In a Kingdom by the Sea

‘That,’ said Emily, ‘is because men are Very Important, Kate, with very Important Authors and we are just women trying to promote commercial fiction …’

They link arms and disappear off to the underground together.

‘Are you okay?’ I ask Dominique when she comes back from the bathroom. She seems pale and subdued tonight.

‘I’m fine.’ She picks up her vast handbag. ‘I was hoping we might go off somewhere together while I was in London but you are obviously taken up …’

‘Oh, Dom, sorry, really bad timing. Mike’s just got home and you know how it is …’

‘Not really.’ Dominique smiles at me. ‘I’ve ordered a taxi. Give me a ring, darling, if you have time to see me before I fly home on Monday.’

‘Of course!’ I say guiltily. ‘Let’s have lunch together. You haven’t told me why you’re in London. You said you were staying with a friend?’

‘Well, she’s not exactly a friend. I used to make her clothes when she lived in Paris. She’s asked me to design her daughter’s wedding dress.’

‘How wonderful. So, you’re staying at her house?’

‘No. She’s put me up in a posh hotel round the corner from her house.’

‘Why didn’t you come here?’

‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing and you are always so busy with work and I didn’t know if the boys were home …’

‘I’m never too busy to have you to stay, you know that.’ But I also know that Dominique will never stay if Mike is here.

Dominique fiddles with her bag as if she wants to say something.

‘Dom? Is something wrong?’

She shrugs. ‘No. You told me you had a few days off and I thought, maybe, while I was over here, we might get the train and spend a couple of days in Cornwall together. Stupid … a whim. I had forgotten that Mike would be back in London.’

I stare at her. Dominique has never expressed any wish to go back to Cornwall. At Papa’s funeral she vowed that when the house was sold she would never return.

‘What brought this on, darling?’

The taxi arrives at the bottom of the steps. Dominique does not answer. She hugs me. ‘I must go. Gabby, don’t you dare even think of going out to Pakistan …’

She runs down the steps and I call, ‘Another time, Dom. Let’s do it another time … Cornwall, I mean.’

Later that night, when Mike and I have cleared up the debris of the party and are lying exhausted wrapped around each other in bed, Mike whispers, ‘Thanks for such a great birthday … Pity the boys couldn’t be here …’ He buries his mouth in my hair. ‘Love you, Gabs.’

These are words Mike so rarely says that I am unnerved by the sound and shape of them; I shiver as if a ghost has tiptoed over my grave.

Mike falls instantly asleep but I lie awake in the dark feeling an odd ennui, probably brought on by the white wine. Or perhaps it is guilt that I never make time for Dominique when she always makes time for me.

I think of her sitting alone at the kitchen table, steadily working her way through a bottle of red wine, and I feel sad. There have been so many dramas in Dominique’s life that I dread hearing another, but it is no excuse. How did I get so busy that I neglect my sister?

I lie listening to Mike’s breathing. He will be offered the job in Pakistan. He will accept. We will live apart again. It is how our marriage has always been, but this time unease surfaces. It hums and hovers in the air like a tangible presence, a shapeless dark thing, crouched, waiting, just beyond reach.

Somehow, with one thing and another, I did not manage to meet Dominique before she flew home to her tiny flat in the Parisian suburbs. Mike’s job offer had unsettled me. I hid my disappointment. I did not want to play the martyr. Mike was off to new horizons, but I was still in my familiar role at home and oh, how dull that made me feel.

I wish I had not neglected my sister. I wish I had not been so preoccupied with Mike that I failed to pick up Dominique’s misery or her desperate need to talk to me. Her drinking, her dark clothes, her sudden wish to go back to Cornwall had all been clues. And I ignored them.

CHAPTER TWO

Cornwall, 1966

Whenever I am sad or unhappy I run to Cornwall in my head. I no longer have a home there but I take myself through the rooms of the house where I grew up as if they will still be exactly the same; as if my parents still inhabit the rooms, still roam the garden and orchard full of ancient apple trees.

I can still hear the sound of the chickens in the long grass and Maman’s cry when the fox got any of them or she spotted a rat near the feed.

I can see Papa stripped to the waist as he dug out a vegetable patch on a piece of the field next to the house. I can see Maman watching him from under her sunhat and remember the little flush inside me as I sensed, but did not understand, the innuendo of their banter.

My first memory of our house is standing on the balcony with my father gazing downhill across a field of wild flowers to the sea. There was a mist hanging over the water like a magical curtain and the sea was eerily still, like glass.

‘Fairyland!’ I whispered. To a five year old living in a terraced house in Redruth, it was.

‘Can you imagine living in this house?’ Papa asked me, sounding excited.

‘I wouldn’t like to live with Aunt Loveday. She’s old, Papa, and she smells.’

‘That’s not very kind, Gabby,’ my father said. ‘It’s sad. Loveday is too old to live here any more. She can’t cope with all the stairs so she is going to a private nursing home. This house has to be sold to help pay for her care …’

My father sighed as he looked down at the neglected garden.

‘Poor old Loveday. She’s lived here all her life. It is a big thing for her to admit she can’t manage on her own. Now she wants her home to stay in the family.’

‘So, are we going to buy her house?’ I asked my father, following his eyes across the jungle garden.

‘Maybe, if we can afford to. The house has to be valued first. If we moved here you would have to leave your friends and change schools.’

I stared out at the sea, blindingly blue below me. ‘I don’t mind. I’d love to live here. We’d have the beach and a garden to play in but Dominique won’t want to move. She’s got so many friends, she won’t want to leave any of them.’

‘Leaving some of them behind would be no bad thing,’ my father said. ‘She might make more sensible ones and concentrate on her schoolwork …’

Loveday’s house was an old and shabby granite house. Once a farmhouse it lay foursquare and solid, facing the coastline. Loveday, a distant cousin of Papa’s, had slowly sold off most of their land but had protected the house by keeping all the surrounding fields.

Papa pointed to the village sloping off to the right of us. Fishermen’s cottages lay in tiers raised above the water. We could not see the small harbour full of fishing boats from here, or the lifeboat station; they lay out of sight beyond the point, like another little hamlet. On this side of the village there was only the perfect horseshoe cove and the coastal path through fields.

‘With a little imagination, this coastline could attract so many more people …’ my father murmured to himself.

Maman came bustling onto the balcony with Dominique behind her. They were carrying a French loaf, cheese and tomatoes. Maman looked happy. My sister looked bored and sulky.

Maman kissed the top of my head and said to Papa, ‘I rang the education department at County Hall this morning. There are no staff vacancies in the village school at the moment but I would almost certainly be able to teach in Penzance.’

She dropped the bread on the table and turned and looked out at the sea, and the garden below. ‘We would be mad not to try to buy this house, Tom, however hard it will be. I could do supply teaching. There will always be work in the shops and hotels in the summer season. I could probably earn more money having two part-time jobs than I do teaching.’

Dominique rolled her eyes, dismissively. ‘Maman! Are you going to stop teaching in Redruth to be a cleaner like Kirsty’s mum? Just so you can live in this house?’

‘Dominique,’ Maman said. ‘I have loved Loveday’s house from the first moment I saw it. I would do any job that brings in money to live here. I do not want to spend my life in a rented house in Redruth with no garden. This might be the only chance Papa and I have of owning a house …’

‘But this village is miles away from anywhere,’ Dominique wailed. ‘It’s like a dead place. I won’t have any friends. I like Redruth …’

‘In a couple of years you’ll have to change schools anyway,’ Papa said. ‘You’re good at making friends. You’d soon make new friends in the village …’

‘It’s a boring, boring village. It doesn’t even have a proper shop …’ Dominique was in a rare bad mood and spoiling the morning.

‘Loads of tourists will come to the beach every summer,’ I told her.

‘Big deal.’ She flounced off down the steps to the overgrown garden.

Maman said, slightly deflated, ‘It is a bit off the beaten track, Tom. If we did B&B, would anyone come, apart from walkers?’

‘There are plenty of walkers but the village does need a café, a decent pub and nice places to stay to draw more people here. Look, down there to the beach, Marianne … See those little huts by the lifebuoy? The council are thinking of doing those huts up and renting them out. Wouldn’t one of them be the perfect place for a little café? As you say, there’s nowhere to get anything to eat or drink at the moment.’

Papa laughed at Maman’s face. She was staring out visualizing the café up and running.

‘I reckon this little village is going to change dramatically in the next few years. More and more tourists are coming further west. St Ives is getting crowded and too expensive, but up-country people still want to buy second homes, which means plenty of work for a builder like me …’

My father was waving his hands about and striding up and down as if we already lived here.

‘The village would be ruined,’ Maman said, ‘if it was built up and overpriced like St Ives. I love all the fields covered in gorse. Who wants to live near empty houses all winter?’

‘No one can sell agricultural land. No one can change the coastline or coastal footpaths. People will always come to walk and how many walkers pass a café if it’s there? I’m not talking about building new houses but renovating old cottages when they are sold off. I’ve heard that the council plan to open craft shops in the old cowsheds in the square as a showcase for local artists, potters and silversmiths and the like. This is the right time for us to buy, my bird. If we don’t take this chance, we’ll regret it for the rest of our lives …’

My parents went inside arm in arm to make lunch. I stayed outside on the balcony staring out at the sea. The mist was blowing away and little fishing boats were heading out of the harbour, the thud of their engines echoing over the still air.

A tractor was ploughing up on the hill with a great carpet of seagulls circling behind it. The church bell chimed. I heard Maman laugh inside the house and the deep boom of Papa’s voice. I caught the flash of Dominique’s dress in the orchard. She had climbed into one of the old apple trees and her singing floated out over the garden. I waved and she waved back. I could see she was smiling. I could see she was changing her mind and tasting freedom.

This was my first memory of the village. A sensation we all had of coming home; an instant connectedness to Loveday’s house that was powerful. The old lady’s life here was ending, but ours was about to begin.

CHAPTER THREE

London, 2009

A few days after our party, Mike flew off to Karachi for his interview with Pakistani Atlantic Airlines. When the phone rang I already knew what he would say. He had been offered the job and accepted on the spot.

Aware of my silence he said, ‘Gabby, I’m going to have to wait for my visa application to be processed. Even fast-tracked, it will take at least ten days, so we will have time together before I go …’

I take time off work and Will and Matteo head down from Edinburgh and Glasgow to spend a long weekend with Mike before he leaves.

‘FFS, Dad, we’re fighting the Taliban, it’s not exactly the perfect time to head for Pakistan, is it?’

‘You’ll get kidnapped … like that journalist, what’s his name … Pearl Someone …’

‘Daniel. Daniel Pearl, he got …’

‘Shut up, both of you, you’ll worry your mother. Of course I won’t get kidnapped. I’m not a journalist after a story. There are other Europeans working in Pakistan, you know. Oil companies, commercial firms, NGOs. Everyone working out there is given security.’

The parks are stunning, full of trees with translucent green leaves and picnickers enjoying a hot June. Mike loves to roam London when he is home, so we criss-cross the city like tourists, drink coffee by the Serpentine, dip in and out of galleries, go to the theatre. In the evenings we take turns choosing where to eat and sip cold white wine and beer on shady terraces.

I cannot remember the last time we all spent time together in London. I let my happiness settle inside me like a precious thing, hardly daring to own it, in case some mean god snatches it away.

One afternoon Will and Matteo persuade us to take a riverboat down to Greenwich like we used to when they were small. As we chug downriver Mike cross-questions his sons on their career plans.

Both boys somehow ended up studying in Scotland. I’ve never been sure whether this was chance or design. There are only twelve months between them and they are close, often mistaken for twins. Will, who is studying medicine at Edinburgh, says warily, ‘I don’t have any plans, Dad. I’m just concentrating on exams at the moment.’

‘But you must have an idea about how you want to specialize,’ Mike says.

‘I have to get a medical degree first. Anyway, I might want to be a GP and not specialize in anything. Have you thought of that?’

‘Dreary job, totally thankless!’

Oh, Mike, I think. Why can’t you tell your sons you are proud of them, rather than question their choices?

Will looks at him. ‘I disagree. There is a national shortage of GPs.’

Mike shrugs. ‘Well, it’s your life, but I think you’re too bright just to be a GP … You’ve always needed challenges.’

I watch them both. Will is winding Mike up. He does not want to be a GP. He wants to be an orthopaedic surgeon. How can Mike forget that as a little boy Will was fascinated by the names of bones and how they knitted together?

Before he is asked, Matteo, who is at the Glasgow School of Art, says, ‘I’m planning on being the next Banksy, Dad.’

Both boys are laughing at him and Mike makes a face. ‘Okay, I’ll shut up. I was just doing catch up …’

‘If you were around longer you wouldn’t need to,’ Will retorts. He yawns and stretches. ‘Matt and I will bore you with our ambitions later, Dad, this boat is too noisy to talk …’

I watch the water slide past, aware of the fast current and how quickly a day can turn. Perhaps, Mike is conscious of it too, for he says, ‘Okay, let’s make serious plans while we are all together. It’s going to take me all summer to get to grips with this job … but how about we plan for Christmas together? Do you want me to come back home or shall we try for Oman? Revisiting the Barr Al Jissah Resort might be fun. If you aren’t caught up with wild parties and Scottish women, of course …’

Will and Matteo goggle at him. ‘Are you serious?’ Will asks. ‘Do you really think either of us are going to miss a chance of Christmas in Muscat?’

‘Oman! That would be so cool!’ Matteo says, grinning. ‘Any chance of slipping in a girlfriend?’

Mike laughs. ‘No chance.’

‘Only joking. I know that hotel is serious money. Are you sure you don’t want to just take Mum? Will and I are always broke and …’

Mike throws an arm around me. ‘Well, you can buy your mother and me a drink, can’t you?’

I watch my sons do a little jig of excitement. I feel like doing one myself. Muscat is paradise. I bend in the cool river breeze and kiss Mike’s cheek.

‘Thank you. Christmas in Oman will be wonderful.’

‘Make up for leaving you so soon?’

‘Not quite.’

We get off the boat at Greenwich and find a table in a crowded pub garden for lunch. When we have ordered drinks, Will asks, ‘What are you actually going to be doing in Karachi, Dad?’

‘I’ll be there to try to save a failing airline and I’m under no illusions that it’s going to be easy …’

‘I was reading stuff about Karachi online,’ Matteo says. ‘The Sunnis and Shias are permanently trying to blow each other up. It’s a violent city. Bad stuff happens.’

‘Bad stuff happens everywhere, Matt. We’re not immune from bombs and terrorist attacks in London. It doesn’t stop us leading a normal life, does it? When I’m away I worry just as much about your mother in London and both of you in Edinburgh and Glasgow …’

‘Ah, sweet of you, Dad,’ Matt says.

‘And there was me thinking you forgot all about us …’ Will says.

‘London is not in quite the same category as Karachi, Mike.’

Mike smiles at me. ‘Gabby, I am going to be well looked after. Do you really think the airline would want the embarrassment of having their European director disappear?’

‘Any Taliban kidnapping you would let you go pretty quickly after you had grilled them, interminably, on their career path …’ Will announces drily.

We all laugh. ‘As you are obviously going to earn gross amounts of money, can Will and I order anything off this menu?’ Matteo asks.

Mike raises his eyebrows. ‘Gross amounts of money you two have no difficulty parting me from …’ He glances at the menu. ‘This is hardly the Ritz. There is nothing here that will break the bank. Go ahead!’

Matt turns to Will. ‘Oh, to be so old you have forgotten what poor students actually live on …’

‘Well, Mum and Dad are baby boomers, they had the luxury of student grants …’

‘Bollocks!’ Mike says. ‘You two have the luxury of the bank of Mum and Dad and you’ve never gone hungry in your lives …’

I smile as I listen to the three of them happily bantering. Familiar old stag, young stag, rubbish. Mike is right; nowhere is absolutely safe and I will not spend the time we have together worrying.

Mike holds his beer glass up. ‘To us and happy times ahead!’

We clink our glasses together, aware of the mercurial nature of happiness and family life.

In the days before he leaves Mike seems uncharacteristically nervous. There are endless delays with his visa and when it finally comes and his flight is booked he asks me to see him off at Heathrow. It is the first time he has ever wanted me to go to the airport with him.

When we arrive at departures there is a small deputation of courteous but formal PAA staff lined up to meet him. They are deferent and anxious, carefully checking that he has all the correct paperwork for entry into Pakistan.

It is only then I realize Mike is being treated like a VIP, that this job holds high expectations and huge responsibility. He is already someone important before he has even set foot in Pakistan.

Before we have time to say goodbye properly, Mike is whisked away and fast-tracked through security and into the business lounge. I stand for a minute in the frenetic hub of the airport, buffeted by people, watching the place where he disappeared.

When I get home the empty house is very quiet. The washing basket is full of the boys’ dirty clothes. Mike’s loose change lies in the little pottery bowl near the vase of freesias he bought me yesterday. Their scent fills the room.

I push the French windows open. Traffic growls like the sound of distant bees. The buds on the magnolia tree are unfolding like tissue paper, their scent subtle and musty.

At the airport, Mike had pulled me to him and whispered, ‘Thank you darling girl, for everything …’

He sounded so unlike himself, the words strange on his tongue, his voice husky, not quite his own.

Sun slants across the table in the empty house that four people have filled for days. The air hums like a threnody to the rhythm of the men I love. I don’t know why I feel so sad. I have done this a hundred times.

I pick up the phone and ring Dominique. It rings and rings in the tiny flat in Paris but no one answers.

CHAPTER FOUR

Cornwall, 1971

If I close my eyes you won’t be gone. If I close my eyes I won’t see Maman’s face any more. If I close my eyes I can pretend we are surfing through small fast waves. If I close my eyes we are together at the beach café eating ice cream after school. If I keep my eyes tightly closed you will still be here …

We are climbing into Papa’s boat and motoring out on the evening tide to fish for mackerel. You and Papa are singing to the fish and embarrassing me.

I love the silver-purple flash of their skins as we reel them in. You are quick at taking the hook out of their mouths but I can’t do it. I hate seeing Papa bang their heads against the side of the boat.

‘Pff!’ you say to me, ‘you like to eat them barbecued with Maman’s frites, though, don’t you? You love her mackerel pâté stuffed in crusty rolls …’

We moor the boat and walk round from the quay with the fish. Maman is sitting on the beach in the last of the sun with a picnic. There is lettuce and tomatoes from the allotment, great sticks of French bread, sausages and chicken, pâté and cheese.

There is always loads of food because Maman knows your friends will wander past hoping she will call out to them to join us. Maman feeds everyone.

‘She’s French!’ you say, shrugging. ‘Food is what Maman does.’

Maman and Papa drink red wine from little kitchen glasses and Papa says, ‘My beautiful girls! Look at my beautiful girls!’

You are the beautiful one. Maman is pretty, too, but I am not. I stand out because of my hair. It is fair and thick with tight springy curls. I don’t have shiny, blue-black hair like you and Maman.

I get teased about my hair at school but you tell me that it is unique. You say that anyone can have straight dark hair but hardly anyone has curly, fair hair, green eyes and olive skin. You tell me I am cute and clever. You tell me you could never make up stories like me, nor read three books in a week. But I would like to be like you, so beautiful that people turn their heads to take another look as you walk past …

‘My beautiful girls. Look at you all sitting on the rug … I must take a photo …’ Papa sighs.

‘Too much red wine,’ Maman says, rolling her eyes.

You can never wait for summer to come. You love it when the campsite opens up on the hill and the beach café stays open until dark. You love it when the tourists start to pour in and the village fills up. You stop pretending to be bored by the grey winter and the empty town. You come alive again like the trees.

What will I do without you? What will I do? You have millions of friends, but I don’t, and you hardly ever say no if I want to play with you. ‘She’s my sister,’ you say firmly. And that’s that.

I know all the places you go when you are fed up, when you and Maman argue. You climb down to forbidden Nannaver Beach, tucked under the cliffs, but you make me promise never to go on my own.

Do you remember that day we made a den up in the fields underneath the hawthorn? A fox or badger had made a hidden path between the thorns. We pinched Papa’s sandwiches and flask and stayed there all day to get out of cleaning our rooms.