He stopped as I came in through the old wooden door in the high stone wall, into the roofless, still space where the wind couldn’t reach with its fine salty spray from the sea that could burn through the delicate petals and leaves. When Mark saw what I’d brought with me, what I was carrying, he asked me, ‘Ready, then?’
‘Whenever you are.’
He tugged off his gloves, set his tools away tidily into the small corner shed, and picked up a small battered rucksack he slung on his shoulder before leading me out of the garden.
The walk to the Beacon was one of the prettier walks at Trelowarth. We went down the hill to the coast path again, through the Wild Wood as if we were going to Claire’s, but we passed by the cottage and right through the clearing and into the woods again, still on the coast path. We came out the other side close to the top of the cliffs, close enough to be able to hear the harsh rush of the waves as they broke on the black rocks and shingle beneath. Here we left the path, turning our backs to the sea as we came to the fence of a broad sloping pasture where several cows lazily stood with their heads to the grass, paying no heed to either of us as we climbed up and over the stile.
Mark helped me over, then went back to walking just in front of me, head down, his thoughts turned inward. I knew why.
He’d often brought Katrina up here, that last summer. This had been their special place, a place to get away from all the adults and us younger children, to be on their own together. I’d been too young then to be my sister’s confidante, too young for her to tell me what they’d talked about up here. I’d only known that when she’d been with Mark up at the Beacon, she had come back shining like a lamp had been switched on inside her, stepping lightly as the butterflies that danced around my feet now as my shoes brushed through the bluebells in the windblown grass.
And Mark, I knew, was walking with the memories.
I had memories of my own to keep me company. My mother, loving history as she did, had loved the romance of the Beacon, ancient relic of the days when there had been a chain of signal fires on hilltops all along the coast of Britain, standing ready to be lit in times of trouble. They had served a double purpose, calling everyone who saw them to come out and take up arms against the enemy, while at the same time swiftly sending warning word to London of approaching danger. In Elizabethan times, this beacon at Trelowarth had been used to pass the signal when the sails of the Armada were first spotted from the shore.
In those days, the Beacon would have been a sight to see – a high stone table, higher than a man, much like the Neolithic cromlechs that one still saw perched on hillsides in this area, but with a pile of kindling wood, perhaps, stacked up on top of it in readiness. My mother’s words had painted such a clear and vivid picture of it in my mind that when we’d come up here on picnics I had always felt the urge to keep a sharper watch on the horizon for a stealthy Spanish sail, and sometimes glanced from left to right along the coast to see if I could spot another beacon fire flaring in the distance.
I still felt a small tug of that same feeling now as we came to the top of the field, to the level place scattered with old weathered stones that had tumbled into a rough circle, and gave little hint of their earlier purpose, except for the stone at the centre that lay like a low table, cracked at one end.
The view from here was wide and unobstructed – I could see the whole unbroken line of coast, headland to headland, the waves beating white on the black cliffs and dark shingle beaches, and the sea deep blue today beneath a warmly glinting sun.
I set the box that held Katrina’s ashes on the table stone, and looked at Mark, who looked at me.
And then he reached into the rucksack he had carried up with him and brought out three small paper cups, the kind you find near water coolers, and a dark-green bottle. ‘We should do this right,’ he said.
‘What is that?’
‘Scrumpy. When Katrina and I came up here, we always brought a bottle with us.’
‘Scrumpy?’
‘Cider. With a kick.’ He filled a cup and set it on the wooden box, then poured two more and handed one to me, then raised his up as though to make a toast. ‘Here’s to …’ he said, then faltered. ‘Well, to hell with it,’ he finished off, and drained the cup.
I drank mine, too, and Mark poured out the third cup on the box itself before he stepped aside and gave a nod to me. ‘Go on, then.’
With uncertain hands I flipped the latch that held the box shut. ‘There was something I was going to read.’
Mark looked at me and waited.
‘From The Prophet,’ I explained. ‘Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. There’s a passage about death that Katrina always liked. She read it at our parents’ funeral.’
I had crammed the folded paper in a pocket, and I had to tug it out and spread it smooth against the blowing breeze.
‘For what is it to die,’ I read, ‘but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is it to cease breathing, but to … but to …’ And there my voice trailed off and would not carry on, and Mark reached over for the page and gently took it from my hand, and went on with the reading in his steady voice. I turned my face towards the sea and let my eyes be dazzled by the brightness of the water while Mark finished off the passage and came down to the last lines:
‘And when you have reached the mountaintop, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.’
It seemed the perfect time, then, so I tipped the box and let the ashes spill.
Beside me, very quietly, Mark told them, ‘Go and dance, now.’
And they caught the wind and did just that, and for that fleeting instant there were three of us again upon the wide and sunlit hill, before the ashes gathered on an upward swirl of breeze that blew them westward, out across the blue and endless sparkle of the sea.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘Do you know,’ I said to Mark, ‘I think I’m getting drunk.’
We were still sitting on the cool ground at the summit of the hill with all the old stones of the Beacon tumbled round us, giving us some shelter from the strengthened wind that blew across the waving grass and wildflowers.
I looked down at my paper cup. ‘What do you call this stuff again?’
‘Scrumpy.’
‘Scrumpy.’ I’d have to remember that name, and avoid it in future, I thought. It came on at first like common apple cider, and then suddenly you realised you were ‘Definitely getting drunk,’ I said. ‘You have the rest.’
Without a word he poured the bottle’s dregs into his own cup and sat back and leant his elbows on the table rock, and looked as I was looking down the hillside to the sea. Like me, he seemed to be in no great hurry to go anywhere.
As if he’d read my thoughts, he asked, ‘How long till you have to go back?’
‘I don’t, actually.’ Far over the water the tiny white speck of a gull wheeled and languidly dipped and I followed its flight with my faintly blurred gaze. ‘I don’t have a job or apartment, I gave them both up. It’s not home for me there any more, not since …’ Letting the words trail off, I gave a shrug. ‘When Bill gave me those ashes, I had to think hard, really think, about where I should scatter them. Where she belonged. And it got me to thinking where I belonged, now that she’s gone. I have friends in LA, but not real friends, you know? Not the kind you can really depend on. And where I was living … well, it was all right, but it just wasn’t … just wasn’t …’
‘Home?’
‘No.’ It was comforting to know he understood. ‘I thought I might look round here for a property to rent. A little cottage, maybe.’
‘Everything around here will be full up for the summer,’ was his guess. Then when he saw my disappointment he went on, ‘But come the autumn you could have your pick of properties, and meantime you can stay right where you are, with us.’
‘Oh, Mark, I couldn’t. That would be imposing.’
‘Why? We have the room,
’ he pointed out. ‘You always used to come and stay the summer.’
His tone had taken on a stubborn edge that I recalled enough to know I wouldn’t win the argument, and so I simply told him, ‘Well, you’d have to let me pay you, then.’
‘The hell I would.’
‘I have the money, Mark. I have more money than I need. I can’t just sit here like a sponge and let you feed me and take care of me when …’ Just in time I caught myself, remembering I wasn’t meant to know about Trelowarth being in financial difficulty.
Mark glanced sideways. ‘When what?’
‘Nothing.’
Silence dropped between us like a stone. I felt his gaze grow keener. ‘What has Susan told you?’
‘Nothing.’
I had never been much good at lying and I knew it, but he didn’t press the point, and after studying my face a moment longer he looked back towards the sea again and told me, ‘Friends don’t pay.’
There was no way of getting round that, so I took a different tack. ‘Then let me pay in kind.’ I paused a moment, trying through the growing haze of drink to organise my argument, both because I had only just thought of it and because all of a sudden it struck me as something that truly appealed to me, something I’d even enjoy. ‘I could help Susan with her tea room project, help her get it off the ground.’
‘Oh, right. That’s all I need.’
‘You’ve seen her plans?’
‘You think I’ve had a choice?’
I said, ‘I like them.’
‘Do you?’
It was more a comment, really, than a question, but I answered, ‘Yes. She’s seems to have it all in hand, she’s thought it through.’
‘I don’t doubt that.’ His mouth curved, briefly. ‘She gets that from our mother. My dad was the one who had all the ideas, but Mum was the person who saw things got done.’
He’d remember his mother, of course. He’d been eleven when she died, whereas Susan had still been a baby and I’d just started nursery school. My earliest memories went no further back than his stepmother, Claire, and Claire had always been so wonderful I’d never given much thought to the woman who’d preceded her.
‘My dad was rudderless when Mum died. It’s a good thing he met Claire, she really set him on his course again.’ Mark’s eyes crinkled faintly with fondness. ‘She’s a different sort of woman than my mum was, though, is Claire.’
‘Well, she’s an artist.’
‘That she is. So was your sister,’ he informed me. ‘Even back when we were young, before she ever started acting, she still had that spirit in her, same as Claire. They need the space to spread their wings. Like butterflies.’ He squinted at the brightness of the sea as he looked westward, where the restless wind had blown Katrina’s ashes. ‘Ever try to hold a butterfly? It can’t be done. You damage them,’ he said. ‘As gentle as you try to be, you take the powder from their wings and they won’t ever fly the same. It’s kinder just to let them go.’
I looked at him, and asked because I’d always wondered, ‘Is that why you stopped writing to Katrina?’
‘She had bigger wings than most,’ he said. ‘She needed room to use them, and she couldn’t do that here, now, could she? Anyway, it worked out for the best. She found her husband. They seemed happy.’
‘Yes, they were.’
‘Then that’s all right.’
We fell to silence once again, and might have gone on sitting there all afternoon if overhead the clouds had not begun to thicken and to threaten rain.
Mark stood first, more steady on his feet than me, and reached a hand to help me up. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’d best head back.’
He carried the now-empty box for me, walking a few steps ahead down the field. Getting over the stile in the pasture fence took a bit more concentration this time, I couldn’t get my legs and hands to coordinate in quite the same way as before and I nearly flipped headfirst down into the dirt, but luckily Mark didn’t see that. Recovering my balance, I followed him carefully into the woods.
It was cool in here, quiet with ferns and the thick press of trees, and all the little flowers that I hadn’t noticed coming up, but that I noticed now since I was keeping such a close watch on my feet and where they landed. There were little white wildflowers close by the edge of the path, and I wanted to ask Mark their name, but I suspected that he’d just come back with something long and Latin, like he always used to do. Show Mark something as lovely as a tiny Star-of-Bethlehem, and he would take one look at it and without blinking say it was an Ornithogalum umbellatum. No, it had been my mother who had given me the names of all the grasses and the flowers I had brought back from my afternoon adventures in the woods and fields. I still remembered some of the old names she’d taught me – tailor’s needles, feather-bow, penny-cake and lady’s smock.
Lady’s smock used to be easy to find at this time of the year. I was looking for some when we came to the clearing where Claire’s cottage sat with its windows wide open and welcoming. We hadn’t bothered stopping in to see her when we’d come through here the first time, on our way up to the Beacon, because what we had gone up there to do had been a private sort of pilgrimage for both of us. But it would never do to pass Claire’s cottage twice and not stop long enough to say hello.
Mark went to knock, but got no answer.
‘She’s gone out,’ I guessed.
‘Most likely.’ Still, he took his own keys out and stepped inside and called out from the entryway, then had a quick look round to reassure himself she wasn’t lying ill or injured somewhere. ‘Gone off sketching something, probably,’ he gave his final verdict as he reappeared. ‘She does it all the time.’ Glancing up at the sky he said, ‘I ought to get her windows shut before this rain starts. You go on, I’ll catch you up. No need for us both to get soaked.’
The first splat of a raindrop on my shoulder helped convince me.
I moved quickly through the trees – a little too quickly, perhaps, because before I’d made it halfway through I started feeling dizzy, so I stopped and briefly closed my eyes, recovering my balance. When I opened them again the woods became a blur of green and brown and quiet shadows. Damn the Scrumpy, I thought. It was muddling my thoughts, and confusing my vision.
A tree a short distance in front of me went all unfocused, dividing in two. And there suddenly seemed to be two paths as well, one I didn’t remember that angled away to the cliffs. I heard footsteps coming up behind me and I turned, expecting Mark, but there was no one there.
It must have been an echo, I decided, because here was Mark just coming into view now on the path and looking slightly blurred as well until I focused with an effort. Seeing me standing there seemed to surprise him. He turned his collar up against the damp wind shaking through the leaves and asked me, ‘Something wrong?’
‘No, not at all.’ I stood as steadily as I was able, not wanting to let on how much the Scrumpy had affected me. ‘It’s just that I couldn’t remember which path to take.’
He laughed at that – the first time I had heard him laugh since I’d been back, and turned me round so I could see with my own eyes the way through the trees. ‘There is only the one path, you know.’
There seemed little point in arguing. I simply let him take my hand as he had done when I was small, and as we came out of the woods the rain came on in earnest and we made a breathless run for it across the rising field towards the house.
The dogs had been out in the garden as well. They sat lined up like penitents in the back corridor while Claire, with mop in hand, dealt with the criss-crossing paw tracks that muddied the floor. The corridor smelt of stone and plaster, and the rubber of old boots left drying underneath the rows of hooks that held a heaped array of well-used coats and cardigans. As Mark and I came diving in the door, wet through and stamping mud from our own feet, Claire gave us both a look.
‘Not one more step,’ she warned us, ‘till you’ve taken off those boots. I’m nearly finished, I don’t want to ha
ve to do this over.’
As Mark bent to his laces the dogs swarmed him happily, pleased he’d come down to their level. He fended them off as he told Claire, ‘You don’t need to do it at all. I’ll take care of it.’
But there was no breaking the long years of habit. She twisted the mop in its bucket of hot water, wringing it out and then slapping it onto the flagstones in front of the dogs. ‘And you lot,’ she said, as she swished past them, ‘can stay where you are, till your feet dry.’
I could have sworn the dogs snickered, the way men will nudge one another and wink when their wives tell them off. Claire had noticed it, too, and she gave them a withering look that made the setter and the Labrador lie down, pretending submission. The cocker spaniel and the little mongrel, Samson, stayed near Mark, and would have followed him in defiance of Claire’s orders if he hadn’t told them both to stay. They whined a token protest, but they did as they’d been told.
Mark said, good-naturedly, ‘My feet wouldn’t be wet at all, if I hadn’t had to stop and close your windows.’
‘Did I leave them open? Sorry.’ Thanking him, she glanced towards the windows just behind him as he straightened, but they both were tightly shut.
This was the part of the house that we children had passed through most often – the workaday, less showy side of Trelowarth. The section we were in now jutted furthest back into the yard – on one side of the corridor two windows and the door faced out across the yard itself, while on the other side the laundry room and office nestled side by side, their doorways all but hidden in among the hanging coats.
I left my own boots with their heels lined up against the wall, the way Claire liked them, and led the way round past the narrow back staircase that dropped like a chute from the old servants’ quarters above, and then up the one uneven step to the kitchen.