Seagulls in the Attic Read online

  I murmur some banal words to the effect that it can’t be, I’m sure they’ll sort it out. Annie goes on, ‘Pete said he’d talked to you. I’m glad he did, he might never have told me otherwise.’

  There is a commotion at the door and Ben says, ‘Pete’s here,’ at the same time as the two men walk in.

  Pete rushes to Annie, ‘Why did you drive off like that? I didn’t know where the hell you’d gone.’

  Annie sobs, ‘Go away. Just leave. It’s best we don’t see each other.’

  ‘What’re you talking about? Annie, be sensible. It’s just a bloody wedding; we’ve got the rest of our lives.’

  ‘Go away!’ she’s starting to sound hysterical so Ben says, ‘Look, Pete, leave her to Tessa until she calms down, then you can talk.’ He steers a bewildered Pete into the living room.

  Annie, still in tears, tells me that she’s driving back to London as soon as she stops crying. Luckily she drove down this time, she gulps, but could I do her a favour next week and gather all her stuff still at Pete’s and send it up to her?

  I say, ‘Annie, this is crazy. Just because he doesn’t want a great big fancy wedding is no reason to break everything off. Can’t you compromise somehow?’

  She looks up at me with swollen eyes. ‘You don’t understand. Pete’s agreed to the wedding. He told me how he felt, and I understood, I really did.’

  ‘I hope you told him that.’

  ‘Of course I did. I was so sorry for not realising before. Then I told him I’d always wanted a big proper wedding, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing for me. And he understood. Said he was being selfish and of course we’ll have the wedding and he won’t mind at all now we’ve talked about it.’

  I stare at her as she begins to cry again. Ben creeps into the kitchen trying not to be seen, grabs the coffee pot from the counter and two cups, then dashes out again. Before he disappears we look at each other and roll our eyes.

  ‘Annie,’ I say, ‘What’s the problem? You’ve talked, you both understand each other now, and Pete is happy for the wedding to go ahead as planned. What are you talking about going back to London for?’

  It all comes rushing out in a gush of sporadic words, tears and a fair amount of tissues. Annie has realised, by this conflict over the wedding, that she and Pete are worlds apart, that their lives and backgrounds are too different to be compatible, that she’ll always be a Londoner and Pete an agriculturalist and never the twain shall meet. She goes on in this vein for nearly an hour, going over the same things again and again while I ply her with coffee and more tissues, trying to make her see sense. In the meantime Ben whisks Pete away, ‘for a walk’, he says, but no doubt he’ll take Pete to the local pub and give him a stiff drink or two. Annie still won’t let Pete near her.

  ‘Annie,’ I say finally. ‘Does Pete agree with this? That you’re incompatible?’

  It appears he doesn’t, as I knew, of course. As is obvious, the way Pete has followed her here and is trying to talk to her.

  Annie says, ‘That’s why it’s up to me, you see? One of us has got to see clearly.’

  I try to tell her that she’s the one not being lucid. Long before she and Pete got engaged, they talked about her leaving London, about the life they both wanted to live in Cornwall. Despite their superficial differences, Annie and Pete share a similar core of values and that’s the important thing, as I remind her now.

  She won’t hear it. I’m about to despair when Pete and Ben come back. Annie tries to retreat to the bathroom but Pete firmly takes her arm, tells her she owes it to him to talk to him before flying back to London, and settles down with her at the kitchen table as she refuses to go back to his house.

  Now it’s Ben and my turn to leave. ‘Thank goodness Will and Amy aren’t home,’ I mutter as we call Jake and take off towards the nearby beech woodland for a walk. Ben and I take off our sandals, paddling in the creek with Jake who chases sticks and races madly about, delighted to be here even though he’s already had a long walk with Ben while I was working.

  When we get back, Annie’s car is gone, as is Pete’s. ‘Oh hell,’ I mutter, ‘She’s gone back to London.’

  But there’s a note on the table. It’s from Annie, saying that she and Pete have thrashed it out, that all is fine, the marriage is on, the wedding’s on, that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. Well, she didn’t write that last bit but that’s what the note implied. Pete had added a postscript, apologising for descending on us so dramatically and adding they hoped it was OK if they came to us for dinner that night as planned.

  Which they do. Both looking gloriously, madly in love. Pete is fine about the wedding now that he knows how much it means to Annie, and Annie is overwhelmed with love and gratitude for his understanding. We end up having a hilarious night, all of us flicking through hymn books and searching the Internet trying to decide what songs to have at the wedding, falling about laughing as we belt out ‘Jerusalem’ at the top of our lungs.

  Now that that traumatic weekend is over, my thoughts turn to the autumn show again, as everyone in the village is talking about it. The locals have been checking up on other people’s gardens for days trying to see how they are faring. I must say it’s catching, for I find myself peering into the odd vegetable patch alongside the lanes to see if I can spot a weird-looking cucumber.

  I start fantasising about entering a proper vegetable next year. Maybe potatoes? There are four categories: Four Round Potatoes (White); Four Kidney Potatoes (White); Four Coloured Potatoes (Round); and Four Coloured Potatoes (Kidney). There are no categories for Potatoes With Slug Holes. Perhaps I should suggest it to the committee for next year’s show.

  The event takes place in the village hall where long trestle tables are set up, covered with pristine white cloths. The produce and other items have to be delivered in the morning, and I’m amused to note a kind of military air about the place, a buzz and alertness as if waiting for the moment of victory. All morning long there are people, mostly men I’ve noticed, marching up to the village hall carrying huge parsnips, turnips, onions and other produce. They carry them as if they were a cross between a precious infant and an explosive, holding their prizes slightly away from their bodies as if not wanting to tarnish the cleaned and polished vegetables by contact with a pullover or jacket. As they march through the village they glance furtively at their rivals, checking out whether some other man’s turnip might be bigger than theirs. You can feel the testosterone driving them on. I can’t help smiling, feeling like I’m in an Agatha Christie thriller, and I invent titles as I watch like, ‘Murder on the Allotment Express’ or ‘The Case of the Missing Cabbages’. I can see Hercule Poirot finding clues amongst the courgettes, or better still Miss Marple. In fact I can see someone just like her, carrying a basket with fresh eggs into the village hall. Miss Marple, ordinary villager, will be the one to solve ‘The Mystery of the Poisoned Parsnip’.

  I try out my little joke about Miss Marple to Doug who is on his way back from delivering his entries and I’m severely reprimanded. ‘’Tis no laughing matter, my lover. Growing stuff is a serious business, not for the likes of folk who laugh.’

  Oh dear. Suitably chastised, I bring my ugliest, funniest cucumber and hand it in to the organisers who will arrange the produce for display after everything has been given in.

  When it’s all set up I and the children, alongside just about everyone else in the village, go in to look. The first thing I’m struck by is the weird symmetry of the displays. The vegetables and fruit look unreal; they’ve been cleaned, washed and polished so that they look nothing like my produce ever looked. Most are in groups of threes and I see that they are all not only large but uniform in size. There’s not a nobbly parsnip in sight, nor a smallish beetroot or a lettuce with even the slightest hole or blemish. There’s no room here for wonky organic carrots or uneven sets of onions or crooked runner beans. Doug wasn’t kidding when he said folk took their vegetables seriously.

  We move
over to the parsnips, which are long, straight and perfect. ‘The winners will have grown them in lengths of drainpipes, to get them like that,’ Daphne says.

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Not at all. I’ve seen Doug do it and he’s not the only one. He also sieves the soil very finely for them.’

  I’m learning about a type of garden totally alien to the way I work. This seems to me more like controlling nature rather than just letting it all grow as it comes. It’s only when we get to the ‘Oddest Vegetable’ category that I see produce which has a similarity to my own. Here there are carrots shaped like half moons, parsnips with legs and arms sticking out and all sorts of weird shapes and sizes of every kind of vegetable. I’m proud of my cucumber; it looks at home here.

  We wander over to the egg section where I’ve never seen so many varieties, all displayed on earthenware saucers with straw to give it some atmosphere. I recognise the amazing brown eggs that could almost be mistaken for chocolate; my Maran hen lays ones like that. The Arauncanas eggs are a pale blue-green. As with the other produce, the idea is to have the three eggs on display identical in size and shape.

  We stroll around the jams and marmalades, which the judges will select for taste and consistency, and then look at the cakes, the bouncy sponge cakes and fruity farmhouse slab cake. All are beautifully presented and look professionally baked. People have worked long and hard for this show.

  After the judging everyone in the village troops in again to see who has won. You don’t even have to look at the cards by the side of the entrants, with the handwritten First, Second, or Third prize and ‘Highly Commended’, like personal invitations to some exclusive party. All you have to do is look at the faces of the competitors, especially the men. Those that haven’t won look either crestfallen or miffed, but you can tell they’re already thinking of next year’s blue ribbon. Those that did get a coveted prize try to look modest but fail utterly. People crowd around them telling them how exquisite their onions are, their brown papery tops bound up sweetly with brown string, or how big their turnips are, how huge their parsnips. Once again the testosterone in the air is nearly tangible.

  I giggle to Daphne in a whisper, ‘I don’t see the female gardeners strutting around like that.’

  She laughs, ‘They don’t take it as seriously.’

  At the cabbages we see Doug, gloating over his blue ribbon. He’s grown the most humongous cabbage I’ve ever seen. I go to congratulate him and he surprises me by saying, ‘Well my lover, I needs be congratulating you too.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Why your cucumber, ’tis the ugliest the judges have seen for years, apparently. You got the blue ribbon for it.’

  I rush over to have a look and sure enough, there it is, first prize for the oddest-looking vegetable. I couldn’t be more chuffed if I’d grown a hundred perfect leeks and a bigger cabbage than Doug’s.

  ‘So, my lover, what’s your secret then?’ Doug has followed Daphne and me to see my blue ribbon. ‘How you be growing such an ugly thing?’ He snorts with laughter.

  I just grin but Daphne says, ‘What about you, Doug? What nasty things did you use to grow that monster of a cabbage?’

  He scowls at her. ‘That’s a slander I thought I’d never hear. Others may do wicked things with their cabbages, ply them with chemicals and such like, and I know for a fact they do, but not Dougie here, no way.’ He straightens his back and glares at her. ‘I got me own secret ingredient.’

  When we’re out of earshot Daphne says, ‘I can’t resist winding him up sometimes; he does get far too cocky. But it’s true, he’s about the only one who wins prizes without using artificial stuff. He thinks I don’t know it but his secret ingredient is nothing more than good old dung. It works a treat for him every year.’

  A tiny seed of elation begins to plant itself inside me. Dung, eh? Dung is good, dung is organic. Daphne and Joe can supply me, I’m sure. My mind is racing ahead to next year, to huge cabbages, monster onions. Maybe I’ll even grow one bigger than Doug’s, enter it in the show, win the blue ribbon.

  Luckily I stop myself before I get too carried away, and I remember that growing food is not a competition but a way to feed my family the way I want to. And besides, the competitive side of my nature has been mollified, what with my cucumber and now, with another victory. As Daphne and I approach the children’s section I see Amy, waving at me and holding up the card in her hand which says her sunflower has won second prize for the tallest sunflower.

  When all the gaping and gawping over the produce and the prize winners has finished we sit down for a massive Cornish cream tea. Life in London was never like this, I think, as I bite into my second homemade scone and ladle the clotted cream on it as thick as I dare.

  ‘Tuck in, my lover.’ Doug, passing my chair, gives me a nudge on my shoulder. ‘You be a proper gardener now. Mebbe next year you can grow the most peculiar radish. Especially if you talk to it.’ He roars with laughter at his joke, as he always does. Then he adds, ‘I even might be persuaded to give you a gardening tip or two for the future.’ He gives me a smug wink, taps the side of his nose and puffs up his chest on which he’s pinned his blue ribbon.

  ‘Oh you have already,’ I say. ‘Given me a huge tip.’

  He looks at me suspiciously, ‘Have I?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say, all innocent and mysterious. He stares at me then shrugs and goes to get his cream tea, plonking down with it in the seat opposite me and Daphne, the one I’ve been saving for Ben who is somewhere around talking to the locals.

  ‘I have to say, my lover, despite all your peculiar ways, your garden ain’t looking half bad.’ He consumes an entire half scone covered with jam and cream, in one huge mouthful.

  I’m ridiculously gratified. I feel as if I’ve passed some enormous test and have come out with flying colours.

  Chapter 16

  Happy endings

  In October, the country is plagued with storms and ferocious gales. With the autumn tides the sea is fierce, pounding over the sea wall as it is doing today, washing over the road in Morranport where I’m on my walking round. I fear I’m going to be blown away into those monstrous waves, never to be heard of again. Despite being dressed in waterproofs from top to bottom, I’m pretty wet when I reach Archie and Jennifer’s house at the end of the sea wall.

  ‘Come in, quickly,’ Jennifer says, hauling me into the house. ‘Get something warm in you and dry off a bit in the kitchen.’

  I take up her offer gratefully. Archie is in the kitchen, already putting on the kettle. I admire some new paintings of Jennifer’s – she does exquisite portraits of local people, and in fact sold a couple of them at Charlie’s gallery – then comment on the storm.

  ‘It’s a bad one, a south-easterly, and lasting longer than it should. They’ll be more call outs for the lifeboats yet, you wait,’ says Archie.

  Jennifer puts a hand on his shoulder. ‘Wayne will be fine. You worry too much about him.’

  ‘Has the lifeboat already been called out from Falmouth?’

  Archie nods. ‘Early this morning, ages ago when it was still dark. The all-weather boat, there’s a freighter in trouble. An old mate who lives in Falmouth rang to tell me. He knows I like to know when Wayne’s out there.’ He looks at Jennifer, tries to smile as he says to her, ‘You think it is best I don’t know until he’s back safe, but I like to hold him when he’s out there.’ He turns to me, ‘Hold him in my mind, is what I mean. In my heart, you know? Like praying, I guess. I like to feel something, some strength or good wishes or whatever, are going from me to him and all the others, out there in this.’

  He looks out of the kitchen window and my eyes follow, seeing the spray lash against it. I’ve never seen the sea this high. ‘The freighter’s got some sort of engine problem I think, and it’s perilously close to some rocks, not sure exactly where, my mate didn’t know.’

  The three of us are silent, listening to the wind and the lashing rain. I go back out, uncomp
laining about the weather. Walking in it is a doddle compared to what Wayne and the rest of the lifeboat crew are doing.

  When much later I deliver some post to Belle, she asks me in and I accept, hoping to spend a few minutes in front of her wood-burning stove warming up again. Batman stops barking when I shout, ‘Ham,’ and lies down like a lamb in front of me. As usual he accepts my ham gracefully and wags his long, thick, furry tail at me; we’re slowly learning to be friends now.

  Belle says, ‘You’ve heard the lifeboat be out?’

  ‘Archie told me. His godson Wayne is on it. I guess Blake, your grandson, is there too?’

  She nods. ‘His mum just rang. ’Tis monstrous rough out there.’ We sit quietly for a few minutes, listening to the storm.

  ‘It don’t get easier, y’know. Not for his mum, nor me, nor any of us who love him. No matter how many times that lifeboat gets called out.’

  Much later I see Nell in the post office, ask if she’s heard anything about the Falmouth lifeboat. ‘Back safe, only just heard. Freighter still out there though, anchored down but they took the ten man crew off, too dangerous for them. Storm’s the worst I’ve seen in a dozen or more years, I’m telling you.’

  I stay a while, drinking more tea with Nell, before going out in it again and heading home. I think of Belle and Archie and Jennifer, the relief on their faces as they learn that their loved ones are safe home from the sea yet another time. I hope and pray it will always be so for the lifeboat crew.

  The weather stays unpredictable for the next couple of weeks and now I’m getting worried about the wedding. It’s the last Saturday in October, not far away now, and it’s more like winter than autumn. We’ve hardly had a chance to admire the splendour of the turning leaves and many have blown away prematurely in the gales. The autumn chrysanthemums in the village gardens look bedraggled and sodden, and everywhere you stand your feet squelch in the soggy grass and mud.