Authors: Isabel Ashdown
Now, as she enters the largest cave, Wren switches on her pocket torch to find her way to the deepest of the pools at the rear of the cave, and for the first time since she left her old life she yearns for news of her mother. Her mind worries away at memories of her father’s death and the weeks that followed, as she’d teetered on the edge of the vast hole he had left in the material of her life.
Rotten bad luck
, was how Eliza Adler had described the car accident to friends and family, speaking on the telephone that seemed to ring day and night as news of Dad’s death reached out into the world. From the shadows of the landing, Wren had watched her mother in the entrance hall below, checking her polished reflection in the hall mirror as she spoke into the phone, conveying reassuring responses to well-wishers near and far:
stiff upper lip, these things can’t be helped, onwards and upwards
. But
they
couldn’t hear her soft murmurs at night-time as Wren could, the low groans of grief penetrating the solid walls of No.6 Highleigh Gardens, the sorrow of a loved one left much too soon.
Wren shines her light into the deepest pool, illuminating a Bloody Henry starfish, crookedly clinging to the
criss-crossed
walls of the pond, two of its limbs nestling neatly within an age-smoothed fissure. Tiny goby fish dart in and out of weed cover as she moves the light beam across the water, disturbing their peaceful slumber. She pulls back her sleeve and eases her hand beneath the water, to gently run a forefinger over the bumpy-smooth surface of the starfish. It
shrinks back, and she gingerly removes her hand to watch its slow journey across the rock, the body trying to follow its probing legs into the narrow vertical crevice. Behind her, Willow and Badger stand in the pool of light at the entrance to the cave. Willow whines, lifting a paw in question, sensing the change in Wren, the shift in their world.
Wren switches off her torch and slides it back inside her jacket pocket. The dogs edge closer, still not venturing all the way, eventually finding a position between her and the opening to the beach, a spot where they lower themselves to settle on the damp morning sand, alert and anxious, guarding their leader as she slumps against the dripping walls of the cave and weeps.
They married on an overcast afternoon in 1986. They had all graduated from teacher training just weeks earlier, and the spirit of change and possibility was ripe in the air; the world was shifting, and it seemed anything was possible. To everyone’s surprise, in place of the traditional honeymoon Robert and Wren shared plans to spend the summer with Laura, travelling to Oregon together, before they eventually had to fall into the conventional rhythms of careers and marriage. Wren was twenty-two, Robert not even a year older. Laura, naturally, was maid-of-honour, and she performed the task with style, dragging Wren up west for her hen night, where they wined and dined at Ronnie Scott’s all evening, just the two of them, talking and laughing and drinking champagne. Robert was away for the night too, having taken the train back to Surrey for an evening at the local pub with his father and uncle and a few old schoolmates. He’d complained as he left the flat they shared,
standing in the doorway of Laura’s bedroom, watching as they pencilled on their make-up and adjusted the shoulder straps of their new posh frocks.
‘How can I enjoy a good stag night, when my best friends won’t be with me?’ he’d asked.
In reply, Laura had blown him a kiss and ushered him out with a dismissive hand. ‘We’ll raise a glass to you,’ she’d said, and she chased him out of the door before he could dither any longer. At the end of the evening, the girls dashed out into the night to escape would-be suitors from the table next to theirs, and tumbled into the back of a black cab to reach the comfort of the flat before they turned into pumpkins. That night they slept where they fell, sharing Laura’s bed, Wren’s drink-fuzzed head slumbering peacefully on her shoulder, as she drifted into dreamless sleep. A few days later, on the morning of her wedding, she had faced her own polished reflection in the mirror of her dressing table and wished that that evening, with just the two of them, could have gone on forever.
On her return to the cottage, Wren finds Laura in the kitchen, cutting sandwiches into crustless triangles with a bread knife she will have searched through the drawers for. She smiles brightly as Wren hangs the dog leads on the back of the pantry door, as if everything is just fine; as if no time has passed at all.
‘I’m taking you out,’ Laura says resolutely, easing the sandwiches into a clear food bag. She must have driven out to Constantine for supplies: the table is spread with items Wren doesn’t keep in the house. ‘I’ve made us a picnic – look, smoked salmon and cream cheese – your favourite. There’s
plenty of fruit and some of those little cheddar biscuits you like. And I thought we could stop for a cream tea later on, if we fancy it.’
Wren stares at the scattered industry of the kitchen table, struggling to adjust to Laura’s buoyant presence under her roof. ‘What?’
‘We’re going out,’ Laura repeats. Just like that.
We’re going out
.
‘Where?’
‘Well, I’ve always wanted to go to St Ives, so I thought you could show me around. I’m dying to visit the Tate gallery – and it looks like it’s going to be a lovely day after that storm last night. The sun’s breaking through.’
Wren runs a rough hand through her cropped hair. ‘No. Sorry – you’ll have to go on your own. I have things to do here.’
Sliding the sandwiches to one side, Laura casually sweeps the crumbs into the palm of her hand, depositing them into the bin in a single brisk motion. ‘Wren, I haven’t come all the way to Cornwall just to wander about on my own. I’m not exactly passing through. You do realise I came here specifically to see you?’
‘I didn’t ask you to,’ Wren replies, hating herself as she says it.
‘Well if I’d waited for an invitation – ’ Laura picks up a bread crust and lobs it at Wren’s shoulder.
It’s all moving too fast. Gone is the reserve and formality of yesterday’s first meeting; Laura is slipping back into her old, playful mode at terrifying speed, and it feels like vertigo to Wren, disorientating and unwelcome. This Wren doesn’t know how to respond, how to react to that Laura. ‘I’ve nothing to wear,’ she says, her voice monotone.
‘Go as you are! It’s not like we’re going out on the razz, is it? Look, if we leave now we’ll be there in time for lunch – your friend Arthur said it should take us an hour to drive to Lelant Sands, then ten minutes or so on the coastal train to St Ives. He said it’ll be easier than parking in the town.’
‘Arthur.’ Wren shakes her head.
Laura stuffs food parcels into her rucksack and flaps her hands to hurry Wren along. ‘You mustn’t be cross with him,’ she says. ‘
Arthur
. I told him I was your sister, that you were expecting me, so you can’t blame him. He said you’d had a bit of bother with a journalist recently. Probably the same little twat who told me where to find you.’
Wren is horrified to think of Mike Woods phoning around all her old contacts. Who else did he call? Robert? Her mother? ‘The dogs haven’t eaten,’ she blurts out, and she strides across the room towards the fridge, unbuttoning her coat.
Laura stops her with a firm hand, tugging the collar of her jacket back on to her shoulder. ‘Then feed them! Hurry up, Wren – there’ll be nothing left of the day if you dawdle forever. I’ll get the car running – see you out there.’
Wren says very little on the journey to Lelant, glad of the third voice in the car with them, the softly lilting Irish narrator of the satellite navigation system. She’s never seen such a thing before, and she fights back the desire to ask about it, to enquire what it is,
how
it can possibly know which direction to send them in. Laura makes polite enquiries about the area, about the weather, about the cottage, and Wren replies with economy, dwelling only where the answers don’t challenge her in any personal way.
‘Where did you get the dogs?’ Laura asks, her focus on the road ahead. She hadn’t been able to drive last time Wren had seen her, having failed her test several times in the years since college. She used to take the train everywhere, and Wren was constantly picking her up and dropping her off at the station in her old green Mini. She wonders how long Laura has had a licence – whether she’s a safe driver or not.
‘Arthur,’ she replies. ‘His neighbour had a litter, and Kelly had just died.’
‘Kelly?’
‘My first dog. She was a stray.’
‘Sounds like Arthur’s a good friend to you.’
Wren turns away to watch the fields and coastal paths rushing by. She hasn’t been a passenger in a car for years. Through the fog of time she recalls another journey, almost two decades ago. Even now, she can conjure up the salty vinyl tang of Arthur’s old van, as he helped her into the back seat and tried to calm her through the delirium of a fever, insistent that she must see a doctor.
‘We’re just acquaintances, really.’
‘Still, he seems like a nice old boy.’
The drive continues without conversation for the next twenty minutes, as Wren tries hard to think of her own questions for the sake of good manners, not knowing where to begin. ‘How does it work?’ she finally asks, breaking the silence and indicating towards the little screen perched on the dashboard.
‘The TomTom? God knows. But I tell you what, I couldn’t manage without it. You know what my sense of direction’s like, Wrenny.
Non-existent
.’
Wren smiles, despite herself. Laura catches it, latches on to it in a heartbeat. ‘Remember when you and Rob had to come
and fetch me from the other side of campus in our first year? Because I’d lost my way following someone I fancied in the science department. I had to call the flat from a public phone box! You two took the piss out of me for weeks afterwards.’
‘Rob called you the Surrey Stalker.’
‘Ha! Yes!’ Laura’s laughter is full and uninhibited, the familiarity of it plucking deep into Wren’s memory, making her want to curl inside its warmth. ‘The Surrey Stalker. Bastard!’ She turns to look at Wren again, her hand leaving the wheel momentarily to brush against her folded arm. ‘We did have good times together, didn’t we, Wren? They
were
happy times.’
Wren returns her gaze to the passenger window, to avoid Laura’s shining eyes. ‘Yes,’ she replies, and the remainder of the journey passes without another word.
Rob wasn’t her first lover, although Wren could never exactly describe herself as experienced with the opposite sex. She’d gone out with John Shelbourne on and off for a whole four months, when she was fifteen, and she had liked him well enough, but she felt nothing for him that even bordered on desire. He was a friend of a friend, a boy from the next town along whose parents, a policeman and a housewife, were kind and dull, and whose siblings were rowdy and many. He was the middle child of five, mousy and invisible for the most part, and his gratitude to Wren for accepting his invitation to watch
Moonraker
at the Guildford Odeon in the Easter holidays was charm itself. At the intermission he bought her ice cream and told her with affection that she ate like a mouse, as she carefully balanced slivers of raspberry ripple on a fiddly flat spatula, desperate not to spill it on
her new white skirt. During the second half, John wriggled his hand into hers, and after the film they kissed against the wall of the electricity works, Wren furtively recoiling at the monstrous intrusion of his tongue on hers. They went on in this way for several months, whenever she was home from school for the weekend or half-term, he edging ever closer in his amorous manoeuvres – a hand over the jumper, a brazen attempt at a love bite, a cautious fumble at the clasp of her bra strap against the pushed-back seats of his mum’s Reliant Scimitar – while Wren expended equal energies in keeping him safely at arm’s length. One sweltering night in late August, on the antique chaise-longue of her empty house (Mum was out dancing with her new husband, Siegfried), John, panting with pubescent verve, slid his hand up her skirt and collided ineptly with her sturdy underpants. She knew it was time to put him out of his misery. ‘I’ve got a headache,’ she claimed, and she sent him and his sweaty upper lip home, phoning him from a call box the next day to finish it once and for all.
At sixteen, Wren insisted on leaving boarding school to attend the local sixth form college, where in her second year she met the youthful Mr Reece, head of English, an Adonis of a man with shoulders like Bodie and lips like Doyle. It was like a switch going off in the deepest part of her. Never before had she known such longing, such emotional obsession and physical yearning. On Valentine’s Day, just after she had turned eighteen, she threw all usual caution to the wind and slipped a card, signed with a kiss, between the sheets of her essay on Chaucer and added it to the homework pile at the edge of his desk as she exited his classroom. The following Monday she took her seat in class, her heart pounding with fear and exhilaration as she waited
for some kind of acknowledgement. He ignored her for the entire lesson, avoiding eye contact throughout and holding back all marked homework until the moment the bell went. As he stood at the desk, handing papers to his
homeward-bound
students, Wren was rigid with the terror of rejection and disapproval. She had made a fool of herself; she could feel the heat of shame rising up over her chest and neck, and all she wanted was to grab her marked paper and run. The last piece of homework was handed to the final departing student, and then there was just Wren left standing alone. Mr Reece, tall and handsome, framed in exquisite relief against the vast wall of his blackboard, turned the full light of his attention upon her, his empty palms turned heavenwards, like those of Aunt Veronica’s religious saints.
‘Ah, Wren. I don’t seem to have yours,’ he said, his expression earnest, scholarly.
Her mouth dropped slightly, her fingers rising to the blush at the dip of her throat.
‘Go and check on the shelf in my cupboard, will you? I’ve probably left it in the top tray with the term papers.’