The Carousel

  “No, as a matter of fact, I’m not.” And with that he began to climb the grassy slope, picking his way between the bramble patches and the clumps of bracken. When he reached my side, he collapsed, a sprawl of long boney limbs. I saw his old canvas shoes had holes in the toes, and the warmth of the sun made his jacket smell sheepy, as though it had been knitted straight off some oily fleece.

  I said, “You can walk by the cliffs if you want to.”

  “Ah, but then you see, I don’t want to.” He spied my sketch pad and before I could stop him had picked it up. “That’s very nice.”

  I hate people looking at my work, especially when it’s not even finished. “It’s just a scribble.”

  “Not at all.” He surveyed it for a moment longer and then laid it down without further comment. He said, “There is a deadly fascination about watching a flood tide. Is that what you’ve been doing?”

  “For the past hour.”

  He felt in his capacious pocket and brought out a thin packet of cigars, a book of matches, and a dog-eared paperback, obviously much read and consulted. Interest stirred when I saw that it was Vanishing Cornwall by Daphne du Maurier. The book of matches had “The Castle Hotel Porthkerris” printed upon it. I felt like a detective and as though, already, I knew quite a lot about him.

  He selected a cigar and lit it. His hands were beautiful; long and narrow, with spade-tipped fingers. On one wrist he wore a cheap and unremarkable watch, on the other a chain of gold links, very old-looking and heavy.

  As he put the matches and the cigars back into his pocket, I said, “Are you staying at the Castle?”

  He looked up in surprise and then smiled. “How did you guess that?”

  “Deduction. Matches. Sharp eyes.”

  “Of course. How stupid of me. Well, I spent last night there, if you can call that staying. I came down from London yesterday.”

  “So did I. I came by train.”

  “I wish I had. I got a lift. I hate driving. Hate cars. I’d much rather sit and look out of the window or read a book. Infinitely more civilized.” He settled himself into a more comfortable position, leaning on an elbow. “Are you on holiday, or staying here, or is this where you live?”

  “Just staying.”

  “In the village?”

  “Yes. Right here, actually.”

  “What do you mean by right here?”

  “In the house up there.”

  “Holly Cottage.” He began to laugh. “Are you staying with Phoebe?”

  “Do you know Phoebe?”

  “Of course I know Phoebe. That’s why I’m here. To see her.”

  “Well you won’t find her just now, because she’s gone to the Cottage Hospital in an ambulance.” He looked horrified. “It’s all right, she hasn’t had a stroke or anything, just broken her arm. It’s been put in a cast, and the doctor wants to have a look at it.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. Is she all right?”

  “Of course. She’ll be back for lunch.”

  “And who are you? A nurse, or one of her perpetual students?”

  “No, I’m a perpetual niece.”

  “You wouldn’t by any chance be Prue?”

  “Yes, I would.” I frowned. “But who are you?”

  “Daniel Cassens.”

  I said, ridiculously, “But you’re in Mexico.”

  “Mexico? Never been to Mexico in my life.”

  “Phoebe said you were probably in Mexico or somewhere mad.”

  “That was charitable of her. In fact, I’ve been in the Virgin Islands, on a boat with some American friends, but then somebody said there was going to be a hurricane, so I decided the time was ripe to get out. But back in New York, I was instantly bombarded with cables from Peter Chastal to say I had to be in London for the opening day of this exhibition he’s mounted for me.”

  “I know about that. You see, I work for Marcus Bernstein. We’re practically next door to Peter Chastal. And I read the reviews of your exhibition. I think you’ve got a success on your hands. Phoebe read it, too. She was enormously thrilled.”

  “She would be.”

  “Were you at the opening?”

  “Yes, I was. I finally made it. At the last moment I gave in and caught a flight over.”

  “Why were you so reluctant? Most people wouldn’t miss it for anything. All the champagne and the adulation.”

  “I hate my own exhibitions. It’s the most ghastly form of exposure, like putting one’s children on display. All those eyes, staring. Makes me feel quite ill.”

  I understood. “But you did go?”

  “Yes, for a little. But I wore a disguise—dark glasses and a concealing hat. I looked like an insane sort of spy. I only stayed for half an hour, and then when Peter wasn’t looking, I slunk away and went and sat in a pub and tried to decide what to do next. And then I got talking to this man, and I bought him a beer, and he said that he was driving to Cornwall, so I hitched a lift with him and arrived last night.”

  “Why didn’t you come and stay with Phoebe?”

  Without thinking I asked the question and immediately wished that I hadn’t. He looked away from me, pulled at a tuft of grass with his hand, and let the wind blow it from his fingers.

  “I don’t know,” he said at last. “So many reasons. Some high-minded, some not so.”

  “You know she would have welcomed you.”

  “Yes, I know. But it’s been a long time. It’s eleven years since I was here. And Chips was alive then.”

  “You worked with him, didn’t you.”

  “Yes, for a year. I was in America when he died. Up in the Sonoma Valley in northern California. I was staying with some people I knew who had a vineyard. Phoebe’s letter took a long time to find me, and I remember thinking then that if nobody ever told you that people you love have died, then they would live forever. And I thought then that I could never come back to Cornwall. But dying is part of life. I’ve learned that since. But I hadn’t learned it then.”

  I thought of the carousel that Chips had made for me out of an old gramophone; he and Phoebe laughing together; the smell of his pipe.

  “I loved him, too.”

  “Everybody did. He was such a benevolent man. I studied sculpture with him, but I learned from Chips a lot about living that, when you’re twenty, is infinitely more important. I never knew my own father, and it always made me feel different towards other people. Chips filled that gap. He gave me a great sense of identity.” I knew what he meant, because that was just the way I felt about Phoebe. “Coming down from London yesterday, I kept having second thoughts; wondering if I was doing the right thing. It isn’t always wise to return to the place where you’ve been young and dreamed dreams. And had ambitions.”

  “Not if your dreams and ambitions came true. And surely that’s happened for you. The Chastal exhibition must have proved that. There can’t be a painting left unsold…”

  “Perhaps I need to be unsure of myself.”

  “You can’t have it all.”

  We fell silent. It was noon now, and the sun was very warm. I heard the soft buffet of the breeze, the lap of water against the seawall. Across the flooded estuary, from the distant causeway, came the hum of passing cars. A flock of gulls fought over a piece of rotting fish.

  He said, “You know, once, centuries before Christ, in the Bronze Age, this estuary was a river. Traders sailed all the way from the eastern Mediterranean, around the Lizard and Lands End, laden to the gunwales with all the treasures of the Levant.”

  I smiled. I said, “I’ve read Vanishing Cornwall, too.”

  “It’s magic.” He opened the book and it fell open at a much-studied page, and he read aloud:

  For the watcher to-day, crouching amidst the sand dunes and the tufted grass, looking seaward to where the shallows run, imagination can take a riotous course, picturing line upon line of high-prowed, flat-bottomed craft, brightly coloured, their sails abeam, entering the river with the flood tide.

&nbs
p; He closed the book. “I wish I had that sort of perception, but I haven’t. I can only see the here and the now, and try to paint it the way it happens to me.”

  “Do you take that book everywhere with you?”

  “No. But I found it in a shop in New York, and when I first read it I knew that someday, sometime, I had to come back to Cornwall. It never leaves you. It’s like a magnet. You have to return.”

  “But why to the Castle Hotel, of all places?”

  Daniel looked up at me, amused. “Why? Don’t you think I fit in there?”

  I thought of the rich Americans, the golfers, the twin-setted ladies playing bridge, the genteel teatime orchestra.

  “Not exactly.”

  He laughed. “I know. It was a fairly incongruous choice, but it was the only hotel I could remember and I was tired. Jet-lag tired, London tired, everything tired. I wanted to get into an enormous bed and sleep for a week. And then when I woke up this morning, I wasn’t tired any longer. And I thought about Chips and knew that all I wanted to do was come and see Phoebe again. So I walked down to the station and caught the train. And then got off the train and met you.”

  “And now,” I told him, “you’re coming back to the house with me, and you’re going to stay for lunch. There’s a bottle of wine in the fridge and Lily Tonkins has got a bit of lamb in the oven.”

  “Lily Tonkins? Is she still going?”

  “She runs the house. She’s doing all the cooking as well just now.”

  “I’d forgotten Lily.” He picked up my sketch pad once more, and this time I didn’t mind. He said, “You know, you’re not only exceptionally pretty, but you are talented as well.”

  I decided to ignore the bit about being pretty. “I’m not talented. That’s why I work for Marcus Bernstein. I found out the hard way that there was no hope of me earning a living by being an artist.”

  “How wise of you to realise,” said Daniel Cassens. “So few people do.”

  * * *

  Together, with the sun on our backs, we climbed the slope of the hill. I opened the wooden gate in the escallonia hedge, and he went ahead of me, cautiously, as a dog will go, nosing his way into once-familiar territory. I shut the gate. He stood looking up at the face of the house, and I looked, too, and tried to see it with his eyes, after eleven years away. To me, it looked as I had always know it. I saw the pointed Gothic windows, the garden door open to the brick terrace and the morning’s warmth. There were still geraniums blooming in their earthenware tubs, and Phoebe’s ramshackle garden chairs had not yet been put away for the winter.

  We walked up the gentle slope of the lawn, and I led the way indoors.

  “Phoebe?” I opened the kitchen door, from whence came delicious smells of cooking lamb. Lily Tonkins was at the kitchen table, chopping mint, but she stopped when I appeared.

  “She got home about five minutes ago. Went upstairs to change her shoes.”

  “I’ve brought a visitor for lunch. Is that all right?”

  “Always plenty to eat. Friend of yours, is it?”

  Daniel, behind me, moved into view. “It’s me, Lily, Daniel Cassens.”

  Lily’s mouth fell open. “Aw, my dear life.” She laid down the chopping knife and put a hand to her meager chest, conveying heart-stopping shock. “The sight of you! Like a body out of the past. Daniel Cassens. It must be nearly twelve years. What are you doing here?”

  “Come to see you,” he told her. He walked around the table and stooped to kiss her cheek. Lily gave a crow of laughter and went pink. “You villain. Turning up like a bad penny. Just you wait till Miss Shackleton sets eyes on you. Us thought you’d forgotten all about we.”

  The Cornish frequently mix their pronouns, but Lily did this only under great stress, her voice shrill with excitement. “Did you know she’d broken her arm, poor soul? Been at the hospital all morning she has, but the doctor says she’s doing nicely. Wait now, till I give her a shout.” And she disappeared into the hall, and we heard her calling upstairs to Miss Shackleton to come down immediate, because there was some lovely surprise waiting for her.

  Daniel followed her, but I stayed in the kitchen because for some reason I felt that if I witnessed their reunion I should probably burst into tears. As it was, it was Phoebe who cried. I’d never seen her cry before, but they were tears of joy and over in a moment. But still, she cried. And then we all found ourselves back in the kitchen, and I took the wine out of the refrigerator and Lily forgot about chopping mint and went to find some glasses, and the occasion then and there suddenly turned into a tremendous celebration.

  * * *

  He stayed for the rest of the afternoon. The day, which had started so brightly, became overcast, with low clouds blowing in from the sea on a rising wind. There were showers, and it became chilly, but none of this mattered, for we were indoors by the fire, and the hours flew by in talk and reminiscence and a general catching up on everything that had been happening to both of them.

  I had little to add to the conversation, but that did not matter. Listening was a joy, because not only did I feel that I was involved with both of them as people but because my interests and my work were relevant to everything that they discussed. I knew about this painter; I had heard of that exhibition; I had actually seen that particular portrait. Phoebe spoke of one Lewis Falcon, who was now living in a house out at Lanyon, and I remembered him because we had held an exhibition of his work at Marcus Bernstein’s not two years before.

  And we talked about Chips, and it was not like talking about a person who had died six years ago but as though at any moment he would walk into the firelit room to join us, sink into his own sagging armchair, join in the discussion.

  Finally, they got onto the subject of Phoebe’s own work. What was she doing now? Daniel wanted to know, and Phoebe laughed in her usual self-deprecating way and said that she had nothing to show him, but under pressure she admitted that there were a few canvases that she had completed last year, whilst on holiday in the Dordogne, but she had never got around to sorting them out and they were down in Chips’s studio, still stacked haphazardly beneath dust sheets. Daniel at once sprang to his feet and insisted on seeing them, so Phoebe found the studio key and pulled on a raincoat and they set off together, down the brick path, to go and search them out.

  I did not accompany them on this expedition. It was half past four and Lily Tonkins had gone home, so when I had collected our coffee mugs and washed them up, I laid a tea tray, found a fruitcake in a tin, and took the empty kettle off the Aga to fill it at the sink.

  The sink in Phoebe’s kitchen was beneath the window, which was pleasant, because it meant that while you were washing up, you could enjoy the view. But the view now was lost, drowned in a mistlike rain. The clouds were low, the wet, emptying sands of the estuary reflecting their leaden darkness. Flood tide, ebb tide. They made a pattern of time, like the minute hands of a clock, ticking life away.

  I felt philosophic, peaceful. And then, suddenly, very happy. This happiness caught me unawares, as I used to be caught unawares by the random ecstasies of childhood. I looked around me, as though the source of this reasonless euphoria could be seen, pinned down, remembered. I saw everything in that familiar kitchen with a rare and heightened perception, so that each humble and ordinary object appeared both pleasing and beautiful. The grain of the scrubbed table, the bright colours of the crockery on the dresser, a basket of vegetables, the symmetry of cups and saucepans.

  I thought about Daniel and Phoebe, rooting around together in Chips’s dusty old studio. I was glad that I had not gone with them. I liked him. I liked his beautiful hands and his light, quick voice and dark eyes. But there was also something disturbing about him. I was not sure if I wanted to be disturbed.

  He had said, “You are not only exceptionally pretty, but you are talented as well.”

  I was not used to being told I was pretty. My long straight hair was too pale, my mouth too big, my nose snub. Even Nigel Gordon, who—according to m
y mother—was in love with me, had never actually got around to saying that I was pretty. Smashing, maybe, or sensational, but never pretty. I wondered if Daniel was married and then laughed at myself, because my thought processes were so painfully obvious, and because it was exactly the question that my mother would have asked. My own self-ridicule broke the spell of that extraordinary moment of perception, and Phoebe’s kitchen dissolved into its usual mundane self, left neat by Lily Tonkins before she had donned her head scarf and bicycled home to get her husband’s tea.

  * * *

  When tea was over, Daniel pushed back his cuff, looked at his watch, and said that he must go.

  “I wish you were staying here,” said Phoebe. “Why can’t you come back here? Fetch your things and then come back to us.”

  But he said that he wouldn’t. “Lily Tonkins has got quite enough on her plate looking after the pair of you.”

  “But we’ll see you again? You’re down for a little?”

  He stood up. “A day or two, anyway.” It sounded vague. “I’ll be back to see you.”

  “How are you going to get back to Porthkerris?”

  “There’s probably a bus…”

  I said, “I’ll drive you in Phoebe’s car. It’s a mile to the bus stop and it’s still raining and you’ll get soaked.”

  “Don’t you mind?”

  “Of course I don’t mind.”

  So he said good-bye to Phoebe and we went out and got into her battered old car, and I backed it cautiously out of the garage and we drove off, leaving Phoebe silhouetted in the lighted doorway of Holly Cottage, waving her good arm and wishing us a safe journey, as though we were setting off on some marathon rally.

  We bowled up the hill through the rain, past the golf club, onto the main road. “You’re so clever to drive,” he said admiringly.

  “But you can surely drive a car. Everybody can drive a car.”

  “Yes, I can drive, but I simply hate it. I’m a total fool about anything mechanical.”

  “Have you never had a car?”

  “I had to have one in America. Everybody has a car in America. But I never really felt at home with it. I bought it secondhand, and it was enormous, long as a bus, with a radiator like a mouth organ and huge, phallic headlights and exhaust pipes. It had automatic gears, too, and electrically operated windows, and some sort of super-charged carburetor. I was terrified of it. When I’d had it three years, I finally sold it, but by that time I’d only just worked out how to operate the heater.”