Chapter Thirty-Nine
Dear New Owner of Sailing Ship,
I have deliberately put this painting into a local jumble sale in the hope that someone buys it simply because they like the picture.
If you happen to be a dealer who thinks they have struck gold with an undiscovered Alfred Wallis, I advise you to calm down because I am almost certain this is not by Wallis’s hand.
The strokes are too tentative and the image feels flat.
To my mind, Wallis’s work expresses a genuine love of the sea.
This painting, however, is the antithesis of that. It is a fake.
That was the year he’d tried to win back an old flame but she had the good sense to turn him down. To ask for my forgiveness, he bought me this ‘token of love’. The irony of it being fake is not lost on me.
From the start, our marriage was one of convenience and my husband was unfaithful many times over the years. I turned a blind eye. But when he tried to go back to his first love, that hurt.
I have shared too much. But I wanted you to know that this small painting carries a story of woe.
For many years it has hung on my bedroom wall and each time I gazed at it, I detested my husband a little more.
Now, I am getting rid of it for good and it will be a relief never to set eyes on it or its fake sentiments ever again.
C W, October 2019, Cornwall
After reading the letter that he’d found secreted inside the frame, Jacob slid it back inside its envelope and propped it up beside the painting.
Now he’d digested the information, it occurred to Jacob that his father Simon also deserved to know the contents of the letter.
Jacob tried ringing him, but there was no answer and then he remembered he and Juniper were on holiday in Italy, probably drinking wine and eating arancini or whatever it was they did on those trips.
A bombshell like that might spoil their appetite.
But then Jacob wondered if the letter would come as such a surprise to his father.
Jacob couldn’t bear to stay in his room looking at the wretched painting a moment longer.
Grabbing his jacket, he bounced down the stairs two at a time and emerged onto the street, where the air was heavy with sea mist. It was the sort of day when visitors trailed from gift shops to cafés, never quite satisfied, and he felt much the same.
A couple of weeks ago, he’d have headed for the gym, but since Alison left it had lost its allure.
He couldn’t even while away a few hours at The Lugger because since the exhibition, he’d been quietly advised to stay away.
‘Roy is a regular, so best you keep a low profile,’ Arnold the landlord had told him.
For want of anything better to do, Jacob got into his souped-up Mini and set off towards Fowey.
As he reached the outskirts, Jacob told himself he’d come to visit the new deli, which stocked local cheeses and sausages and those nice Spanish crackers flavoured with rosemary that he used to get from Waitrose.
But as he parked in a quiet cul-de-sac, he admitted the truth: he’d come to check on Michael, the man who had told him and Alison about fishing knots but who hadn’t come to the exhibition and wasn’t answering his landline phone.
As Jacob retraced the steps he’d made with Alison and her baby, a visit that seemed to belong to a time when life was so much simpler, he wished more than ever that she was by his side.
At Michael Bower’s bungalow, the curtains were closed and his rubbish bin had been left askew on the front path, neither of which squared with the polite, punctilious man they had met several weeks ago.
Jacob rang the doorbell and looked up and down the street, suddenly self-conscious. It was strange, Jacob thought, how a bell could sound different when no one was home, emptier somehow. From inside, not even the barking of Michael’s small dog disturbed the air.
He stepped back from the porch and looked up at the windows.
He hoped this meant Michael had gone on holiday or was visiting family.
But there was a horrible inevitability when he heard the sound of a next-door neighbour opening their front door.
They too had a dog, a scampering black-furred thing on short legs that ran down their path and up Michael’s until it was circling around Jacob’s feet, snuffling and whining.
‘Sorry, he’s too quick for me.’ A woman in an old-fashioned housecoat followed in his doggy wake, trying to grab his collar. ‘It’s the doorbell – soon as he hears it he waits by the front door and then he’s off.’
‘I was looking for Michael, but it doesn’t look like he’s in.’ Jacob felt acutely embarrassed to be putting out Michael’s neighbour.
‘Stop, come . . .’ The woman was making lunges at the dog but it was too quick for her.
Jacob reached down and took hold of its collar and waited for the woman to pick it up.
‘Good boy,’ she said, stroking its head, although Jacob could see no evidence this was true. ‘So, you a friend of Michael? Family?’
‘Neither. He helped with some information for an exhibition we had in Portheast and I wanted to update him. Tell him how it went,’ Jacob said.
‘Oh, I see.’ At that, the woman put the errant terrier on a lead and let him sniff around the porch and the grass, as if she didn’t want to say any more within the dog’s hearing. ‘Michael was admitted to hospital, few weeks back,’ she explained.
‘Is he OK?’ Jacob wasn’t sure he could take more bad news in one day.
‘He’s doing well,’ the woman said. ‘Fell in the park and broke his leg. Waiting to get a care package in place before they’ll let him come home. Either way, he won’t be walking this one for a while.’
They both watched the small dog cock a leg and mark a flowerpot as his own.
‘I’m sure Michael would welcome a visit,’ she added.
‘Thanks, I’ll do that.’
‘Meanwhile, this little tyke is driving us mad. Already got three dogs of our own, see, and they don’t get on. But what was I going to do – turn him away? Send him to the pound?’
An hour later, Jacob was back on the road.
In the back of his car he had two feeding bowls, a bag of kibble, four tins of food and what he was told was a ‘donut’ bed that smelled of wet dog.
Oh, and Max, a terrier puppy of indeterminate breed.
To repeat the words of Michael’s frazzled neighbour: what was he going to do – turn him away?
The neighbour managed to get through to Michael on the ward telephone and explained the situation. ‘But there’s a nice young man here, called Jacob, from Portheast. Says he came to see you about some knots? That make any sense?’
That evening, as he and Max settled down to watch The Dog House, two good things occurred to Jacob.
The first was that he’d barely glanced at the painting since he’d got back, because it turned out that looking after a puppy was a full-time job.
The second was that he’d promised to visit Michael in hospital, which was the perfect excuse for getting back in touch with Alison.