back in British Columbia, and finally himself.
FOUR
Cornwall had always been a place for Davey Bryant that shored up romantic and conservative beliefs. Everything about it served not only a faith in the past but proclaimed that past would endure. The very granite and serpentine from which the peninsula had been honed by millennia of grinding seas affirmed the stubbornly permanent finger poking out from western Europe. So did the unceasing surf that pounded it. Likewise the wind-scoured skies that turned silver mist into azure in one powerful breath. Raven-haunted moors would never be fields, Dozmary Pool would never dry up, and the scream of gulls and swoop of martins would festoon the cliffs facing fabled Lyonnesse forever.
All these images and convictions had entered Davey’s soul, from its first beat in that farmhouse reached only by unsurfaced, fern-bordered lanes and where drinking water, sweet with purity, was carried by sturdy men and women in giant buckets from the moss-screened well at the foot of the elm-clad hill where badgers lived in centuries-old setts.
And if the time warp wasn’t enough, there was also the isolation: a mile’s walk between heather and fern to the neighbouring farm whose tenants might not be seen for a month and whose presence might only be proclaimed by Mrs. Hoskyn’s calling to her upfield calves or the sound of her husband’s milk pails as he strode at sunrise to the cowshed and the clanging of their handles as he dropped them under an udder—weirdly muffled on morning mist—came to him over the boulder- and bracken-strewn valley. Seven miles away to Wadebridge, just under that to Camelford. But where were you when you reached such places?
Davey knew early in life that he lived some two hundred and fifty miles from London and eight hundred miles or so would get him near John o’ Groat’s, the northernmost tip of the British Isles, but all that was nothing to a boy accustomed to standing on Tregardock Cliffs and staring across toward North America over two thousand seven hundred miles westward and recalling how many of his relatives had sailed over there in the past hundred years or so. More Cornish folk, proportionately, than had fled the famine in Ireland.
All these verities that made pygmies of time… Then there were the domestic intimacies that had snared him yet more firmly: the great brass bed of his birth glowing dim in the flickering oil-lamp light, where his mother had groped and gripped at the bedclothes in the bridal bedroom of ancient Polengarrow, where red Virginia creeper grew over slate sidings screening mother and son from the teeming life of the surrounding farm.
He remembered other things: the burr of soft Cornish voices always in the ears; the smell of saffron-laden kitchens never far from the nostrils; the ubiquitous slate stiles in the hedges for pedestrian shortcuts along paths beaten by carless country folk walking from village to village, town to town; the huddled county town of Bodmin, full of friendly fish-and-chip shops but with grim, high walls for both a prison and a lunatic asylum through whose giant gates the mentally stricken would shuffle at full moon after having trudged down so many paths bordering fields and clambering over so many stiles, from white cob cottages often thirty or forty miles distant.
But now this kaleidoscope of recollections began to wobble. Instead of footpaths he was aware of so many gas stations festering the highway. Rows of new concrete-faced houses littered the outskirts of Delabole and Camelford as they had, indeed, of the Tintagel where he’d begun his journey in the wake of the Verrans.
Pylons suspending high-tension cables sprawled across fields double the size of those he’d left behind as their hedgerows had been bulldozed and where he now saw tractors at work rather than horses. Every now and then there were giant billboards that made him grind his teeth, and the far-off China clay pits around St. Austell seemed to have tripled in number whenever they hove in to view. Nor was he prompted to forget that he had had to rent his car in remote Okehampton in Devon, since no trains any longer served his part of Cornwall.
Yet all these visual aggressions and unnerving changes were fleeting and only half-caught as the curving highway seethed with traffic and he had to concentrate hard on both steering wheel and brakes.
By the time he turned off the A-39 and entered the slower pace and elm-tree cool of the winding lanes, he experienced the sudden rusticity as a needed benison that would prevent his skull from cracking. When he eventually reached the final hill outside and overlooking the village of Pentudy, he felt finally cleansed of the highway dreck, and his spirits rose in response to the abrupt change of weather so Cornish in its capriciousness. And he welcomed a sun-shot sky with the coastal wind now given way to a gentle breeze that carried the burnt scents of autumn and the murmur of bees. Then his sight concentrated on the starkly familiar edifice of Aunt Hannah’s Lanoe House with its lime wash differentiating it from its whitewashed neighbours. Parked immediately in front of it was the Verrans’ Morris. He smiled, bemused by the fact that even the ridiculously battered and muddied old minivan was a relief after the hourlong preview of contemporary Cornwall in its festoon of high wires, untidy car cemeteries, and blatant roadside advertising—a place obeisant to tourism and its ugly adjuncts in which he was already convinced he had no proper place.
But if Davey was now the interloper—certainly in the eyes of the Verrans and most likely in the minds of the villagers of Pentudy who “knew not Joseph,” as his biblically versed grandmother would have surely quoted—he felt another conviction perversely but determinedly growing in him. He wasn’t just there to bury an old and unhappy woman who had lived for decades at odds with her neighbours, not even to safeguard her meagre chattels from these Tintagel interlopers, but now in new and startling resolve not to leave until fully possessed of that life in Pentudy that had become progressively beleaguered after the early death of her husband, also a Joseph, the beloved younger brother of Davey’s patriarchal farmer father, Wesley.
He drove by the granite Norman church whose presence dominated the western entrance to the village, past the smithy, whose bellows and anvil could be seen from the open road, past the ugly house that now belonged to only him and Alyson—whatever the Verrans believed—and at which site, until short minutes ago, he had contemplated pulling up and joining them for the fictitious search for the will, and parked instead in the courtyard of the Cornish Arms, the only hostelry in the remote moorland village.
Switching off the ignition, he raced through a “Hail Mary,” subconsciously invoking a dusty religious past and perhaps preparing himself to enter a territory and a time in which the darker things pertaining to his aunt in that isolated life would become intelligibly clear and which he could one day explain to his Cousin Alyson and the two doubters under her roof. And hopefully, as postscript, he could deal with the Tintagel pygmies who seemed bent on feeding off the detritus of her death.
An earlier phone call on arrival in Tintagel before the funeral service had secured his reservation, and in the meantime the current if temporary inhabitants of Lanoe were the immediate challenge. He decided to check into his booked room, after the encounter with them at Lanoe.
In spite of himself, as he crossed the threshold of Aunt Hannah’s domain, the memories gusted. Nearing the steep, plum-carpeted stairs that faced the front door, he again knew the claustrophobia in their narrow steepness between bare distempered walls that formed grotesque maps of dried damp: an immediate reminder for a small boy of threatening goblins and nasty gnomes as he had pushed bare knees in a frantic effort to climb them as fast as his thin legs would allow to reach the cold little room his two aunts called “his” whenever he stayed there and they decreed it was time for bed.
The cold had been one thing, the darkness another. “You’re far too old for a hot-water bottle,” sallow Aunt Nora, with her distinct moustache, had told him dismissively in answer to one piped question, followed swiftly by “Who needs a nightlight when you’ve Jesus nailed above you on the wall, you faithless boy!” And when he persisted in sharing the thought with her that in the unholy dark Jesus would be no good to him, followed by the observation that he knew where
