And yet it is a house I don’t want to go back to—not yet. Not with all its vastness and silence. Not when I am in this pensive mood. Trying not to think about the hare. That uncanny coincidence. The blood on my hands. Again.
Wandering into the bar, I check the array of drinks: local beers, Doom Bar, St. Austell Breweries. But I don’t like beer. Instead I ask the yawning bargirl for a rum and Coke. Why not? After all, I am not pregnant.
“Here you go, my lover.”
I take the drink and sit at a table. The young man is still looking intently at his Guinness, like it is a lap dancer.
Reaching into my handbag, I find my book. It’s a thickish volume about tin mining, sourced from David’s library. David’s rhapsodies on the old mining life have got me interested. This is another way for me to understand my new family. The mine-owning Kerthens.
The book is old and has that annoyingly dense Victorian typography, very difficult to read, but it is full of curious, moving, even sinister vignettes of mining life.
The author toured the West Cornish mines in the 1840s, near the peak of production, and saw the wealth and the energy and the horror. He talks of the suffering and mutilation: the many cripples he met in the villages, men with permanently blackened faces from explosions; men missing fingers or hands or arms from shooting rocks with gunpowder; blinded and broken men being led around the humble Cornish villages by boys, eking out a pitiful living by selling tea, door to door.
In some places, he says, one miner in five died violently. Sometimes they died at each other’s hands: from drunken brawling. The boozy violence of the “wild men of the stannaries” was legendary. In the mid-nineteenth century it was said that, in West Cornwall, wherever three houses met together, two would be alehouses.
Yet the author also saw a vivid beauty: how boats would sail up the nighttime coast, then anchor to gaze in astonishment at the sight of Pendeen and Botallack and Morvellan blazing away on the cliffs without cease, the rising and falling beams of the fire whims, the winding drums of the horse engines, the cries of the landers, the glare from boiler house doors, the crashing of the stamps. And the lights glowing in the windows of the great three-storied engine houses, halfway up the cliffs. And then, most magnificent of all, the mighty fires of the smelting houses lit by fountains of molten metal, springing up fifteen feet into the air, then splashing back into the basin, like majestic geysers of quicksilver.
And now, incredibly, it is all gone. After four thousand years. The men no longer work half-naked in the terrible heat at the end of undersea tunnels; they no longer climb a mile down ropes, like monkeys, deep into the reek of sulfur; and boys of eight are no longer sent down the pit to produce half the world’s tin and copper and many millions in profit. All that is left is those ruins by the sea, those ruins on the moors, and in the woods. Scorrier, South Crofty, Wheal Rose, Treskerby, Hallenbeagle, Wheal Busy, Wheal Seymour, Creegbrawse, Hallamanning, Poldise, Ding Dong, Godolphin, and Providence.
Gone.
I look up from the book, hoping to see a face, swap just a smile with the bargirl. But now I realize the pub is deserted. The drinker has gone, even the bargirl has disappeared. I am totally alone. It’s like no one else exists.
Afternoon
The house is quiet when I get back. The house is always quiet. The great front door opens and I am greeted by perfect stillness, the scent of beeswax, and the long and lofty New Hall.
Something brushes between my legs and makes me start. It’s Genevieve. Nina’s slender gray cat. Winding between my ankles.
When Nina died David gave her to Juliet to look after in her granny flat, because David doesn’t like cats. But sometimes she leaves Juliet’s apartment and stalks the house.
Bending down, I tickle the cat behind the ear, feeling the bone of her skull. Her fur is the color of wintry sea mist.
“Hey, Genevieve. Go catch a mouse, we need the help.”
The cat purrs and gives me a sly, green-eyed glance. Then abruptly Genevieve stalks away, toward the Old Hall.
The silence returns.
Where is everyone?
Juliet is presumably in her flat. But where is Jamie? Heading right, I make for the kitchen, where I find rare human life. It’s Cassie, busy unloading the dishwasher, listening to K-Pop on her iPod. Cassie is young, amiable, Thai, thirty-two. She’s been with the family ten years. She and I don’t interact very much. Partly because her English is still hazy, and partly because I don’t know how to act with her—I don’t know how to deal with “servants.” I am of the serving classes. I feel awkward. Better to leave her to it.
But I feel like I need interaction right now.
Cassie is oblivious to me. She has her earphones in as she works and she is cheerfully humming along.
Stepping forward, I touch her gently on the shoulder. “Cassie.”
At once she flinches, startled, nearly dropping the mug in her hands. “Oh,” she says, ripping the earphones out. “I am sorry, Miss Rachel.”
“No, please, it was my fault. I made you jump.”
Her smile is soft, and sincere. I smile in return.
“I was wondering. Do you fancy a cup of tea?”
She looks at me in a friendly, puzzled way. “Tea. You want me make you cup of tea?”
“No. I thought…” I am shrugging. “Well, I thought you and I could chat and, er, y’know. Have a cuppa and a conversation. Girl to girl. Get to know each other a bit better. This house is so big! You can get pretty lost.”
“Cup… pa?” Her puzzlement is plain now and tinged with concern. “There is problem, you must tell me?”
“No, I—”
“I collect Jamie OK. He is in the Drawing Room. But—is a problem? I have done something—”
“No, no no. It’s nothing. I just, I just, I thought we might…”
This is hopeless. Perhaps I should tell her the truth. Sit her down with the teapot and spill it all out. Confess it all. Confess that I am finding it difficult to find my role. That David’s friends are nice but they’re his friends, older, richer, different. That Juliet is lovely but she is frail and reclusive and I can’t keep intruding on her. That there is generally no one else to talk to, no adult in my days—I have to wait for David to come home to have interesting conversations face-to-face, or ring up Jessica in London and beg for scraps of gossip about my old life. I could tell Cassie the facts. Tell her that the isolation is starting to gnaw.
But I can’t say any of this: she would find it bizarre. So instead I give her a big fat smile and say, “Well, that’s great, Cassie. Everything is totally good. I wanted to make sure you’re OK, that’s all.”
“Oh yes!” She laughs, lifting up her earphones. “I am fine, I happy, I OK, I have a new song, I love Awoo, you know? Lim Kim!” She laughs again, and then she warbles a couple of lines, “Mamaligosha, Mamaligotcha… alway Mamaligosha! Help me work. Miss Nina she used to say I sing too much, but I think she make a joke me. Miss Nina was very funny.”
Her earphones are replaced, she smiles again, but her smile is a little sad now, and maybe sharper at the edges. As if I am something of a disappointment after Nina, though she is far too nice to say this.
Again, the awkwardness returns. Cassie is waiting for me to go, so she can finish her chores. I return her fading smile, and then—defeated—I leave the kitchen.
There isn’t much else for me to do. The house looks at me in derision. Why don’t you do some restoring? Buy a carpet. Make yourself useful. I stand like a frightened interloper in the hall. I must go and see Jamie, check on my stepson.