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‘My friend helped me find him …’
‘Now if I was a little nosier, I’d ask if that friend was anyone interesting?’
‘He’s interesting, as in an interesting person, just notLove Islandinteresting.’
‘Are you sure? Sometimes the greatest romances blossom from friendships.’ Nanny G’s eyes looked vivid again. The warm evening light made her look younger, Helen could almost imagine the years rewinding off her face and what Gladys looked like all that time ago.
‘Well, there’s actually someone else whose shirt I wouldn’t mind ripping off on Kynance Cove!’ Helen allowed herself to smile and wondered if anyone else talked to their nan like that?
‘Now who would ever do such a thing?’ Nanny G’s eyes twitched. ‘I had fun once.’
‘Well, apparently, the fact that Vernon wrote to you every week was quite special. He was married, Nan. Those children he dropped off were his …’
‘Ha, I always knew he had the devil in him … of course that’s why he was so attractive …’ Nanny G was looking out the window now, her mind far out of the annexe and running across the beach again.
‘Yeah, his daughter seemed to think he was a bit of a …’
‘Flaming youth. I know. I mean, I knew it, I must have known it deep down … and I don’t think I minded. It was just nice to have the dream of him to hold on to. Especially during the war! A bit of light relief.’
‘His letters were so romantic though? I don’t know. I think I feel bad, Nan? I was really hoping he would still be alive, or would have been single when you knew him, or …’
‘… have my name tattooed across his heart?’ Nanny G grinned.
‘Well, apparently, he named his daughter after two of his mistresses, which is nearly the same?’
For the first time in a month Nanny G giggled. She still sounded like a schoolgirl, and covered her hand with her mouth. She had deep crow’s feet from a lifetime of finding things funny.
‘So, you’re not at all disappointed?’
‘Of course not, my dear! I am actually very flattered that my beautiful, talented, granddaughter went to such an effort to find this out for me. I also now can take a copy of that picture, can’t I? Good job Grandpa M isn’t around to disapprove. I’ll put them both together on my mantelpiece.’
‘It just doesn’t seem to be a very good end to the story.’
Nanny G threw her handkerchief into Helen’s face. ‘Now Helen, if I can give you just one piece of advice, you mustn’t keep thinking that life is like a fairy tale. You were always so good at your writing, lost in your own world, but it isn’t the real world.
‘Vernon, for me, is a wonderful fantasy. You can’t keep being besotted on sight with people forever, it doesn’t work! Or at least it works a lot better at sixteen than at thirty-six, and even worse at eighty-six. Now I can’t say I was very overwrought when Grandpa M sat down next to me on the train one day and offered to share his sandwich with me, but he grew on me …’
‘I thought you two weren’t particularly …’
‘Well, he certainly annoyed me like no one else in the world, but I loved him. I loved him oh so very much. All his silly ways and annoying notes. He wasn’t always such a stick-in-the-mud. We had our good times … and he was always there. He gave me all my wonderful children … But our romance didn’t come in the usual forms. It wasn’t love letters, alfresco meals, or dancing in the moonlight. It was there when he pitched our tent in the rain, and I sat in the car under a blanket; when I made him pork chops that he loved and I still despise, too chewy! It was there when he held my hand, and took a little sigh as he passed away. It was all him. Those dreadful sticky notes and all.’ A glimmer of recognition passed through Nanny G’s eyes.
‘You must miss him so much …’
‘I do; when I go to sleep it’s not running across a beach in the moonlight that I think about. I think about how Grandpa M used to put his arm around me every night. Even if we’d spent the whole evening calling each other nitwits.’
Chapter 28
As the last of the sunlight receded over the clifftops, Henry’s Landy struggled down the shingle path towards Polveath cove. Helen strained her ears and could swear she heard the dull thud of Ship/Wrecked in the distance. Hedgerows bursting with gorse and briars scratched past the windows, as a slow trail of festival goers marched down the cliffs. Occasionally, a hand would bang on the windscreen, ‘Oggy! Oggy! Oggy!’ then slip back into the oncoming darkness.
Helen kept scanning the faces in the crowd; she couldn’t stop herself from thinking, ‘Is it him?’ In her mind, she’d gone over a hundred different ways she could meet Brody. Would he be there checking into the festival as she showed up? Would they end up with tents pitched opposite one another and stumble into each other in the dead of night? Would she not see him, think all hope was lost and then just as they were leaving on the last day catch sight of his car and wave? He would smile back at her, run his fingers through his hair and …
‘Well, we’re almost here, are you sure you’re going to be all right, Hels, Els?’ Henry sighed, resigned to his older sister’s latest misadventure, as he pulled up the handbrake.
‘We’ll be perfect, don’t worry Henry, thank you for driving us.’ Elle straightened aLast of the Mohicans-style headdress on her head, and leaned over to squeeze Helen’s knee. ‘We’re going to have a good time.’
Helen and Elle dropped out of the Landy and retrieved their backpacks from the boot. They made their way to the check-in point for the festival which had taken over a disused mine building. A huge neon image of a ship being wrecked blinked above them, and somewhere in the distance, below the hiss of the wind, was a deepening thud of music. The air smelt damp and salty as night formed a blanket of starless darkness around them.
‘Cloud cover probably means it’ll be a bit warmer,’ Helen shrugged.
