The Cornish Affair (14 page)

I
scowled at the two children who were whining loudly for a drink the other side of me. They clearly thought I was a witch giving them the evil eye, because they promptly burst into tears and demanded coke, pepsi and a fanta from the van in the car park.

“Poor
sods,” Oliver said, pouring some juice into a couple of paper cups. He stood up and carried over the paper cups to the family.

“Here
you go, kids, a very special drink for you, it’s called the Fistral Beach Sea Breeze,” he handed the cups to the children, saying to the parents “Don’t worry, it’s cranberry and grapefruit with absolutely no added e numbers, that van is miles away, isn’t it?”

I
noticed the mother sit up and automatically suck her tummy muscles in, smiling her thanks at Oliver whilst the father had that look on his face which comes when people know that they’ve seen someone somewhere before, but can’t quite place it.

Oliver
sat down again, and said to me in a low voice, “Any minute now, they’ll figure out that they know me from TV, it always happens. I generally give them about two minutes.”

I
laughed. He didn’t look as though he hated this when it happened, you understand, but had a proud but pleased sort of rueful grin on his face. It was really quite restrained, especially when I considered what I’d be like if the situations were reversed. I knew that I’d be a vile mixture of gauche self consciousness crossed with a great deal of unnecessary showing off. Pathetic, really.

“Great
place,” Oliver said, throwing his arms out to encompass the horizon.

Oh,
Fin, just get in the mood of the day. Yes, it was a great place, yeah, OK, it was a bit day trippy, and a bit surf chick, but the beach was clean, the sun was out, the waves were crashing … so why was I in such a niggly mood?

The
truth was that Oliver irritated the hell out of me. He was, and I hate to use the word, but I have to, he was – here we go – nice. There, I’ve said it. It’s probably, as has been said before, one of the most damning words in the English language. But he was. I mean, he was clearly, much better than I had expected him to be… no London manners, or TV status ego, and, apart from the kilt, not even the trendy laddish sort that I had expected. But he was, without question irritating. He asked so many questions, he was unrelentingly enthusiastic and had so much self confidence that he made me feel like I was in a witness box all the time. He exhausted me. And there was the goodnight kiss as well.

I
lay back on the blanket with my eyes closed underneath my sunglasses, hoping that he’d take the hint and shut up for a bit.

Ha,
fat chance.

“So
I suppose Nancy and Jace are business partners are they?” he said.

“What
do you mean?” I said lazily, covering my yawn with one hand over my mouth. I turned my head to look at him, squinting against the light.

“You
know, all the stuff in the greenhouse,” he continued, sipping his drink.

“I
have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “What stuff in the greenhouse?” thinking he must be talking about the tomatoes that Nancy and Jace grew together. Some exotic yellow sort that I’d never seen, as they kept getting the tomato blight or something.

“The
grass. The weed, you know, the marijuana,” he said, speaking to me as if I was an idiot.

“The
what
?” I said, shooting up into a sitting position.

Oliver
looked embarrassed, “Shit, I’m sorry. I assumed you knew, I mean-”

“Are
you sure?” I said.

“Oh
yes. I mean, you’ve got enough growing in there to keep Port Charles having the munchies for months, I would think.”

Good
grief. So, my seventy year old aunt was growing dope in my greenhouse, was she? I sank slowly back on the sand my mind reeling with wonder.

Chapter
Fourteen

It was after the picnic that things changed between Oliver and me. Not overnight, not drastically, but gradually we just seemed to get on better.

I
avoided going into the greenhouse, though. I firmly believe in a head in the sand approach to things sometimes.

The
work was pleasant enough, and we rattled through it. We had the occasional spat over stuff, his propensity to over use fennel seeds. My seeming inability to give up garlic. I had to point out to him that it was after all, my creative genius with flavours that got me where I was today. He replied by hitting me with a rolled up tea towel.

Things
were OK.

In
fact, things were a bit more that OK.

I’d
cracked the ultimate asparagus soup – a heavy chicken stock, poach, sieve, add butter, add cream, finish off with truffle oil – a real anorexics delight, that one. Oliver had been perfecting a fragrant cous cous with a lamb tagine for his supermarket range.

I
was enjoying myself. I found that against the odds, cooking with Oliver was, and I hate to admit it, fun.

I
mean, not fall around laughing so hard that you think you might wet yourself type fun, but, fun nevertheless. He’d calmed down a lot in the past few days, and we’d fallen into a working routine that suited us. Though he still got unduly agitated when his mobile phone couldn’t get a signal, or his e-mails were delayed.

Jace
had called in a few times, bringing a tray of courgettes, complete with their wonderful papery yellow flowers intact, and bundles of the first season’s asparagus, but Oliver had always been there and he hadn’t stayed very long.

Oliver
was scrupulous about writing things down, and to my particular joy, cleaning the kitchen. Nothing in it had ever looked so gleamingly new. Ever. He even polished the
taps
. That’s the sort of cleaning I mean. We had written up our notes on my computer and frozen large quantities of food, ready for sampling. (All food had to stand up to home freezing, and if it passed the test, we knew that it would be OK on a commercial basis.)

We
decided that we’d have a drink at The Ram, then drive over to Padstow for Rick Steins magical way with fish as a sort of farewell dinner, the night before we were due to leave for London.

Oliver
had gone to the cliff top to take a last look at the dolphins (they were obligingly regular in their habits, and could normally be relied on to cavort across the bay somewhere between the hours of three and four) and I was in the kitchen, standing at the sink, admiring the trees outside dancing in the wind, the leaves blowing silver on one side and a pale green on the other, wondering why I didn’t know the name of it. Nancy would, that’s the sort of thing she knew. It was strictly her department, the garden. I was employed by her to occasionally weed, or help with pruning things, but even then I got it wrong. I’d once pulled up whole bed of baby lupins, thinking they were groundwort. She’d banished me indoors to make tea.

Oliver
came crashing through the door, looking shaken and gasping for breath.

“Christ,
the cliff top crumbled away practically beneath my feet! It was bloody frightening-”

“Erosion,”
I said. “It happens all the time. I suppose I could have the path underpinned or something, but it seems hardly worth while. Are you OK? Was it a big chunk that fell away?”

Oliver
ran his hands through his curly hair. “Big?
Big
? It was fucking huge, that’s what I’m trying to tell you… And the other side of the house,” he gestured with his hand to the south, “The sky, it’s incredible… you can’t see it from here, come outside and look.” He pulled me by the arm, and dragged me outside, round the corner of Penmorah.

I
stood rooted to the spot.

He
was right, it was incredible.

I
had never seen anything like it.

A
dark milky sky above me stretched into thunderous black clouds rolling in from the south. I turned my head and saw that the sky behind us was blue and clear. It was like looking at that Magritte painting where night turns into day above a house. It was impossible to tell where the colour stopped. It was beautiful.

We
stood there gawping at it, till I heard the phone ring from inside. I reluctantly turned away to answer it, and as I did so, the lightening arrived.

A
jagged streak of brilliance hit the ground some way off, over the woods, and seconds later I saw the fire. A tree had been hit. I waited for the thunder, and sure enough the ominous roll of ten thousand beer barrels being rolled in a cellar stormed through the sky. We made it back into the kitchen, and I slammed the door behind me.

I
went to answer the phone, and as I put my hand out, the kitchen which was now plunged in dark gloom, was lit up as if by phosphorous. More lightening. I shrank my hand away from the phone, illogically aware of electricity and storms (My brain was saying danger to me and I listened to it. Coward that I am.) The phone had stopped ringing now, anyway.

I
stared out of the window and saw the next flash of white lightening strike. It filled the horizon in a jagged streak of power, brighter than the sun.

The
next boom of the thunder started as a sharp crack, blooming into the loudest rolling, banging noise I had ever heard. Without apparently moving my body I found myself crouching under the kitchen table, my hands over my ears.

Oliver
soon joined me.

The
storm carried on for ages, right above our heads. It was impossible to talk, and we just sat under the table, clutching hands. We had the occasional freak storm here, but not anything like this. There had been no warning, nothing.

The
wind was gripping Penmorah and shaking it. I heard the sighing groan of a tree coming down quite close to the kitchen, and prayed that it wouldn’t come through the roof or windows. Another splintering crash told me that the greenhouse had been shattered. The force of the storm was elemental, primeval in it’s severity. I knew without even looking at Oliver that he was frightened.

So
was I.

Normally
thunder storms can be quite exhilarating, but this was like being caught in the vortex of a giant washing machine, having thunderbolts hurled at you by a malevolent god. Any creature caught out in this stood no chance. I hoped that Baxter and Nelson were being looked after. I comforted myself with the thought that The Ram was a safe place to be in a storm and Nelson would have his head tucked under his wing, surrounded by the Rampersaud family. They’d be OK.

The
badgers in Penmorah woods should be alright as well, deep underground, well protected from this fearful battering. But the birds, and foxes, the squirrels and the deer, they would have to fend for themselves. As for the dolphins… well, I had no idea what it would be like for them amongst the angry sea. Perhaps they all holed up in a watery equivalent of The Ram and battened down the hatches whilst ordering large rums.

“Do
you think it’s easing off?” Oliver shouted loudly in my ear. I couldn’t tell how long we’d been under the table. Every second seemed like a minute.

The
wind had dropped, but the rain was still torrential. We gingerly crept out from under the table. The thunder had receded, and the sky was still as black as pitch. But even as we stood at the window, the sky slowly lightened, turning from night to a dull dark grey. The rain, which had been solid sheets of water being dumped from the heavens, went back to just being rain.

Oliver
and I turned and hugged one another. We kept our arms around each other for a heartbeat longer than was comfortable. We broke away and began talking at the same time.

“My
God… that was awesome, wasn’t it?”

“Come
on, let’s go and see what havoc has been wrought,” I said, burrowing in the glory hole in the hall for some suitable clothes.

I
handed Oliver a waterproof and sat down to pull on some boots. After having struggled for some time with a recalcitrant zip, we finally pushed open the front door.

A
scene of devastation hit us.

Trees
had been uprooted, benches overturned, great swathes of earth looked as they had been ploughed up. The mud and water soaked everything in sight. The roses Nancy had so lovingly planted were in shreds, not one was left standing. Yellow petals fluttered forlornly around the large puddles, that once was a lawn.

I
ran around to the back of the house, and stopped, horrified at what I could see.

The
cliff top had gone.

Where
there had been a line of bushes that led to the woods and had marked the path, there were none. Raw jagged roots and bare naked earth were all that there was. I could clearly see the sea crashing over the fallen rocks, trees and earth at the foot of the cliffs.

The
greenhouse was crushed by a large limb of an oak tree, which had been ripped off, whilst the rest of the tree leant drunkenly against a small sturdy chestnut.

Miraculously,
Penmorah itself seemed untouched. All I could see were a few missing slates.

I
flung back the hood of my waterproof, feeling dizzy with relief.

“Jesus,
that could be worse, couldn’t it? I’ll have to get the path seen to now, won’t I? Not that there is a path, of course! I must phone the village and see what the damage is down there, and poor Nancy’s garden is in a bit of a mess, and-”

I
stopped abruptly when I saw Oliver’s face.

“What?
What is it?” I asked in alarm.

Oliver
turned his head and looked at where the cliff edge had been, and then looked back at Penmorah.

“Fin,
look, I might not know anything about landslides, or erosion, but I do know that the cliff is a damn sight nearer the house this afternoon than it was this morning. I don’t think it’s safe. You need to get advice, maybe from a structural engineer.”

I
gaped at him.

“But
the house is fine, there’s been no damage to it, look, you can see-”

“I
can see that you want it to be fine, but Fin, look,
look
at the cliff.”

I
turned my back on it and went inside. The kitchen was dark and I switched the lights on. The power was down. This sometimes happened in storms and I wasn’t too worried. It would be back on again soon. I tried the phone, but that too was dead.

I
heard Oliver walk in behind me.

“Are
you OK?” he said.

“Fine.
I can’t call anyone at the moment, my phone’s off.”

Oliver
passed me his mobile, and I held it the palm of my hand for a moment, wondering who to call first. I think we both jumped when it started to ring. I gave it back to Oliver to answer.

I
gathered from his side of the conversation that it was Harry calling to see if we were alright – although how he knew that we might not be, didn’t occur to me. Oliver passed the phone to me, and I pressed it to my ear.

“Fin,
my God, you’ve been in the middle of a freak tornado, did you know? We heard about it on the news, apparently it hit North Cornwall first, went out to sea and then came back on itself, we tried calling but there was no answer.”

I
remembered the ringing phone just before the storm hit. “No, we were in the garden looking at the sky. Oh Harry it was
incredible
… but now, well, the mess is
awful
and Oliver thinks that Penmorah may be unsafe…” I was aware that my voice was very high and I was gabbling. It made me sound like Minnie Mouse on helium, and I took a deep breath to calm down.

Harry
helped by telling me that he would arrange for a surveyor to come, and passed me over to Nancy. We spoke for a while, and I tried to play down the scene of destruction in her beloved garden. I didn’t fool her though.

“Oh
darling, don’t worry. Plants have a habit of growing back very quickly you know, you and Oliver are safe, that’s all that matters.”

“The
greenhouse has gone, too, I’m afraid,” I said, wondering if she’d mention the cash crop that she was tending in there.

“Oh
well, that is a shame,” she said hesitantly.

I
decided it really wasn’t worth pursuing. I promised to call her later on that night, as soon as the power was back.

“Oh
don’t bother darling, we’re off to a modern cutting edge play full of social significance at the Royal Court. To make up for it we’re going to have a lovely dinner afterwards in Soho, I’m making Harry take me to the French pub as well, so we may be late,” she said, sounding very merry.