Chapter 4 Trunk Call
Trunk Call
After that, life at the cottage grew more difficult by the day, so that before we were even two weeks into December, I found myself confessing to Liv about what was happening and that I was only managing to work because I’d bought those noise-cancelling headphones.
‘Don’t you think it’s time to call it a day?’ she suggested sensibly. ‘You can put everything in storage until you find a new home and move back to the flat.’
Evie must have been sitting nearby, for she took the phone and said: ‘That makes sense, Ginny, and there’s lots of research for the new book you could be helping us with.’
Then she cunningly added, knowing how interested I’d be in the prospect: ‘The workmen are finally bringing those trunks of Arwen’s things up from the basement tomorrow.
They couldn’t do it before, because the owners of the next-door house have been around a lot lately, but now they’ve gone abroad till after the New Year.
Aren’t you dying to see what’s in them?’
‘Of course! But I’m staying put till I absolutely have to leave,’ I insisted stubbornly.
I didn’t confess that the thought of the busy, crowded streets of London made me feel panicked, or that the prospect of living at the flat, even for a short time, gave me claustrophobia.
Evie seemed to guess some of this, however. ‘You need to get over your agoraphobia, Ginny.’
‘I haven’t got agoraphobia!’
‘You’re borderline, at the very least,’ she said. ‘I know you only go out when you absolutely have to, and the only person you ever see is that farmer from down the road.’
‘Eli’s a smallholder, not a farmer.’
‘Same difference, just on a smaller scale,’ she said unanswerably.
‘I’ll be fine, and I’m going to step up my internet search for a new place. I’m a cash buyer so once I’ve found somewhere, I can move quickly.’
I’d have to, seeing I had to be out of the cottage by the first day of February!
‘Let me know what you find in those Pandora’s boxes when you open them tomorrow, won’t you?’ I asked.
‘OK, I’ll ring you, or email if you don’t answer because I don’t suppose you’ll hear the phone if you’re wearing those headphones.’
Then Evie handed the phone back to Liv, whose clear, crisp voice said, ‘Ginny, even if you don’t want to move in here, why not just come for a couple of days’ break from all the noise and disruption? I’m sure it would do you good.’
‘I daren’t. Goodness knows what would happen in my absence if I did!’ I exclaimed, then added firmly, ‘Sorry, I’ll have to go now. Someone’s at the door.’
This was not an excuse to put the phone down; there really was someone hammering at the front door.
A big, potbellied workman stood on the doorstep, the one who had been so surly when I’d pointed out I’d need to get my car in and out across his trench. His habit of addressing all his remarks to my boobs didn’t endear him to me, either.
‘I don’t suppose you could make us a cup of tea, love?’ he asked, with a leer that I expect he thought was an ingratiating smile.
‘You suppose right,’ I snapped, and shut the door in his face.
*
By late afternoon next day, when Evie still hadn’t let me know what she’d found in those two boxes, I was almost beside myself with curiosity.
My flurry of text messages went unanswered and it was evening before Evie finally rang.
‘At last!’ I cried. ‘What’s happening? Did you get into the boxes?’
‘Yes, and the game’s afoot, Watson,’ she said.
When she quotes Sherlock Holmes, it means she’s scented a mystery and her bloodhound instincts have been stirred. Once she’s set on a trail there’s no deflecting her.
‘The boxes were locked and we hadn’t got the keys, but once we prised them open, we discovered all kinds of clues to Arwen’s past, her connection with Milly and her brother, Edwin.
Putting them all together has been like making sense of a jigsaw puzzle when most of the pieces are missing and you don’t have the picture. ’
‘But you have made sense of it all now?’ I asked eagerly. ‘What have you discovered?’
‘We proceeded methodically, recording what we found,’ Evie went on maddeningly.
‘We opened a large cabin trunk first, which I now suspect was packed by Arwen following her father’s death and left in Milly’s care – I’ll come to the reason for that bit in a minute – because it was full of mementos and personal documents relating to her parents, Mary and Lewis Madoc, including two framed studio wedding day photos of both Arwen’s parents and grandparents, which I found particularly interesting. ’
‘I’d love copies of those,’ I said.
‘Then I’ll get Liv to organize that for you,’ she promised.
‘I already knew Lewis Madoc was a portrait artist who had continued working in a somewhat Impressionist style, and I’ve now checked out a lot of his work, but it was a wonderful surprise to find two of his small portraits carefully packed at the bottom of the trunk.
They’re of Arwen and her mother. The resemblance between them is striking. ’
‘What do they look like?’ I asked eagerly.
‘I’ll send you pics. They’re both tall and fair, with narrow, aquiline noses, like my mother.’
‘And you,’ I said, although actually I couldn’t remember a time when Evie’s short hair had not been either hennaed a fluorescent orange or dyed some other bright colour and stood up from her head like a cockatoo’s crest. Last time I saw her it had been bubblegum pink.
‘True, I do seem to have the family hooter.’
That nose, along with her beady dark blue eyes, added to the cockatoo effect, but also oddly, together with her height and lean, angular frame, she could look quite distinguished, despite the hair.
Since I possess none of these family attributes, I asked, ‘Who do I take after?’
‘Must be your father’s side. He wasn’t very tall and his hair was the same sort of toffee colour as yours, but darker. And he had hazel eyes, with gold flecks. It’s such a long time ago, I’d quite forgotten that!’
My thick, straight hair is an odd shade of caramel and my eyes, a mossy grey-green, unfortunately without the gold flecks.
‘Tell me what else you found in the trunks,’ I urged, but Evie wasn’t to be hurried.
‘It took a considerable time to sort and evaluate the contents of the larger trunk, but two documents were particularly illuminating.’
‘And they were …?’ I prompted.
‘Well, the first was a copy of Lewis Madoc’s will, dated early 1919, soon after he lost his wife to the Spanish flu.
He evidently wanted to provide for Arwen, should anything happen to him while she was still a minor.
He was twenty years older than his wife.
This was prescient of him, because he too succumbed to the flu at the start of May that year.
Their death certificates are both there.
Arwen was extremely unlucky to lose both parents to the Spanish flu, since the epidemic was fizzling out by then. ’
‘Did Lewis have a lot to leave her?’ I asked.
‘Sadly, since apart from his work he only had an annuity that ceased at his death, nothing much, other than debts. Once his estate had been settled and those paid off, there would be little, if anything, left.’
‘How do you know?’
‘The will makes that clear – and also names his cousin, Cosmo Caradoc, as Arwen’s guardian if she was still a minor at the time of his death.’
I remembered that Evie had told me that Arwen left the Slade in 1919 and that she had studied there between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, and I said, ‘But she was of age. She must have been eighteen by the time her father died.’
‘Actually, Ginny, at that time you only reached your majority at twenty-one,’ Evie said patiently. ‘Also, women’s suffrage was still very much an ongoing battle.’
‘OK, but even if this Cosmo character became her guardian, he must have agreed to her going to live with Milly in Cornwall, mustn’t he? I mean, we know Granny was born there in 1920.’
‘In fact, we know she must have been there before then, because those two Cornish seascapes in Charlotte Vane’s possession are signed and dated September of 1919. Arwen seems to have had the helpful habit of writing the date and subject matter on the reverse of all her artwork.’
‘Does that mean you’ve found more?’
‘I certainly did. For a start, Arwen filled up the space at the top of the large trunk with a random selection of things, including a folder of very accomplished drawings she must have done at the Slade. That’s where I found her parents’ death certificates and her father’s will, too – but also a letter from Cosmo Caradoc, Arwen’s guardian.
It’s evidently in answer to one she must have sent him as soon as she learned the terms of the will.
Caradoc expected her to make her home with his family in North Wales, but Arwen was far from keen on the idea. ’
‘You know, the name Cosmo Caradoc sounds vaguely familiar,’ I said, and was unsurprised when Evie told me he had been a well-known artist of his time.
‘Mainly known for large pastoral scenes and interiors with figures. His work was popular in his day, but has fallen out of favour since. He was from a wealthy family and lived in a remote hamlet called Seren Bach, on the coast of North-West Wales.’
‘If Arwen had always lived in London, I shouldn’t think she would have liked the idea of leaving her friends and her studies at the Slade behind and moving there!’
‘No, you can tell from Caradoc’s reply to her letter that she’d told him about a plan she’d hatched to move to Cornwall with Milly and Edwin.’
‘That seems like a reasonable idea to me,’ I said. ‘Did he agree?’
‘No. He told her it was quite unsuitable and she was much too young to make such decisions for herself. Also, since her father had sought to secure her future by naming Caradoc her guardian, he expected her to fall in with his wishes.’
‘That sounds a bit pompous and autocratic,’ I commented. ‘Positively Victorian!’