and right now it was just the thorns.
She sat on the bed, closed her eyes and began her private ritual of summoning Trevay in her mind’s eye and walking its narrow streets and lanes. What were the little boats in the harbour doing now? Would any of the ones she remembered still be working or were they left in the silt, their hulks rotting down to skeletons? Or perhaps they’d been dragged up to The Sheds where all boats rested, used and unused.
She could smell the seaweed and the salt.
Hear the gulls laughing.
The splash of water as children launched their crab lines into the deep harbour.
Her mother painting at her easel on the beach. Her washed-out linen shirts and faded trousers glowing in the sun.
Poppa sitting at his pottery wheel. The shiny slip of water and clay covering his hands to his elbows.
She dared, for a moment, to think about Henry but, as always, the electric nerve pain of the thought stopped her. She couldn’t even summon his face now. Or Ella’s. She had been a wicked woman. And now, with the letter from Cornwall, they had found her and would make her pay.
It had come like a ghost summoning her to her grave.
There were several old addresses written on the envelope as it had chased her around the globe, before finding her here, in India.
When she had read it, locked in her bathroom, away from any inquisition, the sense of fear had almost compelled her to run again.
The letter told her that her father had died some years ago, her mother three years ago. They had died intestate, had made no will, so she was the sole heir to the estate. The house had been sold for a good price when the solicitor, acting as trustee, had rightly thought the market was at its highest. That money was now in a high interest account and it was hers. She or her solicitor should come to Cornwall. All that needed to be done was to prove her identity and sign some forms. She didn’t even have to come to Cornwall, she could send a solicitor as her representative.
There was nothing about her children.
It took several days before she could formulate her reply. In it she expressed a desire to meet Henry and Ella and would only return to Cornwall if they wanted to see her.
The solicitor agreed to phone her when he had their answer.
She lay on the bed and allowed memories of her childhood to fill her thoughts.
She was on the beach at Shellsand Bay. Her father, nut-brown and strongly muscled, was swinging her round and round. He was smiling. His bright blue eyes twinkling in his tanned face and his deep laugh making her giggle. ‘Daddeeeee.’
‘Bill, darling, she might be sick,’ said her mother.
‘Are you going to be sick?’ he asked Sennen.
‘Noooooo,’ she giggled.
‘Would you like to come swimming with me and Mum?’
‘Yeeessssss.’
He put her down on the warm sand. ‘Get your rubber ring and we’ll look for the mermaids, shall we?’
Sennen ran to her mother. ‘Mummy, Daddy’s taking us swimming.’ She’d pulled at the slender, elegant hand of her mother. ‘Come on.’
Her father stood ready in his dark-blue swimming shorts.
Her mother smiled, ‘Of course. Let me just sort myself out.’ Adela had been painting in the small sketchbook she always carried with her, capturing the likeness of fishermen mending their nets or lobster pots piled high on the harbour or the holidaymakers napping in the sun.
‘I like that,’ said Bill peering over her shoulder at her watercolour of the beach scene in front of them. ‘Good colours.’
Adela stood up and put her hands on her husband’s bare chest. She kissed him. ‘Thank you.’
He kissed her back then held her slim body in his arms. She pressed her cheek against him and smelt the warmth of his skin.
‘I do love you,’ she said.
‘And I love you.’
Sennen bashed her mother on the back of the knees with her sand spade. ‘Come! On!’
Bill and Adela laughed and, taking Sennen in a hand each, they ran to the waves, swinging her between them. She had grown up surrounded by so much love and kindness. How could she have turned her back on them?
Cornwall, 1972
Adela was Cornish to the heart. Her parents had been wealthy landowners from Bodmin, her father the quintessential country squire and her mother a beauty of her day. Adela had wanted for nothing. The only awkward thing being that they were none of the things she actually wanted. Money, comfort, beauty, beaus – all were hers for the taking. But it wasn’t what she longed for. She dreamt of being a great artist, living a rackety bohemian life in London, preferably Pimlico, which she had heard about and liked the sound of.
When she finally told them, it had caused much consternation for her parents, who had planned a husband, Anthony, handsome and untroubled by intellect with a rather lovely medieval manor house on the banks of the Tamar.
But it was not to be. At the age of eighteen she won a place at the Slade School of Art on Gower Street, Bloomsbury.
She refused her parents’ offer of a nice little flat in Baker Street and, instead, put her name down for a flat-share with any of the new, female, students she would be joining up with. She would find out who when she arrived for her first term.
Her mother, a woman with a great capacity for organisation, decided her talents would be best spent taking her only child to Truro for the day and kitting her out with a new wardrobe of fashionable dresses and accessories and, as an afterthought, paints.
Come early September her father ordered his cherished Morris 6 to be serviced, polished and refuelled and drove her up to London in what he noted was record time. Nine and a half hours. It would have been even quicker if it hadn’t been for the thick fog that had rolled over Dartmoor and a puncture on the A38.
Adela had waved him off to his club, where he would spend the night before the return journey the following day, and set about her new life with enthusiasm.
Her new flat, off Marylebone High Street, was small but clean and her flatmates were fun. There was Elsie, who was Irish and smoked, and Kina, who tied her hair with bright cotton scarves and wore boy’s jeans. She was from Jamaica and was the most exotic person Adela had ever met.
Together they shared everything, including Kina’s fashion sense. Within days Adela’s pretty dresses and gloves, were taken off their hangers and bundled
