The Sea Gate Read online

  My mind shies away from this. There are times when considering the renovation of someone else’s decrepit old house is more attractive than dealing with your own reality. But I’ve hardly made a single decision in two years: Eddie’s had to take charge of everything. Suddenly I miss him so badly I could cry.

  Eddie and I met at an art fair. I was setting up my stall and having problems with the lighting. He had the adjoining stall and, it turned out, had overloaded the electrical point with his own rig. ‘There was a spark between us,’ he always says with a laugh. Eddie made pots – beautiful pots, round-bellied and solid, with beautiful turquoise raku glazing. I sold my paintings. I made hardly anything out of it, but I didn’t mind. It was Eddie who encouraged me to ‘monetize the product’: apart from pots, Eddie produced greetings cards and prints and had a website and pages on Etsy and Instagram. ‘People can’t afford to buy original pieces when times are hard,’ he explained. ‘But they feel guilty coming away from your stall empty-handed, so you might at least get a couple of quid out of them.’ He did well, but never well enough. It was Eddie who – without my knowledge – managed to wangle enough out of Mum to buy a garage at the back of our building and turn it into a studio so he could ‘expand the business’. I was furious when I found out but Mum had been adamant she didn’t want the money back. ‘You have to follow your dreams, darling. I never followed mine and I’ve regretted it. You’re a lovely artist and I want to see you happy.’ So he had obviously told her that the studio was for me, not him. I could imagine him doing it: Eddie was always so good with Mum, flirting with her, heaping extravagant flattery upon her. They laughed together a lot – it’s one of the things I shall miss so much now that she’s gone. I could call him now – I’ve got signal, and it looks as if I have some missed calls. But the conversation isn’t one I want to share with anyone else, let alone a stranger driving like a maniac. Even as I think this Rosie brakes to avoid rear-ending a car turning off through the roadworks at St Erth.

  ‘Bleddy terrible driver,’ she rails, giving them the V-sign as they turn off.

  ‘Can you recommend any good builders, Rosie?’ I say into the charged silence that follows.

  ‘What she want done, then? Jem and the boys have always done Olivia’s little jobs.’

  ‘It’s more than a little job. Social services say she needs to have a bathroom put in for when she comes home. A proper bathroom, downstairs, adjoining her bedroom with an indoor loo and walk-in bath/shower with rails and safety handles and all that sort of thing.’

  Rosie grunts. ‘She’s managed very well all this time. Besides, poor old bird won’t be coming home. You’ve seen the state of her.’

  I bite my lip, thinking of the old lady I have just met. There’s still so much fire in her, so much character, a sort of fierce, frail heroism. I wish I’d known Olivia when she was younger.

  4

  Olivia

  April 1943

  THROUGH THE CRACK BETWEEN THE SITTING ROOM DOOR and its wooden jamb, Olivia watched as her parents embraced. Their argument that morning had been so severe that her mother had stormed out into the garden; from her eyrie upstairs, Olivia had heard the shouting and felt the front door slam so hard that she could not imagine how the stained glass would survive. She had watched her mother running towards the orchard, her red tea-dress a danger flag amongst the tall grass and straggling flowers, her father in pursuit, limping just a little, remonstrating but being ignored.

  Her parents had what her mother called ‘a relationship full of passion. He is chalk and I am cheese, a fine Brie de Meaux!’ It sounded very exotic in Mummy’s French accent. Olivia had come to accept these eruptions as a normal part of the pattern of their lives: they laughed and caroused and lived life noisily when they were afforded the luxury of time together, but every so often something would slip out of kilter in the smooth machinery of their marriage and a row would come racketing out.

  Her mother, almost as tall as her father in her heels, was holding him so tight now that her knuckles were white and her varnished nails were almost completely buried in the serge of his jacket. Olivia could tell from the way her shoulders trembled that she was crying, which her mother never did. She shouted, and screamed and swore, but she never cried. Her father, handsome in the uniform he had put on again after weeks in slacks and checked shirts, cradled his wife’s dark head but he was gazing past her with a faraway look in his pale blue eyes, as if he were already back in North Africa with his comrades. ‘Hush, Estelle,’ he whispered. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’

  Olivia bent her ears towards his words. What could he mean? That he was returning to his regiment? But they had known this day was coming for the whole time he’d been back here on recuperation, so why was Mummy crying now? Was it something she, Olivia, had done? Guiltily, she recollected her recent misdemeanours: tea spilled on the best rug, the badly done chores, the fight with Nipper up at the farm, being brought home red and furious. It hadn’t been her fault: she’d only been trying to save Mamie from the boys teasing her, flipping up her skirt to find out the colour of her knickers. Mamie was the farmer’s youngest, at nearly thirteen, and was what local folk called simple, with a flattened face, a sweet expression and small black eyes. Olivia felt very protective towards her, which was why she had got into the fight, even though Mummy was always telling her she was a young lady now and that she should behave like one. ‘Tu es un garçon manqué, Olivia,’ she would scold. ‘A tomboy, a hoyden.’ Olivia’s cheeks flamed at the memory of how Nipper had tried to grope her breasts, a recent addition to her changing body, and one she hated. She’d been caught by Jago, the farm manager, kicking his nephew in the privates, and he had hauled her off and delivered her home, though he hadn’t told her parents the half of it, for which she was grateful.

  But that had taken place three days ago and surely would not have arisen again today of all days, when her father was leaving them to return to active service?

  ‘Come along,’ Tony Kitto said soothingly now. ‘Let’s not waste the time we have left in recriminations.’

  Olivia frowned. Recriminations meant someone had done something wrong, but for once it didn’t sound as if that someone was her.

  Her father started towards the door, pulling Estelle with him. ‘Let’s go upstairs and say our farewells properly.’

  Olivia fled, socked feet gliding noiselessly over the beeswaxed tiles. She managed to get as far as the dining room before her parents emerged and started up the stairs. Just another of their rows, then, nothing world-shattering. But the words ‘the time we have left’ skittered through her uneasy mind.

  She let herself into the kitchen where the sun poured in through the window to cast a rhombus of light across the newly baked bread. Outside, the gold and orange trumpets of nasturtiums tumbled down the wall in a shocking burst of colour. When Daddy was here everything seemed brighter and better; every room in the house felt put to good use, full of light and life and energy. He lit fires on dull days and strewed his belongings through the rooms – his pipe and tobacco pouch alongside a book left split-spined and upside-down on the lightstand in the snug; a sketchbook and sticks of charcoal on the hall console; the draughts board and its scattered pieces on the table in the dining room, where the radiogram played swing band music. When he wasn’t home she and Mummy only used the parlour and the kitchen, and Olivia found herself creeping quietly like a trespasser around the rest of Chynalls.

  She helped herself to the crust off the new bread and spread it with too much butter and honey and chewed ruminatively.

  Half an hour later her parents were back downstairs and Daddy was carrying his kitbag. Mummy’s eyes were overly bright, but she had reapplied her make-up and looked like a film star. Mrs Kitto caught sight of her daughter. ‘Fetch your bathers, chérie, we’ll go for a swim on the way back!’

  This was an unexpected gift. Olivia thudded upstairs to her room, grabbed her knitted navy swimming costume and a towel and was back in the hal
l in seconds flat. ‘There’s my girl!’ Daddy tousled her hair. When Estelle bent to pack Olivia’s things into her basket, he reached into his pocket and drew out a ten shilling note – a small fortune! – which he passed surreptitiously to his daughter, putting a finger to his lips. Olivia grinned and tucked it away in her shorts pocket, already planning how she might spend it. Then they walked up the steep path through the wood behind the house to the old barn where the car was kept.

  *

  Olivia loved to be taken out in the Standard Flying 8. It was a majestic car, with its long running boards and sweeping mudguards, and though it was a bit cramped in the back she felt like Princess Elizabeth being chauffeured around, sometimes practising a regal wave to the villagers and farmhands they passed. Her father drove carefully, letting the road spool out in graceful spans and parabolas, taking the bends gently so that Olivia didn’t shoot sideways across the hard leather seat. She hugged his kitbag to her, breathing in the smell that defined him: tobacco, ironed cotton, leather polish, things he would take back with him all the way to North Africa. When he’d come home he had had to show her where it was in the atlas. Olivia loved his old atlas: her father hadn’t been much younger than she was now when he’d won it. In pencil on the title page was inscribed the rubric: ‘First prize for Geography to Antony John Kitto, Bolitho School, Penzance, 5th June 1917’. Imagine: they had both been teenagers during a war! She remembered how he had tracked his finger across the Channel, through France and across the Mediterranean to Tunisia and Algeria, so far away. ‘I can’t tell you exactly where I was or what I was doing there: walls have ears,’ he’d said with a grin. Impossible to imagine that a war was going on in the world, a world in which her father had taken a bullet, when Cornwall was so peaceful.

  She tuned back into her parents’ quiet conversation. ‘I could be very useful,’ her mother was saying. She shot a look in the rear-view mirror and started to speak rapid French. Even concentrating hard, Olivia could catch only one word in ten – something about translating and connections; her father listening but evidently disagreeing. He spoke more slowly so that Olivia caught the words péril and les lignes ennemies, then her mother rattled away once more, and at last said to her husband in crisp English, ‘Even after all this time, Tony, your accent is quite execrable!’

  ‘Other things to do than polish up my language skills, darling.’

  They exchanged a freighted glance, then Estelle laid a hand on her husband’s arm. ‘You won’t do anything heroic, will you? You won’t take unnecessary risks?’

  He turned his head. ‘Don’t you want us to win the war? Perhaps your heart lies with the Vichy regime after all?’

  ‘Espèce d’idiot!’

  Then they were laughing and the tension seemed to pass.

  All too soon they were pulling up to the station, where passengers were milling about, some in uniform, most in civvies. Olivia watched a gaggle of children emerging in Indian file, wearing belted macs and satchels slung across their chests, being marshalled by a pair of bespectacled women.

  ‘Evacuees,’ her father said quietly.

  Estelle firmed her lips but did not reply.

  Tony Kitto drew the Flying 8 up outside the station, shut off the engine and got out, then opened the back door and Olivia passed him his greatcoat and cap and shoved the kitbag along the leather seat, then slid across and jumped out beside him.

  ‘Haven’t you grown?’ he observed, as if he hadn’t really noticed her in these past weeks. His pale eyes were slitted against the sun, the skin crinkled at the corners. A breeze blew his sandy hair across his face and he swept it back with an impatient hand then jammed his cap down over it, in an instant becoming a man in uniform, a soldier, and not Daddy any more.

  Olivia felt abruptly bereft. ‘I’ll be sixteen soon,’ she said in an attempt to re-establish their connection.

  He regarded her solemnly. ‘So you will.’ Dropping to one knee, he rummaged in his kitbag, coming back up with a sturdy leather pouch in his hand. He held it out to Olivia and she took it tentatively and nearly dropped it, taken aback by its weight. Turning it over, she saw the word ‘Leica’ stamped into the leather.

  ‘Your camera,’ she said in awe.

  ‘By the time I come back I expect you to have mastered the art of taking and printing a good picture,’ he told her. ‘You’ll find everything you need – the manuals and books, the printing paper and the chemicals – in the back bedroom.’

  Estelle made a face. ‘Don’t you think she’s too young for such an expensive camera, chéri?’

  ‘Never too young, and why start with something sub-standard? Besides, she’s inherited my artistic eye and should be encouraged, eh, Livy?’

  Olivia hugged the camera case possessively: she wasn’t giving it back now. It felt heavy and significant beyond its physical being, symbolic, somehow, of her passage from childhood into a more grown-up world. ‘I’ll treasure it,’ she promised.

  Estelle wavered. ‘Are you sure you won’t you need it?’

  Tony shrugged. ‘I’ll pick up another one in London on my way through,’ he said insouciantly, as if Leicas were two a penny, rather than the best German technology you could buy. He touched his wife’s cheek. ‘Now, remember the instructions from the Ministry? Keep the car locked in the garage and the fuel canisters in the stonehouse, and take the starting handle into the house with you, and if you’re not going to use the car at all, put it out of action. Jago will help – and he knows how to drive it if you need him to.’

  ‘I can too!’ Olivia piped up and her father grinned.

  ‘Best not, Livy, not without me.’

  ‘I should think not,’ her mother declared.

  ‘And if the Germans come, destroy all the maps and get yourselves down into the cellar, yes? The key’s over the lintel; lock the door behind you. Everything you need is down there – the camping stove, emergency rations, blankets, candles, matches. Keep the water canisters refreshed, just in case; and if worse comes to worst you can go down the tunnel to the cove and swim out.’

  Estelle stared at him. ‘Surely the Germans won’t invade Cornwall now. I thought you said the tide was turning?’

  ‘Who can read the future?’ He put a finger to her lips then kissed her, smearing her lipstick.

  Olivia looked away, embarrassed. When she looked back he was striding towards the waiting train, then the clouds of steam swallowed him up.

  *

  Her mother drove them back out along the main road, where all the signposts had been taken down to confuse any enemy that landed. The lanes of West Penwith were a maze at the best of times – it was easy to lose your bearings when taking shortcuts – but when they suddenly turned off St Buryan Hill, Olivia knew exactly where they were headed. The car lurched over the uneven stones of the lane towards Treen Farm but as they reached the Logan Rock Inn a uniformed soldier stepped into the road and waved for them to stop.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Estelle put the handbrake on but didn’t turn off the engine. She rolled down the window and bestowed a dazzling smile upon the young corporal. ‘We’ve just dropped my husband, Captain Antony Kitto, at the station so he can return to his regiment. It’s made our daughter terribly, terribly upset – hasn’t it, darling?’ She turned to Olivia and gave a barely perceptible wink, and Olivia, who till now had been successfully holding back tears at the thought of Daddy going back to the war, gave a snuffle and nodded. How curious, she thought, to hear her mother putting on such a very English voice. She sounded like an actress and Olivia felt a sudden gulf open between them. ‘So I promised her that we could go for a quick dip to take her mind off losing her father.’

  The corporal looked embarrassed. ‘I’m afraid all the beaches are closed off around here, ma’am. It’s a prohibited zone.’

  ‘Well, I know we have to protect the Atlantic Cable Station for reasons of national security,’ Estelle continued crisply, which made the young man look even more uncomfortable, ‘b
ut we’re not heading to Porthcurnow, only to one of the little coves before there.’

  ‘It’s not safe, ma’am. I’ve been instructed to turn everyone back, unless you’ve got a pass?’

  Estelle frowned. ‘But really—’

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am: everyone. And if you haven’t a pass I have to charge you a five-pound fine.’

  Five pounds! ‘It’s all right, Mummy,’ Olivia said quietly, ‘we can go down through the sea gate and swim in our own cove. I don’t mind.’

  Her mother rounded on her. ‘Don’t interrupt when adults are speaking!’ She returned her attention to the soldier, leaving Olivia feeling stung. ‘Are you under Major Ellery’s command?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Well then, just tell him Mrs Estelle Kitto sends her regards and looks forward to beating him at bridge next week. Five pounds, indeed!’

  The young man shuffled his feet. Despite his rank and uniform, he was probably only a couple of years older than her, Olivia thought, and did her best to pull herself together so that he did not think her a cry-baby. Which she most definitely was not.

  ‘I’ll do that, ma’am.’ He hesitated. ‘But I still can’t let you through.’

  Estelle glared at him, then rolled the window up and executed such a violent four-point turn that she almost ran him over. She drove them back towards Porth Enys with a sort of focused fury, making the tyres screech whenever she braked, throwing the Flying 8 around tight bends so that Olivia hit the door time and again with considerable force, and the overgrown hedge flowers and grasses whipped against the car’s glossy body as they zoomed down the narrow lanes. Daddy would have a fit, Olivia thought, if only he knew. She thought of him on the train, chugging back upcountry, every minute getting further away.