3 August 2018, 12.00 p.m.
St Austell Bay gleamed in the distance as Diana Trewin turned left towards Porthpean and Boskenna. Once she had longed for Boskenna with everything that was in her. Every night she would clutch her pillow to her chest and pretend she could hear the sea, then she would dream. In those dreams she wandered sunlit rooms, seeing glamour and hearing the echoes of music and laughter. She would discover new rooms and new treasures then she would wake and the world around wasn’t as bright or as beautiful. Those dreams still came to her, mostly at times of stress. She escaped to those visions of blue sea and sky, big lawns and a library filled with every book she could want. No real house could live up to what her mind had created.
Last night she’d had that dream again. She’d walked Boskenna’s halls, seen the views and discovered new rooms. It was achingly familiar and yet entirely new. Something was forever just out of reach. She had always assumed that it was her father. If Diana found one more room, or the right book on the correct shelf then a secret door would open and her lost childhood with her father would appear. He would tell her that he’d just been playing hide and seek. She was his fierce huntress and she had found him. But no book, or panel or secret door would reveal her father, Allan Trewin. The morning light always showed the truth. Boskenna wasn’t a palace of delights but a big draughty dwelling, housing two old people.
Now she was just moments away and the lane narrowed, funnelling her towards the beach. A sharp turn and she was through the gates. Yesterday the call that every adult child expects and dreads when their parents reach a certain age had come. ‘Your mother’s dying,’ George Russell, her mother’s second husband, had said. She wasn’t sure how she felt about returning to Boskenna or about her mother. But that didn’t matter. Some things have to be done.
She parked next to George’s old Jag and grabbed her overnight bag. A shiver of recognition and homecoming covered her skin as she walked across the gravelled drive towards the house. She’d only been back to Boskenna a few times since she’d left it as an eight-year-old. Her heart had broken then – and a few more times since – and now it was whole, if patched. It performed its job a bit like the roof on the caretaker’s cottage to her left where a bit of blue tarpaulin covered an eave.
Outside the front door she stopped and turned to the bay. The heat of the sun beat down on her and the happy cries rose up from the beach. The world went on, while somewhere inside her mother was dying. She paused, feeling that sharp contrast between life and death, between the holiday world on the beach below and the everyday life in Boskenna. Even back in 1962 when she had spent her last summer holiday here, Boskenna existed on a different plain. She had tripped lightly among the intelligent and interesting, the suntanned and the salt-encrusted. That was all she remembered because tears had erased the important bits.
A seagull landed on the lawn and peered at her. The tilt of his head asked her why she was here. Duty she guessed. She pushed a piece of gravel with her toe. Diana and her mother, Joan Trewin Russell, had nothing to say to each other. They hadn’t for years. If Diana were honest this was a sadness she had sought to lose in her work. Travelling the world as a war correspondent had filled the void for years, but now she was slowing down and that left gaps. Unwanted thoughts and questions had begun to seep into the spaces.
Looking at the lawn, a memory of playing tag with her mother flashed in Diana’s mind. She was laughing and so was her mother. Once they must have been close but since her father died over fifty years ago, that had evaporated. Her mother loved Diana in her way. Diana had wanted for nothing . . . except her. Everything changed and she knew it was because of that long weekend fifty-six years ago.
The front door was open, and she couldn’t stand on the threshold forever, as tempting as the view was. George would be around somewhere. Striding in, she put the past aside to focus on what was happening now.
In the hallway the temperature dropped, and she shivered. The newspaper on the large round table in the centre of the hall flapped. Due to her early start she hadn’t read the papers cover to cover as she normally would, but she’d listened to today’s stories on the radio. They were eerily similar to those in her last summer here. She flattened the pages and placed an empty vase on top of it. In 1962 the world had been on the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union and currently the great bear was roaring again. The world moved forward and thought things would be better, but people never learned.
She peered into the drawing room then the snug, but George wasn’t in sight and she was reluctant to call out. All was quiet aside from a lawnmower and the distant beach sounds. The small kitchen was empty too. There was nothing for it but to head up to her mother’s room. She dropped her bag on an empty chair and took the stairs slowly, trying to prepare. She had seen the dead and the dying, but she knew this was different despite her ambivalent feelings.
On the landing she hesitated. A cough echoed down the hallway. Her mother was still alive. Diana was not too late to say goodbye. The floorboards complained as she walked the corridor. A closet popped open as she passed, and she glanced away. It would be full and what on earth would Diana do with it all? Maybe she would be lucky, and it would be empty. The house had been let for nearly thirty years. It wasn’t until George retired in 1990 that Boskenna had become her mother’s home again. Diana stopped. She’d seen her mother’s will years ago. Boskenna would come to her but George had the right to live in it until his death. Her mother, of course, had expected to outlive George. That was the normal order of things but that hadn’t worked for her grandmother either. Caroline Penquite, née Carew, had died of cirrhosis of the liver long before her husband Edward had passed away. Boskenna had bypassed him and gone straight to Diana’s mother.
There were seven steps up to the landing in front of her mother’s room. An odd detail to recall but she used to hop up and down them. Now the door was wide open, and the smell of illness hung in the air. Every few seconds as she stood there, she heard a raspy breath. Yet she remained motionless, staring not at her mother propped up in a chair but out of the windows. This room commanded an all-encompassing view, or it would have done if the trees hadn’t been allowed to grow untended.
Boskenna had been added to over the years as the wealth of the family had increased. This room sat in the extension made in the 1840s. The ceilings were higher, and the sea-facing wall curved out towards the bay. Twenty years later the north end of the house was extended in the same way. As with all the windows at the front of the house, these framed a view. Gribben Head baked in the August sun while boats with white sails dotted the bay. It was postcard perfect, but what pithy lines would she pen on the back? Mother unwell but perfect holiday weather . . .
She could make out Carrickowel Point, the little headland to the left, which seemed to spring from the end of Boskenna’s garden. Black Head to the right was just visible through the trees. Beauty could stop her in her tracks, but that wasn’t what was holding her here on the threshold. Fear was. It was foolish because in the course of her work she had walked straight up to men holding guns pointed at her heart, but here she was rooted to the spot afraid of facing her dying mother. What could she say? She’d thought about this the whole drive and she’d rehearsed words and phrases. ‘I love you,’ being one of them. But then the questions that had gnawed at her for years popped up. They would not sink down into the recesses of her mind. Like children’s toy ducks pushed to the bottom of the bath, they kept bobbing back up bringing unwanted emotions with them.
Clenching her hands, she took one step after the other, keeping her gaze focused out of the windows. A gull swooped down from the roof and she jumped. She was hardened and had seen death in its worst forms, but her head refused to turn to look at her mother.
George had been right to call her, but it would have been easier to come for the funeral. Being here now still gave her time, and time demanded action in some way. She exhaled. Standing here she couldn’t avoid thinking of her father, missing what she could barely remember. She’d been eight
