The Carousel (12 page)

"Well, if you won't come, then I must go on my own. Phoebe will think I've forgotten about her or crashed the car or something ghastly."

I got out of my chair and so did Daniel. We stood, like people at a formal party when it is time to leave.

"Good night, Daniel."

He put his hands on my shoulders and stooped to kiss my cheek. When he had done this, I stood for a long moment, looking up into his face. I put my arms around his neck and drew his head down to mine and kissed his mouth. I felt his arms come around me, felt myself held so close that I could feel the beating of his

heart through the thick, rough wool of his sweater. "Oh, Prue."

I laid my cheek against his shoulder. Felt his lips caress the top of my head. It was the most gentle of embraces, without passion, without apparant significance. So why did I suddenly feel this way, aching with a need I had never known before, my legs weak, my eyes burning with ridiculous, unshed tears? Could loving a person happen so suddenly? Like a rocket, fired into a dark sky, exploding into infinity and carrying with it a trail of shimmering, many coloured stars.

We stood silent, holding each other, like children clinging for comfort. It didn't seem to matter about not talking. Then Daniel said, "That house in Greece. I don't want you to think I didn't mean it when I asked you to come and visit me."

"Are you asking me to come with you now?"

"No."

I drew away from him and looked up into his face. He told me, "I can't go on running away from the inside of my own head. Maybe someday, sometime." He kissed me again, briskly this time, becoming practical, glancing at his wristwatch. "You must go. The casserole will be burned to nothing and Phoebe will think I've ravished you." He fetched my coat from the chair and held it out for me, and I put my arms into the sleeves, and he turned me around and did up all the buttons down the front.

"I'll come downstairs with you." He went to open the door, and we walked together, side by side, down the long corridor towards the head of the stairs. We passed rows of closed bedroom doors behind which people we had never known had loved and honeymooned and holidayed and laughed, and quarrelled and made up the quarrels with laughter.

The foyer, when we reached the foot of the stairs, now presented its most festive face. Guests emerged from the bar or made their way towards the restaurant or sat around those same little tables with cocktails before them and dishes of nuts. The hum of conversation, raised in order to be audible above the sound of the orchestra, was considerable. The men wore black ties and velvet dinner jackets, and the ladies were in evening skirts or sequinned caftans.

We walked through it all, causing a slight stir with our unexpected appearance, like ghosts at a feast. Conversations faltered as we walked by; eyebrows once more were raised. We reached the main door and were turned out into the darkness and the night. It had stopped raining at last, but there was still a wind keening through the high branches of trees.

Daniel looked up at the sky. "How will it be tomorrow?"

"Fine, perhaps. The wind may blow all the bad weather away."

We came to the car. He opened the door for me. "When shall I meet you?"

"About eleven. I'll come for you, if you want."

"No. I'll get a lift over to Penmarron or catch a bus or something. But I'll be there, so don't go without me."

"We have to have you there, to show us the way."

I got into the car, behind the wheel.

He said, "I'm sorry about this evening."

"I'm glad you told me."

"I'm glad, too. Thank you for listening."

"Good night, Daniel."

"Good night."

He slammed the door shut, and I started the engine and set off down the curving drive, following the beam of the headlights; away from him. I do not know how long he stood there after I had gone.

We talked that evening, Phoebe and I, far into the night. We indulged in memories, recalling the days when Chips was alive. We went even further back, to Northumberland, to Windyedge, where Phoebe had spent her childhood, running wild and riding her shaggy pony along the margins of those cold and northern beaches. We spoke of my father, and the contentment he had found with his new wife, and she remembered expeditions when they were all children together, to Dunstanbrugh and Bambrugh, and midwinter meets, with the pink coats of the huntsmen bright as berries in the frosty air and the foxhounds streaming across the snow-streaked fields. 

We talked about Paris, where she had been a student, and the little house in the Dordogne she and Chips had bought one affluent year and to which she still returned for annual painting trips.

We talked about Marcus Bernstein, my job, my little flat in Islington.

"Next time I come to London, I shall come and stay with you," she promised.

"I haven't got a spare room."

"Then I shall sleep on the floor."

She told me about the new Society of Arts that had just been formed in Porthkerris and of which she was a founding member. She described for me the house of an old and famous potter, who had returned to Porthkerris to spend his final years in the warren of narrow streets where he had been born eighty years before, the son of a fisherman.

We talked about Lewis Falcon.

But we did not speak of Daniel. As though we had made some secret agreement, neither Phoebe nor I mentioned his name.

Past midnight she went at last to bed. I followed her up the stairs to draw her curtains and turn down the quilt and help her off with her more awkward clothes. I took a hot-water bottle downstairs and filled it from the boiling kettle and finally left her, warm in her huge and downy bed, reading her book.

We said good night, but I did not go to bed. My mind was seething, as alert and restless as if I had pumped myself with some enormously stimulating drug. I could

not face lying in the darkness, waiting for sleep that I knew would not come. So I returned to the kitchen and made a mug of coffee and took it back to the fireside. The flames had died to a bed of grey ash, so I threw on more logs and watched them kindle and flare, and then curled myself up into Chips's old armchair. Its battered depths were comforting, and I thought about him and longed for his presence. I did not want him dead; I wanted him alive, here, in this room with me. We had always been very close, and now I needed him. I needed his counsel.

Like the very best sort of father. I thought of Chips, his pipe in his mouth, listening as the young Daniel told him about Annabelle Tolliver and the baby. Annabelle, with her dark hair and her cat face and her grey eyes and her secret smile. 

It's your child, Daniel.

There were other voices. Lily Tonkins. Mrs. Tolliver can't be bothered to look after the child, then she should pay some other person to do the job. Lily shrill with indignation, beating out her resentment on a bowl of batter. 

And my mother, exasperated because I would not conform to the pattern that she had endeavoured all her life to cut for me.

Honestly, Prue, I don't know what you 're looking for.

I had told her that I wasn't looking for anything. But there was a word—"serendipity." It was such an odd, strange-sounding word that I had once looked it up in a dictionary.

serendipity n: faculty of making happy discoveries by accident 

I had discovered. Daniel. Watched him walking from the little railway station, along the old seawall, towards me, into my life. This evening, "How little we know each other," he had said, and up to a point, that was true. A day. Two days. Too short, one would have said, to achieve anything but the most superficial relationship.

But this was different. For me time and events had become miraculously encapsulated, so that I felt as though I had lived an entire lifetime with him in the course of the past twenty-four hours. It was hard to realise that I had not known him forever, that our two separate existences were not already spun together, like strands in a single skein of wool.

I wanted it to go on being this way. I was prepared to let him go his way, as Phoebe had let him go. I was wise enough for that. But I did not want to lose him. And I knew that the odds were against me. Partly because Daniel was the man that he was—an artist, restless, seeking, he would always need to be free. But infinitely more formidable was the memory of Annabelle, the existence of Charlotte.

Charlotte. Who knew what traumas Charlotte had suffered, foisted upon a man who was not her father and who must surely know that he was not her father. I had taken an instant dislike to him during those brief moments I had seen him on the train, watched his impatience with the little girl and recognised a total lack of affection as he thrust the ten-pound note into her hand, as though he were paying off some tiresome debt. 

And Annabelle. So much unhappiness to answer for. It was no fun creating havoc if she couldn't leave behind her a trail of guilt and remorse. She had done that, all right, with her wayward passions, destructive as a hurricane. Now the hurricane seemed to have blown up again, and I was afraid because I could see it tearing Daniel and me apart forever. 

I can't go on running away from the inside of my own head.

I thought of the house in Greece, the sugar-cube house above the sea, with the whitewashed terrace and the bright geraniums. A scrap of poetry, half-learned, half-forgotten, flew like a ghost through the back of my mind.

Oh, love, we two shall go no more to lands of summer beyond the seas.

From the mantelpiece, Phoebe's clock chimed a single, silvery note. One o'clock. I laid down the empty coffee mug and with an effort pulled myself from the deep comfort of Chips's armchair. Still not sleepy, I went over to Phoebe's radio and fiddled with knobs, searching for some early-hour music. I found a recorded programme of classic pop, recognised a tune that dated back to the years of my growing up.

God bless you,

You made me feel brand new

For God blessed me with you.

The toy carousel still stood on the table where Charlotte had played with it. It had never been put back in its cupboard, and now I went to do this, for fear that dust should seep into its ancient mechanism and cause it to grind to a final halt. I couldn't bear to think of it broken, forgotten, never played with again.

I simply don't know which is my favourite . . .

I wound the handle and gently released the lever. Slowly, sedately, the brightly painted animals revolved, their tinselly bridles sparkling in the light from the fire, like decorations on a Christmas tree.

Without you,

Life has no meaning or rhyme

Like notes to a song out of time.

There was always tomorrow. I could not be sure whether I dreaded the day we had planned or looked forward to it. There seemed to be too much at stake. I only knew that we would go, the three of us, to Penjizal and look for the seals. Beyond tomorrow I could not imagine, simply hope that some good would come of our being together. For Daniel's sake. For Charlotte. And, selfishly, for myself.

The mechanism ran down; the turntable slowly came to a halt. I stooped and lifted the carousel off the table and put it away in its cupboard; closed the doors, turned the key. I put the guard in front of the fire, switched off the radio, turned off the light. In the darkness, I went upstairs.

I awoke early, at seven, to the sound of a big old herring gull screaming at the new day from the roof of Chips's studio. My drawn curtains framed a sky of the palest blue veiled in a haze reminiscent of the hottest days of summer. There was no wind, no sound but the cry of the gull and the whisper of an incoming tide, trickling to fill the gullies and sand pools of the estuary. When I got up and went to the window, it was very cold, almost as though there had been a frost. I smelt the seaweed, tarry rope, and the clean saltiness of fresh seawater surging in from the ocean. It was a day made to order for a picnic. 

I dressed and went downstairs and made coffee for myself and breakfast for Phoebe. When I took this up to her, I found her already awake and sitting up against the pillows, not reading but simply gazing with pleasure as the warmth of the sun on that perfect autumn morning burned away the last of the mist.

I put the breakfast tray on her knees.

"These are the sort of mornings," she said without preamble, "that I'm certain one remembers when one is very, very old. Good morning, my darling." We kissed. "What a day for a picnic."

"Come with us, Phoebe."

She was tempted. "It depends where you're going."

"Daniel's going to show us the way to Penjizal. He said something about a tidal rock pool where the seals come and swim."

"Oh, it's so beautiful! You'll be enchanted. But no, I think I'd better not come. The path down the cliffs is a little too precipitous for a person with only one arm. It would be too tiresome for you if I lost my balance and went flying over the cliff into the sea." She went into gales of her usual laughter at the very idea. "But the walk down from the farmhouse at the top is magical. There are wild fuchsias everywhere, and in summertime the valley is humming with dragonflies. What are you going to take with you to eat? Ham sandwiches? Have we got any ham? What a pity you can't make cold casserole sandwiches, there's so much left over from last night. I wonder if Daniel got in touch with Lewis Falcon. I've heard that he's got the most beautiful wild garden out there at Lanyon . . ."

She chattered on, her conversation, as always with Phoebe, darting from one intriguing subject to the next. It was tempting to forget about the day ahead; to lose all sense of time and simply to settle down to spending the rest of the morning sitting there on the end of Phoebe's downy bed. But, with the coffee pot empty and the sun's rays shining obliquely through the open window, I heard from downstairs the slamming of the kitchen door and knew that Lily Tonkins had arrived on her bicycle.

I looked at Phoebe's clock. "Heavens, it's past nine o'clock. I must get moving." I climbed reluctantly off the bed and started to gather up cups and plates, stacking them on Phoebe's tray.