Her sandals allowed the long grasses to tickle her instep as she pushed her way along the overgrown path. She saw the remembered stile ahead of her and, after climbing it, turned right to follow the rushing stream leading through the valley and on to the sea. The first time she’d come here was with Merlin and Pru. The three of them had played Pooh sticks and Merlin had given them their first experience of smoking a joint. It had been a warm afternoon with the drone of flies in the air.
‘Either of you girls know what a fuggee hole is?’ asked Merlin, his blissed-out eyes turning Connie to jelly.
Pru giggled, ‘I wouldn’t like to say.’
Merlin grinned his suntanned grin and clamped the joint between his crooked teeth. ‘Shame on you, Pru Carew. Dirty mind!’
He took her hand and pulled her up the sloping side of the valley.
Connie watched the giggling couple for a moment then hurried to catch them up, not wanting to be left behind. The climb got steeper until they reached a small plateau. Merlin was now leading the way and the girls were scrambling after him. Giggling and stoned.
After about fifty metres, Merlin stopped and bent down on his haunches, pulling aside some tall ferns.
‘’Ere it is.’
The girls crouched next to him and saw an opening in the side of the valley. Carved out of the rock, it was just big enough to take a barrel of brandy or a small crouched person.
Merlin flicked his lighter and, using it as a torch, disappeared into the hillside.
The girls looked at each other nervously.
‘Come on, girls. The lights are on,’ he called.
Pru went first, letting out a gasp as she entered the carved cavern, lit now by six flickering church candles.
‘Oh my God!’ she called to her sister. ‘Connie, you must see this.’
‘What is this place?’ breathed Connie in wonder as she stood in the tall space.
Merlin shrugged. ‘No one knows for sure, but there are several of them in these parts. Prehistoric, I think. The smugglers used them to hide their stash.’
At the back of the dry cave there lay a pile of blankets and an old-fashioned feather quilt. Merlin shook them out and spread them on the floor.
‘Come and lie down next to me,’ he told them. As they did so, he began to sing the Beatles’ ‘Come Together’. His voice ricocheted richly from the walls.
Connie put her arm across his muscly chest and met Pru’s doing the same thing from the other side. Merlin finished the song and put each of his arms under their heads.
‘Oh, my lovely girls. Summer doesn’t get much better than this!’
*
Connie was starting to sweat a bit as she climbed the steep slope and found the plateau. Her heart beat with a sense of stepping back in time. It didn’t take her long to find the entrance, hidden now by a thicket of ferns and gorse. The plants scraped her legs and stung her feet, but she kept going until the small hole was revealed.
As she ducked her head inside, Connie cursed herself for not bringing a torch. Then she remembered that the three of them had scratched their initials just inside the entrance. She closed her eyes tightly and counted to sixty, hoping that this would trick her eyes into seeing in the dark better. When she opened them, her sight slowly adjusted. Turning her head to the right she saw the letters CC, PC and MP.
As soon as he saw Pru in the water, Merlin stopped paddling and put his head to one side, staring at her from under his still-golden eyelashes. He dropped his gaze to her bare shoulders and then down to the water, where he could clearly see she wasn’t wearing any clothes. He lifted the boat’s paddle out of the water and balanced it across the front of the canoe.
‘So. My little Pru has returned.’
‘I think it’s you who have returned.’
He laughed. ‘True, that. I haven’t been to Figgoty’s since you left me.’
Pru snorted in derision. ‘Stop sounding like a schoolboy and leave me alone. I need to get out and get dressed.’
‘Nothing I haven’t seen before, eh, Pru?’
She was shivering in the water now. ‘Bugger off, Merlin.’ She started to swim back to the beach.
He leaned on the paddle and looked thoughtfully up at the sky.
‘You’re not holding a grudge are you, Pru?’
Angrily she stopped swimming and turned to him. ‘Hold a grudge? Whatever for? You are a footnote to my youth, someone Connie and I laugh about.’
He smiled, showing his attractively wonky teeth. ‘If I thought that was true, you’d be breaking my heart.’ He picked up his paddle and put it in the water. ‘You and I are unfinished business. Catch you later.’
She watched as he disappeared around the next headland and then she swam back to shore and into her warm, dry clothes.
The climb from the beach and up the cliffs was hard. Her legs were shaky and her fingers felt weak as she fumbled for handholds in the slate. Seeing Merlin had upset some delicate balance within her. She grasped a good wedge of rock, but as she hauled her weight on to it, it came away in her hand and she slid a little, grazing her shins. Her breath was uneven and painful in her throat. She felt something rising within her – something buried but not dead.
‘Come on, Prudence. It was all a long time ago. Don’t let that idiot under your skin.’
After a while she scrambled from her hands and knees to a bent walk and then, finally, she was standing upright on the grass-tufted path of the clifftop. Pru rubbed her eyes with her T-shirt and looked down to the beach. She saw her own footprints in the bare sand, but of Merlin there was no sight.
There was a weather-beaten bench ahead of her, facing the ocean, and she gratefully walked towards it and sat. She put the palms of her hands over her blue eyes and instantly saw an image of Merlin making love to her for the first time in the little cave up in the valley. The fuggee hole. She remembered the excitement of having given Connie the slip. She remembered how he’d held her hand and guided her through the gap in the earth bank and into the warm pitch-blackness. She could hear the rasp of his lighter and see the candle stubs sitting in solid pools of wax on the floor. She’d watched as he bent and lit their wicks. Now, she could see the tall graceful arch of the rock; white and smooth. It wasn’t dank and slimy like the cave under Atlantic House. Merlin had moved to the back of the cave and collected the bundle of blankets and the faded paisley eiderdown quilt. He’d laid them on the floor, the same as he had that day when Connie had been with them.
‘Do you want to lie down?’
She kicked off her plimsolls and sat on the makeshift bed.
‘I’ve
