The Carousel (17 page)

"Prue!" Charlotte's voice.

"I'm here. In my bedroom."

"Can I come in?" The door opened, and her face appeared around the edge of it. "Daniel's here." "I saw him get off the train."

"But Phoebe's taken him down to the studio. She says she wants to show him something that belonged to Chips. She says they'll be about ten minutes. What a lovely smell!"

"It's Dior. I always use it. Want a squirt?"

"Don't you mind?"

"Don't take it all."

She sprayed on some scent, breathing in the perfume with an ecstatic expression on her face. I picked up my comb and tidied her hair for her, straightening the parting and refastening the plastic slide.

When this was done, I said, "Perhaps we should go down to the kitchen and start packing our picnic basket. And it might be a good idea if you found your Wellingtons and an anorak."

"But it won't rain today."

"This is Cornwall . . . you never know what it's going to do."

So we were in the kitchen when Phoebe eventually came to find us. I saw her through the window, walking slowly up the brick path that led from the walled garden and the studio. She came towards us like an old person. She was alone. She came through the garden door and saw us standing, waiting for her. She told us that Daniel had gone. He would not, after all, be able to come with us on the picnic. He was sorry.

"But he promised . . ." Charlotte kept saying, near to tears. "He said he'd come . . ." 

Phoebe would not meet my eyes.

So we never got to go to Penjizal. Somehow, by then, none of us had the heart to go anywhere. We ate the picnic right there, in the garden of Holly Cottage. We never saw the seals.

It was evening before I got Phoebe to myself. Charlotte was engrossed in television, and I cornered my aunt by the sink.

"Why did he go?"

"I warned you," said Phoebe.

"Where did he go?"

"I've no idea. Back to Porthkerris, I suppose." I said, "I'm going to take the car. I'm going to go and see him."

"Don't do that."

"Why not? You can't stop me."

"Ring him first, if you must. Talk to him. Make sure that he wants to see you."

I went straight to the telephone. Of course he would want to see me. I dialled the number of the Castle Hotel, and when the girl on the switchboard answered, I asked for Daniel Cassens. But she put me through to the Reception desk, and a girl's voice told me that Mr. Cassens had gone, checked out, and left no forwarding address.

I washed Charlotte's hair and trimmed the ragged ends with Phoebe's sewing scissors. Clean, it was the colour of chestnuts shot through with unexpected copper lights.

Phoebe telephoned the headmaster of the local school and took Charlotte for an interview. She returned home full of excitement. She would have a new uniform, navy-blue and white. They had a pottery wheel in the art room. She was going to learn how to play the clarinet.

We watched, on television, a pretty girl showing us how to make a dolls' house out of cardboard boxes. We took the car once held bottles of Scotch whisky. We bought a Stanley knife, and little pots of paint and some brushes. We bought tubes of glue. We came home and began to measure and mark out the door, the windows. The kitchen was littered with sheets of newspaper, scraps of card, all the tools of our trade. 

Now there was a new moon in the night sky. It hung in the east, a silvery eyelash, and its pale reflection hung in the black waters of the estuary, drowned in trembling slivers of light.

"Prue."

"What is it?"

"Where has Daniel gone?"

"I don't know."

"Why did he go?"

"I don't know that, either."

"Is he ever coming back?"

"I expect he will. One day."

"People always go away. People I like. When Michael first went to school, the house was funny without him. All quiet and empty. And I had a nanny once, when I was very little, about six. I really liked her. But she had to leave and go and look after her mother. And now Daniel's gone."

"You scarcely know Daniel."

"But I've always known about him. Phoebe used to tell me about him. She used to show me bits in the newspaper about him, when he was having exhibitions and things in America. And she used to tell me about him."

"But, still, you scarcely knew him. You only met him for a day or so."

"I didn't want him to go away. It wasn't just the picnic. It wasn't just not seeing the seals. We can do that any time."

"Then what was it?"

"I wanted to tell him things, show him things. I wanted to show him the dolls' house. I wanted to ask him things. Daddy never has time to answer properly if you ask him things. And Daniel doesn't talk to you as though you're little, he talks as though you are a grown up person. He'd never tell you that you were being a nuisance or that you were stupid." 

"Well . . . perhaps you have a lot in common. You're interested in the same sort of things. Perhaps that's why you feel so close to him."

"I wish he would come back."

"He's a busy man. An important man. And now he's a famous man. He has so many things that he has to do. And an artist is . . . different from other men. He needs to be free. It's hard for someone like Daniel to put down roots, to stay in the same place all the time, and be with the same people."

"Phoebe's an artist, and she stays in the same place."

"Phoebe is different. Phoebe is special."

"I know. That's why I love her. But I love Daniel too."

"You mustn't love him too much, Charlotte."

"Why not?"

"Because it's no good loving a person too much, if you may never see them again . . . oh, don't start to cry. Please don't cry. It's just that it's true, and it's no good either of us pretending that it isn't."

We painted the door red, the frames of the windows black. Lily found an old dress box, and we cut the roof from the lid of this and scored a central line and bent it into a gable. We painted tiles.

One day it rained, and there was a great wind, and Charlotte and I walked over the golf links and down to the beach. There was sand blowing everywhere, and the breakers poured into the shore from half a mile out or more. The rushes on the dunes were flattened by this wind, and the sea gulls abandoned the coast and flew inland to float and scream over fields of newly turned plough.

No letter came for Charlotte, no postcard from South Africa. We learned, through Betty Curnow and Lily Tonkins, that Mrs. Tolliver had gone to spend a few days with a friend at Helford. Which made three people who had run away.

We constructed furniture for the doll's house out of empty matchboxes; we painted wallpaper. We raided Phoebe's rag bag and made carpets from scraps of tweed with fringed ends. Just like real, said Charlotte when we laid them, and she closed the door of the dolls' house and put her face to the window, loving the smallness of everything, the little, safe, miniature world.

One night, "I can't bear to see you looking so unhappy," Phoebe told me, but I pretended that I had not heard her, because I did not want to talk about Daniel.

He was gone. Back to his nomadic, searching, restless life. Back to his painting, his exhibition, Peter Chastal. Perhaps, by now, back to America. Much later, when he felt able, maybe he would send me a postcard. I saw it, dropping through the letter box of my front door in Islington. A brightly coloured picture of the Statue of Liberty, perhaps, or the Golden Gate bridge, or Fujiyama.

Having a wonderful time, wish you were here. Daniel.

There was a future. My future. My job, my flat, my own friends. I would go back to London and pick up the threads again. But on my own, as I had never been alone before.

I had the dream again, the swimming dream. It was the same as before. The water first shallow, and then deep and warm. The racing current. The sensation of being swept along by this flood, not struggling but acquiescent. Not dying, I reminded myself at the end of the dream. Not dying, but loving. So why did I wake with tears wet on my cheeks?

The passing days had lost their names, just as I had lost all sense of their passing. Then suddenly it was a

Tuesday and time to be practical. Phoebe had decided the previous evening that I should drive her and Charlotte into Penzance, where we would buy the new navy-and-white school uniform. Perhaps, as a treat, we would have lunch in a restaurant or go down to the harbour and see if the Scilly Islands steamer was in.

But these plans did not come off, because early that morning Lily Tonkins rang to say that Ernest, her husband, had been taken poorly. Phoebe answered the telephone call, and Charlotte and I stood around and listened to the quaking voice over the line.

"Up all night," Lily told Phoebe.

Phoebe said, "Oh, dear."

Lily enlarged on the details. Phoebe's face took on an expression of horror. "Oh, dear. " After this she hastily agreed that on no account was Lily to abandon her ailing husband until the doctor had seen him. She rang off. Lily was not coming to work today. 

We hastily changed our arrangements. I would stay at Holly Cottage to do a bit of sketchy housework and cook the lunch, and Mr. Thomas, in his trusty taxi, would be asked to make the trip into Penzance with Phoebe and Charlotte.

Charlotte was slightly indignant about this. "I thought we were going to have lunch in a restaurant." 

"It wouldn't be any fun without Prue," Phoebe told her briskly. "We'll do it another day, when I have to go and see the bank manager or have my hair done."

A telephone call was duly made, and Mr. Thomas turned up in ten minutes with his chauffeur's hat on his head and the wheels of his car encrusted in pig manure. Phoebe and Charlotte clambered in, and I waved them away and then returned indoors to deal with the morning chores.

They were not very arduous. Lily cleaned thé house so thoroughly every day that once I had made the beds, scoured the bath, and cleared the ashes out of the sitting room grate, everything looked more or less as usual. I went into the kitchen, made a cup of coffee and started to peel potatoes. It was a grey, still day, with rain in the air. When I had finished the potatoes, I pulled on a pair of rubber boots and went down to the vegetable garden to cut a cauliflower. As I returned to the house, I heard the sound of a car coming down the road towards the house. I looked at my watch and saw that it was only an hour since Phoebe and Charlotte had set off. There was no way that the shopping expedition could be over so soon. 

The car came over the railway bridge, and I knew then that it was heading for Holly Cottage, for we were the last house on the road, and at the end of it lay only the dead end, the padlocked iron gates of the old shipyard.

I hurried back inside. In the kitchen I laid my knife and the cauliflower on the draining board, and then, still wearing Lily's apron and my boots, went through the hall and out the front door.

There, on the gravel, was parked an unfamiliar car. An Alfa-Romeo, long and sleek, dark green and travel-stained. The driver's door was already open, and behind the wheel, his eyes on my face, sat Daniel.

On that still, misty morning, there was little sound.

Then, from far away, I heard the scream of some gulls flying low over the empty sands of the estuary. Slowly, he climbed out of the car and straightened himself cautiously, arching his back, and putting up a hand to massage the back of his neck. He was wearing his usual strange assembly of clothes, and there lay the dark shadow of stubble on his chin. He shut the car door behind him, and it closed with a solid expensive-sounding thud. He said my name.

That proved it was true. He wasn't in London. He wasn't in New York. He wasn't in San Francisco. He was here. Back. Home.

I said, "What are you doing?"

"What do you think I'm doing?"

"Who's car is that?"

"Mine." He began to walk stiffly towards me.

"But you hate cars."

"I know, but it's still mine. I bought it yesterday." He reached my side and put his hands on my shoulders and stooped and kissed my cheek, and his chin felt rough and scratchy against my skin. I looked up at him. His face was colourless, grey with tiredness, but his eyes were bright with secret laughter.

"You're wearing Lily's apron."

"Lily's not here. Ernest's ill. You haven't shaved."

"Didn't have time. I left London at three o'clock this morning. Where's Phoebe?"

"She and Charlotte have gone to do some shopping."

"Aren't you going to ask me in?"

"Yes . . . yes, of course. I'm sorry. It's just that you were the last person I expected to see. Come along. I'll make you some coffee, or bacon and eggs if you want something to eat."

"Coffee would be fine."

We went back indoors. The house felt warm after the chilly dampness outside. I led the way through the hall and heard him close the front door behind us. In the kitchen I saw the cauliflower and the knife by the sink where I had left them, and for a moment, so disoriented was I, found myself wondering what I had intended doing with them.

I filled the electric kettle and plugged it in and switched it on. When I turned around, I saw that Daniel had pulled out a chair and was sitting at the head of the long scrubbed pine table. He had an elbow on the table and was rubbing his eyes with his hand, as though it were possible to erase exhaustion.

He said, "I haven't driven so far or so fast in my life, I don't think." He took his hand away and looked up at me, and I had forgotten the darkness of his eyes, the pupils round and dark as black olives. He still looked exhausted, but there was something else about him, an exhilaration, perhaps, that I could not fathom, because I had not seen it in him before.

I said, "What made you buy a car?"

"I wanted to get back to you all, and it seemed the quickest way."

"Have you found out how the heater works?"

It wasn't much of a joke, but it helped break the tension.

He smiled. "Not yet. Like I told you, I've only had it for a day." He crossed his arms on the tabletop. He said, "Phoebe told me, you know. About Annabelle and Leslie Collis and Mrs. Tolliver."