the kids are on the grounds. I like that. I want that for my kids, as well. Formality and discipline. More things I didn’t have.
I climb out of the car, smiling at my stepson. I have to resist the urge to run and hug him, close and tight. It’s too soon for this. But my protective feelings are real. I want to protect him for ever.
Jamie half-smiles in response – but then he stops and stands there, rooted to the pavement, and gives me a long, strange, concentrated stare. As if he cannot work out who I am or why I am here. Even though we have now been living together for weeks.
I try not to be unnerved. His behaviour is peculiar – but I know he is still grieving for his mother.
To make it worse, another mother is coming out now, guiding her son, passing us on the pavement. I don’t know who she is. I don’t know anyone in Cornwall. But my isolation won’t be helped if people think I am weird, that I don’t fit in. So I give her a wide smile and say, all too loudly, ‘Hello, I’m Rachel! I’m Jamie’s stepmother!’
The woman looks my way, then at Jamie. Who still stands there, motionless, his eyes fixed on mine.
‘Um, yes … hello.’ She blushes faintly. She has a round, pretty face and a posh, clear voice and she looks embarrassed by this strange, loud woman and her wary stepson. And why not? ‘I’m sure we’ll meet again. But – ah – really must be going,’ she says.
The woman hurries away with her boy, then looks back at me, a puzzled frown on her face. She probably feels sorry for this frightened boy with this idiot for a stepmother. So I turn my fixed smile on to my own stepson.
‘Hey, Jamie! Everything OK? How was the football?’
Can he stand there in rooted silence for much longer? I cannot bear it. The weirdness is prolonged for several painful seconds. Then he relents. ‘Two nil. We won.’
‘Great, well, great, that’s fantastic!’
‘Rollo scored a penalty and then a header.’
‘That’s totally brilliant! You can tell me more on the drive home. Do you want to get in?’
He nods. ‘OK.’
Chucking his sports bag in the back seat, he slides in, clunks his safety belt in its socket, then as I start the car, he plucks up a book from his bag and starts reading. Ignoring me again.
I change gear, taking a tight corner, trying to focus on these tiny roads, but I am nagged by worries. Now I think about it, this isn’t the first time Jamie has acted oddly, as if suspicious of me, in the last few weeks: but it is the most noticeable occasion.
Why is he changing? When I met my stepson in London he was nothing but laughter and chatter: the initial day we met we got on brilliantly. That day was, in fact, the first day I felt real love for his father. The way man and boy interacted, their love and understanding, their joking and mutual respect, united in grief yet not showing it – this moved and impressed me. It was so unlike me and my dad. And again I wanted some of this paternal affection for my own child. I wanted the father of my children to be exactly like David. I wanted it to be David.
The sex and desire and friendship were already in place – David had already charmed me – but it was Jamie who crystallized these feelings into love for his father.
And yet, ever since I actually moved in to Carnhallow, Jamie has, I now realize, become more withdrawn. Distant, or watchful. As if he is assessing me. As if he kind of senses that there’s something awry. Something wrong with me.
My stepson is quietly looking my way in the mirror, right now. His eyes are large, and the palest violet-blue. He really is a very beautiful boy: exceptionally striking.
Does this make me shallow – that Jamie Kerthen’s beauty makes it easier for me to love him? If so, there’s not much I can do; I can’t help it. A beautiful child is a powerful thing, not easily resisted. And I also know that his boyish beauty disguises serious grief, which makes me feel the force of love, even more. I will never replace his lost mother, but surely I can assuage his loneliness.
A lock of black hair has fallen across his white forehead. If he were my son, I’d stroke it back in to place. At last he talks.
‘When is Daddy going away again?’
I answer, in a rush. ‘Monday morning, as usual, day after tomorrow. But he’ll only be gone a few days. He’s flying back into Newquay at the end of the week. Not so long, not long at all.’
‘Oh, OK. Thank you, Rachel.’ He sighs, passionately. ‘I wish Daddy came home longer. I wish he didn’t go away so much.’
‘I know Jamie. I feel the same.’
I yearn to say something more constructive, but our new life is what it is: David commutes to and from London every Monday morning and Friday evening. He does it by plane, in and out of Newquay airport. When he gets home he burns his silver Mercedes along the A30, then crawls along the last, winding moorland miles, to Carnhallow.
It is a gruelling schedule, but weekly, long-distance commuting is the only way David can sustain his lucrative career in London law and retain a family life at Carnhallow, which he is utterly determined to do. Because the Kerthens have lived in Carnhallow for a thousand years.
Jamie is silent. It takes us twenty-five muted minutes to drive the tortuous miles. At last we arrive at sunlit Carnhallow and my stepson drags himself from the Mini, tugging his sports bag. Again I feel the need to talk. Keep trying. Eventually the bond will form. So I babble as I rummage for my keys, Maybe you could tell me about your football match, my team was Millwall – that’s where I grew up, they were never very good – Then I hesitate. Jamie is frowning.
‘What’s the matter, Jamie?’
‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing.’
The key slots, I push the great door open. But Jamie is staring at me in that same bewildered, disbelieving way. As if I am an eerie figure from a picture book, come inexplicably to life.
‘Actually, there is something.’
‘What, Jamie?’
‘I had a really weird dream last night.’
I nod, and try another smile.
‘You did?’
‘Yes. It was about you. You were …’
He tails off. But I mustn’t let this go. Dreams are important, especially childhood dreams. They are subconscious anxieties surfacing. I remember the dreams I had as a child. Dreams of escape, dreams of desperate flight from danger.
‘Jamie. What was it, what was in the dream?’
He shifts his stance, uncomfortably. Like someone caught lying.
But this clearly isn’t a lie.
‘It was horrible. The dream. You were in the dream, and, and,’ he hesitates, then shakes his head, looking down at the flagstones of the doorway. ‘And there was all blood on your hands. Blood. And a hare. There was hare, an animal, and blood, and it was all over you. All of it. Blood. Blood all over there. Shaking and
