Chapter Two
‘No idea what I’ll do,’ Della said gloomily.
‘I already had a quick look and there are no other cafés to rent.’ The two of them sat on Evelyn’s favourite bench, the one where the three old men had been earlier.
It looked out to sea but also gave them a clear view of the boat sheds – ‘Just in case we get a morning rush,’ Della said with a wry smile.
The truth was, neither of their establishments was likely to be overrun with custom on a grey morning in February.
Even in summer, Della’s ice cream varieties were an acquired taste.
Instead of offering customers old favourites such as vanilla and choc chip, she liked to make her own unique recipes.
This morning, she had presented Evelyn with a scoop of her latest experiment, mint and burdock.
‘The sugar will help with the shock,’ she said kindly.
Evelyn took small, polite licks, unable to decide which of the competing flavours was more unpleasant.
‘In truth, this space is too big for me. I only need a little kiosk – just enough room for my freezer and a tea urn. Whereas you . . . Well, you’ll need all the space you can get.
’ Della paused to taste her own ice cream, which had an unappetisingly grey hue.
She scrunched up her face. ‘Yeah, this one’s liquorice and nettle.
Might need a bit of refining,’ she conceded.
Evelyn knew what Della was trying to say – that to the untutored eye, her museum was a big confusing muddle of stuff and a clear-out was long overdue.
‘I just need to get on top of my cataloguing,’ Evelyn said firmly. ‘But it’s all significant, every last scrap. All it takes is the right person to come along. One person’s rubbish is another’s treasure.’
Della gave a brief nod, having heard her excuses before. ‘The letter says there’s a period of review, but you know how these things go. It’s a done deal: all worked out on the golf course before they bother consulting people like us.’
‘But they can’t just close us down, can they?’ A coldness snaked through Evelyn’s gut – and it wasn’t Della’s mint and burdock.
Della passed Evelyn her ice cream, smoothed out the letter and read out the highlights. ‘Reassessing the needs of the community . . . Need to generate income . . . Cornish heritage will be preserved. Comments are welcome, blah blah . . . By the deadline: 7th of April.’
Evelyn let this sink in. ‘That’s in two months. Looks like they want our sheds back before the summer season.’ She gazed forlornly down at the twin ice cream cones in her hands. Even in the February chill, they had begun to melt and drips were running onto her hands.
Della followed her gaze. ‘Yeah. The texture might need refining too.’ She nodded at a nearby bin. ‘It’s OK, you can ditch them.’ With relief, Evelyn jettisoned both cones.
Della zipped up her multicoloured jacket and dipped her chin inside the collar. ‘Yep. The council wants us out. And we both know who will be moving in.’
When the men came in the first week of January, all they said to Evelyn was that they were ‘reassessing the property’.
Thinking they might finally repair the hole in the roof, Evelyn gave them a polite welcome, but they didn’t seem interested in the leak, each deftly sidestepping the bucket she’d placed under it.
The one in charge was called Mr Palmer. He had thinning hair and eyes as pale as a rabbit’s and he asked to see all sorts of ludicrous things: a tally of visitor numbers, a health and safety policy and visitor feedback forms. When he saw the sign announcing the prices, he let out a bark of a laugh.
‘That all you charge?’ he asked. ‘Well, that explains a lot.’
Evelyn knew it wasn’t worth wasting her breath explaining the rationale – ‘Enlightenment before profit,’ her father Edwin Silver had announced to the modest crowd that had gathered for the opening ceremony – as the rabbit-eyed Mr Palmer was too young to remember how things used to be.
So she said nothing and watched as he and his mute sidekicks went off to poke around Della’s ice cream parlour next door.
After their visit, Della had headed straight to The Lugger pub, because if there was one thing that Portheast excelled at, it was gossip.
‘It’s all because of that celebrity chef, Rufus Rowan,’ she’d reported back to Evelyn. ‘Apparently, he’s been sniffing around for a new restaurant to add to his empire. And our two “authentically Cornish boat sheds” are exactly what he’s looking for. He’s promised to put Portheast on the map.’
Evelyn was vaguely aware of this Rufus chap, a man with a bristling orange beard and an attitude to match. Already, he owned a string of restaurants in seaside towns, serving up fish and chips at four times the going rate. And now he wanted to take over Evelyn’s museum.
Slowly, the two women walked back to their sheds. As Evelyn stepped inside, the calm darkness welcomed her back. With relief, she breathed in the briny smell, a saltiness that was woven into the coils of rope, the ragged nets and the myriad shells, stones and scraps of driftwood set under glass.
To her surprise, Della had followed her in and was bending down to look for something on the floor. ‘Here you go.’ Della brandished a brown envelope identical to her own. ‘You must have missed it.’
Evelyn glanced at the pile of post that had accumulated behind the door: red pizza leaflets, a brochure for conservatories and what she strongly suspected was a final demand electricity bill.
She accepted the brown envelope and walked over to her desk in the corner, where, after a moment’s indecision, she added the council’s letter to the tallest pile of paperwork.
As Della took in the scene of disarray that was Evelyn Silver’s workspace, she mouthed a silent ‘Wow’. Evelyn cleared her throat. ‘Like I said, I just need to catch up on a bit of cataloguing.’ But even she had to admit that her ‘in-tray’ had got a little out of hand.
Three sides of her desk were piled high with reference books and academic papers, then balanced on top of each pile were various objects.
They included a rusty ship’s lamp, a box of 1970s seaside postcards, a dry agapanthus seed head, three beach shoes (none matching) and a piece of driftwood that, to Evelyn’s eye, resembled a rearing snake.
It was a good job Della couldn’t see underneath the desk, which had become Evelyn’s unofficial overflow space.
There was a pile of mildewed books about fishing and several bin bags containing .
. . well, she wasn’t sure what was inside them.
All she knew was those bags were starting to disintegrate and each time she sat down, small fragments of plastic floated around her ankles, like mournful black confetti.
But now, Evelyn needed to make a show of curatorial efficiency. She retrieved the morning’s finds from her satchel and placed all three onto the green blotter in the centre of her desk: the broken shard of china, the pebble and the old dog’s lead.
She picked up the pottery and began to dust sand from its edges.
‘This fragment, for example, displays a hand-painted design that dates back to . . .’ And then Evelyn stopped.
With a flush of embarrassment, she realised her mistake: she’d recognised the pattern not from her book about the Cornish china clay industry, but from a shopping trip to St Austell last weekend.
She’d popped into Asda for more bin bags, and a mug bearing that exact bird-on-a-branch motif had caught her eye, for the very reasonable price of ￡2. 99.
Casually, Evelyn set aside the offending piece of pottery. ‘I mean, not everything is going to be precious . . .’ she blustered.
But Della wasn’t bothered about the broken mug. She was staring at the old dog lead. This was a surprise to Evelyn, who had herself hesitated over which bag to put it in, unsure whether to classify it as treasure or trash.
Thoughtfully, Della ran a finger over the lead’s ragged orange trim. ‘Mind if I borrow this for a bit?’
‘The dog lead?’ Evelyn was itching to snatch it back because she wasn’t used to people meddling with her treasures. ‘I’m not sure. I mean, it’s not useable. The leather is tough. It’s been in the sea too long.’ A note of alarm crept into her voice. ‘More importantly, it’s not catalogued yet.’
But Della was already making for the door. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll bring it back,’ she called out in her cheery antipodean accent. ‘I’ve got a hunch.’ And then Della was gone, leaving only the faint scent of patchouli oil in her wake.
Determined to put all thoughts of Della and the council out of her head, Evelyn resolved to make a dent in her cataloguing and labelling and remained hard at work for the rest of the morning.
She did not pause to make her usual coffee and she definitely didn’t let her eyes drift towards the stack of paperwork with the brown envelope on top.
Evelyn liked the fact that once she was seated, the piles of books and papers around the perimeter of her desk served as a wall effectively hiding her from sight – not that anyone else ventured into the museum that blustery winter day.
Outside, she could hear the spatter of rain on the paving stones and the slap of the sea against the quay as the tide crept in.
Where possible, Evelyn liked to make her museum labels using the manual typewriter her father had given her. Recently, the letter E key had stopped working, so the challenge was to describe each object without using that troublesome vowel.
Perhaps, she mused, it was a good thing that Della had taken the dog lead away – and not simply because the only viable alternative to ‘lead’ was ‘leash’.
Without knowing more about the object’s history, she was unsure where to put it in the museum.
Given its canine association, it could join the Natural History case, alongside the sun-bleached bones of seagulls, a fragile tern skull, and pink tellin shells, tiny as a baby’s fingernails.
Realistically, the dog lead was probably destined for the catch-all Miscellanea cabinets.
In Evelyn’s view, this was where the museum’s most interesting finds ended up.
And inside the third Miscellanea cabinet lay Evelyn’s most special object of all.
For the past thirty-eight years, it had been her abiding hope that someone would walk into her museum and recognise it, but no visitor had ever shown even a passing interest in the item labelled:
One piece of fine Cornish lace, handmade. Found attached to a baby’s blanket with a safety pin (now rusted), 3 December 1964
This fragment of cream lace, with its ragged edges and intricate motif of daisies, had been pinned to the blanket wrapped around the infant Evelyn when she had been abandoned.
She had been a foundling, left with no note – only this piece of lace as an identifier.
Within the week, she’d had the good fortune to be adopted by Edwin and Elsbeth Silver of Portheast.
Evelyn supposed that meant she was the rightful owner of that piece of lace. But who made it, and why they had pinned it to their newborn baby’s blanket yet never came back to claim her, had remained a mystery.
Finding its maker was one of the reasons why Edwin Silver had pulled strings to turn this abandoned boat shed into a museum.
Handily, it also gave Evelyn a job at what had been a tricky time in her life, having recently returned from a failed traineeship in London that had ended in tears and disgrace.
It was best if Evelyn remained closely anchored in Portheast, her father had said gravely, where she could catalogue facts rather than indulging in fanciful stories.
But with both her parents now gone, the true reason behind this museum had become clearer: her father had paved a way for the broken Evelyn to be made whole.
It was a long-held hope that, if that lace remained on display, one day someone would walk into the Portheast Museum of Maritime Curiosities, recognise it and claim Evelyn as their own.
Having recently marked her sixty-first birthday, Evelyn knew the likelihood of anyone turning up and identifying the lace was becoming smaller. But if her museum disappeared, that slenderest hope would be gone for good.