The Cornish Guest House (19 page)

Luke fetched a bottle of distilled water from the fridge and poured himself a glass.

‘I’ve had some bad news. I came home early because I need to discuss something with you.’

He pulled up a chair and the women listened intently while he explained that his main financial advice business, still based in Manchester, was principally run by his partner. Now, however, the new venture that he, Luke, had started in Plymouth had begun to take off, but unfortunately the wife of one of his key employees had fallen ill and he needed to go back up North, where she and the family still lived.

‘Hopefully he won’t have to stay long but in the meantime I’m short-staffed at a crucial time.’

Tabitha looked worried. ‘What are you going to do?’

Luke crossed his arms. ‘That’s why I wanted to talk to Loveday.’

She looked surprised. ‘Me? What do you mean?’

He went on to explain that he and Tabitha were very pleased with the work that she’d been doing so far, with her attitude and maturity, and her potential for greater things, and he was certain that Tabitha could spare her from Oscar duties for a couple of afternoons a week to lend him a hand, just until the other man returned.

‘It’s interesting work,’ he went on, ‘and you’ll learn a lot. I can pay you a bit extra, too, plus your fares, of course.’

Loveday was amazed; she hardly knew what to say.

‘What is your business? What is it you do?’

‘Come in tomorrow and I’ll explain,’ he replied, ‘it’s highly confidential.’

‘Highly confidential? Wow!’ Her eyes shone. ‘It sounds like spying or something.’

Tabitha’s heart fluttered. ‘Luke?’ But he gave her a look that made her throat constrict, the words freeze in her mouth, so she got up to put the empty tea mugs in the dishwasher.

‘What do you say?’ he went on. ‘I know I can trust you. Are you up for it?’

There was a pause and Tabitha, standing by the sink with her back turned, felt Luke’s eyes on her. She could hardly breathe.

‘Would you mind?’ she heard Loveday ask her in a small voice. ‘I mean, can you manage without me? You’ve only just opened the guest house.’

She sounded young – and so trusting. Tabitha’s head swam and she gripped the edge of the work surface, turning her knuckles white.

One, two, three, she thought, before spinning herself round and giving a dazzling smile.

‘I think it’s a wonderful idea! We’re not exactly busy yet. Shelley’s a great help and it’s only for a couple of days a week. It sounds like a fantastic opportunity. Go for it!’

Two weeks later, Liz stood in front of the bathroom mirror, put the toothbrush in her mouth and heaved. How could such a little thing cause her to retch? She took the brush out quickly, thinking it would almost be funny if she didn’t feel so bad. She wasn’t throwing up every morning like last time; instead, she felt tired and nauseous all day long. Even certain smells – like peanuts, oddly – made her gag.

According to the old wives’ tales, it was the sign of a strong pregnancy, but knowing this didn’t seem to make it any easier. She peered at herself in the glass and decided that the dark circles under her eyes were getting bigger and her skin, pale at the best of times, was positively sallow. Ugh.

Disgusted, she abandoned the toothbrush and swilled mouthwash around instead. It might have tasted foul but at least it didn’t make her want to vomit. Honestly, the things women had to put up with. Robert did his best to sympathise but, really, he couldn’t hide his excitement about the baby; she reckoned he secretly regarded morning sickness as no more than a tiresome but necessary irritation. He had no idea…

Of course she’d stopped using the e-cig and she’d tried ginger and nibbling on dry biscuits, to no avail. She was losing weight, despite her husband’s best efforts, and it was a miracle that Rosie hadn’t noticed but, there again, she was so wrapped up in school, and Tim Butler, that a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig might have taken up residence at Bag End and she wouldn’t have noticed.

‘We’re not going out together,’ she huffed, whenever Liz tried to probe. ‘We’re just friends, that’s all.’

But the secretive phone calls continued, plus trips into Plymouth at weekends when she wouldn’t let her mother drop her anywhere near the meeting-up point, or wait for her in the same street when it was going-home time. As far as Liz knew, Tim was a nice boy; she reckoned his interest in her daughter would give her confidence and the fact that he, too, had a disability, his stammer, had no doubt brought them together. She wished, however, that Rosie would invite him home, or at least allow her to meet him somewhere neutral. Liz wanted him to know that Rosie was more vulnerable than other girls and needed to be taken care of. Most of all, she didn’t want her to get hurt.

After saying goodbye to her at the garden gate, she set her sewing machine on the kitchen table and sat down to a few hours of making hair accessories. She’d come up with a new range of yoga sweatbands in bright colours that could double up as scrunchies, and she’d managed to sell quite a few through her friend in Birmingham, who owned a women’s dress and accessories shop, and whom she’d met in Oklahoma when Rosie had been undergoing treatment.

The woman, Sam, had a daughter, Lottie, who’d hit it off with Rosie and the families had also become close, travelling to see each other every few months since their return. Recently, however, doctors had revealed the dreadful news that Lottie’s tumour was growing again and she was undergoing another round of aggressive chemotherapy. Naturally, Sam was devastated, although she tried to put a brave face on it, and Liz had been doing her best to cheer her up.

At around two o’clock she strolled slowly up the hill to the church hall, where Tremarnock Art Club was holding a show of their work. She’d promised Felipe that she’d be there and was delighted to find him sipping tepid coffee with Esme and Tony, who had left London early that morning in order to enjoy a long weekend in the village.

Thankfully, Tony and Felipe had recovered from their contretemps and, indeed, Tony was sporting the brown leather jacket that his spouse had bought him as a peace offering, zipped up to his chest and straining a little over the tum.

‘Darling!’ Tony cried when he spotted Liz. ‘You look absolutely ghastly. What on earth have you been doing to yourself?’

Liz, who immediately felt ten times worse, was about to mutter something about ‘a bad night’ when Bungle shuffled over and offered to explain something about the work on display.

She sensed Tony bristle in his presence, but he said nothing. To be fair, despite Bungle’s nice enough blue eyes, there wasn’t much competition; he smelled slightly stale, had a scratchy beard and wispy grey hair with a bald patch in the centre, and was wearing a navy smock and brown sandals, out of which peeped knobbly toes with thick yellow nails.

Liz walked slowly round the exhibition. The paintings, which were mounted on wooden display boards, were mostly fairly samey, featuring fruit, flowers, crockery and other day-to-day objects, competently drawn but with nothing that would really make you sit up and take notice.

‘We used acrylics for these,’ Bungle explained in his Cornish burr, stopping by a picture of an orange and a beer bottle artfully arranged beside a shiny stainless-steel kettle. ‘It’s the layering of colour that produces the depth and richness. Otherwise the picture can look flat and contrived. I say to my pupils that every picture should tell a story, like a novel.’

She nodded, trying to think of something intelligent to say, but her eye kept wandering across the room to another painting, quite different from the rest. It looked a bit like the layered petals of a crimson flower against a pale pink background, with black whiskery stamens protruding from the top.

‘Who did that?’ she asked, quickly regretting her question because the more she stared, the more she feared that the image might, in fact, bear a rather strong resemblance to a certain part of a woman’s anatomy.

‘Rick Kane,’ Bungle said proudly. ‘He only recently joined the group and he’s doing very well. As a matter of fact, he painted this one at home. It’s different from what we normally do but I accepted him at the club straight away on the strength of it. It’s wonderfully rich and symbolic, don’t you think?’

At that moment she heard Rick, behind her, introducing Sylvia to some other visitors. They were still together, it seemed, despite her ill-disguised passion for Luke. Keen not to get drawn into conversation with him about the subject of his oeuvre, Liz told Bungle that she was gasping for a drink and headed swiftly towards the teas and coffees that were being served by Jenny Lambert, standing behind a white, linen-clad trestle table.

‘It’s a bit risqué, isn’t it?’ Jenny laughed, having clocked Liz’s hasty exit. ‘Rick’s telling everyone Sylvia modelled for him and she seems quite proud of it. She’s not embarrassed at all!’

‘Don’t.’ Liz shuddered. ‘I’m not sure we’re ready for it in Tremarnock. I wouldn’t fancy it on my wall, would you? Give me a nice bowl of apples or a bunch of cornflowers any day!’

The room was filling up and she noticed Audrey make a beeline for the enigmatic artist from Polgarry Castle. He was quite striking, tall and well built with jet-black hair, and he looked somewhat taken aback by Audrey, who had a tendency to talk loudly and stand very close to people. She fancied herself as a bit of an artist, too, and perhaps hoped that some of his talent might rub off.

Liz felt a little sorry for him and might have gone to his rescue, had she and the others not been joined by an unknown, middle-aged couple, who revealed that they were staying at The Stables.

‘Lovely place,’ the woman cooed. ‘So comfortable and tastefully done, and Luke’s delightful. Full of amusing stories.’

‘Yes,’ the man agreed. ‘Perfect for a weekend break, or a week, come to that. The wife’s very quiet, though, isn’t she?’ he added, more to his own wife than Liz. ‘Hardly says a thing.’

‘She’s probably got her hands full with their little boy,’ said Liz, wondering why she was defending the woman yet again. Loveday did give her glowing reports, though.

‘We have the best chats,’ she’d said recently, before going on to describe some of her boss’s tastes and mannerisms. ‘She never has milk in her tea, she says it kills the flavour. And she doesn’t eat carbs, or only sometimes, anyway. That’s why she’s got such an ama-a-a-zing figure.’

Liz, who wasn’t feeling all that positive about her body right now, had felt a stab of jealousy. ‘I don’t like tea without milk,’ she’d snapped back, pulling a face. ‘And everybody needs carbs for energy.’

Then she’d checked herself and backtracked, remembering Tabitha’s frightened expression at the party. ‘She
is
in fantastic shape,’ she’d added. ‘I wish I had a minuscule waist like that.’

Jenny poured more boiling water from the kettle into one of the giant urns and asked the unknown couple where they’d come from.

‘West Sussex,’ the woman replied. ‘Near Chichester. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it?’

Liz smiled to herself, thinking it was funny how often outsiders assumed they didn’t have a clue about anywhere else in the country, as if Cornwall were some backward colonial outpost.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Jenny, ‘I know it well. I grew up in Sussex, actually. Near Eastbourne.’

The woman seemed almost put out. ‘We like it very much. We’re not as cut off as you are here – but of course we don’t have as much space, or your magnificent coastline,’ she added quickly.

‘Have you walked to Hermitage Point yet?’ Jenny asked politely, deftly steering the subject in a less competitive direction. ‘It’s not far, only a mile or so, and there are magnificent views. There’s a footpath leading out of the village that’ll take you right there.’

The woman turned to her husband. ‘That must be the place we read about in the
Western Morning News.
I said we should go.’

Liz would have stayed longer, except that she noticed Nathan admiring the exotic crimson flower and as Rick was elsewhere, decided to excuse herself.

‘I’m surprised to see you, I didn’t think painting was your thing,’ she said, adding mischievously, ‘How do you like this one? It’s by Rick. Apparently it’s of Sylvia.’ It was naughty, she knew, but she couldn’t resist it.

Nathan frowned, trying to work out what she meant, then, as the truth hit him, ‘What? You don’t mean…?’

She nodded.

‘That’s disgusting.’

Liz giggled; young people seemed to think sex had been invented just for them and adults weren’t allowed to talk about it, far less paint it.

‘It’s art, Nathan,’ she replied, fake-innocently, glancing around to check no one was listening and lowering her voice. ‘I wonder if it’s a good likeness.’

‘Stop!’ the young man spluttered. ‘I don’t want to hear any more.’ And with that he hotfooted it on his big body and skinny legs over to the nice, safe, still lives on the far side of the room. The story would, of course, be all around the younger members of the community in no time, which was probably a good thing as it might swell visitor numbers.

Once she’d complimented Felipe, Audrey and the other artists on their work and made appropriate noises about their choices of colour, subject matter and so on, she decided to take a quick detour to The Stables, hoping to find Loveday there with Oscar.

She hadn’t been to the guest house since the party before Christmas, not wishing to intrude on Tabitha or make things awkward for her niece. However, having tried Loveday on the mobile a couple of times without success, Liz thought that a quick visit wouldn’t do any harm. After all, the girl had pretty much settled in now and they seemed happy with her. Surely they wouldn’t begrudge a five-minute conversation on the doorstep with her aunt?

It was cold, wet and windy and just before the turning to Market Square Liz was overtaken by a bedraggled group of strangers, striding purposefully in cagoules and muddy boots, with backpacks strapped to their shoulders. They were talking to each other in accents that definitely weren’t from around here, and one of them was holding a map in a protective plastic cover.