“Morning Harry… yes, I know it’s early but… yes I’m still in Cornwall… is Rachel there… thanks.”
I waited for a minute or so as the sound of children’s voices echoed down the phone, then heard my sister-in-law’s voice.
“Jack, is everything alright?”
“I’m fine, Rachel, and sorry for the early call but I need to—”
“Just hang on.” I heard her shout to her husband. “Harry, take Charlie and Ruth into the front room, would you, I need some peace and quiet.” The background noise subsided. “Now what’s the matter?”
“Does there need to be something the matter?”
“Come on, Sarah called me yesterday in a dreadful state.”
“Alright, look, without beating about the bush, it’s like this…” I told Rachel that Sarah, no matter what I did, worried about me being unfaithful, about being not good enough for me, about being unable to bear children.
“It’s all nonsense, she’s out of my league, everyone knows that.”
“Some people wouldn’t say that.”
“But just look at her.”
“Certainly always the beauty of the family, Jack.”
“And clever, everyone knows that as well.”
“Always the brains of the family too.”
“And I never gave her any reason to—”
“Well hold on, Jack. Have you ever asked yourself why she might be worried she’ll lose you?”
“Of course.”
Rachel sighed down the phone.
“Really?”
“Well, maybe not when you put it like that, I…”
“Do you love her?”
“Yes.”
“Then talk to her about the reason she can’t have children. Now then, I’ve got kids to feed and a husband to get out of the house, so bye-bye, Jack.”
It took me what seemed like an age to dial our home number, and when I did, I felt my heart drop when the pips went.
“Sarah?”
Silence.
“It’s me, Jack. I love you.”
“And I love you.” I could hear her sob as she said this.
“I want you to come down here. Tomorrow.”
“Alright,” she sniffed. “It was my fault, Jack.”
“No, it was mine.”
“Don’t be such an, oh, I don’t know… blithering idiot.”
“You sound like Sir John.”
“That was the idea, slowcoach,” she laughed. We spoke a little more, mainly trivia, then went to say our goodbyes. Then, just as she was about to hang up, I asked her.
“Sarah, is there something I don’t know, something you want to tell me?”
“About what, darling?”
“Look,” I said. “Cards on the table. I was so worried I spoke to Rachel, and she said that—”
“Did she now.”
“That there might be a reason you can’t, well, you know, children…” I heard her cry loudly down the phone and looked out of the call box to make sure there was nobody within earshot.
“I suppose the phone’s not too good a place to tell you, Jack, but there never will be a good place, or time, so here goes…”
Sarah talked about meeting me on a cruise to Israel and Egypt when she was still in her late twenties, and I was recently divorced. My ex-wife, Eileen, who suffered from Huntington’s Chorea, the wasting disease of the mind that gives every generation a fifty-fifty chance, was still alive at the time, and this had been an emotional burden for Sarah. I still wasn’t sure she’d overcome the guilt (which wasn’t justified at all), and had always thought this burden, as well as her being unable to bear children, the reasons for the periodic insecurity. After all, Sarah was a beautiful woman, highly educated and more than twenty years my junior. Why else would she be insecure?
“You see Jack, with everything to do with Eileen, I never got the chance to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“About Frank.”
“No, you never mentioned a Frank.”
“Then let me tell you now…”
She was, she said, studying for a psychology masters at Manchester when she met Frank, a senior lecturer who immediately caught her eye.
“I was twenty-two, he was thirty-seven. Never underestimate the charm of the older man to the younger girl, Jack, no matter how bright and logical she thinks she is.”
“I, er… won’t.”
“Well, we dated, and Frank was kind, super clever, funny, took me to all sorts of places, dazzled my friends, so that within a few days I was head over heels in love.”
“Sounds just like me, except for the kind, super clever, funny, taking you to places and dazzling your friends parts.”
“No,” she snapped down the phone. “Stop making a joke of it. He’s nothing compared with you, nothing.”
“Sorry.”
“So,” Sarah continued, voice returning to normal. “Then I found out, doesn’t matter how, just after we first slept together, that he was married. I confronted him and he didn’t deny it.”
“How did you find out?”
“Stupid really, I knocked his wallet off a dressing table and a wedding ring fell out, and when I asked him if it was his he didn’t even try to deny it. Anyway, that was that, until I began to experience symptoms.”
“Symptoms?”
“Yes. You don’t need to hear the gory details, but it hurt when I, you know…”
“Had sex?”
“Yes, I had a couple of partners after that then gave up. I also had pain in my tummy, which got worse and worse. By the time I was checked out it was too late.”
“You were okay when we met, weren’t you?”
“I’d been treated by then, and the thing was all cleared up, but the scar tissue on my tubes had already done its worst.” She began to sob. “There Jack, what do you think of me now?”
“I think…” I said, for a few seconds lost for any more words, my mind spinning with emotion, not confused emotion, but a tremendous throbbing warmth for Sarah, a throbbing that made me feel twice as alive. “I think, I love you and I want you here for a while.”
“Oh Jack, I’ll make sure I can get some time off… and you know, there’s something in your voice.”
“As long as you are okay, then I’m okay, and right now, knowing you’re coming down here, everything seems connected.”
“Connected?”
“Yes, somehow, although the girl’s still missing.”
“Then use that. Such feelings don’t come calling all the time. Use your instincts to find that girl, as only you can. And you know what?”
“No.”
“If you do, I think you’ll find her before the day is out.”
*
“I’ve not said anything in the past,” said Morwenna. “But I want to say now, it’s an odd breakfast that one.” She cleared away my plate and refilled my coffee cup. “We never had anyone else ask for an egg white omelette.”
“I did have kippers at the weekend.”
“Agreed, but Nob don’t know what to do with all the leftover yokes.”
“You charge me for them I hope?”
“Oh yes, all goes on your bill, but why just the whites?”
“It was a navy cook years ago first made me one that way, and well, I just feel it’s healthier, don’t ask me why.” I raised my coffee cup. “Good way to start the day after a run as well, that and a bit of fruit.”
“And running each morning, you’ll do yourself a mischief. Mind you, you got a good figure Jack, and…” She placed her hand on my thigh before I could protest. “Your leg muscles certainly seem in shape.”
“Suppose you heard about the Cassandra?”
“Oh God yes. Heard it on the radio. Place almost burned down to the ground. Thatched roof caught fire they said, scores of arrests as well. Had to laugh when I saw all those Devenish folks stuck in their car in the river though.”
“One up for the St Austell Brewery, eh?”
“Of course, Jack.” She looked up at the ‘St Austell Ales’ sign above the bar and smiled. “But you got back safe?”
“Yes, it was pretty hairy at the end though. I was glad to get away.”
“Glad all my boys got home safe then,” she said, presumably referring to Stocker, Jackson, and Pasco, as well it seemed, as me, now elevated to be an honorary ‘Morwenna’s boy’.
“Is Slevin still here?”
“No, that priest left first thing. Paid cash, went on his way, and I don’t miss him.”
“Okay,” I said, watching her trying to pull a pint from a beer pump. “Bit early for a drink isn’t it?”
“It’s the weather.”
“The weather?”
“Just checking the barrels. The proper ale like Hicks, not the lager or the keg bitter with the gas, won’t pull properly when there’s a storm coming. Hicks don’t like low pressure storms.”
“We’re due rain on Sunday,” I said, looking out of the taproom window at the blue sky.
“No Jack, the ale never lies,” she said, repeatedly pulling at a beer pump handle. “There’s a weather front coming in fast, and ’e’s a nasty one. Be here tonight latest, so if you’re going out, take a raincoat.”
“I’ll do that.”
“And you know, Jack, it’s been a funny spring all round, weather wise. Garlic’s really late.”
“Garlic?”
“In the woods. Normally smell garlicy in March, but this year, why, I was out walking the other day and the air was still thick with it.”
I decided it was time to go.
“May I ask,” I said, as I stood up to leave, a comment from Pasco suddenly coming to the forefront of my mind (‘Morwenna speaks better Cornish than me’). “What your name means?”
“Ooooh, never thought you’d ask, Jack,” she replied, with her tell-tale flirtatious hair adjustment.
“No, really, could have some bearing on the missing-girl case.”
“If you want to know then, ‘waves of the sea’ or more exactly…” She adjusted her hair again. “The white spray you sometimes see on top of the waves.”
“Poldhu?”
“Ah, no that’s Morwenna.”
“So, in Cornish, Poldhu means?”
“Black lake, only the other way round. ‘Pol’ for lake, ‘dhu’ for black.”
“Impressive. Pasco did say you knew more Cornish than him.”
“Taught by my granny,” she said. “I couldn’t have a long conversation in the old tongue, but I know plenty of words.”
“And do you know if there’s any other meaning of ‘dhu’?”
“None that I can think of. Nearest would be ‘duw’, which you’d actually pronounce more like ‘dee-ooh’, but nobody would have that in their name.”
“Why not?”
“It means God.”
“And ‘well’?”
“Like a hole in the ground where you find water?”
“Yes, but a word that sounds like well.”
She put her hand on her chin and seemed lost in thought for almost a minute (the longest I could remember Morwenna being silent during any conversation).
“Nearest might be ‘Hwel’,” she said at last. “What they now say as ‘Wheal’.” She pronounced this ‘Hweel’. “Means a mine and sounds a bit like ‘well’ in English.”
“And ‘Betha’?”
“No such word that I know of.”
“If we broke it down, ‘Beth’ and ‘a’?”
She put her hand on her chin again.
“Ah, a word like grave, or maybe tomb.”
“Tomb?”
“Could be a tomb Jack, but… now what was it… yes, now I remember,” said Morwenna. “Granny and I once went to a village church up near Bodmin, and she used that word ‘Beth’. To do with Easter it was.”
“Easter?”
“Yes, Easter Sepulchre she said it was in English, and now I see.”
“What do you see?”
“Something,” she said, looking at me with an uncharacteristically serious expression. “I don’t know what you’re getting at, Jack,” she then said, now with no. “But put together, that would all translate as ‘Sepulchre of God Mine’, but hang on, no it wouldn’t.” Her eyes lightened and she laughed. “You’re talking about Bethadew Well, aren’t you?” I nodded. “It would have to be called Bethawhealdew to mean Sepulchre of God, so they’re not the same Jack. Dunno why I went on so about it.”