Page 3 of A Cornish Love Story
I rolled my eyes as I poured hot water into the mugs. ‘This is not the Nineteen Fifties, and I’m not going to the houseasAmelie Rosevar. It isn’t role play.’
‘You play at being a successful journalist often enough,’ she said, and I stopped in front of her armchair. She smirked up at me, and I resisted the urge to cover her neatly written letters in hot tea – mostly because she would just make mewrite them all out again. Instead, I placed the mug carefully on her side table.
‘My pieces are always well received,’ I said primly. ‘And that’s partly because I have a friendly and professional approach, which means I get good interviews. Wynn isn’t going to be happy if I turn up on Friday night in a floaty dress and lounge around on the beds pretending I’m a character from a romance novel. I’m going to ask polite questions and show an interest in the house.’ I had imagined all the beds … all the rooms, really. I had only ever visited the house when it was a damp, deserted shell, full of spiders’ webs, unknowable corners and creeping mould, and I couldn’t wait to see the transformation.
‘Maybe I’ll get a car and come with you. I can get my legs to be useful when I really want them to be.’
Spence sounded blasé, but I knew how much herlack of mobility frustrated her. A condition called sarcopenia had weakened her legs decades before, which was part of the reason – she’d told me when I started working for her – that she’d been forced to move from her clifftop mansion to the comfortable bungalow in the village. It was also why she’d hired me, so I could do the administrative jobs that were outside her carers’ remit.
‘Really?’ I said. ‘You’regoing to pose on the furniture in a chiffon dress and pretend to be Amelie?’
I hid my panic at the very real possibility she might decide to do exactly that. If she came, she would completely derail our plan, not just because she was getting more mischievous as she got older, but because her appearance would change the whole nature of the event. It would thrust her back into the limelight, and she might get a better offer than resurrecting old characters with the help of her inexperienced PA. I knew I was being selfish, but I didn’t want to watch something else I cared about slip through my fingers.
‘I’m just worried you won’t make the most of the opportunity.’ Spence smiled up at me. ‘It’s not every day you get to explore a house of such extravagant proportions.’
‘If there’s a swimming pool, I’m not jumping in it.’
‘Drink the champagne, at the very least. And take as many photos as you can. I want to see every nook and cranny.’
‘I’ll take all the photos, because Wynn will wantpictures anyway, and I promise I’ll try and find out who owns it now.’
Spence waved a hand, looking out at the view – rooftops rolling down towards Alperwick Bay and the shimmering sea. ‘It’ll be some faceless developer. They’re only doing this fancy open house for publicity, so they can draw the attention of fat-cat millionaires and make a sizeable profit. All that glass and chrome doesn’t come cheap.’
‘You don’t like what they’ve done with it?’ Spence had gone up there on her mobility scooter, though only as far as the high, redbrick wall and towering gates. They had only offered her a hint of the gleaming clifftop palace beyond, but it was enough to see the scale of the transformation.
‘Ilovewhat they’ve done with it,’ Spence said. ‘It’s better than evenmyimagination could have conjured. I just don’t want it to be bought by someone who’ll only live in it for three weeks every summer. That house deserves a family.’
‘It does.’ I slumped into my chair and stared at the blank space where my fishing article should have been. ‘It deserves the very best family.’ Because it had had the Rosevars, in the Cornish Sandsseries, and in real life it had been lived in by Spence and her ex-husband, and then, even when it was deserted, my friends and I had shown it love and attention. It deserved owners who would appreciate it. ‘I’ll find out,’ I said, with more confidence than I felt. ‘I’ll track down the developer or the architect or whatever –they’re bound to be there, aren’t they, at a swanky, showy-off event like that? I’ll grill them on their vetting process, find out how they’re going to choose who buys it.’
Spence smiled at me over the top of her mug, but it wasn’t her usual impish grin. ‘Oh Georgie,’ she said sadly, ‘they’ll sell it to the person who offers the most money. There’s no room for romance in the property market. That’s why we have to give it a second life in our new book, because that way it won’t be lost to us completely.’
I phoned my best friend Kira as I walked down the hill into the village later that afternoon, as the blazing orb of the sun hovered above the mellowing sea, the sand of Alperwick Bay like a pool of molten gold.
‘You’re really going back to the house?’ she asked, then I heard her shushing her young son, Barnaby, while she waited for my answer. Kira had been my friend since primary school, had married her childhood sweetheart Freddy, and now the three of them lived in Greenwich in southeast London. It was so different from our tiny coastal village in Cornwall, and I sometimes envied their escape while I was still languishing here, but all that mattered was that we were still close.
‘I have to cover it for Wynn.’ My footsteps echoed as I turned onto a road of neat terraces with front doors that opened straight onto the street, window boxes blossoming with summery begonias. ‘It’s a majorevent in Alperwick. I’m honoured to be the one reporting on it.’
‘But did Wynn pick you, or did you ask for it because we spent so much time up there, drinking vodka and eating Pringles, telling each other ghost stories?’
‘Well …’ I hadn’t told Kira about Spence’s offer yet, because in some ways it still seemed too good to be true. Once I’d been inside Alperwick House I would be less apprehensive, not because I really believed that seeing the upgraded version would make a huge difference to the book we were going to write, but because it felt like a test that Spence was setting me: prove how much you care about this by enduring a stuffy, schmoozy sales-pitch event inside your childhood haunt, a place overflowing with complicated memories. Spence lovedchallenging me, and I only minded about 70 per cent of the time. ‘I might have mentioned it to Wynn,’ I said. ‘And of course I’m curious about what’s happened to it. Getting inside without trespassing will be a novel feeling, too.’
Kira laughed, the sound bubbly and luminous, and Barnaby squealed excitedly. ‘No dusty fireplaces with cat corpses shoved up them.’
‘God, Orwell had such a twisted mind.’
‘The ghost stories were fun, though. You know, when you and—’
‘They were,’ I cut in, because I didn’t want to follow the path she was leading me down. ‘And it’ll force me to do some actual investigating: find out who’s behind the renovation, which I’ve had no luck with so faronline. Give Spence peace of mind that it’s not being bought by some hotelier or corporate company who are going to run team-building retreats there.’
‘Shit, yeah,’ Kira said. ‘It must be hard for her, looking on from her sunny little bungalow while the grand house she used to love gets pimped up and passed on.’
‘She’s more curious than anything, but I think she really cares what happens to it – in a rare case of her giving a crap about something other than how she can amuse herself.’
‘You love her really,’ Kira said indulgently. ‘You’re PA to your favourite author, even if she is a cantankerous old lady now. And … you know,’ she added slowly, pointedly, ‘with your work for theStar, and the generous rate you get for stuffing envelopes, you could think about writing something – for yourself, I mean. You could take a break; get an idea started, then make the time to keep going. Just a few hundred words a day. It soon builds up.’
‘It does,’ I said, my throat thick. I would tell her about Spence’s offer soon, and she was right – Ididhave time, because beyond Spence and my work for the paper, my life in Alperwick was small. There hadn’t been anyone serious since my break-up with Rick a couple of years ago; a guy from Mousehole, Corran, who I’d seen a few times before it had petered out, the occasional night in the pub with friends from the paper, long cliff walks by myself, vague notions about getting a dog that I hadn’t followed through with because itseemed like a lot of effort. I didn’t want to think about how many books I could have written in all the time I’d used idly.
I reached home, took my keys out of my rucksack and opened my red front door. ‘I could write something,’ I said, and then asked how Barnaby was getting on, which was a subject Kira would never sidestep. As she told me (moaned) about the other women at the mum’s group she’d found, and I asked about Freddy’s recent promotion at the tech firm he worked for, I promised myself I would tell her everything soon. Once I’d been to the open house and grabbed the carrot that Spence was dangling with both hands, I would feel comfortable telling Kira the whole story. Four more days to go, and I would be on much firmer ground.
