and changed into fresh un-paint-stained and undust-streaked clothes. They made do with the pasty on the first evening, but the second evening seemed to issue them with a challenge. Charlotte decided that as hostess she must do better for her guest who was already working her passage in a most ungrudging manner, and said they would go down to the Three Sailors and have dinner in a slightly more civilised setting than the kitchen at Tremarth.
Hannah was nothing loath, and put on a smart little black number for the occasion that was rather over-dressy for the Three Sailors, and would have become her even more if she had taken pains with her make-up and adopted a hair-style that was more in keeping with her youth and did not make her look like a severe governess in search of unfamiliar entertainment. Charlotte – following upon the intrusive thought that Richard Tremarth might still be staying at the inn – decided to wear her latest acquisition for a quiet evening away from home, and that was a lemon yellow silk dress over which she draped a black lace mantilla that she had bought on a trip to Spain the previous summer.
The two girls set off in Charlotte’s car, and the landlord of the Three Sailors welcomed them with effusive smiles and assured them he could fit them up with a table in the dining room. Luckily they had chosen one of the occasions when his menu, was quite exceptional, and that meant a bottle – or rather, a half bottle, since they were neither of them heavy drinkers – of wine to accompany the meal, and perhaps a liqueur apiece afterwards.
When they arrived at the liqueur stage, however, Charlotte said she would skip it, remembering that she had to drive them both back to Tremarth; but as the half-bottle of wine in the dining-room was still very nearly half full the landlord did not seem to think there would be much danger of her infringing the laws of driving. He had carried coffee to them in the lounge, and was beaming because of the flattering comments on the meal he had just served to them, when Charlotte asked him whether Mr. Tremarth was still a guest at the inn.
The landlord looked slightly intrigued when she asked the question, and then admitted that Richard Tremarth was still staying with him.
“But he’s a gentleman who likes to come and go when he pleases,” he explained. “He may be in to dinner to- night, and he may not. At the moment he’s out. I think he’s doing what he calls’ ‘rediscovering Cornwall’,” he added, lowering his voice as if to him that was a novel occupation.
Charlotte nodded, and then addressed a remark that had nothing whatsoever to do with Richard Tremarth to Hannah, just in case the landlord might have received the wrong impression. He no doubt remembered that she and Richard had sat at that same table on the night of her arrival in Tremarth, and although it must have struck him that their relationship was not particularly good one could never tell.
On the way back to Tremarth Hannah voiced the thought that Charlotte herself was thinking as she drove over the cliff top in a swirl of cold, white unfriendly mist that had encroached upon them from the sea.
“Your friend Tremarth must either have made up his mind that he’s not going to remove himself until you’ve changed your mind about selling him your house, or else the countryside has really gone to his head and he can’t have enough of it.”
She peered through the swirling white vapour ahead of them, and warned:
“Look out! You were very nearly off the road…”
“Sorry!” Charlotte jammed on her brakes, and then proceeded more cautiously. It was eerie driving through the mist, and she felt as if ghostly fingers were tapping at the windows on either side of her, and behind them the blackness they had left behind seemed intense. “We would pick upon a night like this to go out junketing, wouldn’t we? Not that a dinner commencing with grapefruit and taking in local lobster and apple flan before its grand climax of coffee and no liqueur could honestly be described as junketing! But I’m not really used to this part of the world, and – ”
Headlights pierced the mist and bathed them in a flood of uncanny yellow light, and Charlotte practically gasped as the oncoming car swept past them. It was travelling far too fast for such a night and such a spot, and Hannah, too, gasped:
“The man must be out of his mind! Or else he’s in a tremendous hurry to get somewhere -” “It was Richard Tremarth!” Charlotte had glimpsed him only for a moment, and she had also recognised his gleaming, expensive car. “He’s probably hungry and hoping they’ve kept some dinner for him at the Three Sailors.”
“He’ll never reach the Three Sailors if he continues on his way like that!” Hannah was peering backwards through the rear window at the disappearing tail light of Tremarth’s car, caught up in a pocket of mist. “He’ll go over the cliff! ”
“Oh, don’t!” And Charlotte shuddered so much that she decided it was her own fear of going over the cliff that was affecting her. They were very close to the edge here, and in fact the wall of Tremarth rose up like a bastion on the other side of them and provided her with the uncomfortable feeling that it was literally thrusting them into the sea. The road was quite wide, but allowing for the various indentations in the cliff it was not so wide, and her heart had been in her mouth when Tremarth swept past them.
She sighed with relief when she recognised the tall piers of a pair of gates ahead of them, and knew that once inside the drive they would be comparatively safe. And if they wanted to avoid crashing into a tree-trunk they could always walk up the drive.
The next moment vexation rolled over her, for the car had stalled as a result of the crawling speed at which they were proceeding. They had come to rest in a comparatively clear stretch of the road, with the red brick wall of her own house on their right hand and the sea making mystical splashing noises on the beach at the foot of the cliff on their left. The noise of the sea seemed strange in the otherwise clammy stillness, and she was about to remark that it was a most inconsiderate moment for an engine to go out of action when that same curious stillness was shattered by a sound like a violent explosion.
Hannah blenched visibly and stared at Charlotte.
“What… do you suppose that was?”
“It sounded as if something blew up! ”
“What could blow up in a place like this? On a lonely stretch of coast like this?”
“A car accident?”
Their eyes met and held for a moment, and then each was scrambling out of the car and on to the wet grass of the cliff top.
“It’s no use my attempting to turn the car,” Charlotte panted. “I couldn’t do it in a place like this, with so little visibility!”
“Then don’t try.” Two years of hospital training, and with memories crowding back on her of some testing experiences she was unlikely ever to forget, undoubtedly affected Hannah’s thinking just then, and without considering it necessary to explain her intentions she started to run back along the road they had crawled over only a minute or so before. Long before Charlotte had started to break into a trot after her she had disappeared into the darkness and the mist, and Charlotte called frenziedly in fear lest she too should become the victim of an accident that would mean that her body would be found the following day at the foot of the cliffs, if it had not already been carried out to sea by the tide.
“Keep away from the cliff edge! It’s dangerous and crumbling in places -! ”
Her voice came back to her like an empty echo on the moistureladen air, and she realised that the only thing she could do was follow Hannah and hope that, by some miracle, disaster refrained from claiming them both, and that when they finally caught up with one another again the shock would not be so great that it would pulverise their wits.
If an accident had happened they would need their wits. Not that she had any doubt at all that Hannah would keep hers. Hannah might think she was an artist, but she should have stuck to nursing.
Her instincts were quite obviously the right ones, and it was Charlotte who allowed her feet to drag became she was horrified of what awaited her at the end of a fairly peaceful and reasonably convivial evening. And the knowledge she had that, unlike Hannah, she was never at her best in a crisis made her feel slightly sick.
Ahead of her the blanket of mist was pierced by an angry light. It was like the damped-down glow of a bonfire, and as far as she could judge it was on the cliff top, and most certainly not on the beach.
So, if the car that had speeded past them had overturned, it had done so without rolling over and over down into the inky blackness of the sea.
But if that really was a conflagration…”
Hannah’s voice came back thinly to her through the mist.
“Stay where you are! There’s nothing we can do… and the heat’s too great to get really near.”
