‘Who is Lottie?’
Emma stood with her back to the fire, leafing through the new paperback edition of Bruno’s most recent novel. Receiving no answer to her question, she glanced towards the archway that led to the kitchen and raised her voice a little.
‘Bruno? Did you hear me? Do we know anyone called Lottie?’
There was the noise of the oven door being shut, water gushed briefly, and when he finally appeared Bruno was drying his hands on a rather ragged towel.
‘Sorry. Who did you say? Lottie?’ He shook his head. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Something Mutt was saying earlier.’ She held the book up. ‘Nice cover. Looks good, doesn’t it? Very modern and exciting and lots of good reviews on the back.’
He took it from her. ‘I’m very pleased with it,’ he admitted. ‘Apparently the backlist is going to be packaged in the same format.’ A pause whilst he turned the book over in his hands, studying it. ‘So what was Mutt saying?’
‘Oh, she was rambling rather.’ Emma kicked at a smouldering log and bent to take another from the big basket beside the hearth. ‘Joss mentioned it too. The medicine confuses her a bit and I wondered if it might have anything to do with this American who was here yesterday.’
Bruno put the book down carefully on the long table that stood at the back of the room, facing the bay window.
‘I haven’t heard about an American,’ he said. Rather mechanically he began to tidy the table, clearing a space ready for supper. ‘So what did he want?’
‘He wrote, so Joss said, saying that he’s looking for a relative who might have been out in India at the same time as Daddy and Mutt. He sent a photograph of this aunt, or whatever, with the letter to see if Mutt recognized her and then he turned up yesterday afternoon hoping to have a chat with her.’ Satisfied with the blaze, Emma perched on the arm of the sofa and began to stroke Nellie, who was stretched out on her back in a languorously abandoned position on the old blanket thrown over one of the faded cushions. ‘Joss wondered whether it might have stirred up some memories for her.’
Nellie groaned pleasurably and Emma chuckled, leaning further over so as to reach the soft hair on her chest. ‘You are such a tart,’ she said to Nellie. ‘Look at you. You haven’t a single shred of modesty, have you? Good girl, then.’
‘And did she?’ asked Bruno, after a moment.
‘Did she what?’
‘Did Mutt recognize this … relative from the photograph?’
Emma shrugged. ‘From what I can gather, Mousie’s playing it a bit low-key. She wouldn’t let the young man actually see Mutt but, from what Joss said, I think she’d told her about it or read the letter to her. Joss said she called out the name several times in her sleep. Lottie.’ She frowned. ‘It sounds odd but it kind of rang a bell.’
She looked at him hopefully, brow furrowed in an attempt to cudgel her memory, but he shook his head.
‘Not with me,’ he said firmly. ‘And if you want a bath before supper you’d better get a move on.’
When she’d gone, collecting up various belongings, pouring a glass of wine to take upstairs with her, Bruno sat beside Nellie on the sofa. He stretched a hand to the silky black-and-white coat – but it was an automatic gesture and his thoughts were elsewhere.
Emma is not yet four years old when she first asks that question. Halfway up the cliff, out of breath from the steep climb, they sit together on spongy, springy turf, staring over the silky surface of the bosomy sea that gently lifts and swells below them. Rounded rosy-pink cushions of thrift, honey-scented in the hot sunshine, cling to the rocky ledges where seagulls sit in rows. A fishing boat chugs north, heading towards Port Isaac, and Bruno gulps down deep breaths of delicious salty air, feeling the cool breeze tugging his hair. He looks sideways at Emma: her hair is fine and fair as candy floss and the sun shines through it so that she appears to have a halo. Her pudgy fingers pluck at the grass and her gaze is fixed, thoughtful, so that he knows that she is working something out, remembering.
‘Who is Lottie?’ she asks him. ‘Lottie.’ She speaks it carefully in two distinct singsong syllables – ‘Lot-tie’ – as if she is tasting the name.
Abruptly, Bruno allows himself to fall backwards on the turf. He closes his eyes, not only against the sun but also to keep the question outside. There were so many questions when they first arrived in St Meriadoc nearly two years ago.
‘Goodness!’ Aunt Julia cried, half amused, half shocked. ‘Why do you call your mother “Mutt”? Does she allow it?’
He felt panic rising inside him as memories of that last dreadful week in India edged back into his consciousness.
And dear Mousie smiled at him – oh, how he loves Mousie! – and said, ‘You’re just like your father. He always gave people nicknames, do you remember, Mother? It was Hubert who called me Mousie.’
To Bruno’s relief Aunt Julia nodded, although she wasn’t quite happy about it. ‘But “Mutt”,’ she murmured, ‘it sounds so disrespectful,’ and it was Mutt, herself, who said, ‘Oh, I’m used to it now. It was his way of saying “Mother” when he was very small. Please don’t worry him about it. He’s been through quite enough, poor little fellow …’
As he lies in the sunshine, the sun hot on his face, Emma prises with her small fingers at his tightly closed eyelids. He rolls away from her, over and over, and she scrambles after him, shrieking with laughter, her question forgotten.
The smell of stewed fruit, spilling over the side of the saucepan onto the hotplate, brought Bruno back abruptly to the present. He cursed beneath his breath and hurried out to the kitchen. Nellie stirred, raised her head to sniff hopefully, and settled back with a disappointed sigh. No delicious smells tempted her from her comfortable seat: no noise of a tin-opener, which might indicate that her own supper was being prepared. Bruno, having gone straight from boarding-school into the Royal Navy, had never bothered to develop his cooking skills beyond pasta, stews and a delicious goose cassoulet; his friends and family knew exactly what to expect and, if they required variety, then they supplied the ingredients themselves. It was Emma who had come back from the house with the apples – picked in the orchard and stored away last autumn by Honor and Mousie – and had peeled them, chatting all the while.
Now Bruno snatched up the saucepan and dropped it hastily on the draining-board, opened the oven door to check the stew and turned the potatoes, which were baking in their jackets on the shelf beside it. All was well. Closing the door on his creation, he began to assemble knives and forks but he was clearly preoccupied: part irritated, part anxious. It was difficult, almost impossible, at this critical moment to detach himself from the world he was creating, to re-engage with reality, and part of him resented Emma’s arrival and the need to entertain her. He longed to be alone: to be going back into his study to pore over old documents and books; to be weaving together those plain strands of fact between other brighter, fictional threads that would bring life and colour and shape to the fixed, historical part of the pattern. His own vividly imagined story must coexist alongside the true records of the time and it required concentration to listen to its rhythm as it developed: he needed to stride over the cliffs and along the secret, wintry lanes and hear it coming to life inside his head.
Yet it had seemed churlish to refuse Emma’s request when Mutt was ill and Mousie already stretched in caring for her. Bruno paused, his hands full of clashing spoons and forks, his thin, clever face thoughtful, anxiety gnawing in his gut. Just how ill, he wondered, was Mutt? Unease edged his mind further from its own interior world; thrusting it towards sealed-off places and reminding it of voices long since silenced.
The gurgling and splashing of the bath water pouring away, the pattering of footsteps in the small bedroom above the kitchen, forced him to concentrate on the present. By the time Emma appeared, the table was set, candles were lit and Bruno was opening a can of dog food with Nellie in close attendance. Emma sighed contentedly and topped up her glass from the bottle on the long sideboard, looking affectionately at the familiar scene. A modern oil painting of the harbour at Port Isaac – with a bright Reckitts-blue sea and crimson-splashed fishing boats – hung on the whitewashed stone wall alongside a charcoal drawing of The Lookout, sketched strong and bold with its outflung window, clinging to the precipitous cliff. Another water-colour showed a row of terraced houses, squeezed together, toppling down a steep, cobbled alleyway to the sea. At first glance it was a charming scene, invoking times past; yet a second look showed something disturbing beneath the picture-postcard image. Beneath the high gables, pointy as witches’ hats, small windows glinted – sly eyes, half-closed, winking at a shared secret – and narrow doors gaped like shocked mouths. It had a cartoonish, fairy-tale look and, like all good fairy tales, there was a sense of menace implicit in the pretty simplicity. Staring at it, Emma could believe that the big, bad wolf – or a wicked stepmother – lurked just out of sight, waiting.
She shivered a little, turning away to the huge, framed, black-and-white photograph, which hung over the sideboard, opposite the big granite hearth. It showed a Paris boulevard, passers-by stepping round the pavement café, a Citroën parked at the kerb: the girl’s head was turned a little aside, chin up, but the long, narrow eyes looked straight at the camera; indifferent yet provocative. Her elbow rested on the small wrought-iron table, a cigarette between the fingers of the drooping hand whilst her companion, just out of focus, was bending towards her, holding a coffee cup.
Bruno came in carrying the casserole dish, saw the direction of Emma’s gaze and hoped that they were not about to embark on a discussion of his ex-wife.
‘Dinner is served,’ he said cheerfully with a mock bow. ‘Hang on, I’ve forgotten the potatoes. So how do you think Mousie is looking? Pamela and Rafe are on good form, aren’t they?’
He lifted the lid and plunged a spoon into the lamb stew, used a threadbare linen napkin to put a hot potato on her plate. The warm room seemed to close in a little, leaning as if to listen, and Emma settled more comfortably in her chair, ready now for confidences and gossip.