The Fire Child

162 Days Before Christmas

Morning

David is drawing me. We’re sitting in the high summer sun on the south lawns, a jug of freshly squeezed peach-and-lemon juice on a silver tray set down on the scented grass. I’m wearing a wicker hat, at an angle. Carnhallow House – my great and beautiful house – is glowing in the sunlight. I have certainly never felt posher. I have possibly never felt happier.

‘Don’t move,’ he says. ‘Hold for a second, darling. Doing your pretty upturned nose. Noses are tricky. It’s all about the shading.’

He looks my way with a concentrated gaze then returns to the drawing paper, his pencil moving swiftly, shading and hatching. He is a very good artist, probably a much better artist – as I am realizing – than me. More naturally talented. I can draw a little but not as skilfully as this, and certainly not as fast.

Discovering David’s artistic side has been one of the unexpected pleasures of this summer. I’ve known all along he was interested in the arts: after all, I first met him at a private view in a Shoreditch gallery. And when we were in Venice he was able to show me all his favourite Venetian artworks: not just the obvious Titians, and Canelettos, but the Brancusis in the Guggenheim, the baroque ceiling of San Pantalon, or a ninth-century Madonna in Torcello, with its watchful eyes of haunted yet eternal love. A mother’s never-ending love. It was so lovely and sad it made me want to cry.

Yet I didn’t properly realize that he was good at making art until I moved here to Carnhallow. I’ve seen some of David’s youthful work on the Drawing Room wall, and in his study: semi-abstract paintings of Penwith’s carns and moors and beaches. They are so good I thought, at first, that they were expensive professional pieces, bought at a Penzance auction house by Nina. Part of her painstaking restoration, her dedication to this house.

‘There,’ he says. ‘Nose done. Now the mouth. Mouths are easy. Two seconds.’ He leans back and looks at the drawing. ‘Hah. Aced it.’

He sips some peach-and-lemon contentedly. The sun is warm on my bare and tanning shoulders. Birds are singing in Ladies Wood. I wouldn’t be surprised if they went into close harmony. This is it. The perfect moment of good luck. The man, the love, the sun, the beautiful house in a beautiful garden in a beautiful corner of England. I have an urge to say something nice, to repay the world.

‘You know you’re really good.’

‘Sorry, darling?’

He is sketching again. Deep in masculine concentration. I like the way he focuses. Frowning, but not angry. Man At Work. ‘Drawing. I know I’ve told you this before – but you’re seriously talented.’

‘Meh,’ he says, like a teenager, but smiling like an adult, his hand moving briskly across the page. ‘Perhaps.’

‘You never wanted to do it for a living?’

‘No. Yes. No.’

‘Sorry?’

‘For a moment, after Cambridge, I considered it. I would have liked to try my hand, once. But I had no choice: I had to work, to make lots and lots of boring money.’

‘Because your dad burned up all the fortune?’

‘He even sold the family silver, Rachel. To pay those imbecilic gambling debts. Sold it like some junkie fencing the TV. I had to buy it back – the Kerthen silver. And they made me pay a premium.’ David sighs, takes another taste of juice. The sun sparkles on the glass tilted in his hand. He savours the freshness and flavour and looks past me, at the sun-laced woods.

‘Of course, we were running out of money anyway: it wasn’t all my father’s fault. Carnhallow was absurdly expensive to run, but the family kept trying. Though most of the mines were making losses by 1870.’

‘Why?’

He picks up the pencil, taps it between his sharp white teeth. Thinking about the picture, answering me distractedly. ‘I really must do you nude. I’m embarrassingly good at nipples. It’s quite a gift.’

‘David!’ I laugh. ‘I want to know. Want to understand things. Why did they make losses?’

He continues sketching. ‘Because Cornish mining is hard. There’s more tin and copper lying under Cornwall than has ever been mined, in all the four thousand years of Cornish mining history, yet it’s basically impossible to extract. And certainly unprofitable.’

‘Because of the cliffs, and the sea?’

‘Exactly. You’ve seen Morvellan. That was our most profitable mine, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it’s so dangerous and inaccessible.’

‘Go on.’

‘There’s a reason Morvellan has that strange architecture – the two houses. Most Cornish mineshafts were exposed to the air, only the pumps were protected, behind stone – because machinery was deemed more important than men, perhaps. But on the cliffs, above Zawn Hanna, the Kerthens had a problem: because of the proximity of the sea, and consequent storms, we had to protect the top of the shaft in its own house, right next to the Engine House.’ He stares at me and past me, as if he is looking at the mines themselves. ‘Creating, by accident, that poignant, diagonal symmetry.’ His pencil twirls slowly in his fingers. ‘Now compare that to the open-cast mines of Australia, or Malaysia. The tin is right there, at the surface. They can simply dig it out of the ground with a plastic spade. And that’s why Cornish mining died. Four thousand years of mining, gone in a couple of generations.’

His cheerfulness has clouded over. I can sense his darkening thoughts, tending to Nina, who drowned at Morvellan. It was probably my fault, letting the conversation stray in this direction. Down the valley. Towards the mineheads on the cliffs. I must make amends. ‘You really want to do me nude?’

His smile returns. ‘Oh yes. Oh, very much, yes.’ He laughs and peels his finished drawing from the volume, and slants his handsome head, assessing his own work. ‘Hmm. Not bad. Still didn’t get the nose right. I really am better at nipples. OK’ – he tilts a wrist to check the time – ‘I promised I’d take Jamie to school—’

‘At the weekend?’

‘Soccer match, remember? He’s very excited. Can you pick him up later? I’m seeing Alex in Falmouth.’

‘Of course I will. Love to.’

‘See you for dinner. You’re a great sitter.’

He kisses me softly before striding away, around the house, heading for his car, calling out for Jamie. Like we are already a family. Safe and happy. This feeling warms me like the summer weather.

I remain sitting here in the sun, eyes half-closed, mind half-asleep. The sense of sweet purposelessness is delicious. I have things to do, but nothing particular to do right now. Voices murmur in the house, and on the drive. The car door slams in the heat. The motor-noise dwindles as it heads through those dense woods, up the valley to the moors. Birdsong replaces it.

Then I realize I haven’t looked at David’s drawing of me. Curious, maybe a little wary – I dislike being drawn, the same way I dislike being photographed: I only do it to indulge David – I lean across and pick up the sheet of paper.

It is predictably excellent. In fifteen minutes of sketching he has captured me, from the slight sadness in my eyes that never goes away, to the sincere if uncertain smile. He sees me true. And yet I am pretty in this picture, too: the shadow of the hat flatters. And there in the picture is my love for him, vivid in the happy shyness of my gaze.

He sees the love, which pleases me.

There is only one flaw. It is the nose. My nose is, I am told, cute, retroussé, upturned. But he hasn’t sketched my nose at all. This nose is sharper, aquiline, more beautiful: this bone structure is from someone else’s face, someone else he drew a thousand times, so that it became habitual. And I know who. I’ve seen the photos, and the drawings.

He’s made me look like Nina.

Afternoon

The drawing lies on the grass, fallen from my hand. I am awake, and surprised that I slept. I must have drifted off in the indulgent warmth of the sun. Gazing about me, I see nothing has changed. Shadows have lengthened. The day is still fine, the sun still bright.

I sleep a lot in Carnhallow, and I sleep well. It is like I am catching up, after twenty-five years of alarm clocks. I sometimes feel so leisured that my latent guilt kicks in, along with a hint of loneliness.

I haven’t got any proper friends down here yet, so these last solitary weeks when I haven’t been in the house I’ve been using the hours to drive and hike the wild Penwith landscape. I love photographing the silent mine stacks, the salt-bitten fishing villages and the dark and plunging coves where, on all but the calmest days, the waves throw themselves psychotically at the cliffs. Though my favourite place so far is Zawn Hanna, the cove at the end of our own valley. Morvellan Mine stands above it, but I ignore its black shapes and instead gaze out at the sea.

When occasional summer rain has sent me indoors I’ve tried completing my mental map of Carnhallow. I’ve finally counted the seventy-eight bedrooms and it turns out that there are, in fact, eighteen, depending on how you categorize the tiny, sad, echoing box rooms on the top floor, which were probably servants’ quarters, though they have an odd echo of the monastic cells which must once, I presume, have stood on this ground, in this lush little valley.

Some days, standing alone in the dust of this top floor, when the sea-wind is combing through the rowans, it feels like I can hear the words of those monks, caught on the breeze: Ave Maria, gratia plena: Dominus tecum …

At other times I linger in the Drawing Room, my favourite part of Carnhallow, along with the kitchen and the gardens. I’ve checked out most of the books, from Nina’s volumes on antique silverware and Meissen porcelain to David’s many monographs on mainly modern artists: Klee, Bacon, Jackson Pollock. David has a particular liking for abstract expressionists.

Last weekend I saw him sit and stare at the solid black and red blobs of a Mark Rothko painting for an hour, then he closed the book, looked at me, and said, ‘We’re all astronauts, really, aren’t we; interstellar astronauts, travelling so far into the blackness we can never return.’ Then he got up and offered me Plymouth gin in a Georgian tumbler.

But my biggest personal discovery has not been porcelain or paintings but a small dog-eared volume of photographs, hidden between two big fat books on Van Dyck and Michelangelo. When I first opened this battered little booklet it revealed startling monochrome images of historic Kerthen mines and the miners within them.

The photos must, I reckon, be nineteenth century. I look at them almost every day. What amazes me about them is that the miners worked practically without light: all they had was the faint flicker of the tiny candles stuck in their felt hats. Which means that the moment the camera’s magnesium flash exploded was the only time in their lives when the miners properly saw where they worked, where they had spent every waking hour, digging and hewing and drilling. One precious fraction of brightness. Then back to lifelong darkness.

The thought of those miners, who once toiled their lives away in the rocks right underneath me, stirs me into action. Get to work, Rachel Daly.

The drawing is folded and set on the tray, which is warm from the sun. I carry the tray with the lemon-scented glasses into the coolness of the house, the airiness of the kitchen. Then I open my app. There are only two significant places left to explore: I’ve left them to last because they are the ones that give me the most concern. They are the worst of Carnhallow’s challenges.

The first is the basement and the cellars.

David showed me this bewildering labyrinth the day we arrived, and I have not revisited. Because the basement is a depressing place: a network of dismal corridors, grimed with dust, where rusted bells dangle below coiled springs, never to be heard again.

There are many stairs down to the basement. I take the first set, outside the kitchen. Flicking on unreliable lights at the top of the steps, I pick my way down the creaking wooden stairs, and look around.

Ancient signs hang from peeling doors: Brushing Room, Butler’s Pantry, Footman’s Room, receding into shadows and grey. At the end of the dingy corridor ahead of me I can make out the tall, arched stone threshold of the wine cellar. David and Cassie visit the cellars a lot: it is the one part of Carnhallow’s vast basement that gets used. Apparently there are lancet windows in the cellar, blinded and bricked, showing the monastic origin of Carnhallow, one thousand years ago. One day I will sit myself down in that cellar and blow dust off old French labels, teach myself about wine the way I am slowly teaching myself about everything else, but today I need to get an overall grasp.

Turning down an opposite corridor I find more signs: Bake House, Cleaning Room, Dairy. The piles of debris littering and sometimes obstructing the corridors are stupefying. An antique sewing machine. Half of a vintage motorcycle, taken to pieces then left here. Broken clay pipes from maybe two hundred years before. A mouldy Victorian wardrobe. Some kind of light fitting, made possibly from swan feathers. An enormous wheel from a horse-carriage. It is like the Kerthens, as they slowly died out, or dispersed, or decayed, couldn’t bear to part with anything, as it painfully symbolized their decline. So it all got hidden away down here. Entombed.

Phone in hand, I pause. The air is motionless and cold. Two huge antique fridges lurk, for no obvious reason, in a corner. I have a sudden image of being imprisoned within one of them. Hammering on the door, trapped in its reeking smallness, stuck down a basement corridor that no one will ever use. Dying over days in a cuboid coffin.

A shudder runs through me. Moving on, turning left, I find an even older doorway. The stonework of the doorjamb looks medieval, and the painted wooden sign hanging from a nail says STILL.

Still?

Still what? Still here? Be still? Please be still? The sign agitates.

STILL.

Repressing my anxieties, I push the door. The hinges are stiff with rust: I have to lay my shoulder on the door and shunt hard, and at last the door springs open, with a bang. Like I have broken something. I sense the house glaring at me with disapproval.

It is very dark in this room. There is no apparent switch and the only light comes from the corridor behind me. My eyes slowly adjust to the gloom. In the middle of this small room is a battered wooden table. It could be hundreds of years old, or it could have just had a hard time. Various bottles, greyed with dust, sit on shelves. Some have tiny labels on them, hung on exquisite metal chains, like little necklaces for tiny slave girls. Going close I see the handwritten names, scratchily penned – quilled – with ancient ink.

Feverfew. Wormwood. Comfrey. Mullein.

Still.

STILL.

I think I understand it now, maybe. This is a place for distilling. Making herbal remedies, tinctures. A still room.

Turning to go, I see something totally unexpected. Three or four large cardboard boxes in the corner of the room, partly concealed by a case of ancient glassware. The boxes have the name Nina vigorously scrawled on them.

So this is her stuff? The dead woman, the dead mother, the dead wife. Clothes, or books, maybe. Not ready to be thrown out.

Now I feel really improper, like a trespasser. I’ve done nothing wrong, I am the new wife, a keeper of Carnhallow, and David wants me to explore so that I can restore this maze of dust: but the act of almost-breaking-in to this room, and happening upon these sad boxes, makes me blush.

Trying not to run, I retrace my steps, and I climb the stairs with a definite sense of relief. Taking deep breaths. Then a glance at my watch reminds me. I have to collect Jamie, soon, which means I have enough time for my final task.

There is one more interior space I want to see: the entirely untouched West Wing. And at its heart, the Old Hall. David has told me it is impressive.

But I’ve not once set foot inside this space yet. Only seen the gaunt exterior. Taking the corridor beyond the grand stairs, I cross from east to west, and from now to then.

This must be it. A large but unpainted and very heavy wooden door. The handle is a twisted, cast-iron ring. It takes an effort to turn, but then the door swings smoothly open. I step, for the first time, into the Old Hall.

The tall arched windows are Gothic, and leaded. Obviously from the monastery. The vaulted stone chamber is cold; it is also totally uncarpeted and unfurnished. David says that centuries ago they used to pay the miners in this hall. I can see them now. The humble men, stoically queuing, summoned by their surnames. The mine captains looking on with crossed and burly arms.

The room is imposing, but also oppressive. I shiver like a child in here. I think the atmosphere must be something to do with the size of the room. Here in the frigid empty heart of the house, I realize the scale of Carnhallow. Vast and engulfing. This is where I truly comprehend that I am in a house with space for fifty people. For three dozen servants, and a large extended family.

Today, just four people live here. And one, David, will be spending most of his time in London.

Three o’clock. Time to pick up my stepson. Heading outside, jumping in the Mini, I gun the engine – then slowly navigate the narrow drive, up through the sunlit woodlands. It’s a difficult road, but lovely, too. Inspiring. One day maybe my kids will play here. They will grow up in the magnificence of Carnhallow – surrounded by space and beauty, beaches and trees. They will see bluebells in spring, and pick mushrooms in October. And there will be dogs. Happy, galloping dogs, fetching mossy sticks: in the glades of Ladies Wood.

At last I hit the main road – and I drive west, threading between the green and stony moors to my left and the rioting ocean on the right. This mazy B road takes in most of the little ex-mining villages in West Penwith.

Botallack, Geevor, Pendeen. Morvah.

After Morvah, the road splits: I take the left turn, heading over the barrens of higher moorland to Jamie’s school in Sennen, a private prep school.

Two left turns, another mile of moor and the landscape has subtly changed. Down here on the southern coast sunlight dapples calmer seas. When I park the car near the school gates and swing the door open the air is slightly but noticeably softer.

Jamie Kerthen is already here, waiting. He walks towards me. He is in his school uniform, despite it being a Saturday. This is because Sennen is a pretty formal school that demands uniforms whenever the kids are on the grounds. I like that. I want that for my kids, as well. Formality and discipline. More things I didn’t have.

I climb out of the car, smiling at my stepson. I have to resist the urge to run and hug him, close and tight. It’s too soon for this. But my protective feelings are real. I want to protect him for ever.

Jamie half-smiles in response – but then he stops and stands there, rooted to the pavement, and gives me a long, strange, concentrated stare. As if he cannot work out who I am or why I am here. Even though we have now been living together for weeks.

I try not to be unnerved. His behaviour is peculiar – but I know he is still grieving for his mother.

To make it worse, another mother is coming out now, guiding her son, passing us on the pavement. I don’t know who she is. I don’t know anyone in Cornwall. But my isolation won’t be helped if people think I am weird, that I don’t fit in. So I give her a wide smile and say, all too loudly, ‘Hello, I’m Rachel! I’m Jamie’s stepmother!’

The woman looks my way, then at Jamie. Who still stands there, motionless, his eyes fixed on mine.

‘Um, yes … hello.’ She blushes faintly. She has a round, pretty face and a posh, clear voice and she looks embarrassed by this strange, loud woman and her wary stepson. And why not? ‘I’m sure we’ll meet again. But – ah – really must be going,’ she says.

The woman hurries away with her boy, then looks back at me, a puzzled frown on her face. She probably feels sorry for this frightened boy with this idiot for a stepmother. So I turn my fixed smile on to my own stepson.

‘Hey, Jamie! Everything OK? How was the football?’

Can he stand there in rooted silence for much longer? I cannot bear it. The weirdness is prolonged for several painful seconds. Then he relents. ‘Two nil. We won.’

‘Great, well, great, that’s fantastic!’

‘Rollo scored a penalty and then a header.’

‘That’s totally brilliant! You can tell me more on the drive home. Do you want to get in?’

He nods. ‘OK.’

Chucking his sports bag in the back seat, he slides in, clunks his safety belt in its socket, then as I start the car, he plucks up a book from his bag and starts reading. Ignoring me again.

I change gear, taking a tight corner, trying to focus on these tiny roads, but I am nagged by worries. Now I think about it, this isn’t the first time Jamie has acted oddly, as if suspicious of me, in the last few weeks: but it is the most noticeable occasion.

Why is he changing? When I met my stepson in London he was nothing but laughter and chatter: the initial day we met we got on brilliantly. That day was, in fact, the first day I felt real love for his father. The way man and boy interacted, their love and understanding, their joking and mutual respect, united in grief yet not showing it – this moved and impressed me. It was so unlike me and my dad. And again I wanted some of this paternal affection for my own child. I wanted the father of my children to be exactly like David. I wanted it to be David.

The sex and desire and friendship were already in place – David had already charmed me – but it was Jamie who crystallized these feelings into love for his father.

And yet, ever since I actually moved in to Carnhallow, Jamie has, I now realize, become more withdrawn. Distant, or watchful. As if he is assessing me. As if he kind of senses that there’s something awry. Something wrong with me.

My stepson is quietly looking my way in the mirror, right now. His eyes are large, and the palest violet-blue. He really is a very beautiful boy: exceptionally striking.

Does this make me shallow – that Jamie Kerthen’s beauty makes it easier for me to love him? If so, there’s not much I can do; I can’t help it. A beautiful child is a powerful thing, not easily resisted. And I also know that his boyish beauty disguises serious grief, which makes me feel the force of love, even more. I will never replace his lost mother, but surely I can assuage his loneliness.

A lock of black hair has fallen across his white forehead. If he were my son, I’d stroke it back in to place. At last he talks.

‘When is Daddy going away again?’

I answer, in a rush. ‘Monday morning, as usual, day after tomorrow. But he’ll only be gone a few days. He’s flying back into Newquay at the end of the week. Not so long, not long at all.’

‘Oh, OK. Thank you, Rachel.’ He sighs, passionately. ‘I wish Daddy came home longer. I wish he didn’t go away so much.’

‘I know Jamie. I feel the same.’

I yearn to say something more constructive, but our new life is what it is: David commutes to and from London every Monday morning and Friday evening. He does it by plane, in and out of Newquay airport. When he gets home he burns his silver Mercedes along the A30, then crawls along the last, winding moorland miles, to Carnhallow.