Chapter 13 Settling In
Settling In
Feeling the need to be alone for a while after lunch, I retired to my cosy bedroom.
There I arranged my desk, laying out my paints and bottles of drawing ink around the table easel, before erecting the bigger easel and putting it in the window, then tightening the nuts as much as I could because the thing always tried to slowly close itself up, like a faulty umbrella.
Still, sometimes I like to put up my work on it so I can step back and consider it.
Once I’d put out the jars of paint brushes – fat bamboo ones and sable fine liners – pens, pencils, water jars, palettes … all the familiar accoutrements to my work, it looked very inviting, there in the window embrasure with a view over sloping grass towards the distant gleam of the sea.
There was one small bookshelf stocked with a random selection of novels to suit all tastes in bedtime reading, but also two other, larger, empty ones, which I now began to fill with the contents of the two big cartons that Tudor had brought up from the car the day before.
First, in year order, went my sketchbooks, fat with all the odd variety of things I’d stuffed between the pages: postcards and photos, cuttings from magazines and papers, recipes, nature notes, craft ideas …
They bulged, all held together with elastic bands, some of which had shrivelled to look like desiccated worms.
I made a mental note to buy some more next time I had the opportunity … and maybe some new make-up wouldn’t come amiss. I decided I’d better start a list. I love lists; it’s so satisfying when you tick something off.
I’d soon crammed most of the other shelves with boxes of photographs of Wisteria Cottage and the old woods, and of course hundreds of Mrs Snowboots. I had one of her in a little silver frame, too, which I set on my bedside table.
Then there were several old-fashioned photograph albums, which held my best photographs, to pile on one bottom shelf.
Finally, I arranged on the empty top shelves of both bookcases the treasures I needed near me when I was working: a little splotchy brown and cream stone bear that Evie had once brought back from Canada for me; a twig with a beard of moss hanging from it; a huge leathery dark bronze oak leaf; a piece of special green stone from Ireland, and a few other odds and ends picked up on my way through life, as you do …
The little glass Christmas tree was the last thing to be unwrapped, very carefully, and set on the desk where the coloured glass parcels caught the light.
Now the room had become mine: I could work happily here, even if I was still troubled by the thought of Evie, possibly even now planning on how to use her relationship with Nerys to force the latter to reveal details of the family history she might not want to.
I couldn’t forget that look on Nerys’s face when Evie had told her we were related and her intention to find out more about Arwen’s stay here and the connection with Cosmo Caradoc.
It was … perhaps first startled, but quickly guarded and wary.
I liked Nerys, and if there was any dirty linen to be laundered in the family history department, I didn’t see why she should be forced to reveal it.
But then, the expression could just have been dismay at realizing where the focus of my formable mother’s attention was going to lie.
That wasn’t the only thing on my mind either.
I was finding sharing a house with Rhys Tarn totally unsettling.
Of course, after our original meeting, once I’d found out he was married, I’d done my best to forget about him.
That hadn’t always proved easy when his deep, mellow voice was so often on the radio, reading poetry or discussing literary fiction.
Still, I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself over him all over again. My guard was up and I’d treat him just the same as any other of the household.
Time had passed quickly and the late December day was rapidly growing dark.
Remembering that there would be tea, coffee and cake in the refectory – my cake, which I have to say is the most delicious Christmas cake you will ever taste, however immodest that seems – and suddenly ravenous, I headed out of the door.
If my appetite carried on like this I’d be entirely spherical by the time I left, and someone would have to roll me out to the car like a giant snowball.
*
The air of Seren Bach must have had the same effect on the appetite of the others, for most of them were there before me. Cariad rushed in just after I arrived, her face pink from the cold.
She was followed by Rhys, whose craggy face, now he’d had his rest, looked younger and much less forbidding.
One corner of his long mobile mouth quirked up in a smile when his amber eyes met mine, but I looked away quickly.
While I still felt that tug of connection I’d instantly been aware of the first time we met, I wasn’t going to let myself be fooled into thinking it was mutual this time.
Snookums rushed up barking joyously to welcome his mistress and brought Cariad his red rubber ball, which she rolled for him over the wooden floor.
‘Go and wash your hands if you intend to eat cake,’ said Rhys.
‘Well, you too. You were patting the new pony. It’s sort of pink, but they call it strawberry roan,’ she explained to us. ‘It’s very placid and used to little children too, so Mel’s mum is really pleased with it.’
Clearly, she didn’t include herself among these lesser beings.
I’d just sat down with coffee and a slice of my own cake, having been almost elbowed out of the way by Kate, who seemed to be on her second slice, when Cariad, fixing me with a dark gaze, suddenly said: ‘Ginny, can you ride?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, surprised. ‘I went to a boarding school for a couple of years where it was on the curriculum and some of the girls had their own ponies with them.’
‘It’s a pity it’s winter, then, or we could have gone on a trek, but they only do them in the summer. Daddy comes sometimes.’
‘Really?’ I said, eyeing Rhys’s tall, muscular frame dubiously.
He grinned. ‘Believe it or not! Emma keeps a couple of large cobs with, I think, a bit of the carthorse in them, for her heavier customers.’
They went out to wash and came back just as everyone was complimenting me on my Christmas cake.
‘It’s the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted,’ Toby said.
‘You’re right,’ agreed Nerys. ‘Even Bronwen wants the recipe, Ginny. She’s offered to swap it for the wassail cake one, which she guards jealously, as long as you don’t share it with anyone else.’
‘That would be great. I collect recipes. I think the taste of my cake is due to my soaking the dried fruit in dark rum for five days, and then using butter in the mix.’
There was no sign of Timon, presumably still at the pottery, or Evie, who would be having tea at this moment with Noel at the bookshop and pumping him for information.
But Verity was opposite me, next to Nerys, very, very slowly chewing each crumb of a tiny piece of cake before swallowing it, and I asked her if she had completed her watercolour of the flowers.
‘It still needs some finishing touches,’ she said. ‘But so many of the petals have fallen.’
‘I’m sure you can add those from the photos you took of the arrangement,’ suggested Nerys. ‘You work a lot from photos, don’t you?’
‘Only as reference points,’ said Verity, a little stiffly.
‘I work from photographs a lot,’ I said, ‘as well as from quick outdoor study sketches of plants and animals, but you can’t really sit there in the dark painting badgers, for instance.’
‘Good point,’ said Toby.
The twins had been silent until now, but Opal, who was nibbling a piece of cake even smaller than Verity’s – more of a crumb than anything – said, ‘Capturing our performances on film is part of our art form, but we ourselves are our points of reference.’
Since from what they’d already said, their work consisted of filming or photographing themselves in various situations, that was sort of blindingly obvious, but Opal said it as if she was imparting a great secret of her Art.
I don’t think Pearl heard her. She and Toby, who was sitting on her other side, were both demolishing large slices of cake and, in between bites, talking in an undertone.
Opal cast her sister’s averted and unusually animated face a basilisk glare, but the effect only seemed to work eye to eye, for Pearl carried on her conversation with Toby, a faint flush warming her pale little face.
Rhys got up from the table first, saying he had some things to catch up on, now that his brain was functioning again. Kate, looking disappointed, said she had hoped they could have a cosy little chat about her ideas for a new novel.
‘Some other time,’ he said, evasively.
‘Since we are all professional artists and writers, we must respect each other’s need to work during the day, although of course in the evenings we can discuss what we are doing, if we wish,’ said Nerys, and Kate looked deeply dissatisfied, as if she expected Rhys to be on tap twenty-four seven.
Verity, whose mother must have made her chew her food a hundred times, was still eating her cake and Tudor was clearing the table around her when Cariad dragged me off upstairs to look at her books.
It seemed Cariad had been an early reader, just like me, so her many bookshelves ranged from board books, including mine, through classic children’s fiction, to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and T. H. White’s novels, including The Sword in the Stone.
Also, like me, she tended to go back and comfort-read favourite children’s books, between more heavyweight ones. Cariad’s shelves also held a variety of books on archaeology and ancient history.
‘I’ve got all your Mrs Snowboots books even though I’m way too old for them, because I love the illustrations,’ she said seriously. ‘The same with the Hedgehoppers books. I want them all.’
‘That’s very flattering,’ I said. ‘Did you say my new Hedgehoppers book was on your Christmas wish list?’
‘Yes, Uncle Noel will give me that, and the new Mrs Snowboots one. I asked Daddy for the complete set of Harry Potter books because I’ve only seen the films and the books are never the same as those, are they?’
‘No, definitely not,’ I agreed.
‘My friend Mel likes books with ponies in. She’s a bit obsessed.’
‘I’ve got quite a lot of those myself,’ I admitted, ‘but they belonged to my mother’s PA, who used to be my nanny.
She was brought up in the country and hated it, but she was given that kind of book and she still had them.
But of course, I didn’t only read those.
I’m like you, I read anything and everything, and as soon as I was old enough I started scouring second-hand bookshops.
My mother buys me a book for Christmas every year too.
She doesn’t go in much for present giving, so that’s it, but it’s generally on feminist art history, or poetry. ’
‘My mummy used to send Daddy tokens so he could get me what I wanted,’ Cariad said.
‘She sent them to you?’ I echoed.
‘Yes, because she and Daddy divorced years ago and she lived in London after that. Daddy used to take me there sometimes to see her, but once when she took me back to her flat her boyfriend, Finn, was there and I didn’t like him at all. I could tell he was only pretending to be pleased to see me.’
‘That wasn’t very nice of him,’ I said, while trying to take in the information that Rhys had been divorced from his wife for years …
‘Yes, and when I told Daddy about Finn sniffing his sherbet up his nose through a straw instead of sucking it up with a liquorice wand like anyone else, he said perhaps Mummy should just come and see me here, on her own, instead. But she didn’t.
We just face-timed occasionally after that, but then she had a car accident and was killed. ’
‘That’s very sad,’ I said weakly.
‘I suppose so. Even though I hardly saw her, she could be fun when she was in the mood. Nerys says she was a very good sculptor, too – and of course, she was very pretty.’
‘She was beautiful,’ I agreed, remembering that lovely, Pre-Raphaelite profile of the dying woman in the car. ‘And Nerys was right, she was a very talented sculptor.’
‘Nanny said she’d probably gone to heaven, because she wasn’t bad enough for the other place,’ Cariad confided.
‘I’m sure she’s right,’ I said feebly.
‘Yes …’ She eyed me sideways. ‘Daddy was surprised to find you here, wasn’t he? But nice surprised. He never said he’d met you before, even though he knew you were my favourite author!’
‘Maybe he forgot? It was only a brief meeting at a party, years and years ago.’
‘I don’t think he’d forgotten. And he likes you, Ginny, I can tell.’
‘Since we’ve hardly exchanged a word since I got here, I don’t know how you work that one out!’ I said lightly and got up to leave. ‘I’d better go and get ready for dinner.’
‘And I’m going to have a shower because I smell of horse,’ said Cariad. ‘If I’m down late, don’t let that Kate woman wolf all the canapés.’
‘I don’t think I could really stop her; she’s built like a bulldozer,’ I said without thinking, and Cariad giggled.