Chapter Four
Evelyn’s parents had been no-nonsense people: practical scientists by nature, they never concealed from Evelyn the fact that she had been a foundling. Whenever the subject arose, they discussed it with their usual direct approach.
‘Your birth mother was unable to look after you,’ her father would explain.
‘Chances are, she was too young. Or unwed,’ Elsbeth would add. ‘But we’ll never know.’
They hadn’t even been worshippers at the church on the north coast where the infant Evelyn had been left, but a local doctor knew that the Silvers in Portheast were good people, ready to start a family, and a private adoption was set in motion.
‘One day it was just the two of us – and then we were three. But we soon adjusted,’ Elsbeth used to say with a vague smile.
In her teenage years, Evelyn saw how other mums and dads busily ferried her classmates to the cinema, play dates and sports tournaments and she realised how little impact her own presence had made on her parents’ routines.
She supposed they must have endured things like teething and chickenpox but, for the most part, the Silvers did parenting on their terms. Even the name they chose for their new baby felt a little half-hearted, as if Edwin and Elsbeth had started to thumb through a book of baby names but never got beyond the initial E.
As soon as the infant Evelyn was able to walk, weekends were spent on family field trips, as Edwin Silver specialised in the study of coastal flora and fauna, ably assisted by his wife, an accomplished watercolourist who painted the plants.
By the age of six, Evelyn knew how to identify milkwort, yarrow and eyebright; at ten, she was more familiar with the Latin names of plants than the Top Forty.
In the school holidays, while her classmates jumped off the quay and learned to swim, Evelyn was far away, walking remote clifftop paths with her parents.
In companionable silence, the three of them would comb through the clover and hardy grasses in search of perfect specimens.
The Silvers kept her warm, clothed and fed.
They gave her a place in the world, albeit an unconventional one.
The TV was only turned on for the news and she was frequently dressed in her mother’s cast-offs: Marks & Spencer frocks and sensible cardigans.
Her first bra was also a hand-me-down and she wore it with shame, crossing her arms over the too-large cups until the PE teacher had a quiet word with her mother.
At home, it was a tradition that on the first of each month, Evelyn was called into the kitchen to have her height measured.
She stood with her back flat against the wall so that Elsbeth could mark a horizontal line above her head.
At such moments, Evelyn felt like one of her parents’ greenhouse plants: routinely tended and measured against some unstated ideal.
Her parents’ lack of sentimentality meant that the words ‘when we’re dead and buried’ had long been part of the family vocabulary.
Still, it had been a shock when her mother went so early.
It had happened on a clifftop ramble with Edwin, who described later how Elsbeth had sunk to her knees in a patch of sea-thrift, one of her favourites, before rolling onto her back to stare up at the perfect blue sky.
She had been forty-eight and had been felled by an undiagnosed heart condition, the ancient local doctor explained. ‘A good thing your father still has you at home,’ he added.
Her father had lived to the age of seventy-six, when he caught Covid.
There was no time for last words, just his blurry image on her phone screen as an exhausted ICU nurse called Priscilla finally said, ‘I’m very sorry, I have another patient in need.
We need to say goodbye’ and then the screen had gone black.
Now only Evelyn remained to uphold the spirit of the museum.
She had made sure its routines had remained unchallenged. Until now.
Evelyn locked up the museum and began the long walk up the hill to her home.
Everyone had assumed the Silvers – and therefore Evelyn – were wealthy, but that had not been the case.
After her father’s death, it emerged that he had run up numerous debts, so after a hushed conversation with the solicitor, Mr Treffrey Junior, Evelyn agreed the contents of the house should be auctioned.
The second surprise was that the Victorian home she assumed her parents owned was in fact a long-term rental from the Warburn estate, once the area’s largest landowner.
A peppercorn rent had been agreed when her parents first came to the town, but with them both dead, the tenancy was null and void.
With a doleful expression, Mr Treffrey Junior explained that Evelyn would need to adapt to being ‘a woman of slender means’.
Portheast now being awash with holiday lets and second homes, even a small cottage was beyond her.
‘You will continue to be paid a small stipend in perpetuity, but if you wish to stay local, your best bet is Sunny Days,’ he advised.
Sunny Days was a holiday park on the outskirts of town and not the sort of place the Silvers had ever frequented.
But with little alternative, Evelyn was shown around the three static caravans that were available.
She chose the one furthest from the clubhouse and beside a thin patch of woodland.
Her new home was called The Mirage and it came with what the salesman called ‘sea glimpses’.
She soon discovered that in summer, the place was overrun with children, dogs and Union Jack flags and in winter it became a quagmire of mud.
The Mirage was one of the shabbiest models at Sunny Days, but what Evelyn liked most about it was its impermanence: the flimsy bounce of the plastic front door, the way that the bottled gas was always running out and her neighbours changed on a weekly basis.
It was the opposite of what she’d grown up with: unquestioned traditions and furniture darkened by decades of wear.
It fostered the illusion she might not always live this way.
The wind was picking up, dashing tiny grains of sand against her coat, which was not good news: if an easterly gale came in, her little home would be buffeted all night. She didn’t mind it when the caravan rocked – it felt like a comfort of sorts – but Toots hated it.
Toots (short for Tutankhamun) was her cat and he’d appeared a few days after Evelyn had moved her meagre possessions into The Mirage.
She’d returned from the on-site Spar shop to find a small black cat sitting on her top step, his tail neatly coiled around him.
Then he’d slunk inside, given the caravan the once-over and settled onto the bobbly brown corner sofa.
That evening, she’d shared her ready meal with him and this, it seemed, was reason enough for Toots to keep coming back.
As Evelyn warmed up her tin of soup, she left the caravan door ajar and it wasn’t long before she felt the damp sleekness of Toots circling her ankles. He didn’t always come – she suspected he had the run of several places – but it was nice when he did.
Later, Toots slept curled up at the foot of her narrow bed, but Evelyn couldn’t settle.
The wind whistled through the gaps in the plastic windows and the branches above her creaked and sighed, but she was used to that.
No, it was the day’s events playing on a reel in her head that kept her awake.
The letter from the council, Della’s slightly manic face and Leonard with his sad, rheumy eyes.
Most of all, she was plagued by the thought of losing her beloved collections.
Unable to sleep, she got up and sat at the fold-out breakfast table.
She opened up her mother’s paintbox (one of the few things she’d kept from her childhood home) and she set to work.
She had a few photographs of museum objects on her mobile phone (a necessary evil in this day and age), but she barely needed to look at them because the objects she wanted to draw were clear in her mind’s eye.
By morning, she had finished and she stood up, stretched and admired her work. She had made a poster, which she would get photocopied.
At the top, bright red letters announced:
Calling all treasure hunters!
Below, she’d written a short paragraph:
Do you recognise these long-lost items? Come to a meeting at the Maritime Museum on Friday 6th February, 2 p.m. and you will find plenty of things like these that could relate to your family history. This museum is threatened with closure, but it is part of your Cornish heritage. Save Our Museum!
Then came the best bit: Evelyn had divided the rest of the page into four and drawn an object from the museum in each box.
In the top left, she had chosen an old favourite, a neatly embroidered map of the Cornish coastline and a boat, worked in coloured thread on sailcloth.
She’d found it in a jumble sale and always wondered about its origins.
Next to it was a newer addition, the painting she’d only just catalogued and that she secretly hoped was an Alfred Wallis.
For the bottom left, she chose a pretty teacup she’d always loved.
It definitely wasn’t from Asda, but was in bone china and decorated with a design of golden lilies.
The colours had faded and a hairline crack ran from the base to the rim, but otherwise it was perfect.
Finally, in the bottom right-hand corner, she had traced the familiar tiny knots and threads of her own piece of fine Cornish lace, its top speared with a rusted safety pin.