villages of Kingsand and Cawsand, both picture perfect, with narrow lanes lined with cottages painted pink, blue and ochre, leading down to the three beaches in the bays, all easy to get to for holiday-makers wanting an ice cream, pub or pasty to follow. On the other side of the peninsula is wild, unspoilt coastline with beaches that are harder to reach without a long climb down a winding cliff path. At a third point is Cremyll, where the small passenger ferry docks. It’s a wonderful way to enter the area, the boat chugging in through the yachts moored on the Plymouth side, to see the stately home of Mount Edgcumbe up on the hill with lawns in front stretching down to the sea.
‘Dear God,’ I said. ‘I need five hundred thousand pounds and I need it fast.’ I turned to Max. ‘Where am I going to find money like that in the next few weeks or months? I can’t wait a year until I’ve fulfilled Mum’s requests whatever they may be.’ Max blinked and turned away. God was probably bored with requests like that too.
At least I had the presence of mind to ask Michael Harris for time, I told myself. I’d learnt the ‘can I get back to you?’ trick years ago from Rose though, being the people-pleaser I am, usually forgot to put it into practice. I didn’t need to go over my finances at all. I knew exactly what I had – four hundred pounds in the bank. I had a part-time job teaching art at the local secondary school and I ran workshops in the evenings in the winter months. Both jobs paid a pittance. I earned enough to pay my bills and, with the occasional painting I sold, have some sort of a life. Though in recent months, I’d had no new ideas or inspiration to do my own work. I had no pension plan or savings either; like so many of my generation, we thought we’d never get old. Of course, I’d get my inheritance in a year if my sisters agreed to go along with it but would the brothers Harris wait? Somehow I thought not.
Wednesday 2 September, late afternoon
‘Genius,’ said Anna when she’d finished reading Mum’s letter. ‘Have you any idea of what you’ll have to do?’
We were sitting in her kitchen and catching up over a pot of Earl Grey tea. Like me, Anna had been out gardening and was dressed in an old T-shirt and jeans, her short dark hair tucked away under a blue and white polka dot hair band. I’d known her since art college and been friends ever since. She shared my love of Cornwall and when the cottage opposite came up for sale ten years ago, at the same time she was separating from her husband, she didn’t waste any time buying it with her divorce settlement. Her proximity was one of the many reasons I didn’t want to move. I couldn’t imagine life without her. We even had keys to each other’s house so we could drop in on each other anytime.
I shook my head. ‘None. Just that we have to meet some man that Mum hired as a PA to organize it all. He’ll give us our instructions at the beginning of every other month.’
‘Starting when?’ she asked as she cut a slice of her home-baked lemon drizzle cake, put it on a plate then handed it to me.
‘Next month. October. Mr Richardson will let us know where to be, when and what with, then this mystery man will take over.’
‘Exciting.’
‘God only knows what she’s devised for us all.’
‘I can just imagine her glee when she was thinking this up. How’s it going to be funded?’
‘All taken care of from funds from the sale of the family house.’
‘So while you thought your mother was living a quiet life and letting you get on with yours, she was busy scheming up a “kicking the bucket list” for her wayward daughters.’
‘With the help of her friends, Martha and Jean. Fleur’s already called them to see if she could get anything out of them, but neither will spill the beans.’
‘How are you feeling about it?’
‘Mixed. It was a shock to all of us. Curious to discover what Mum’s planned, but mainly still sad. I miss her so much and can’t bear that I’ll never see her or hear her voice again.’
Anna looked wistful. ‘That never goes away.’
‘And I feel bad I didn’t get up to see her more often.’
‘You went every six weeks. She understood – distance, money.’
‘Rose dropped in twice a week.’
‘Well she could, couldn’t she? She lives in London. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Guilt is a waste of energy.’ Anna glanced back at the letter. ‘Have you been talking to God as she requested?’
I smiled. ‘A couple of attempts. I asked where I was going to get the money to buy the house but I reckon if there is a God, he’d think I have more than many and should be grateful.’
‘Possibly but remember that quote from Matthew in the Bible? The one about not worrying about your life? “Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, or reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?”’
‘That’s exactly the sort of thing Mum would have come out with. She was always sending me happy quotes in her last few months. She had one for every occasion, as for your Bible lines, if you lived with two cats and saw what they brought in, that would be the end of the “look at the birds of the air” theory, because they’re not in the air, they’re lying dead on my kitchen floor with their heads chewed off.’
‘Cynic,’ said Anna. ‘Do you think your sisters will try talking to God?’
‘Fat chance. Rose is an atheist and Fleur thinks she is God.’
Anna laughed.
‘Mum hated me saying anything critical about either of my sisters. She refused to acknowledge that we’d fallen out or that we only spoke to each other if completely necessary. She always chatted away about Fleur and Rose as if nothing had changed between us, and gave me their latest news and what was happening with Rose and her writers in the publishing world, how Fleur’s property portfolio was going. I’d nod and listen and imagined that Rose and Fleur did the same.’
Anna pointed at the letter. ‘She might not have acknowledged it to you but clearly she was more than aware how things were with you and your sisters hence this brilliant plan to get you back together. She’d obviously been doing a lot of thinking and scheming in her last months.’
I nodded. ‘Her letter reflected a lot of what was going on in her head before she died. She was death obsessed. On my last visit to her, she said she was researching what she could about the next stage of the journey. Where we go when we die, what life’s been all about, that sort of thing. She said she wasn’t afraid and was convinced that there’s something after life, something good.’
‘We’ll probably have the same curiosity when we’re in our late eighties. When I was in India in my twenties, I asked a guru if there was an afterlife. “Only one way to know for sure,” he replied. “Die and find out.”’
‘Sounds like good advice. Mum was never what I’d call a religious person in a church going sense but she was spiritual. On her shelf, she had a wide range of books – the Bible, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Bhagavad-Gita, Richards Dawkins, There is
