrong she slipped away and hurried off up the tow-path towards home.
Her father wasn’t easily softened, not even by the story she brought, and grunted and sulked through the hour before it was time to go to bed.
In her own room Miss Cotty stood for a long time at the window listening to the distant tramp of the sea. When after a while she climbed into her curtained bed it was to dream of blond Vikings and caves and wet sand and a man’s eyes upon her.
When she went down to the beach next day after lunch he was waiting for her. Her heart began to beat. He’d bought or borrowed new clothing: a blue shirt open at the throat and long blue corduroy trousers. And the two-day stubble was shaved. He bent his head a little over her hand, very polite.
‘How,’ she said, ‘– how did you know? … Did you know I should be here?’
‘Well, I didn’t quite like to call at your home. And I reckoned I had to say thank you.’
‘I – sent down this morning to ask. I heard you were better. But there’s nothing to thank me for.’
He smiled at her. ‘I like to think different. But it’s good luck us meeting like this again. Can you stay a while?’
She sat down at the mouth of the cave, not easily and gracefully as she did when alone, but primly and stiffly, like a spinster. She felt she had been a little familiar in her greeting, and she was angry with herself for still feeling embarrassed.
But he soon got over that. He had a way with him. The exposure and the exhaustion had done him no harm. Miss Cotty got that impression of his vitality. Always it would be able to throw off fatigue or depression. It bubbled. It effervesced. It affected her and fascinated her and threatened to swamp her.