spent most of his days burying the dead under sunless skies and in driving rain.
Behind and above the preacher’s bobbing, balding head with its few flat strands of carefully arranged hair was a sign curving over the generous pulpit space he occupied. It read COD IS LOVE. Davey took a moment or two to realize that the bar of the G had fallen off or worn away. He sniffed his satisfaction. His sense of geography evidently hadn’t let him down. He recalled that the isolated spot where the chapel was defiantly situated was only a mile or so south of the fishing village of Poltiddy, itself south of Tintagel, where any species of fish, along with the local mackerel, lobster, and crab, provided the fishermen contingent of the local inhabitants with a precarious living. COD IS LOVE seemed more germane there as a source to pray to than obeisance to some remote and distinctly unfishy deity.
The service struck the deceased’s nephew as indecently short. He was subconsciously expecting, if not a full-blooded requiem, at least something that bespoke departure. Along the lines, say, of “Farewell, Thou Christian Soul,” In his mind there were vague echoes of Edward Elgar’s stately Dream of Gerontius, a composition, based on Cardinal Newman’s poem, of which he and Ken were extremely fond. Instead the chapel was filled with the staccato squawks from a dumpy harmonium now pressed into service by a white-haired woman in mackintosh to match, who hunched over her modest instrument in that Spartan Methodist tabernacle as if she were Wanda Landowska at the harpsichord.
But there now reluctantly stirred in Davey a bundle of memories that had been quiescent, if not suppressed, since he’d first headed for North America in the company of Ken. He was remembering the pull from the distaff side of his family of that Primitive Methodist Connection that had determined his youthful attendance in Trelinney Chapel for Sunday Morning Service and Sunday School.
There now vividly returned divers recollections of the battery of onerous Sunday sorties to chapel that had been dovetailed into the equal Sabbath obligations of Anglican Mass and Evensong. As the tiny congregation bawled—with little seeming relevance to the circumstances of Great-Aunt Hannah (or, indeed, the weather)—the sprightly chorus of “Jesus, wants me for a sunbeam,” Davey’s thoughts turned to an onerous past; to those infinitely dull annual Sunday School outings to the surf (forbidden to enter) and sand (only the top part which the tide rarely washed) of Polzeath Beach instead of the church’s more exciting expeditions to more distant places such as St. Ives, Penzance, or Land’s End.
From “Sunbeams” the creaky harmonium led the congregation to the hymn “All Glory, Lord, and Honour,” after which the exhausted throats were reminded by the preacher that “Methody was born in song.” They were then asked to inform their Wesleyan God just how happy they all were to have known his saint, Hannah Bryant, who had valiantly darkened the doors of Cornish Bethels since her remote childhood. This was a detail that was news to Davey who had vaguely been under the impression that her “remote childhood” had been lived in London.
Then it was soon evident from the preacher’s florid oratory that he knew next to nothing about Mrs. Hannah Bryant, other than that she had passed the last few months in an old folks’ home called the Breakers where she’d also expired. He referred to her “valiant battle”—valiant was a favourite word with him—with cancer and, somewhat incongruously, that she was an exceptionally well-travelled woman. His balding head then turned in Davey’s direction as he obliquely added that evidences of that were there in the chapel with them that very afternoon.
The object of the reference quickly bowed his head, not through modesty but in a stubborn determination not to make eye contact with someone who was patently grasping at straws. Such determination was to prove in vain. The preacher was at Davey’s side before he could reach the pitch-pine doors. The man offered him every cliché of condolence in the book before introducing him to the rain-coated couple as “Hannah’s grandson.” The Canadian wouldn’t even have bothered to correct the preacher had not the information invoked immediate and unmitigated looks of hostility from the two dwarfs. Davey was forced to confront them whether he liked it or not. They were both even shorter than he’d first thought. With wrinkled, wind-tanned flesh and dark, furtive eyes, they might also have been brother and sister.
At the threshold to the moan of the wind and the hiss of rain the woman spoke up. “Us didn’ know as how Hannah had a grandson. Ask me husband. Never spoke of ’un, did her, Len?”
By now Davey knew that whatever else had gone, the Cornish dialect hadn’t died out in North Cornwall. “Len” confirmed it. “Oi bide there were none but a nephew and he lived a brave way away. Foreign parts, Oi reckon. By the way, we’m Len and Hilda Verran.”
Davey didn’t extend his hand.
The object of their attention addressed them in a slightly Southern accent, filched from excessive observances of Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind. “You are addressin’ the very same! Across the water from where we stand,” Davey added, pointing toward Newfoundland. “I come from afar, ma’am, but I represent her other four kin—all of them residents of this island if not exactly in Cornwall but none of whom, from mental distress or other preoccupations, are able to be here with us this afternoon.”
Mrs. Verran attempted a smile. “We was her closest friends, we was, as well as her Tintagel cousins. She did mention of ’ee, didn’ her, Len? Full of kind words for ’ee, she was. Her was allus speaking of your friend and that lovely house you two do have. Down by the Pacific Ocean, Oi think her did say?”
“Was allus saying,” her diminutive husband interrupted. “Talked of little else when her moind was working. Not that that were too often. Till we persuaded her to go into the Home we had to spoon-feed her, you. And bravun more’n that, Oi don’ moind a-telling of ’ee. If ’twasn’ for Hilda here, Hannah Bryant would have been in some messy state, you. Hilda made her loife worth living these past years. Whole village will tell ’ee that. Little to show for it, though there’s some will tell ’ee otherwise. Spiteful bastards!”
“Come now, Len, no need for bad language,” his spouse reprimanded, offering Davey such a sickly leer that he could have upchucked.
By this time Hannah’s nephew also gathered the Verrans were fluent liars. The old girl would never have mentioned Ken and himself in the same breath, let alone their sharing a house. His betting was they’d been through her correspondence like an avid brace of ferrets. More, he knew of no Tintagel cousins, though the idea brought with it the earlier vague notion that they looked somehow familiar. Not that at that point he sought further elucidation.
Davey’s palms sweated with discomfort. These two unwholesome relics of Aunt Hannah’s final phase of life, he told himself, reeked of cupidity. A brace of money-grubbers, they obviously scented potential recompense from him. Perhaps they’d also discovered the fact that his aunt had died skint, that she didn’t even own Lanoe, the house she’d lived in, as that had reverted to Alyson and him when Hannah’s sister-in-law, their Aunt Nora, had died
As Davey stared down at the Verrans, he imagined how, as arduous little maggots, they must have wriggled their way into his aunt’s trust as her pain-wracked body moved steadily toward its final state of collapse. Whether they had or not, peasant cunning determined that he now be regarded as a potential stone to be turned carefully over lest there be further trove from an unwanted link to Hannah they hadn’t contemplated, turning up now at her funeral.
He told himself he hated them for that—detested them for thinking he was going to be an easy make. Then he drew back. Where, he thought, suddenly bewildered, was his mind taking him? A kind of contempt for their mercenary attitudes over his aunt was one thing, but he was experiencing visceral feelings that went far beyond that. Whence came this vigorous loathing of an odd little couple who had been utter strangers until minutes earlier?
He
