have been content to ascribe their bond to common bloodlines, but that was too facile for Davey. The son of the gene-conscious age, he was no longer satisfied with totem words for either the menace and tyranny or the shared joys and insights from their inherited genetic bank.
They shared a volatile sense of childhood, liking the same relatives and equally scorning others. Another thing he relished was their ability to trust each other to a profound degree.
He knew a peace in her company that wasn’t only at violent odds with the feelings her children set up in him, but which he knew she reciprocated. If only she didn’t sometimes bore him… But where was perfection? he ruefully asked himself, concluding his little meditation.
In spite of poor Alyson’s endless attempts to calm the choppy waters that Quentin and Hester perversely animated, Davey believed she identified basically with him, her only cousin, and that this went beyond the claims and instincts of her own offspring. The frequent signs that the ever-potential rift between her children and himself was painfully troubling to her he took as evidence of what they shared from their own childhood past. Put simply, he silently argued, Alyson and he loved each other in a very Cornish family manner. And like all true human riches, such love was effortless— unimpeded by all the separations and vastly different attitudes to overcoming the hurdles and ambushes of the days.
Why, then, all this being true, he asked himself, did they fret and peeve as they sat there that late-September afternoon, discussing Aunt Hannah and what had set her apart from the Bryant clan?
If it wasn’t her children, then surely it was what they stood for: that ineluctable Englishness they had absorbed and what, in a narrower sense, they had inherited as teenage Londoners in today’s world. Some historical umbilical cord had been severed and their mother was powerless to mend it. The fluke of gayness, the chance of geography, had removed him, only to confirm him, paradoxically, in that Cornish ancestry they had repudiated and duly lost.
Life, the aggressive present, had also persuaded Alyson that her Celtic past was moribund and that survival for her from the wounds that littered and weighted her past meant a total grasping of the world she now inhabited and caring not one whit for the one she had left: that snug, crescent of a harbour and scattering of alien palms along the Falmouth front that stretched beyond the bay and lipped the English Channel’s mouth.
“You say you don’t want to reconsider staying here with us? That would give you and me, Davey, one of the few times we ever get to talk anymore. Surely we owe that to each other, now that no one else is left.”
“Alyson, we are talking now.”
“You do understand about Allen, dear? Why his improved condition makes it impossible for me to accompany you?”
“Of course I do! Quentin and Hester are something else, though. Not that for one moment I need them as companions.”
She shrugged plump and rounded shoulders. “They are free agents, aren’t they? I can’t force them. They expressed no interest— any more she in them. Then they hardly knew her, did they? Oh, dear! Why does everything end up in questions?”
“The simple truth of the matter, Alyson, is the fact she was the end of something. And that something is all tied up with just you and me. We’re the end of the Bryant line. We’re looking at the bare bones, the carcass of what we so long took for granted as the family.”
“You did maybe as a single man. But not my children, not their generation. They’ve been reared so differently. Their values… Well, Davey, surely the whole world has changed.”
“We will still never understand those changes unless and until we’ve all said our goodbyes to what precipitated them. Even your kids came out of something, not just a London limbo.” He could see by the obstinacy giving faint contour to her fleshy features that she was unconvinced. “Anyway, let’s drop it. I’d rather stick with what we have in common than waste time on what pushes us apart. Alyson and Davey…all that’s left.”
She wiggled her ample bottom uncomfortably in the armchair as always, resisting bleakness, fighting harsher realities, realizing if she had capitulated to that in the past it would have broken her. “I suppose in the end, Davey, I’m just a silly old mother. That’s what everything comes back to in the end. I can’t help it. Someone has to think of the shopping.”
He stared at her. How he wanted to admire her, knowing her virtues, her powers of self-sacrifice that he believed far beyond him. But he couldn’t help an irritation welling over her exaggerated mother bit, of her wasting her substance over two kids who already inhabited another universe from the one she understood. Teenagers who were already set to go their own way, leaving her by the way-side. He conceded then and there that he was probably jealous of them. In any event, he knew he had no right to upset her by scoffing at her maternity, however simplistic it sounded. If he even hinted at all that, he knew she would only end up rounding on him as a childless bachelor without either the instincts or experience to understand.
“Here’s to motherhood, old girl,” he said instead, holding up an imaginary glass in toast to her.
“Here’s to us both, Davey,” she responded similarly.
As shortly after that as he could, again carefully avoiding hurting her feelings, he guiltily made his departure, promising her with excessive emphasis that he would call her from their shared birthplace.
On the train the next morning, circuitously heading to Tintagel via Okehampton, it occurred to him that this was the second voyage since leaving home that he was encompassed with a sense of guilt that wouldn’t go away: first, after leaving Ken under less than warm circumstances, and now because of Alyson whom he’d somehow failed to comfort. He emerged from his compartment on the last train leg of the journey in a black depression as he sought to hire a car for the final part of the exhausting trip.
THREE
Davey looked about him over the rows of pitch-pine pews in the squat slate chapel perched on the heathered cliff top. There were five people scattered about the drafty space. For a deceased without immediate family, he surmised, it was the local custom for the coffin to remain in the funeral home until after the service when a hearse would drive it to a churchyard—in this case Pentudy’s—and the undertakers would provide professional bearers before burial. He hadn’t volunteered for the task.
The others were strangers to him. Then Hannah had no relations in Cornwall and only five—if one included Alyson’s three children—in that larger world beyond the windblown headland stubbornly confronting the uninterrupted Atlantic.
In the front row of the sea of empty pews huddled a close-sitting couple. They both looked middle-aged and each wore navy blue belted raincoats. The woman’s head was covered in a gaudy red-and-white kerchief, while her companion, at a dig from her, suddenly pulled off a Donegal tweed hat and placed it on the pew beside him. The action revealed a grizzled head of close-cropped hair. They were wearing rubber boots that evoked the incessant rain prevailing outside. There was something vaguely familiar about the two to the Canadian, and he wondered if, in spite of his conviction that only he and Alyson’s family were left, they might be relatives he’d utterly forgotten. They were both very short, even shorter than he who was only five foot six, and as he eyed them he strove to recall if there had been others in the family who, at a pinch, might have been described as dwarfs. The reflection brought no immediate results, so he turned his attention elsewhere.
Facing the miniscule congregation was their opposite in height—a tall, dank man in a dark brown corduroy suit who announced in a sepulchral voice
