Despite the games of backgammon, Mina’s thoughts strayed back to the past; to those long-ago years with Papa away in London for much of the time so that the children had Mama all to themselves, reading to them, taking them to the beach, for excursions on the moors; the rules belonging to the smart London house relaxed into permanent holiday.
Mina is eight years old when her mother, Lydia, is sent down to Ottercombe for a long rest. The youngest child, Josephine – for Timmie and Nest are not yet born – has just had her fourth birthday and in the last three years there have been two miscarriages. Ambrose believes that the sea air will do Lydia good, strengthening her, so that she will be able to give him the son for which he craves.
‘All these women!’ he cries – but she hears the irritation rasping beneath the geniality and feels the tiny tick of fear deep inside her. She has had twelve years in which to discover the seam of cruelty buried deep in Ambrose’s bluff good temper. He is not physically cruel – no, not that – but he uses language to prick and goad so that Lydia learns that a voice can be both instrument and weapon.
Her own voice is an instrument: pure, sweet, controlled. She sings to her babies, lulling them with nursery rhymes, and reads to them.
‘All these books,’ says Ambrose. ‘Oh, for a boy to play a decent game of cricket.’
Ambrose is an attractive man; not much above average height, with brown curling hair, which is cut very short. His eyes are a bright, sparkling blue and he has an easy, confident approach which makes people, at first, feel very comfortable with him. It is he who names the children: Georgiana, Wilhelmina, Henrietta, Josephine. Only later does Lydia understand that these lovely names are part of his strange humour, related to his frustration at being the father of girls. He is not the type of man to be interested in babies, and she thinks it is just a joke when he asks after George or Will, but, as they grow, the joke wears thin. She hates to hear her pretty daughters addressed as George, Will, Henry and Jo but he does not relent.
‘Don’t be so sensitive, darling,’ he says, the blue eyes a little harder now, less sparkling, as they look at her; she tells herself that she must be careful not to irritate him, and that it’s simply, like most men, he longs for a son. She feels inadequate, as if she is failing him, and hopes for another child to follow Josephine; a little boy, this time. After her first miscarriage Lydia begins to suffer asthma attacks and during the winter of 1932, so as to avoid the London fog, she is despatched to Ottercombe. She cannot quite believe her luck. Since a child, Exmoor has been her idea of paradise and, although Ambrose has consented to summer breaks in the old house at the head of the cleave, he does not like to leave her behind when he returns to London. He is a senior civil servant and his delightful wife is a great asset to him. Lydia is beautiful, popular – and useful. So she is deeply touched when he announces that he is prepared to manage without her for as long as is necessary. Her health, however, is not the only reason for Ambrose’s unexpected attack of philanthropy. Ambrose has made a new friend, a wealthy widow whose robust appetites and tough ambition match his own, and he seizes this opportunity to know her better.
He is too clever, though, to rouse Lydia’s suspicions, and he makes certain that – by the time the party is due to set out for the South-west – she feels too guilty at leaving him to think of her husband with anything but gratitude. He drives them himself, in his handsome, much-cherished Citroën, and settles them at Ottercombe. The young local couple, who are glad to earn extra money to caretake the house, are given instructions to shop and clean and care for Lydia and her children so that the following morning, when Ambrose drives away, his thoughts are all directed towards a certain house in St John’s Wood.
As the sound of the engine dies in the distance, Lydia gives a great sigh of relief. Her children run shouting and laughing on the lawn and Wilhelmina tugs at her arm.
‘May we go to the beach, Mama? If we wrap up warmly?’
Lydia bends to hug her. ‘Of course we shall. After lunch. Afternoons are the best times for the beach, even in the winter.’
‘And we’ll come back and have tea by the fire, won’t we? Will you read to us?’
‘Yes, my darling, if that’s what you’d all like. I’ll read to you.’
So it begins.
In her bedroom, which had once been the morning-room, Nest was very nearly ready for bed. The room, adapted for her needs, was austere, simple and unadorned, no roads back to the past by way of photographs or knick-knacks; no idiosyncrasies by which to be interpreted; no possessions with which she might be defined. Only necessities stood on the small oak chest, although several books were piled upon the bedside table along with her Walkman. She was able to stand for short periods, to haul herself along using furniture and her stick as aids, but she tired quickly and the pain was always there, ready to remind her that she was severely limited. At first, in the dark months immediately following the accident, she hadn’t wanted to move at all. Suffering was a penance for her guilt. She’d lie on her bed, staring at the ceiling above, reliving the appalling moment: Henrietta at the wheel, Connor beside her, head half-turned to Nest in the back seat. If only she hadn’t spoken, hadn’t cried out in frustration, maybe Henrietta wouldn’t have been distracted for that brief, vital, tragic moment.
It was Mina who had propelled Nest back into life, both physically and emotionally; bullying her into her wheelchair so as to push her into the garden, manhandling Nest and her chair into the specially adapted motor caravan, forcing her to live.
‘I can’t,’ she’d mumbled. ‘Please, Mina. I don’t want to see anyone. Try to understand. I have no right . . .’
‘Not even the deaths of Henrietta and Conner give you an excuse to wall yourself up alive. Anyway, Lyddie needs you . . .’
‘No!’ she’d said, straining back in her chair, head turned aside from Mina’s implacability. ‘No! Don’t you see? I killed them.’
‘Lyddie and Roger know only that Henrietta misjudged the bend, not why. They need you.’
Lyddie’s love and sympathy had been the hardest burden to bear.
‘I think you’ll find,’ Mina had said much later, ‘that living and loving will be just as cruel as self-imposed seclusion could ever be. You’ll be punished quite enough – if that’s what you want.’
So Nest had given herself up to life as best she could, withholding nothing, accepting everything – nearly everything. She still refused to allow Mina to push her down to the sea. The sea was the symbol of freedom, of holiday; the reward after the long trek from London. Oh, the smell of it; its cool, silky embrace on hot hands and feet; its continuous movement, restless yet soothing.
Now, as she lay at last in bed, exhausted by the exertions of getting there, she could picture the path to the sea. Here, between Blackstone Point and Heddon’s Mouth, the steep-sided cleave, thickly wooded with scrub oak, beech and larch, cuts a deep notch into the cliff. At the head of the cleave, a quarter of a mile from the sea, stands Ottercombe House, sheltered and remote in its wild, exotic garden. A rocky path, stepped with roots, runs beside the stream which rises on Exmoor, on Trentishoe Down. A tiny spring at first, it gathers speed, trickling from the heights, spilling down the rock-face in a little waterfall behind the house, welling through the culvert in the garden and pouring along the narrow valley until, finally, it plunges into the sea.
Her eyes closed, Nest could picture each bend in the path to the beach; she could see the rhododendrons flourishing, despite the shallow covering of soil over the rocks: those Morte Slates, which run in a narrow band from Morte Point, across Devon and into Somerset. In early May drifts of bluebells grow beneath the terraces of trees, a cerulean lake of falling, flowing colour. In August, when the heather is in flower, the shoulders of the moor, which hunches above even the highest trees, shimmers bluish-purple in the afternoon sun. The path itself holds tiny seasonal treasures: bright green ferns, a clump of snowdrops, yellow-backed snails. How the children dawdle, postponing that delicious moment when they can at last see the sea; the cleave widening out as if to embrace the crescent-shaped beach, the cliff walls descending steeply into the grey waters. The stream, which has been beside them all the way, tumbles into a deeply shelving, rocky pool and then travels on, carving a track across the shaly sand until it is lost in the cold waters of the Bristol Channel.
Nest and her brother, Timmie, learn to swim in the rock pool; they paddle there too, with shrimping nets and bright, shiny tin buckets, and share a passion for the wildlife on this rock-bound coast.
‘We’ll live here together when we grow up,’ he tells her, his cold sandy hand clutching the handle of his bucket, which contains a crab and two minute shrimps.
‘But who will look after us?’ The youngest of the family, it is beyond Nest’s experience that she might one day do this for herself.
‘Mina will,’ he answers confidently. Nine years older than he, Mina at fourteen seems already adult.
‘Yes,’ she agrees contentedly. ‘Mina will look after us.’
Stirring restlessly, Nest recalled this prophecy. Mina had, indeed, looked after her – and now she must look after Georgie too. Panic fluttered just below Nest’s ribs, her fears returning – bringing memories with them – and she groaned. Sleep would elude her now, and she would become prey to those night-time terrors that left her exhausted and ill – but there was a tried-and-tested remedy at hand. She hauled herself up against the pillow, switched on the bedside light and reached for Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia.
In her bedroom upstairs, Mina was pottering happily. The dogs, curled ready for sleep in their baskets, watched her as she moved about, their ears cocked as she murmured to them, a quiet monotone – ‘Good dogs, good little persons. There then, settle down now, and we shall have a lovely walk tomorrow, won’t we? Who’s my baby, then? Who’s a good Boyo?’ – and then that little exhalation, an explosion of air escaping from her lips in a descending scale, ‘po-po-po’, as she paused for a moment to brush her silky white hair.
This room, which had once been her mother’s bedroom, was a complete antithesis to Nest’s cell. Here, freed briefly from the necessary disciplines of nearly a lifetime of caring first for her mother and then for Nest, Mina allowed her passion for vivid, visual drama full rein and, glad to see her creating something of her own, various members of the family had contributed by bringing her presents: prints, silk cushions, ornaments, even small pieces of furniture. Mina received them with delight and made haste to find homes for them. The walls were crammed with images – Klimt’s The Three Stages of Life and The Kiss next to Paul Colin’s La Revue Nègre poster – whilst a set of prints depicting what Mina thought of as Jack Vettriano’s gangster world hung beside Jackson Pollock’s silk-screened Summer Time. A chaise-longue, draped with silky shawls and loaded with cushions, reposed beneath the window facing a Lombok tallboy, exquisitely painted with exotic birds, which stood against the opposite wall beside a bucket-shaped cane chair. Odd, fascinating objects jostled on every polished surface: photographs in a variety of pretty frames, a pair of Chinese cloisonné vases, a charming set of amusing papier mâché ducks. A puppet, long-limbed, was suspended from a hook, his clever magician’s face lit by the gentle light of an elegant brass lamp with a tulip shade made of blue glass.
The room brimmed with colour. A velvet throw covered the deep, high double bed, its jewel colours – amethyst, sapphire and ruby – repeated in the long, heavy curtains, and three long shelves creaked with books, stacked and piled together, old-fashioned, elegant leather jackets residing happily alongside modern, cracked, paper spines. A thick, plain grey carpet was almost completely covered by beautiful, ancient rugs and a high, lacquered screen half-hid the alcove in the far corner.
After the glowing, extravagant display of textures and tints, the starkness of the small alcove was a shock to the unprepared. A simple shelf, containing a computer monitor with a keyboard and a printer, ran the length of the wall, a typist’s swivel chair beside it. There was nothing here to distract from the simple, working atmosphere. Mina came around the screen, switched on the computer and sat down, humming beneath her breath. Connected to the world by means of the Internet, she settled happily, still humming, pulling her long fleecy robe more cosily around her knees whilst the screen scrolled and flickered. She typed in her password and waited, watching eagerly, her grey-green eyes focused and intent. She was rewarded at last: ‘You have four unread messages.’ The mouse moved busily, covering and clicking. With a sigh of pleasure Mina began to open her mail.