As we took the photo it captured our outlines reflected in the bookshop window, behind us the shops on the opposite side of the cobbled street and above, in a blue sky, the spires of Truro Cathedral. But as we took it we saw none of that. All we saw was a pile of pale blue books with swallows flying from their spines and a hand-drawn poster with quotes from the book. My words written among drawings of waves and gulls and draped in bunting. Dolphins and birds hanging on triangles attached to blue ribbon.
‘Can you believe this?’
‘No, not at all. Don’t you think the picture on the cover looks just like that spot where we camped at Land’s End?’
‘It really does. Who’d have thought, when we put the tent up that night at the end of that horrendously wet day, that a few years later we’d be standing here?’
‘Take another photo while I pose by the books.’
‘Shall we go upstairs to the café, have tea and a teacake to celebrate?’
We poured tea while people walked along the street below, still in T-shirts and shorts in unexpected early autumn warmth.
‘You know if we say yes to this man, it’ll be as if we haven’t learnt anything. Putting our stability back into the hands of someone else. And look where that got us before. Homeless.’ Moth scratched at his teacake with the thinnest smear of butter.
‘But this isn’t the same. We’re not putting money into this, so what do we have to lose? Anyway, that’s what renting is: you’re only ever as safe as the landlord lets you be. We’re on a rolling contract now, so any month Anna could give us our two months’ notice and that’s it, we’re out. I’m sure she wouldn’t, but things can change. So I don’t think we can look at it from that angle.’ I buttered my teacake, using all of the small pot of butter. I’ve never understood why confusion makes me eat so much.
‘That’s true, but it’s going to take a lot of work to clean the place up, before we even start any repairs, or consider how it could make a turnover, never mind a profit. And we could get the place back in shape, then he could ask us to leave.’
‘Can’t stop thinking about the bunting in the window. When we were in that gale at Land’s End we’d have given anything to be in this position. Trying to decide if we dare to give up one roof to go to another. I know it’s a risk, and it could go wrong, but I think we should at least consider it.’ Clouds had moved in and people in the street were putting jumpers on. I shook the last dregs of tea from the pot. Despite my brave words, I feared Moth was right, as always.
‘But the difference is, when we were at Land’s End all we had was a Mars bar, so nothing to lose at all. Now we at least have a flat and we can’t walk away from that lightly. And Anna helped us when no one else would, so I feel a loyalty to her. But it’s the land. I watched that buzzard as it held the air, almost caressing it as he followed the contour of the hill, and I wanted to be there more than anything else. But I can’t let us be hurt so badly again, to put all our efforts into something then have it taken away. I couldn’t go through that again. And I have to think of you. If my health carries on going downhill at this rate I won’t be able to do any of the work – I don’t know if I can now. And I have to just say it: if I die in the next few years you’d be left in a really difficult position.’
‘Don’t say that, don’t. I can’t let that happen.’
‘Ray, we’ve been through this. Some things you can’t control.’
Umbrellas were being put up in the street, people rushing into shops, sheltering from the unexpected rain.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t have the key with me when we met, but I’ll post it to you. Go and have a look around the house.’
How much longer could we procrastinate before he gave up on us? We’d go back to the farm and look again, on our own, and see how we felt when we’d seen inside the house.
The sun was lowering on the horizon, the nights getting longer, but still the days hung on to their warmth. Standing outside the farmhouse, the wind blew up over the abandoned orchards from the creek below. Before we went into the house we felt drawn to explore through the long grass and tangled branches. Monks had rowed to the shore of the creek centuries ago, getting out of their boats with sacks of grain and bottles of rum of unspecified origin, and storing them in the priory that had stood on the edge of the mudflats. A handful of men, living a strange and isolated religious existence in a wooded valley. And quite possibly planting apple trees. Sam had found reference to the farm being in cider production at the time of the signing of the Magna Carta: hundreds of years of apples being made into cider on this one spot. Quite possibly those monks, with very little to do with their days other than pray and fish, would have wandered up the sheltered valley and thought, What an ideal spot to plant apple trees. And hardly surprisingly, living such a quiet life by the water, their thoughts might have turned to cider. Some historians would say that cider was offered in exchange for illicit goods brought in by sea, and their monastic life was far from quiet. But that could just be a Cornish version of history. The priory is long gone and a Georgian house now stands on the site, but the history remains, and looking at the apple trees on that autumn afternoon, it seemed quite possible that some of them were actually the ones planted by the monks. Gnarled and filled with canker, branches weighed down and broken with ripe, unpicked apples. At least we knew the source of the mysterious falling apples in the river: not children in the woods at all, but crows collecting a feast from the orchard and carrying the fruits away, then, distracted as they crossed the creek, dropping their lunch on passing canoeists. Heading back to the house, we found one ancient tree stood out among the others, its roots broken and twisted, leaving the tree lying on the ground where it had clearly been for years. The branches on one side were dead and crushed in the waist-high grass, but the ones that remained growing stretched vertically up to the sky, hanging on to the last gasp of life, still reaching for the sun. And along the length of the fallen trunk was a scattering of perfectly symmetrical holes as if they had been bored out with an electric drill.
‘That’s weird. Someone practising with their new drill maybe?’
‘Or bugs? Some kind of wood-boring bugs?’ We stared at the holes for a moment. ‘Enough of looking at bug holes. I can’t wait any longer – shall we go and look inside?’
The house was built of a grey Cornish stone that looked like narrow blocks of flaky slate, but with two sides rendered and painted in the same peach I’d seen in lots of 1970s bathrooms. Although livestock would still be on the land for a few more weeks, Sam’s plan to sell the farm had left the house standing empty, the doors locked and windows closed for months, so we held our breath as we turned the key. The plastic front door led into a peach corridor, lined with a wildly patterned carpet that oozed damp when we trod on it. In one of the main living rooms the plaster was cracked and hanging from the walls, held back only by layers of peach wallpaper; in the other there was a wood-burning stove and patchy rugs, with sodden, rotting cardboard underneath and water collecting in a pool in the corner. The kitchen was a brown box, brown tiles on the floors and the walls and only a tiny outside window, making it hard to see anything in the early-evening light. A corridor formed by sliding hardboard doors led out of the kitchen, hiding a stairway and the entrance to another small room, where a small wood burner stood out of the fireplace, attached to the wall by a piece of flexible flue-liner that curved across the tiled floor and up the chimney.
‘So, why are we here? There’s obviously been no one living here for ages, but when there was …’
‘When there was, they loved peach?’
‘They really loved peach.’
Upstairs the smell of damp was overwhelming, the carpets clearly holding the wet air that rose from below. The damp had collected at the highest point, leaving the Artex ceilings swathed in black mould. The seal of the double-glazed plastic windows had perished over time, turning the gap between the two layers of glass into a trap for condensation, mould and dead flies.
‘Jeez, I don’t know if I can bear the smell up here.’ The pungent smell of damp was burning my throat.
‘Let’s open the window, see if it makes a difference.’
‘It’s going to take a lot more than fresh air to make this okay.’
‘You’re right, this is grim.’ Moth hung his head out of the window, the plastic sash hanging over him like a guillotine. Could this be a life sentence for anyone mad enough to accept Sam’s offer? ‘Oh wow, Ray, get your head out here and look at this.’
I leant out of the window next to him. Through the apple trees, beyond the barns and heaps of cow-muck, was a view to the creek. The late-afternoon sunshine caught the water, reflecting the autumn colours from the trees lining the banks. Then in the distance, faintly, softly on the wind as it lifted, dry and cool, carrying the sounds of the creek up the hillside and across the quiet dead fields, the calls of oystercatchers on the mudflats.
‘I bet you could almost see the curlews from here.’ A flicker of possibility lit Moth’s face.
‘Maybe, if the grass was managed differently, the fields might become their feeding grounds.’
‘I don’t know if you could get this grassland back to a state of biodiversity that would attract them. It might have gone too far.’
‘It would take a lot of work.’
‘Too much work for us.’
We hung out of the window as the day cooled towards dusk. The house was becoming cold, intensifying the smell of dampness. A mist began to rise from the creek, creeping through the trees of the riverbank and following the valley up to the orchards. We gathered our things, preparing to head back to the chapel, but as Moth turned to close the window there was a movement in the hedgerow on the other side of the narrow road. Almost without sound a roe deer emerged on to the road and walked slowly and calmly in front of the house, along a path she clearly took every night. She hesitated at the edge of the stone yard, glanced around, checking she was alone, took a mouthful of short grass, then vanished into the tall vegetation, a mirage disappearing into the dusk. No other sounds. No roosting birds, no owls emerging to call across the valley, no blackbirds with their late-evening song. Just one deer passing into the night.
We closed the window, locked the door and drove back to the chapel. There was no need to speak, no need to examine the sanity of the choice. We’d been through the best and the worst of life together, had made choices that had turned out well and others that had been disasters. But we had reached a point where we understood that nothing was permanent, anything could or would change, that the only stability in life was my hand in Moth’s and our children’s voices on the phone, that risk only has meaning when there’s something to lose. We stood outside the chapel on a cold evening, about to go down the dark concrete corridor to the door at the back, but our feet were shuffling on the warm soft hay of midsummer. Trust was still elusive, we might never find a way to truly trust other people again, but we had something bigger than that. The South West Coast Path had led us out of anguish and despair to a place of hope and possibility. And now, by walking it again on paper, The Salt Path had led us to the farm. Our feet stepped over the baler twine as a warm wind blew against our skin. We held hands, put our trust in the path and jumped.