High Tide At Midnight

‘It has been known,’ he said laconically. ‘The thing to do is stand your ground. Don’t try to outrun them—that’s fatal.’

‘I can imagine it would be.’ Morwenna knew an overwhelming desire to sit down on the wet lane and scream and drum her heels. ‘But you don’t have to worry. I doubt very much whether I could outrun a tortoise at the moment. Would it help if I knew the dogs’ names?’

‘It might. They’re called Whisky and Max. Do you think you can remember that?’

‘Oh, I think so,’ she said grimly. ‘I imagine I shall have great difficulty in remembering anything else.’ Wincing slightly, she settled her rucksack on her shoulder then picked up her case.

‘Dear God!’ He was still standing in the shadows well out of range of the headlights. ‘Not just a casual call, I see. Just how long were you planning to stay at Trevennon?’

It was on the tip of her tongue to confess that she would be satisfied with a roof over her head for the night, but she suppressed it. After all, it was none of his business.

She sent him a smiling glance over her shoulder as she prepared to negotiate the tree. It was one of her best, slightly teasing, deliberately provocative, aimed at leaving him with something to think about.

‘We’ll just have to see how things work out,’ she said lightly. ‘Maybe the king of Cornwall will take a fancy to me.’

But if she had counted on having the last word, she was to be disappointed.

‘I’m sure he’ll take something to you.’ His voice was bland. ‘Preferably a riding crop. Au revoir, my pretty way-farer.’

She held her head high, and wouldn’t allow herself to limp until she was round the next bend and out of the range of those too-revealing headlights.

The force of the wind seemed to have spent itself, and now the air was full of the sound of the sea, a sullen booming roar as the breakers hurled themselves against the granite cliffs. Nor was it rain on her face any longer, but spray.

As she trudged on wearily, Morwenna found herself wondering how easy it would be to miss the house entirely and walk straight over the cliff into the sea. She grinned wanly at the thought, and then stiffened, peering almost incredulously into the gloom. Somewhere just to the left she could see a light, a steady, purposeful light like a lamp set in the windows of an uncurtained room. And at that moment the moon emerged from behind the flying clouds, and Morwenna saw the dark mass of the house, its chimneys and roofs clearly outlined against the sky.

Under the circumstances, it was madness to feel such a sense of relief, of homecoming even, but the familiarity of the building’s shape, imprinted on her mind by her mother’s painting, caught at her heart, and she felt childish tears prick at the back of her eyelids.

Somewhere close at hand a dog began to bark, deep and full-throated, and then another took it up, and in the house another light went on, as if the occupants were responding to the animals’ warning. Of course, she thought, they would be expecting a visitor—the man she had met on the road.

Summoning all her courage, she walked up to the front door. The notice she had seen had been perfectly correct, she thought wryly. The road indeed led to nowhere but Trevennon—straight to its door in fact. And what kind of arrogance had decided to build a house in this very spot anyway—out on a headland, exposed four-square to the elements? ‘A barn’, Biddy had called it, she thought, and wished that her first view of it had been in daylight.

There was an old-fashioned bell pull at the side of the front door, and Morwenna tugged at it half-heartedly, not really expecting any results. But to her surprise, a bell did start jangling somewhere inside the house, and the dogs began barking again tumultuously. They seemed to be penned up somewhere in the outbuildings which rambled away from the side of the house, and as Morwenna waited, she heard the barking rise almost to a frenzy and the sound of heavy bodies banging against some kind of wooden barricade. It was altogether too close for comfort and Morwenna hoped devoutly that it would hold.

‘Whisky!’ she called out, trying to sound firm. ‘Max! Quiet, good dogs.’

The good dogs were clearly puzzled by this personal appeal from an unfamiliar voice, but they stopped barking. There was a lot of subdued whining, and convulsive sniffing, and paws scrabbling on a hard surface, but that, Morwenna felt, was a far more acceptable alternative.

And someone was actually coming to answer the door. Morwenna felt her stomach flutter with nervousness, and clenched her hands into fists deep in the pockets of her coat as the heavy door swung open with an appropriate creak of hinges.

She was confronted by a small stocky man, almost enveloped in a large and disreputable butcher’s apron. His face was wrinkled like a walnut into lines of real malevolence, and bright eyes under grey shaggy eyebrows glared suspiciously up at her.

‘Wrong ’ouse,’ he snorted, and attempted to close the door.

Morwenna stepped forward quickly to circumvent the move. She smiled beguilingly at him, ignoring the scowl she received in return. Her thoughts were seething. Was this—could this be Dominic Trevennon? He would be about the right age, she reasoned, and he seemed to fit the portrait of unlovable eccentric which she had begun to build in her mind.

‘Mr Trevennon?’ she asked, trying to speak confidently.

‘Not ’ere,’ was the discouraging reply. ‘So you may’s well take yourself off.’

‘Do you mean he’s away?’ Morwenna’s heart sank within her. ‘Or is he just out?’

‘Tedn’t none of your business,’ the gnome remarked with satisfaction. ‘Now go ‘long with you. I want to get this door shut.’ Somewhere in the house a telephone began to ring, and his face assumed an expression of even deeper malice. ‘ ’Ear that?’ he snarled. ‘I should be answering that, not stood ’ere, argy-bargying with you.’

‘Oh, please,’ Morwenna said desperately, seeing that he was about to slam the door on her. ‘I—I’ve come a long way today. If Mr Trevennon isn’t here at the moment, couldn’t I come in and wait?’

‘No, you couldn’t.’ He looked outraged at the thought. ‘If Mr Trevennon’d wanted to see you, he’d have left word you were expected. You phone up tomorrow in a decent manner and make an appointment. Now, go on. I’m letting all this old draught in.’

The door was already closing in Morwenna’s face when a woman’s voice called, ‘Hold on there, you, Zack. You’re to let her in.’

‘ ’Oo says?’ Zack swung round aggressively.

The woman approaching jerked a thumb over her shoulder. ‘ ’E does. Good enough for you?’

Apparently it was, because Zack held the door open—not wide, it was true, but sufficiently to allow Morwenna to squeeze herself through it into the hall. She put her case down and eased the rucksack from her aching shoulder, ignoring Zack’s mutter of, ‘Seems mazed t’me.’

‘You keep your opinion until you’m asked, Zack Hubbard.’ The woman gave Morwenna a searching but not unfriendly look. ‘You can wait in the study for the master, miss. There’s a nice fire in there.’ She paused doubtfully, taking in Morwenna’s chilled and generally bedraggled appearance. ‘Would you fancy a cup of something hot, while you’m waiting?’

Morwenna accepted gratefully and followed her rescuer across the wide hall. She was too bemused by the suddenness of her access to the house, just when she had almost given up all hope, to take much account of her surroundings, but the paramount impression was one of all-pervading shabbiness.

And this was confirmed by the room in which she found herself. A big shabby desk, littered with papers and crowned by an ancient typewriter, dominated the room. A sagging sofa covered in faded chintz was drawn up in front of the fireplace, and these with the addition of a small table just behind the sofa constituted the entire furniture of the room. The square of dark red carpet was threadbare in places, and the once-patterned wallpaper seemed to have faded to a dull universal beige, with lighter, brighter square patches seeming to indicate depressingly that pictures had once hung there.

Morwenna sank down on to the sofa and held out her hands to the blazing logs. What she had seen so far gave her no encouragement at all. The Trevennons, it seemed, had fallen on hard times since her mother had last visited the house. And it could furnish an explanation as to why Laura Kerslake had never returned there. Perhaps the Trevennons themselves had discouraged any reunions, preferring her to remember things as they had been. To remember people as they had been.

She glanced at the rucksack which she had placed on the sofa beside her and began to fumble with the buckles. She took out the parcel of paintings, and after a moment’s hesitation walked across and laid it on the desk. Her own equivalent, she thought wryly, of putting all her cards on the table.

There were some newspapers and magazines piled rather untidily at one end of the sofa and she riffled through them casually when she sat down again. They were an odd mixture, she thought, giving little clue as to the tastes and personality of the subscriber.

There were some local newspapers as well and Morwenna unfolded one of these and began to glance casually through the news items on the front page, but the newsprint had a disturbing way of dancing up and down in front of her eyes, and at length she gave up the effort, acknowledging that she was more tired than even she had guessed.

The door opened and the women came in carrying a tray, which she placed down on the sofa table. Again Morwenna was the recipient of one of those searching looks.

‘Is—is something wrong?’ she asked.

‘You have a look of someone I know. Can’t bring to mind who it is, but I daresay it’ll come to me.’

Morwenna’s heart skipped a beat. Was it her mother that this woman recognised in her? She was quite aware that there was a resemblance, but before she could ask further, a door banged nearby and Zack’s voice shouted pettishly, ‘Inez!’

The woman tutted and moved towards the door. ‘Dear life, doesn’t he go on,’ she remarked placidly, and went out closing the door behind her.

Morwenna studied the tea tray with slight amusement. It had been laid with a tea towel, and bore in addition to a fat brown earthenware teapot, a cup and saucer, neither of which matched, and a small plate holding two buttered cream crackers. But the tea itself was strong and fragrant, and by some miracle not made with teabags. She sipped it as if it was nectar.

When she had finished, she leaned back against the shabby, comfortable cushions and closed her eyes. She felt warmed through, and oddly at peace in spite of her inner uncertainties. All kinds of curious images began to dance behind her shuttered eyes, and it was pleasant to lie back and contemplate them while the warmth of the fire began to dissolve away some of the ache from her tired limbs.

Trees danced in the wind, and dogs with eyes as big and golden as the headlamps on a car went bounding through the night, baying at the moon. And somehow Biddy was there too, the wind filling her black cape. ‘Private road,’ she seemed to be saying over and over again. ‘Private road. Keep out.’

Morwenna had no idea how long she had been asleep or what had disturbed her, but she was wide awake in an instant and sitting up startled. It was much lighter in the room and she realised that someone had switched on the powerful lamp which stood on the desk.

It was a man, and she knew as soon as she saw him that it was the man she had encountered in the lane. Her instinct, she saw, had not misled her. He was dark, as dark as the stormy night outside the windows, tall and lean. His face was thin and as hard as if it had been hewn from the granite cliffs—a high-bridged nose, a jutting chin, firm lips and dark, hooded eyes that stared down at her mother’s paintings spread on the desk in front of him.