A Perfectly Good Man (21 page)

He had his answer when they reached Casualty and she told the nurses on reception, ‘I had a fall and now I think I may be miscarrying.’

One of the nurses took her into a small examination room. There was a lot of blood as Nuala lifted up her nightdress, which seemed answer enough but the nurse fetched a doctor anyway, another woman, who examined her and gravely confirmed that she had indeed miscarried.

‘That’s a nasty bruise you’ve got there,’ the doctor said.

‘I fell,’ Nuala told her. ‘It was so stupid. The rug slipped under me and I landed against a coffee table.’

And the doctor gently touched the second bruise, the one Nuala hadn’t realized had blossomed all up one side of her neck and asked, ‘Are you sure about that?’ Nuala said nothing but must have glanced towards the waiting room. ‘Do you want me to call the police?’

‘No.’

‘Have you got somewhere safe you can go, then?’

Nuala thought a moment and nodded.

‘Good. You go there.’ The doctor gave her a shot for the pain and some tablets to take when it wore off. Then she slipped her the card of a women’s refuge in Carlton, just a block from Nuala’s studio. ‘Ring them,’ she said. ‘They’ll help you see sense in a way family and friends probably can’t.’ She was an athletic-looking fifty-something with a quick-dry haircut, more priestly than feminine.

Christos was devastated about the baby, there was no doubting that, but she hardened her heart. She had to be kind and sweet and say she forgave him or he would never have left her alone long enough to pack her things and slip away. And it was two days – a whole eternity of weekend – before he went to work and she could spring into action.

She went to Niamh at first but that was hopeless as he knew exactly where to find her and what the phone number was and simply laid siege. She rang the women’s refuge who put her onto a lawyer who not only started divorce proceedings but had an injunction placed on him to keep his distance. Yet still he sent anonymous cards, flowers, chocolates, champagne. It would have been funny had it not been so frightening. She had always hated all the trappings of Valentine’s Day and this was like having it three times a week. At last she could stand it no longer, especially once he started terrorizing Niamh and even flying down to Adelaide to visit their mother, who knew none of the nasty details so welcomed him in and threatened to take his side.

Nuala escaped to San Francisco, but found that too expensive, and tried London, which was little cheaper. Then she came on a trip to Cornwall to visit a nice ex-hippy couple she had got talking to at an opening in Clerkenwell, and took a room in a B&B in Penzance, hired a car and started house-hunting. Her mother’s family were Adelaide-Cornish, something that had always seemed utterly meaningless and irrelevant when she was growing up – a heritage apparently consisting of little more than various unsuitably wintry recipes like pasties and heavy cake, and a tendency to name one’s houses and children after Cornish beauty spots. (Their father had been Irish, however, and stronger willed, otherwise they’d surely have been called Lamorna and Endellion.) Her great-grandfather had been a miner from Pendeen who had been lured to the South Australian minefields with the promise of better weather and higher pay. That was all she knew. That and that nobody in Adelaide seemed to call their bungalows or children Pendeen.

Although it was actually only seven miles from Penzance, it felt profoundly remote, especially in the dingy weather in which she first saw it. The linked parishes of Pendeen and Morvah lay along a sort of windswept shelf of land on the north coast, between the forbidding high moorland that screened it from what felt like civilization, and the no more inviting rocky shore, which, to the untrained eye, appeared entirely beachless. Tin mining had begun out at the cliffs centuries ago and steadily progressed inland towards the villages to which it had given rise, leaving an apparently devastated landscape in its wake. She parked the car by Pendeen church. One generation of miners, including quite possibly her ancestors, had helped build it and another, in urgent need of work, had been hired to encompass it with high, fancifully crenellated walls.

After a quick glance around it, idly looking on gravestones for surnames she knew from Adelaide and finding a host of them, she walked down a steep lane to the stumpy lighthouse whose foghorn was blaring at intervals. From there she followed the coast path to bring her as close to the mine workings at Geevor as she was allowed and she admired the lurid green staining on the cliffs from copper traces in the waste water and wondered at the creeping wasteland still caused by a former arsenic works. Compared to the minefields she knew in Australia, it covered a tiny area and damage to the landscape was relatively confined. Pendeen felt hunkered down and grim, its appearance not helped by the drizzle and being strung out along the road rather than picturesquely gathered around a village green. When she had told her new friends she was visiting the place, they had pulled faces and someone had made a joke about how she’d need a passport to get back from there and someone else, with the thoughtless English racism so different from the Australian kind, said Pendeen lay in Indian Country. All of which made her feel instinctively sorry for the place and protective of it. Added to which, the negative perceptions of others had a way of keeping property prices usefully low.

She returned the next day, in better weather, with a map and a sheaf of estate agents’ details. Nothing she saw was right. There were several places she discounted from the car and a couple of near-misses. She wanted something built in the vernacular style from granite, not brick or rendered blockwork and she needed somewhere with an outbuilding suitable for a kiln, which ruled out even the more charming of the old terraces as none of these had outbuildings bigger than a privy or cramped washhouse. She had given up and was heading home by what seemed the quickest way, along the road to Morvah and then back inland towards Penzance, when a hawk swooping over the road in pursuit of something led her eye up to the left and she saw the place and lost her heart.

It lay high above the road and up its own long track and appeared to be a farmstead, only with no evidence of continued farming. An ex-farmstead, perhaps. It was not large but stood entirely alone. And it had a couple of stone outbuildings, one of which had a chimney. There was a For Sale sign at the drive’s end with a ferociously messy BY APPOINTMENT ONLY! painted on a piece of wood nailed below it.

There was some confusion at the estate agent’s as to whether, actually, it was for sale or not. The owner was an old lady with a tribe of cats and no great fondness for her fellow men, especially if they had children, dogs or were merely looking for a holiday home.

‘Basically she’ll interview you before she’ll even let you see the place,’ the agent warned her. ‘That For Sale sign’s been up for two years but most people don’t get to see beyond the first room. Either that or they can’t take the cats.’

Sure enough, the feline reek was almost overpowering and Miss Eddy, who had the look of a once-great actress devastated by years and misfortune, began by saying the agents had wasted Nuala’s time since the house was no longer for sale. But then she softened, when Nuala stooped to pet an antique, white tom who had come to circle her legs and – a further test – accepted coffee in cups that gave no sign of having been washed within recent memory. And then, after quizzing Nuala closely about her plans and prospects and pottery, she relented further and showed her around.

Redworks House was newer than it appeared from a distance, being some rich man’s folly built just before the Great War. It was little more than a hunting lodge when Miss Eddy bought it and added a bathroom in the early sixties and she had lived there ever since, apparently doing nothing more to it. It retained its original, leaky, metal-framed windows and Bakelite light switches with, presumably, antique wiring to match. Beneath the cat-shredded rugs, yellowing newspapers and overflowing litter trays, Nuala could see a filthy parquet floor. There was no garden as such, just grass, gorse and incredible views. The two outbuildings were a garage and a stable complete with a rudimentary fireplace, where Nuala could position a kiln, assuming she could have three-phase wiring connected to such a remote address.

‘I love it,’ she wanted to enthuse but she was wise to the old bird so simply said, ‘I can’t think how you can bear to leave it.’

‘I can’t,’ Miss Eddy said. ‘Probably go in a box when I do.’

She left things maddeningly vague, implying that, if she were to sell, if, then a non-churchgoing, non-dog-owning, childless artist like Nuala would be just the sort of person she’d want to sell to. If she wanted to sell.

Nuala pressed her mobile number on her, promising to have nothing further to do with the estate agents, and Miss Eddy – Constance, as she now became – rang her repeatedly in the weeks that followed. As Nuala found other houses of less and less interest now that she had experienced the one that was perfect, she found herself dragooned into running ever more intimate errands for the old woman who had what she wanted. First she asked her to call in at the estate agents and pass on the message that the house was now definitely off the market. (‘Again,’ sighed the estate agent, picking the display out of her window.) Then she asked her to collect a prescription and to return some criminally overdue library books, which stank of cat. Then she asked her to take one of the cats to the vet in St Ives for a booster. This was a major test as the creature yowled all the way there and all the way back and, when it emerged that Constance’s account had long-unpaid invoices against it, Nuala had to pay for two years’ worth of injections.

And then it became clear that a greater change was afoot, as the errands related to something very like housemoving. Sacks of empty food tins for taking to the recycling centre in St Just. Boxes of old books for the Oxfam shop. Boxes of clothes, ditto, though these were so stained Nuala shamefacedly stuffed them into the more anonymous Oxfam bin instead, so that she need meet nobody’s eye over them. Then all the cats bar the antique tom (the yowler and favourite) were mysteriously rehomed or rescued. And then, just when Nuala had decided to put in an offer on a perfectly nice and far more practical place on the lane down to Cape Cornwall, Constance rang, early and excited. She would like a lift to St Ives that morning, please.

‘Much better, now I’m getting on a bit,’ she said as Nuala negotiated the unbelievably narrow lane towards Zennor. ‘It’ll make a change being down in the sunshine and crowds, like being on holiday. I’ve paid all the bills and put everything in your name. The key’s under the dustbin at the back. You’ve been such a dear. So patient. I’ve had to leave you Eustace because he’s part of the furniture. He’d never have got on in a twilight home and he’ll be a reformed character now all the girls have gone. Otherwise the place is all yours.’

‘What about lawyers?’ Nuala stammered. ‘Bank details? Conveyancing?’

Once she had settled Constance into the council-run home in St Ives, Nuala consulted her lawyer, who soon discovered that the old bird’s saying, ‘I couldn’t possibly sell you the place – it would be robbery,’ was perfectly true since she had never owned the house but had been a squatter. This explained both her longstanding reluctance to sell and her cheerful lack of interest in maintaining the property. No living owners could be traced. Perhaps because of the widely-held assumption that Constance owned it, the property had fallen through a loophole when the land to either side was adopted by the National Trust. Having squatted there herself for nearly a year, and spent what felt like a cottage’s cost on legal fees, Nuala became established as Redworks House’s rightful owner.

Constance hated being in the home, predictably, became ever more peculiar and unruly then, mercifully, died. Nuala and the home’s matron were the only attendees at her faith-free cremation. Eustace held on a few months longer then took himself off somewhere in the impenetrable gorse thickets that had been his hunting grounds and never returned.

With what was left of the settlement from her divorce, Nuala turned the old stable into a studio. Inspired by her new surroundings, the radically different weather, colours, rocks and plants, her work took a new direction. Escaping at last from the oppressive influence of her teachers at VCA who, ironically, had been shaped in turn by the St Ives potter, Bernard Leach, she no longer felt the need to produce work that was in any way useful or practical. Or, indeed, brown. Although she still made the occasional bowl that might be prettily filled, her bottles, vases and platters were now far too delicate for use. She began to lose herself in the risky, expensive realms of lustreware.

Fascinated by the colours she could produce with ground-down gold and silver jewellery, picked up in antiques markets, she also experimented with the metal-laden clays that bad weather washed out of the adits of some of the abandoned mine workings, from Geevor to Nanquidno. One especially arsenical shaft often produced an intense sunshine yellow that was all the more pleasing for the knowledge that a poison had been transformed to produce something so cheerful. Inevitably she had disasters, false turnings, entire batches – weeks of work – ruined when the insane winds made her kiln burn too hot and took all the precious glazes up the chimney, but she steadily found a new style that worked for her. She specialized in pieces that looked ancient – their intense colours frayed and foxed so that they seemed like once-bright artefacts clouded by centuries under sand or earth.

She was learning about herself too. Raised in cities, always in noisy crowds even when she escaped to the beach or the bush, she discovered that she preferred solitude and that her apparent gregariousness had been no more than an habitual mask. She enjoyed her own company. Entirely alone, she was discovering she was far more thoughtful than her upbringing had led her to believe. She had always read for pleasure, though never voraciously. Settling into the house, prompted by boxes of Constance’s old books that had travelled no further than the garage, she fell into a routine of reading in the evenings, reading for reading’s sake rather than merely to fill the time or make her sleepy.