Postcards from the Past Read online

  ‘Gorse!’ she cried at last, triumphantly – and he felt quite weak with relief, as though some important corner had been turned. ‘And forsythia.’

  She spelled it for him, and he wrote obediently, although he forbore to say that forsythia was not a wild flower but a tame garden shrub. Nevertheless, his heart beat with ungovernable joy: their roles were reversed and he’d drawn her back from the edge of the abyss. But it was Dom who really saved them from their despair.

  ‘Dominic is a kind of relation,’ their mother told them. She looked uncomfortable, as though she would rather not discuss it, but Ed and Billa had been full of the news that Mrs Tregellis’s grandson had come to stay with her at her cottage down the lane.

  ‘He’s twelve,’ Billa had told her, ‘and he came all the way from Bristol on the train on his own. And he and Ed look alike. It’s so odd. Mrs Tregellis says that we’re related.’

  And that’s when their mother said, ‘Dominic is a kind of relation.’ Colour burned her cheeks a dull red, and her mouth compressed into a thin line, but they were too excited to notice much. The arrival of Dom distracted them from their grief and gave them something new to think about.

  * * *

  The sharp trill of the telephone bell cuts across Ed’s thoughts. As he dries his hands and reaches for the handset the bell stops and he knows that Billa has picked up the extension. It will probably be one of her co-workers from the charity. He pours himself some more coffee and takes the Miles Davis CD from the player. He puts it away, hesitating at the shelf on which other CDs are piled, and then chooses a Dinah Washington recording.

  * * *

  Billa finishes her conversation with the treasurer, replaces the handset on its stand and stares at the computer screen. The small room off the kitchen is now her office. An old pine washstand is her desk and Ed’s tuck box, which accompanied him to school, is her filing cabinet. She is amazingly untidy. Even Ed, who is not methodical, is silenced by the disorder of Billa’s office.

  ‘However did you manage when you were working?’ he asked once, awed by the magnificence of such chaos.

  ‘I had a PA and a secretary,’ she answered briefly. ‘I wasn’t paid to do the filing. I was paid to have ideas about how to raise money.’

  Pieces of paper, books, letters, are piled on the floor, on the desk, on the Lloyd Loom chair, on the deep granite windowsill. At intervals she has a tidying session.

  ‘Thank heavens so much is now done by email,’ she’d say, coming into the kitchen with her short fair hair on end and her shirtsleeves rolled up. ‘Be a duck and make me some coffee, Ed. I’m dying of thirst.’

  Now, she stares at an email about fund-raising at an event in Wadebridge and thinks about Tristan. Her first instinct is to protect Ed; her second is to talk to Dom. All her life – since her father died and her sense of security irrevocably shattered – she’s turned to Dom for advice and for comfort. Even when he was working abroad in South Africa, and after he was married, she’d write to him, sharing her woes and her joys. She feels inextricably linked to him. From the beginning it was as if their father had come back to them in the form of a boy.

  * * *

  He built dams across the stream and a tree house high in the beech tree in the wood – though not too high because of Ed still being little – and showed them how to light a campfire and cook very basic meals. All that long summer – the summer after their father died – Dom was with them. He was tall and strong and inventive, and they recognized that look of his, the way he laughed, throwing back his head, the way he used his hands to describe something, shaping it out in the air. How safe they felt with him; just as if their father was back with them – but young again, and reckless and fun.

  Their mother was cool in response to their enthusiasm – and they were too conscious of her grief to want to upset her – and, anyway, Dom preferred the cosiness of his granny’s cottage and the wild countryside beyond it to the old butter factory and its grounds.

  ‘I wonder how we’ll manage now,’ Billa said to Dom as they watched Ed splashing in the quiet, deep pool behind the dam. ‘Without Daddy, I mean. Ed’s too little to be able to be in charge yet, and Mother is…’

  She hesitated, not knowing the right word for her instinctive awareness of their mother’s neediness and dependence on others; for her emotional swings between tears and laughter; her instability.

  Wood pigeons cooed comfortably amongst the high leafy canopy that dappled their camp with trembling patterns of sunlight and shade; tall foxgloves clung in the stony crevices of the old footbridge that spanned the stream where tiny fish darted in the clear brown shallows.

  ‘My father’s dead, too,’ Dom said. ‘I never knew him. He was in the navy in the war and he got killed when I was very small.’

  And here again was another wonderful coincidence. ‘Our father was in the navy, too,’ she said. ‘He might have been killed but he was only injured. That’s why he died, though. It was the injury and then he had a heart attack. I don’t know what Mother will do without him.’

  She didn’t mention her own overwhelming sense of loss and pain.

  ‘My mother works,’ Dom said. ‘She’s working now. That’s why I’ve come on my own. She says I’m old enough now.’

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ Billa said. ‘We both are. And we’re glad you’re a relation.’

  He looked at her then, his face serious. ‘Funny, though, isn’t it?’ he murmured, and she felt a little shock of fear – and excitement. He was so familiar, yet a stranger. She wanted to touch him, to be close to him always.

  * * *

  Now, on an impulse, Billa picks up the telephone and presses buttons.

  ‘Dominic Blake here.’ Dom’s voice, cool, impersonal, calms her at once.

  ‘It’s me, Dom. I was just wondering if I could come down and see you in the morning.’

  ‘Billa. Yes, of course. Everything OK?’

  ‘Yes. Well…’

  ‘You don’t sound too certain.’

  ‘No. The thing is,’ instinctively she lowers her voice, ‘we’ve had a postcard from Tristan.’

  ‘Tristan?’

  ‘Yes. Weird, isn’t it, after all these years?’

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘That’s the whole point. It just says that he might come down and see us.’

  In the silence she can imagine Dom’s face: that concentrated, thoughtful expression that narrows his brown eyes; his thick hair, black and grey badger-streaked like Ed’s, flopping forward; his straight brows drawn into a frowning line.

  ‘What does Ed say?’

  ‘I haven’t told him. I didn’t want to worry him.’

  She hears the tolerant, amused snorting sound with which Dom acknowledges her ingrained sense of responsibility for Ed’s wellbeing.

  ‘You assume there’s something to worry about, then?’

  ‘Don’t you? Fifty years of silence and then a postcard. How did he know we’d both still be here?’

  ‘What’s the postmark?’

  ‘Paris. Is Tilly with you?’

  ‘Yes. We’ve just finished supper.’

  ‘Will she be there tomorrow morning?’

  ‘She should be gone by about ten.’

  ‘I’ll come down about eleven.’

  ‘OK.’

  Billa sighs with relief. As she puts the phone back on its rest, she can hear Dinah Washington singing ‘It Could Happen to You’. She passes through the kitchen to the hall where Ed is piling logs on the fire whilst Bear lies in his favourite place across the cool slates by the front door. Billa watches them, filled with overwhelming affection for them both.

  Tomorrow she will talk to Dom: all will be well.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dom stands still, arms folded across his chest, his face thoughtful. Tristan: Ed and Billa’s stepbrother. In his mind’s eye he calls up the boy’s face: thin, sharp, attractive; frosty grey eyes that stare with a bland challenge. Dom was eighteen when he first
met Tristan Carr and never before had he been so aware of the capacity for destruction in one so young. Even now, more than fifty years later, Dom remembers the shock of that meeting; the sensation of a fist in the guts.

  * * *

  He was back in Cornwall with a place at the Camborne School of Mines to study mining engineering. He felt strong and proud and free, and he couldn’t wait to see Billa and Ed; especially poor Billa, who’d written to him telling him about the disaster of their mother’s second marriage.

  ‘Wait till you meet the ghastly Tris,’ she wrote. ‘He’s utterly loathsome. I’m glad Ed and I are away at school all term. Ed’ll never be able to compete with Tris. Nor will I…’

  He wrote back, trying to comfort her, to make light of her antagonism.

  ‘He can’t be that bad, can he?’ he replied. ‘Didn’t you say he’s only ten? I’m sure you’re more than a match for a ten-year-old…’

  And now, as he walked along the lane to the old butter factory, a shadow moved beneath the ash tree and a wiry, russet-haired boy stepped out into Dom’s path. This boy stared for a moment – he had to look up at Dom but that didn’t faze him – and then his left eyebrow shot up and his lips quirked as though in amused recognition.

  ‘So you’re the bastard,’ he said lightly.

  Even now, all these years later, Dom’s hands ball into fists at the recollection of that meeting. Memories hurtle back, fragmented and random: the little house in Bristol where he and his mother lived with a cousin, and how the three of them huddled beneath the kitchen table when the bombs fell. His father, James Blake, was away, they told him, he was at sea, at war – and then, he was dead. Later, there was the little school round the corner and, when Dom was eight and the war was long over, there was the interview at the cathedral school. He won a scholarship, sang in the choir, grew taller. And, all the while, there was a shadowy presence of someone in the background who sent money and supported them.

  ‘He’s a relation,’ his mother said evasively. ‘You have relations down in Cornwall. No, not Granny. Other relations. I’ll tell you when you’re older.’ But, in the end, it was Granny who told him.

  And now the memories shift and change. He was in the potager with Billa on a hot June afternoon. With the scent of the herbs and the lavender drifting on the warm air, Granny’s potager was a magical place. When her husband died in the Levant mining disaster in 1919 she was twenty-one years old. Old Matthew St Enedoc allowed her to stay in the cottage as long as she could pay the peppercorn rent, so she got a job at the old butter factory and channelled all her passion into her six-month-old daughter, Mary, and the garden at the back of the cottage.

  She grew the necessary vegetables – as many as she could in her small patch – but she loved flowers and, in amongst the vegetables, she planted her favourites. Delicate sweet peas climbed amongst the pea-sticks, yellow-headed sunflowers peeped from the willow wigwams that supported runner beans, lavender grew at the edges of the narrow paths. Nasturtiums tumbled over the stone wall alongside campanula, geranium and dianthus. Between the lettuces and beetroot and chard, with its red and yellow stems, grew clumps of herbs: fennel, basil, chive, rosemary, thyme.

  The young widow cherished her garden almost as passionately as she cared for her child, who trundled around beside her, falling over, chasing a butterfly, sitting down suddenly to examine a stick or a stone. The child grew, attended the little village school, became beautiful – and, all the while, the rumours of another war grumbled like distant cannon-fire. And then young Harry St Enedoc came calling. His father had died and he was their new landlord. He drove a smart shiny car and he was kind and amusing. The two women were shy to begin with and then began to relax. He drank tea in the little parlour, teased Mary and complimented her mother on the delicious cake, before continuing along the lane to the butter factory.

  ‘He’s nice,’ said Mary, eyes glowing, cheeks bright as the poppies in the potager.

  ‘Yes,’ answered her mother, watching her daughter with a mix of fear and heart-aching compassion. ‘A bit too nice for us, perhaps.’

  But Mary wasn’t listening; she twirled a strand of hair dreamily and presently wandered out into the lane …

  But on that June afternoon eighteen years later, when he and Billa were picking peas in the potager, Granny hadn’t yet told Dom this story.

  Billa was angry. She talked and talked as she twisted the pea pods from their stalks, telling him that her mother was going to marry this man called Andrew and that he had a son called Tristan who would live with them and that life could never be the same again. Billa was fourteen; Dom was nearly eighteen. For five years, during the long summer holidays, she and Dom and Ed had been inseparable. Today, her barley-fair hair was snagged by the leaves and her pansy-blue eyes gleamed with tears. She looked up at him, mouth trembling, and, without considering his action, Dom put an arm around her and held her close. To his surprise – and pleasure – she flung both arms round him and clung to him.

  ‘Whatever shall we do?’ she sobbed. ‘It won’t be the same now, will it? Everything will be spoiled.’

  He held her, comforting her, and then he saw Granny watching them from the little path. Something in her face made him disentangle himself quickly, though he treated Billa gently, bringing her on to the path where Granny took control and led Billa into the cottage.

  Granny made tea, listened to Billa, and then walked with her back to the old butter factory, leaving Dom with some digging to do in the potato patch. He worked hard, driving himself in the hot sunshine, until Granny came back and told him, sitting there on the little bench amongst the scents of the potager, about young Harry St Enedoc and his fast, smart car.

  She explained that Harry hadn’t known, that he’d gone off to war a few months before Mary, weeping and distraught, told her mother the truth about secret meetings in the woodland along the stream – and the result that was growing in her womb. And her mother thought hard and fast about what must happen. She imagined the local talk: hot gossip licking its lips as it passed from tongue to eager tongue. She thought of her cousin Susan, in Bristol. Susan had done well for herself but she had been widowed young, and was childless, and might welcome some company during these dark days of war. So Mary was sent across the Tamar, away to Bristol, to help cousin Susan, and presently, when the news spread that Mary had found a nice young sailor called James Blake and that a child was on the way, her old friends and neighbours in Cornwall were very happy for her. And when three years later, in 1942, that nice young sailor was killed at sea, well, by then it was a very common story and people were sympathetic but not shocked or even surprised.

  Dom was both. He sat on the little bench, his mind whirling with this amazing story. Granny watched him. She didn’t touch him and made sure to keep her voice firm and light.

  And then, she went on, Harry St Enedoc came back from the war. He’d been torpedoed twice and wasn’t in very good shape but he’d got married along the way and he was now planning to convert the old butter factory. He’d asked after Mary and that was when she, Granny, had told him the truth.

  She sat in silence for a moment, as if remembering the shock on Harry’s face. ‘Oh my God,’ he’d said. ‘Oh my God, I never knew. I swear I didn’t, Mrs Tregellis.’ And she’d believed him and made him some tea and told him about Mary and about Dom – and showed him a snapshot of his six-year-old son.

  Harry hadn’t doubted it or denied it. He’d stared at the snapshot and said: ‘I’ve got a little girl. Wilhelmina. And my wife is expecting another baby.’ He’d looked at her then – and he’d seemed like a child himself for all his twenty-eight years. ‘I can’t tell Elinor,’ he’d said. ‘I can’t. She’d never forgive me.’

  And somehow things were managed between him and Granny. When old Mr Potts in the adjoining cottage died Harry put both cottages in Granny’s name in trust for Dom. He paid for school uniforms and any fees over and above Dom’s scholarship, and helped however he could. But he didn’t
go to the little house in Bristol, and Mary and Dom only came to Cornwall when the St Enedocs were away. Granny travelled by train to see her daughter and her grandson until Harry St Enedoc died when Dom was twelve and he was considered old enough to travel to Cornwall alone on the train.

  Another little silence whilst Granny watched him and Dom remembered that first visit to Cornwall on his own on the train; Billa and Ed running into Granny’s kitchen to meet him, commenting on how alike he and Ed were. He sat with the sun on his back and tried to grapple with the thought that Billa was his half-sister.

  ‘They don’t know?’ he said to Granny quickly. ‘Billa and Ed and their mother? None of them?’

  But it seemed that Mrs St Enedoc knew. When Harry died, his will made it clear but Mrs St Enedoc refused to tell her children. Even when Dom began to spend his summer holidays with Granny she continued to refuse to tell Billa and Ed, despite Granny’s pleas that they should know the truth.

  ‘But I’ve told her that she must tell them now,’ said Granny. She stood up, pausing for a moment to pass her hand lightly over Dom’s bent head. ‘And if she doesn’t, then I shall tell them myself.’

  She went away, leaving Dom sitting with his hands clenched between his knees, trying to come to terms with such cataclysmic news, wondering what he would say to Billa.

  But it was Ed who saved the day: Ed, running down the lane with Billa trailing behind him, who flung himself at Dom, shouting with delight, ‘I knew it really all the time. I just knew it. You’re our brother, Dom. Tris might be going to be our stepbrother but you’re our real brother.’

  Dom looked over his head to Billa, who hesitated; she looked nervous and awkward.

  He thought: she’s only fourteen. I must deal with this. I must be the strong one.

  He grinned at her. ‘It’s a bit of a shock, isn’t it? But Ed’s right. It explains lots of odd things … and feelings, and why we’re all so close.’ And he saw her relax a little.