Chapter 11

  Caught in the Conflict

  ‘You can’t SELL Daddy’s boat.’ Matt’s eyes were savage with pain as he looked at his mother.

  Lottie sighed. Caught again in the conflict. Her peaceful, secure new life had come to an end on the day Arnie died. Today, on the first day of the summer holiday, it was raining, the rain driving sideways in from the Western Sea in densely packed needles of silver, and the colours of the cobbles glowed in the wet streets.

  ‘I can sell the boat,’ Jenny said. ‘Sell it, or we don’t eat.’

  ‘But Daddy promised it would be MY boat when I grow up.’

  ‘Well, you won’t grow up at all if we don’t get some money in for food.’ Jenny looked at him fiercely. ‘Stop making trouble, Matt.’

  ‘How is that making trouble?’ he asked. ‘Remembering what Daddy promised isn’t making trouble. Is it, Lottie?’

  ‘Don’t drag Lottie into it,’ Jenny snapped. ‘Where do you think I’m gonna get money from? Eh?’

  ‘You could get a job,’ Matt said sulkily.

  ‘And who would look after you children? And do the washing?’

  ‘We don’t need looking after,’ Matt argued. ‘Do we, Tom?’

  Tom looked up from making a model cart from matchboxes. ‘Yes, we do. I want Mummy to be at home. Why don’t you do what Nan does, Mummy? Nan sells flower posies and herbs.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what she does,’ Jenny ranted. ‘And Nan has got a garden and we haven’t. Anyway, I don’t know how to grow plants.’

  ‘Nan would teach you,’ Lottie said brightly. ‘She’s teaching me.’

  ‘THAT WOMAN is not gonna teach me anything. I don’t care if she knows how to make solid gold bricks. I don’t want nothing to do with her.’ Jenny frowned at Lottie who was making pompoms from wool and old cardboard milk bottle tops. ‘And what d’you mean, she’s teaching you? I told you not to go up there, Lottie.’

  ‘She went up there yesterday,’ said Matt gleefully, ‘and the day before – and the day before that.’

  Lottie felt her face going red. She continued winding the skein of yellow wool through the hole in the centre of the bottle top. It was true. She had been going to see Nan as often as she could, letting Jenny think she was out playing or out with Morwenna. After Arnie’s death, Jenny had forbidden her to visit Nan. Shocked and disappointed, Lottie had kept quiet and done it anyway. She loved Nan, and Nan loved her. She knew that. The visits were precious times for Lottie. Nan was teaching her about herbs and flowers, how to make jam from fruit, how to care for the animals, and now music: how to read music and play it on a wooden recorder. Nan had promised to teach her to play the piano accordion when Vic could bring it down from the attic, and when Lottie was strong enough to hold it. On wet days, Nan took out the photo albums and showed her pictures of Arnie as a little boy, or they would read together from Nan’s extensive library.

  ‘Is it true, Lottie?’ Jenny asked sharply.

  Lottie stopped threading the yellow wool. She didn’t like having to tell lies. So she kept quiet.

  ‘Lottie?’

  Silence.

  ‘Look at me will you?’ Jenny’s eyes always seemed to be angry since Arnie died. Lottie didn’t like looking into them any more. She actually felt she had lost Jenny as well as Arnie. Jenny banged a fist on the table, making Tom’s matchbox cart topple over. ‘Will you answer me, Lottie?’

  Lottie shook her head. She stared at the ribbons of rain pouring down the window.

  ‘Answer me. Have you been going up to Nan’s place or haven’t you?’

  Silence.

  ‘Yes or no?’

  Lottie was aware of Jenny burning a path to her secret life. But she didn’t feel like a vulnerable ten-year-old. Oh no. Lottie felt like a grown woman, a woman with rights to a life of her own.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking steadily at Jenny. Beside her, at the table, Tom twitched with anxiety.

  ‘Yes? Is that all you have to say?’

  Lottie just looked at her.

  ‘How dare you disobey me?’ Jenny was pumping herself up for one of her rages. Rages ten times worse since Arnie died.

  Tom froze, looking at her beseechingly, a half-glued matchbox gripped in sticky, industrious fingers.

  ‘I want an explanation, Lottie.’

  Lottie thought carefully. Finally she said, ‘I’m not going to stop visiting Nan. I have a right to a life of my own. And there’s nothing more to say.’ She picked up her wool and went on threading the pompom.

  ‘You little MADAM.’ Jenny raised her hand to slap Lottie, changed her mind and hit the table instead.

  Lottie managed to keep still, trembling inside, her beautiful dark blue eyes inspecting Jenny’s hidden soul. She longed for Arnie to come and make everything right. Her memory of him was vivid. The love in his eyes as he’d rescued her from the sea. His quiet voice explaining things to her. The way he calmed Jenny down and made her laugh. The way he’d sprawl in the middle of the sofa with a story book and the three children snuggled round him. The way he’d taught her to swim on Porthminster Beach. She missed him. It hurt, along the rims of her eyes and into her hair like a tight cord drawn around her head.

  It wasn’t Lottie who broke down, but Tom. ‘You’re not to hit Lottie, Mummy. It’s not fair.’ He swept the matchbox cart onto the floor, put his head down on the table and howled unashamedly. ‘I want Daddy. Why did our Daddy die?’ He looked up at Jenny, the question fathomless in his eyes.

  Lottie stared at Matt who was sitting on the stairs, endlessly bouncing a ball he’d made from rubber bands he’d collected since he was five. She didn’t want Matt to upset Jenny even more with one of his knife-edged remarks. Matt thought he owned the answer to Tom’s question. He blamed Jenny for Arnie’s death, and told her so at every opportunity.

  Jenny went to the sofa, her face pale and desperate. She held out her arms. ‘Come here, Tom – and you, Lottie.’

  Lottie picked up the matchbox cart and arranged it considerately on the table. She put her arm round Tom and steered him to the sofa. He curled up between her and Jenny, his loud crying diminishing into sobs and sniffs.

  ‘And you, Matt,’ Jenny said hopefully.

  Matt wavered, then hardened his stare, shoved the rubber ball into his pocket and stomped upstairs.

  ‘We’ve got no money,’ Jenny said in a low voice, her arms around Tom and Lottie. ‘We’ve got to stick together, not fight.’

  They clung together, letting the pain settle, listening to the rain, and the sound of Matt slamming around upstairs. He was dragging furniture across the floorboards and there was the sound of a bucket clanking. Then he came running down the stairs.

  ‘The roof’s leaking, Mummy. It’s coming through the ceiling in your bedroom – in two places.’ He grabbed a white enamel bowl from the kitchen and ran back up the stairs with it. They all followed him up and stared into Jenny’s bedroom at the rainwater pouring in through a sagging hole in the ceiling.

  On that night of relentless rain, Jenny bedded down on the sofa, sleeping in deep dreamless interludes and waking to the muted glow from the stove and the deafening roar of her worries. Several times in the night, she heard Matt get up to empty the rainwater from the bucket. She heard his bare feet struggling with the weight of it, then the battle with the broken window catch and the clank of the bucket. He was emptying the water down into the street, and she heard the slap of it landing, then the gleeful ring of drips leaking into an empty bucket. Matt is being responsible for once, she thought in surprise. In the morning she’d say thank you and give him a cuddle, if he’d let her. Matt had offered to run down to his grandad’s cottage at first light and ask for help before Vic set out in his fishing boat. Matt CAN be helpful, Jenny thought. She pictured the leggy, resentful boy he had become, and winced with remembered hurt from the times he’d yelled, ‘I hate you,’ or ‘It’s YOUR fault Daddy died.’

  Matt, and the leaking roof were just some of the problems stacking up in Jenny’s life. Without Arnie she felt like half a family, the weakest half. Every day, every hour she was making terrible mistakes. Shouting at the children. Bursting into tears. Losing her temper. Making a mess of everything she tried to do. Extreme grief seemed like a demolition gang, knocking down a different bit of her every day, leaving her to find her way through the rising dust cloud. Nobody talked to her about Arnie. Even Millie seemed to be avoiding her. And Vic was too hollowed out by his own grief, and his need to pretend he was cheerfully coping.

  Today she had come perilously close to slapping Lottie, something she and Arnie had pledged never to do. It had taken little Tom’s open-hearted distress to bring Jenny home to her true self. At times she realised the three children were carrying her. Loving and accepting her as she stumbled blindly through the day, burning their meals, ignoring their cries, pushing them out to run wild in St Ives, not knowing or caring where they were or who they were with. Jenny had given up trying to ban Morwenna, sensing she and Lottie were close friends.

  It was Vic who talked Matt through the business of selling The Jenny Wren. At seven o’clock the following morning in clean, forgiving sunshine, Vic was up on the roof, fixing the leak, and he took Matt up there with him. ‘You can’t use your Daddy’s boat ’til you’re fourteen, Matt,’ Jenny heard him say. ‘We can’t leave the boat to rot – because it will rot. A friend of mine, Terry – you know Terry – he wants to buy it. He’ll look after it – and when you’re fourteen maybe we can buy it back for you.’

  ‘But it’s still not fair,’ Matt said. ‘Daddy wanted ME to have it – so I should have the money for it, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Life isn’t fair,’ Vic told him, and Jenny could hear the crunch of slate tiles as he wedged them into place on the roof. ‘You wouldn’t walk round with a big bag of money while Tom and Lottie and your mum are starving, would you?’

  ‘No,’ said Matt, after a pause, and what he said next chilled Jenny to the bone. ‘I’d share it with Tom but not with HER.’

  ‘Who d’you mean? Lottie?’

  ‘No – Mummy. It’s her fault Daddy got drunk and drowned. She betrayed him.’

  ‘No – no, lad – she didn’t.’

  ‘She DID,’ insisted Matt. ‘She made Daddy jealous ’cause she was dancing with Troy, and she knew he was jealous but she still did it. I hate her, Grandad. I hate her.’ A fragment of masonry came whizzing down and crashed into the street. ‘I wish that was HER head.’

  ‘If you’re going to throw stones, I won’t have you up here helping me,’ Vic said firmly, his voice quiet. ‘You go down my ladder and pick up every single bit of that piece of tile, and bring it back up here, right now. No messing.’

  Matt did climb down, with a very red face. He glanced guiltily at Jenny who was on the doorstep, picked up the fragments of tile and climbed the ladder with the same reckless, careless confidence as Arnie had always shown.

  ‘Now you’ve gotta change your attitude . . .’ Vic began, but Jenny couldn’t bear to hear any more. She went inside, took Arnie’s coat from the back of the scullery door and held it to her face. ‘I loved you, Arnie – I adored you,’ she wept, letting the tears soak into the oily, salty old fabric of the coat that felt like Arnie. She tasted the bitterness of being hated by Arnie’s firstborn son. She’d wanted so much to be a mother, but it had been harder than she imagined. Harder – and now impossible. What would she do when the money from the boat ran out? By then it would be winter, and the children would need new shoes and warm coats. And decent meals.

  Pull yourself together, Jen, she told herself, replacing Arnie’s coat on the door. She stoked the fire and added some of the coal scavenged from the harbour beach. Once a week the coal ship came in from Swansea, laden with silvery black Welsh coal. As each sack was unloaded and carried up the granite steps to the horses and carts waiting on the pier, plenty of it got spilled, ending up on the sand against the harbour wall. Unbeknown to Jenny, the St Ives coalman had seen the Lanroska children gathering it into sacks and dragging it home with black hands and legs. He knew they were Arnie’s children, so he was extra careless with the coal, ‘accidentally’ letting the sacks topple and drop some sizeable chunks.

  On the following Tuesday when the children arrived home with bags of coal loaded into Arnie’s driftwood cart, Jenny made sure she met them at the door. The two boys looked like chimney sweeps, their eyes sparkling from sooty faces. Only Lottie managed to keep reasonably clean but her hands and feet were black, and there were smudges on her pinny.

  ‘You’re not coming in here,’ Jenny said, heartlessly but with a touch of humour. ‘You go in the sea and get clean – go on – down Porthminster – and don’t come back ’til you’re clean.’

  ‘But I’m hungry, Mummy.’

  ‘And I’m tired.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Jenny fired back. ‘You can’t eat with hands like that. You’ll be eating more coal dust than bread. And while you’re gone I’ll be getting dinner ready.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Star-gazy pie.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Yes – again, Tom. Pilchards are all we’ve got. Now will you GO and get clean, or do I have to chase you down the road with me rolling pin?’ Jenny reached for the wooden rolling pin which was on the scullery table. Her eyes twinkled with a rare moment of fun and the three children ran off, giggling. Jenny sighed, her smile vanishing, the glint of humour misted over like an island in a storm. She wheeled the precarious cart through the cottage to the yard and tipped the scavenged coal into the outhouse. It was enough for about three fires. And then what? How would they live and keep warm through the winter when westerly gales buffeted the streets, when the hail stung your face and the salty wind burned your eyeballs. Endless days when the fishermen couldn’t go out and there were no more pilchards, and no fuel to light the stove. No hot drinks and no cooked meals.

  Her boys were tough and used to those dark winter days of blankets and candles. Jenny worried about Lottie. She wanted Lottie to be radiant, the way she’d looked when Arnie was alive, not thin and haunted as she looked now. I could lose her, Jenny thought, remembering how ill Lottie had been after the shipwreck.

  ‘You all right, Jen?’ The door opened and Millie came in with a tray of pasties and a fruit cake she had made. ‘I thought you could use these up. I made too many.’

  ‘Oh Millie.’ Tears welled in Jenny’s eyes. She suspected Millie had made them on purpose and was offering her a face-saving way of accepting them. ‘Course I can. The children will love them – and CAKE! Will you stay and eat with us?’ She gave Millie a hug. ‘You’ve been such a good neighbour.’

  Millie sat down at the table. She looked uneasy.

  ‘Something’s up?’ Jenny said, concerned.

  ‘Well . . . yes. I’ve got summat to tell you, Jen.’ Millie’s merry eyes looked doleful, and she was pulling a long cream-coloured thread from the bodice of her apron, winding it around a flour-ingrained finger. ‘I feel bad – leaving you on your own, things being as they are, but I gotta go an’ live in Penzance. Me sister’s on her own like me and she’s crippled with arthritis, she can’t walk. I gotta look after her. I don’t want to leave S’nives, but there you are, families come first, don’t ’em?’

  ‘Penzance! Such a long way. I’ll miss you.’ Jenny was shocked. She reached out and held Millie’s hand. ‘That’s a bombshell. You’ve been like a mother to me, and the children.’

  Millie nodded. She pulled the thread harder until it came out. ‘It’s only a train ride away. You can bring them down one day and we’ll walk over to the Mount.’ She spoke brightly but her eyes told a different story. A story of loneliness and poverty.

  ‘That would be lovely,’ Jen said, but they both knew it probably wouldn’t happen. How could she ever afford the train fare for four of them? ‘When are you going, Millie?’

  Millie took a deep breath. ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’ Jenny was devastated.

  A wounded silence trembled between them.

  Millie’s bust heaved with another deep breath. ‘I want you to promise me something, Jen.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You’ve gotta bury the hatchet with Nan, Jen. I know you don’t like her – but you need her, and she needs you. Lottie’s so happy up there – I went up to see Nan, to tell her I was leaving, and Lottie was there helping her pick the Victoria plums, and she looked so happy. She loves the animals and the garden, and did you know Nan is teaching her music?’

  ‘No.’ Jenny was tight-lipped.

  ‘Nan wants to help you – if you let her – she grows all her own veg. Her garden’s like a wonderland. Jen – you can’t let yer silly pride ruin Lottie’s life after what that child’s been through.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Thinking about it’s no good,’ Millie said passionately. ‘You gotta do it. Get over it. Put it behind you, Jen. You can’t afford pride. I know I’m sticking me neck out, but I ’ope you’ll take it from me, ’cause I love you like a daughter. A daughter I never had, Jen.’

  Jenny’s throat ached. Arnie’s soulful eyes with their long lashes seemed to be close, looking into her heart, telling her Millie was right. So why, why was it so impossible?

  ‘I will think about it, Millie,’ she said, to keep the peace.

  Alone in his spacious London apartment, John De Lumen took a last, appraising look at his painting, Discovering Charlotte. Since witnessing Arnie’s funeral he had made subtle changes to the painting. The carefree child he’d seen on the sands at Porthmeor Beach must now be given a new depth and dimension. The sadness would be in her eyes, those dark blue, dreaming, knowing eyes. The innocent sparkle of them shone out from the ambience of the painting. The way the pale sands changed from white-gold to mirrors of silver reflecting the marbled clouds of a summer sky, and reflecting the bubbling fringe of each incoming wave. To John, the lines of surf were like a page of music, a blend of lullaby and power. Largo and fortissimo. As he painted, he found himself pausing to compose sea music on his Bechstein grand piano, his paint-stained fingers flying over the keys, his eyes searching Charlotte’s eyes as she gazed out at him from the canvas.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29