The Fire Child Read online

  And there is still another, nagging question. The only witness to all this, supposedly, was Jamie. Is he entirely reliable? And why is he behaving so oddly, now?

  ‘David.’

  He is pouring yet more Scotch. ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘You need to know some things. About Jamie.’

  I see his eyes glitter, immediately. ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s this. He’s been acting very strangely, worse than ever. It’s not just the words he wrote, on the car window.’

  The rain makes an irritable noise at the windows. Like angry scratching. My husband scrutinizes me. ‘How, exactly? How is it worse?’

  ‘We were at Levant, this week. Taking photographs. And then suddenly, it was, well – very unsettling. He had a kind of episode.’

  David spins his whisky glass on the granite worktop. Thin-lipped. ‘And then?’

  ‘He went on about the Kerthen gift, the Kerthen legend. And then he actually said he’d been talking to Nina, that she was back from the dead—’ I barely pause, aware that I may sound ridiculous. ‘And then, to top it all off, he claimed that I was going to die at Christmas. Dead by Christmas. That’s what your son Jamie said, two days ago. I would be dead by Christmas!’

  David’s stare is hard.

  I hurry on, acutely discomfited. ‘And then he says things to no one, in the house. Like he is talking to his mother. So many things. You already know about the fires, the lights in the Old Hall, how he predicted that. And – and then there was this dream, back in the summer, he predicted that I would run over a hare, and then I did, he predicted that, too – of course, it is all explicable, and yet, and yet, now he predicts I am going to die at Christmas.’ I come to a sudden stop. Too late, I realize I have made that ghastly mistake. Now it is me under scrutiny. David is looking my way, with something like distaste, even revulsion, in his eyes.

  I’ve exposed myself. I said it all wrong. He thinks I am mad. He thinks I believe in this. He think I believe something ghostly is happening. That Jamie can foresee events.

  And why shouldn’t he think that? Because sometimes I do believe these things.

  56 Days Before Christmas

  Lunchtime

  The sea sang its dutiful verses, Morvellan stood on the cliffs like a dark-robed Methodist priest, sternly lecturing a congregation beneath. And David walked the damp, leaf-strewn path to Juliet’s apartment, deep in thought.

  ‘Hello, Mummy.’ He could tell, as soon as the door opened, that she was seriously drunk. That was what she did to dispel the memories, and assuage the loneliness.

  ‘Oh, oh, David, how nice to see you. I thought I was joining you for supper tonight, in the kitchen.’

  ‘Yes, you are. But I thought we might talk. Alone, beforehand.’

  She was on port wine, probably. His mother often mixed the best vintages with supermarket lemonade.

  ‘Talk, David?’

  ‘About things. Carnhallow. Rachel.’

  ‘Carnhallow! Life here used to be so lovely.’

  ‘Mummy?’

  She was wandering down the corridor. He realized, too late, that he had set her off, that before he even got a chance to ask any questions, he was going to get one of her more rambling and tipsy soliloquies.

  Leading him into the sitting room she sucked at her drink, and stared at some greying photos on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Well. Well, well. Where do I begin. Carnhallow? You know life in Carnhallow wasn’t all bad, I did love your father once, before he became so brutish. You Kerthen men are all the same, charming, womanizing, but then, oh …’

  His mother’s expression was dreamy. She was lost in the mazy ballrooms of memory, giddy and dancing, and falling – and with no one to catch her. Not any more.

  ‘Mummy – I—’

  It was pointless.

  ‘Did I ever tell you the picnics we used to have? Here. Here. Have a port, Fonseca 2000, I persuaded Cassie to steal it from your cellar. Will you have me taken to jail? You won’t throw me down Ding Dong will you, David dear? Mmm? Have a drink. You want to know about life here, darling?’

  He took the drink from her quavering hand, even though he didn’t want it. He wasn’t going to escape this, he was going to have to let her talk it out. His mother’s short-term memory was often faulty, but she had tremendous memories of the past, and she liked to speak of them. Because it was all she had left, she was obviously in pain from cancer though she refused any treatment. Because she didn’t want her hair to fall out.

  David filled with pity for his mother. When she was dead it would be him and Jamie. The last of the Kerthens. And he loved his mother, fiercely. She had protected him from his father’s drunken cruelties. So he tolerated her monologues now.

  ‘Oh, the parties we used to have here, David, before you were born, such parties, summer parties, here, and at Lamorran, Trelissick, Lanihorne Abbey. Always armfuls of flowers, so many flowers, and all the girls from the village, from Zennor and Geevor and Morvah, remember them, making those hollyhock fairies, with the heather under their beds.’

  Sitting back, in her cluttered sitting room, he let her words wash over him: these Alzheimery fragments of a shattered lifestyle. Half these memories came from Juliet’s parents, and her grandmother and great grandmother – mixed up with recollections of Juliet’s own childhood and youth. Yet these chaotic heirlooms were precious: they were much of the reason he was desperate to hang on to Carnhallow. The last memories, the old glory, the Kerthens as they were. The Kerthens of Carnhallow. Somehow he could restore it. Couldn’t he?

  His mother sipped at her £200-a-bottle port, then dashed it with cheap lemonade, and rambled, lyrically, ‘You don’t remember, so long before your time, I had you so very late, at forty, much too late for a sibling, we thought I couldn’t … you know. It was a great joy: you were a great surprise. But I didn’t mind being barren, not so much, even if it meant Richard left me. Life was so pretty, I didn’t want it to change. I wanted to stay young for ever with the parties and the dancing.’ Her smile was giddy, her eyes were closed – dreaming aloud. ‘And the breakfasts – the breakfasts were amazing, David. Minted peas in aspic, we had. Bradenham hams, and ptarmigan.’

  ‘Mummy. Darling.’

  ‘And then in the summer, the swimming. My sister and I and all our friends, we were always barefoot, running down the lawns of the allee, straight into the sea.’ Another measure of port, a second splash of Lidl lemonade. ‘One day we went swimming when we were so hot, we actually dived straight off the big lugger in the bay – and when we swam back to the beach someone had folded our clothes and when we’d got dressed, we rode those old Dartmoor ponies over the dunes, and we went the long way to Carnhallow, through Ladies Wood, it smelt of white clover, I remember, and of wheatstraw, and it was so pretty, that great tide of bluebells, on the green, and then we went into the house and on the elm table there was, oh, everything – plates of lobsters, and dishes of honey, and fresh clotted cream. They gave us milk and brandy drops, saucers of white Carnhallow raspberries. So lovely, so lovely.’

  She drank a last gulp of port.

  ‘And that’s when I fell in love with your father, David. He’d been away at Oxford and I barely knew him and I was half in love with his cousins but then I saw him, he was very handsome, he came walking down the allee, from Ladies. A young man in a waistcoat and a white shirt stained red with ash bark juice, and he took me into the garden – you don’t remember the garden as it was then, old old old, David, so old. The sunlit walls, thick with clove pink, and marjoram, and thyme, and in the middle, in the roundel of grass, there was a wheelbarrow seat, and that’s where he sat me down and there’s where we kissed. Your father and me, for the first time.’

  At last she fell silent. Was it over, this dance of disjointed recollection? ‘Mummy, I want to ask you a question.’

  She was absent now. Her face was blank. David realized he preferred her animated – if slightly demented.

  ‘Question, darling?’


  ‘Yes. A question. Do you think Jamie and Rachel are at odds? Because I detect a very serious tension. And Rachel is increasingly erratic, making some very strange remarks. And she’s hunting, and prying: asking things.’ His sigh was exasperated. ‘Something has occurred, something is wrong.’

  ‘Life has occurred, darling. Jamie already loves Rachel, I can see it. She will be a good replacement. She confuses him, of course he is confused. We are all confused.’

  ‘Sure. But Rachel is acting oddly and I think it is affecting Jamie. The dynamic between them. It’s not good, and it’s getting worse.’

  ‘Well. What can that be? Tension in Carnhallow, how ghastly. Why don’t you ask Nina why there is tension?’

  He stiffened. He knew this was probably the dementia, beginning to steal away her mind, and it pained him. ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask her? She knows better than anyone, what it’s like to move here, in this way, she will understand what Rachel is going through.’ She was talking quickly, nervily, yet her eyes were sharp as she fingered the row of pearls around her neck. ‘Yes, my darling, ask his mother, or ask your wife, you chose her, and let her do what she wanted, so she will understand better than any, won’t she?’

  ‘But, Mama—’

  His mother’s stare was unnerving. Angry, even.

  ‘Enough of this. Now I must go to sleep. I am exhausted. Must go, must go. There will be people with us tomorrow. We should take them riding in the dog cart if it’s a nice day, haven’t done that in years, have we, in spring, when the verges are yellow, with all the buttercup? So pretty, so pretty. And the pink, from the cuckooflower—’

  The tears were falling again. This time for real.

  ‘Mummy.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  His darling mother, with all her exquisite, old-fashioned politeness, was snapping at him, fiercely. ‘Don’t, David. Don’t. Please go. I will be better by tomorrow. Leave me alone now. Leave me be with all the people, I don’t even know their names. There are people in the house and I don’t even know who they are. I see them. I see them. You’ve invited her in and I have to watch them, at night, in the windows, down at Morvellan. It’s utterly unfair.’

  David knew this mood: it wouldn’t go away quickly. Though this was worse than normal. ‘OK, Mummy, I’m going.’

  She lifted a hand to wave goodbye. She said nothing.

  Quietly he shut the door. Breathing the cool air, he gazed down the valley at the latticed blackness of Ladies Wood, marching onwards to the sea. The autumn berries were bright and red on the rowans, clusters of bloody colour amidst the dark branches.

  His mother was, in her own way, entirely right. There were too many ghosts and memories in Carnhallow. The intensity of the past was too much. The last couple of months he’d had the actual urge to move, even though he’d spent his whole life, risked everything, to keep the house: to save it, to maintain it in the family.

  Please go. Start a new life. Go.

  Yet he couldn’t. He could not be the first Kerthen to abandon Carnhallow, the first to quit in one thousand years. He was imprisoned. The past weighed on him like the ocean above the tunnels of Morvellan. And he was another miner among many generations of Kerthens, hewing a life from the bitter rock.

  As he walked back to the East Wing, kicking through rusty piles of fallen leaves, he recalled those terrible hours and days. The hunt for Nina’s body, the police cars parked around Morvellan.

  Police frogmen had spent days in rubber suits searching the mines: the Jerusalem Shaft, the Coffin Clista shaft, the great diagonal of the Wethered Cut, all of them interlinked. They’d spent many shifts scuba-diving the frigid, dangerous waters, ostensibly hunting for Nina’s corpse but, from the off, it seemed an unspoken truth: the search was largely a charade, done for effect.

  A week after Nina fell in the water, the Truro detective had sat him down, the grieving husband, and told him the cold and clinical science: the forensic pathology.

  Almost all drowned human bodies sink within minutes of death, the policeman explained, because, as water fills the lungs, they become too heavy to float. However, unless these corpses are weighted, or wearing exceptionally heavy clothes, they then float to the surface a few days after death. Gases enter the flesh and bloat the corpse, making the cadavers buoyant. The bodies literally bob up, like obscene bath toys.

  But in certain cases that would not happen. Such as, for instance, a body drowned in an ancient, complex, watered mineshaft. That kind of corpse was irretrievable.

  So Nina – Nina’s cadaver – could, the policeman said, be anywhere. One day, any day, she might resurface, a grisly residue; alternatively, she would never be recovered. David remembered the way the detective had added, as though it was some quip, ‘Morvellan would, in fact, be a very good place to dump a murder victim, though of course there is no question of that in your case. Would you more like coffee?’

  David had accepted the boiled and tasteless coffee. The aftertaste of that interview remained with him many months later.

  Murder.

  At the end of the little path, where it turned right for the main door, David paused – caught by the sound of the distant sea singing its mournful song. Like miners hymning their sadness in a Sunday chapel, long ago and far away.

  A very good place to dump a murder victim.

  39 Days Before Christmas

  Evening

  I’m talking with David, online. That’s the way we mainly connect, these days. That’s where we argue.

  He snipes at me, from his office, barely hiding his irritation and frustration. I catch myself whingeing, with a horrible hint of a south London snarl, sitting here in the vast, quiet kitchen of Carnhallow. How has my brief and miraculous marriage come to this? A few weeks ago we were happy. Or so I thought. Now we are closing in on Christmas. When I am somehow supposed to die.

  Of all the times to choose. Christmas. Like Jamie knows me inside out. He knows how to scare me, or unnerve me. How?

  And now David and I are at odds. It gets worse.

  The irony is that I have some potential and important news to tell him. I think I am pregnant. I am very late: so late, I’ve lost track. But I’ve been holding off the test, to make sure it’s not a scare. The wounding disappointment of the previous false alarm has made me wary.

  The testing kit rests on the kitchen table, I bought it this afternoon; I will do the test tonight.

  But even if it is positive, I am not sure how, or when, I am going to give David the joy of this news – not when he is so hostile, when we are arguing so much, when he will barely speak to me. I’m not sure if we will still be married in a year.

  He is being hostile right now.

  ‘Rachel, I insist, I am absolutely adamant about this, I don’t want Jamie to see a bloody therapist.’

  ‘But why not?’

  ‘Because they do him no good. As you well know. I took him to a therapist after the accident and they messed him up even more. Getting him to write secret letters to his dead mother. It’s one reason he thinks she is still alive.’

  I flinch. And he sees it. And he pounces.

  ‘Yes. Them. Remember? Those letters you found. When you were snooping around – like some damn detective—’

  ‘I was doing my best for Jamie!’

  ‘Really. Of course. Right.’

  ‘I was!’

  He goes to speak, angrily; but I rush on, not giving him time. ‘Look, David, this isn’t about me. It really is about Jamie. You must see that he needs professional help. Because. You know what he did—’

  His chin is tilted forward, with a hint of aggression, even violence. What might this man do to me? For the first time, the playful dominance and submission of our sex life hints at something more dangerous. In my husband.

  He leans even closer.

  ‘Really? We know this, do we? What did he do?’

  I watch those noble cheekbones of his. But I won’t let my desire cloud my thoughts, not any m
ore. I might not even tell him if I am pregnant. Not yet. I need leverage. He begins to scare me.

  ‘Well, Rachel? Hmm?’

  ‘I was there, I heard him say it.’ I struggle not to swear, to lose my temper. ‘Jamie is deeply disturbed. He needs professional help.’

  David snorts. ‘No he bloody doesn’t. We’ve tried that. It doesn’t help. And besides, the only witness we have for much of this is you, my darling Rachel. You. You are the only person who hears him say these things. Are you sure you’re hearing him correctly?’

  ‘Yes!’

  My righteousness is complicated by sadness. I hate this widening gulf between David and me. I had hoped that my marriage would be an opening up, that it would allow me to reveal all of myself, tell another human everything. Be honest. Be understood. Be forgiven and loved, for what I really am, maybe for the first time. Instead I am reduced to bickering.

  The kitchen is silent, the moon glows through the trees outside, as if it is trapped in the branches. A big white screaming mouth in the black. I place a pensive hand on my stomach. Considering the tiny life that possibly stirs inside. A distant astronaut, coming home to earth. A floating sparkle of dust, in the distant black. Yet umbilically linked.

  This new child, if I have a child, will be safe, as I was not safe. I will make sure of that.

  Quickly I remove my hand. Did David notice that gesture? He is still online, still banging on about child therapists. Why does he hate this idea so much? His vehement opposition is bizarre. As if the shrinks might find out a deeper involvement in Nina’s death, something beyond what he has told me.