Chapter Six The Four Items
Chapter Six
The Four Items
Sariah Carnie was not a sentimental person, never had been.
Efficient and organised, yes, which was why her job at the hotel suited her so well.
She was a whiz with spreadsheets and had a knack for remembering guests’ names and preferences.
But the moment Jacob showed her the poster he wanted to put on the hotel noticeboard, her heart did a weird flip.
She was probably mistaken. After all, there must have been hundreds if not thousands of teacups made like the one on the poster.
It had been a family tradition that they all went to the beach on the May Day bank holiday and Grandma Karensa insisted on doing it in style, with proper food and her precious bone china. ‘None of your paper cups and plastic plates,’ she always said.
Except that year, her grandma had been complaining of dizzy spells, so Sariah’s mum, Grace, and Auntie Rose took over doing the cooking, which really meant Grace had to do it all.
Nobody said it out loud, but her Auntie Rose had airs and graces.
She didn’t live locally, for a start; she’d moved to somewhere called Cheltenham and lost her accent.
She talked like a BBC newsreader and, on the rare occasions when she did come home, Rose had a free pass from doing anything strenuous.
Rose sat around in a powder blue twinset and pink padded headband and leafed through a magazine while her older sister Grace cooked.
She explained that she’d recently ‘had her colours done’ and pastels were her best shades.
If Rose’s colours were pink and blue, Grace’s were black and red.
Left alone to bake, whisk, roll and ice all the food for the May Day picnic, Sariah’s mum got hotter and crosser, and Sariah kept out of her way.
On the day, Grandma Karensa got out her old picnic hamper, which used to belong to her own mother.
It was made of wicker and inside there were brown leather straps to hold the china cups and plates in place.
To Sariah and her younger brothers, that hamper had near magical qualities: when you heard the creak of it opening, you knew the picnic was about to start.
The family always sat in the same spot and used the same green and yellow checked blanket, its wool long-since stiffened with salty sand.
Because she’d recently turned thirteen, Sariah had wanted to appear sophisticated, so she had stayed sitting on the itchy blanket while her brothers and her dad ran down the beach, black silhouettes against the dazzle of the sea.
It wasn’t long before Sariah regretted her decision because there was nothing to do except wait for the boys to get hungry and come back.
Finally, Jamie and Liam ran up the beach like excited puppies, kicking up sand and dripping seawater everywhere.
They didn’t get told off. Unlike Sariah, Jamie and Liam could do no wrong.
Out came the food: warm bread rolls, hard-boiled eggs with salt in a twist of paper and shiny slices of ham that made Sariah’s stomach turn.
Then came the good stuff: scones with cream and jam (jam first!), shortbread and a big simnel cake with marzipan and icing.
Then Grandpa Luke and her dad slept and the women drank tea from a flask.
She noticed that Auntie Rose stuck her baby finger out to one side when she held her teacup, and so, hoping to appear sophisticated, Sariah asked for a cup too.
Yes, she insisted, she would like the taste.
But when she took her first sip, she had to turn her face away.
Grandma Karensa had been right: it was horribly bitter.
Sariah waited until all the grown-ups were asleep and the boys had run off before she carefully carried her cup over to the big rock in the middle of the beach.
She liked to imagine that, from afar, she would look alluring, sipping her tea and looking out to sea – the sort of girl a handsome stranger might find irresistible.
The accident happened in an instant. One minute, she’d set the teacup on a flat nook in the rock; the next it was tumbling.
She wanted to wind back time, rerun the day so it spooled out differently, with her running down to the sea with her brothers, drinking orange squash instead of tea and staying away from the jagged rock.
Horrified, she looked down. Tea had turned a patch of the grey stone black and the empty cup lay on the sand. Praying it wasn’t broken, she jumped down. But there it was – a long crack, from base to rim – and she knew her fate was sealed.
Over at the picnic blanket, the grown-ups dozed on, but even in sleep, her mother Grace’s face looked clenched and angry. Sariah held the cup and thought of all the times she’d been told off for far less serious misdemeanours. Panic began to bloom. She would be in such trouble.
Then she heard an unfamiliar voice beside her.
It was Rose, carrying the picnic hamper.
‘Here,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Give it to me.’ Rose took the cup and placed it back in the basket, turned at an angle so that the crack didn’t show.
Then she fastened the leather straps around the stacks of plates, cups and saucers and closed the lid.
‘There, all packed up. And when we get back, I’ll make sure I do the washing up.
’ She gave Sariah a wink. ‘No one needs to know.’
‘Thanks,’ Sariah whispered. Then they sat together, listening to the calls of seagulls and the rush of the waves until the air cooled and the boys came running back up the beach.
‘Makes a change, you doing something useful,’ her mother said when she saw Auntie Rose already carrying the basket, and Rose gave a polite shrug. In Sariah’s mind, the broken cup wouldn’t reappear until next May – a whole year away.
But next spring, there was no picnic and the family had bigger problems to think about.
Grandma Karensa’s dizziness had got worse and she’d had a fall, breaking her hip.
She languished in hospital, where they diagnosed other unmentionable ailments.
Grace sent Sariah round with cottage pies, stews and soups for Grandpa Luke.
The last time Sariah saw her grandmother, she had held a drink of water (sadly in a paper cup, the only sort available) to the old woman’s lips, but she was too weak to sip. Sariah wished she could get that image out of her head.
After the funeral, Grandpa Luke got a place in an ex-Armed Forces home, a nice one-bed unit with a red emergency cord hanging in the bathroom and a wipe-clean armchair.
Down in the lounge there was bingo on Thursdays and singalong Saturdays.
Auntie Rose came back for the funeral, but only on a day-return ticket.
A month later, the council wanted her grandparents’ house back, so it was down to Sariah’s mum and dad to clear it out.
Perhaps the cracked teacup was discovered and discarded at that point, or the hamper was dispatched, unopened, to a charity shop; Sariah had no idea.
Because, after Grandma Karensa’s funeral, things at home went from bad to worse, with arguments and slammed doors.
Sariah started staying over with friends whenever possible and when she was fifteen, she left home for good.
She had barely spoken to her mother since, but the last she heard, she was still in Redruth, while her father was long gone.
Seeing the cup on the poster, Sariah could pretend it was a strange coincidence.
But when she’d seen it for real in the museum, there was no doubt it was the same one: that jagged crack was etched in her memory.
Quite how that lone cup had ended up behind glass in the local museum was a mystery, but one Sariah had no intention of solving.
That cup was a painful reminder of how Sariah felt as a child: always in the wrong or about to get told off.
As she walked away from the chaotic museum, Sariah vowed never to set foot in the place again. In her view, Evelyn Silver was wrong. Objects might come with stories, but not all of them needed to be shared.
Now aged thirty, Sariah had no plans to have a family. But if she ever did, she would do things differently. She would draw her child towards her, rather than letting them drift away. And she would make them feel loved – no matter how many cups they broke or mistakes they made.
Item 2: Hand-embroidered picture of a boat at sea, with a section of the Cornwall coast. Coloured silk thread on sailcloth. Date unknown.
Alison Blake was bone-tired. She’d been up since 6 a.m., sliding out of bed quietly so as not to wake Roy.
Before heading to the sports centre for her shift, she’d made their son, Will, his packed lunch to take to nursery and put on a load of laundry.
Once at work, she updated the rota and left a message with the plumber because the women’s changing rooms had flooded again.
She made herself wait until 8 a.m. before texting Roy.
Forgot to say, he now hates Rice Krispies. Cheerios only!
She hoped the exclamation mark looked jokey rather than shouty. It was tricky, sometimes, to get the tone right.
She watched the blink of grey dots on her phone screen, picked at the skin around her nails and wondered if she’d gone too far. She didn’t want to imply Roy couldn’t work these things out on his own. ‘Micromanaging’ he called it.
The dots disappeared and Alison supposed she’d find out later if she’d overstepped the line.
She’d come to sense the mood of the house as she stepped through the front door; it was like dipping your toe in the water before a swim, that split second you had to decide if it was freezing cold or bearable. But either way, you had to jump in.