Page 96 of A Secret Cornish Wish
I smile at Rosie; she is so smart and on the ball all the time.
‘Let’s find somewhere to eat our lunch first, and I’ll tell you. We’ll go to one of the places I always liked to go when I was younger.’
We walk around to Morvoren Cove and climb up over the grass to the little viewing spot I always liked to go to on my lunchtimes. And I’m overjoyed to find that no one is already sitting there as we peep round the brow of the hill.
‘This is amazing,’ I tell Rosie as we sit looking out over the sea. To our right is Eddie and Dexter’s café, now called The Mermaid of Morvoren. Right now, it’s busy with a queue of people waiting outside for drinks and sandwiches. ‘I can’t believe I’m sitting up here again after all this time, and I have my beautiful daughter sitting next to me.’
‘It’s a fab view, isn’t it?’ Rosie says as a breeze lifts up off the sea, blowing her long dark hair away from her face.
‘It is that.’ I sigh. ‘I could sit and watch the sea for hours. It’s always changing, and yet in another way, it never does. That reminds me, I was going to tell you about your name.’
‘Yes, you were,’ Rosie says before she takes her first bite of Cornish pasty. ‘Ooh, this is good.’
‘Even though you were partly named after Rose from the flower shop, I also chose it because your full name, Rosemary, means “dew of the sea”. I wanted you to have a name that was related to St Felix in some way, because even though I’ve lived in Scotland for so long, I’ll always think of here as home.’
‘That’s really nice, Mum,’ Rosie says after she’s swallowed her second mouthful of pasty. ‘I like it here too. It’s very . . . ’ Her little face screws up in concentration as she tries hard to think of the right word, before deciding on one. ‘Fresh.’
‘Yes, it is fresh, isn’t it? It’s the air, I think.’ I take a deep breath. ‘It’s very clean.’
Rosie does the same. ‘I wish Grandma and Grandad still lived here,’ she says. ‘Then we could come back here and stay with them.’
I automatically assume Rosie means holiday with them.
‘Yes, we could. But at least Claire is still here, so we’ve been able to stay with her on this holiday.’
‘No, I meanstaywith them – like live with them?’
It’s always funny when I hear Rosie, who understandably has picked up a slight accent, use a Scottish turn of phrase when I still hear the English use of the word.
‘Oh, I thought you meantstayas in holiday.’
‘No.’ Rosie looks confused for a moment. ‘Oh right, I get it. You heard the English stay.’
I nod. ‘But you would have liked that, would you? To live here with Grandma and Grandad?’
‘Oh, yes. I mean, I like the wee house they live in now. But I would have liked to stay, I mean,livein a big house here like Alice, George and Freddie do.’
‘Yes, that would be lovely, wouldn’t it? One day, maybe,’ I say wistfully. ‘Perhaps not right now, though. I mean, you have school and all your friends in Scotland. You’d miss them if we moved all the way down here.’
Rosie considers this. ‘Yes, but I’d make new friends. And school is school.’ She shrugs and tucks into her pasty again. ‘Could I have these every day if we did move here?’
‘Er, no. Pasties are an occasional treat only.’ But as I begin to eat my own pasty, I can’t help but dream as I look out over the waves, of what it might be like to move back here again to St Felix.
‘Let’s wish, Mum,’ Rosie says, lowering her pasty for a moment.
‘What for?’
‘Let’s wish that we can come and live here again one day.’
‘All right.’ I nod, knowing full well that is all it will ever be – a dream. Property is far too expensive now for me to be able to afford to buy or even rent anything in Cornwall, let alone St Felix.
‘Close your eyes . . . tightly!’ Rosie tells me. ‘Right, I’m doing the same. Now we wish!’
And as I sit in my favourite spot in all of St Felix, with my world sitting by my side gripping my hand tightly, I put all my sensible, realistic, even pessimistic thoughts to one side, and I wish. I wish really hard.
And as I do, I hear a sound I haven’t heard in a decade.
The sound of a large tail splashing in the waves below us.
