Chapter 9
Death of a Matriarch
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In the middle of the second week of her holiday at the Smugglers’ Inn, Dame Beatrice received an invitation from an unexpected source. The reason for it was that she bought the second picture which Bluebell had painted.
It was a distinct improvement on the first one, a charming impression of the cove and the old entrance to the hotel. The white walls, the flattish weathered roof-slates, the fuchsias, the small rockery were there, and so were the ancient gateposts and the flagged path up to the door. Newly-painted fishing-boats were drawn up on the grey, uninviting sand and beyond them, under the green hill from which the short cut to Campions had been taken by Parsifal, the fishermen’s little stone jetty thrust out into the cove.
Beyond the jetty the waters broke in foam against the spurs of the two headlands and beyond their flurry, spume and spray lay the open sea as blue, in Bluebell’s picture, as the cloudless sky above it.
‘Your artist wields a persuasive brush,’ Dame Beatrice had said to Trev when the picture was almost finished. ‘Would she take it amiss if I entered into a financial transaction with her? I should like to take home with me so pleasant a reminder of my stay here.’
‘She’d be more than pleased to sell it to you,’ Trev had replied, so, when the picture was completed, Dame Beatrice had entered into negotiations and the painting became her own. The invitation had followed.
‘I suppose, Dame Beatrice, you would not care to come and take tea with us one afternoon? I have other pictures—oh, not for sale—the family’s collection, merely, and one gets a different view of the cove and the hills and rocks from our balconies. It is only a short walk, whether by smugglers’ path and steps or by road. Or you could use your car if you do not care to walk up the hill through the village. We have plenty of parking-space outside the front of our house. You can’t miss the house. It is at the bottom of a little spur of road which leads to the Methodist chapel and has a sign which reads:
‘I shall be delighted to come. Would five o’clock tomorrow be convenient?’
Tea was served on the lower of the two balconies. Bluebell, whose artistry included a flair for baking, had excelled herself, as the uninhibited Gamaliel, sloshing Cornish cream on top of raspberry jam and scones, exultantly proclaimed.
When tea was over and Garnet and Gamaliel were left to entertain the guest while Parsifal assisted his wife to clear away and wash up, the black boy said: ‘You must see the view from the top balcony. It used to be very rickety, but Garnie and I shored it up last year, so it is perfectly safe now. I do all my early morning exercises out there. The way to it is through my bedroom. I will show you my picture of Muhammad Ali. Do you admire him? He is my great hero.’
‘He is the greatest. We have his own word for that,’ Dame Beatrice solemnly responded. She duly admired the enormous poster which took up almost the whole of one wall in the little room.
‘When I can save up enough money,’ went on Gamaliel, ‘I shall buy myself a pair of proper boxing boots like his. At school I box in plimsolls, but the proper boots would make me more mobile and would increase my self- confidence, don’t you think?’
Dame Beatrice could not imagine, from her impression of him, how any addition to his self-confidence could be necessary, but she assented gravely to his remark and asked where such boots could be bought.
‘I expect I would have to go to Exeter, or even up to London. I shall leave school as soon as my examinations are over and get work to do. Then I shall have money. There is a boys’ club in Truro which I shall join. An old pro is the instructor. I shall soon be beyond him, but no doubt he will teach me enough to be going on with. Tricks, you know, and how to step out of a clinch the best way. These old pros are up to all the dodges, and you have to know them, in case your opponent does. I shall represent England amateurs at the Albert Hall one day; then the Olympics and then my professional career.’
Dame Beatrice, who found the brash and innocent youth refreshing and amusing, made a promise which she was never to regret, since it had the effect of removing three possible suspects from what turned out to be a complicated and difficult case. She glanced at Bluebell, who had accompanied them, and raised questioning eyebrows. Bluebell made a despairing little gesture of assent. Dame Beatrice thereupon spoke briskly.
‘It ought to be London, I think,’ she said, ‘for the boots and perhaps two pairs of boxing shorts, two or three singlets and a boxer’s dressing-gown. My chauffeur, George, a knowledgeable man, will know where to go. Ask for me at the Smugglers’ Inn when you have finished your examinations and you shall be set on the road to fame and fortune.’
She spent the whole of the next week in touring the countryside, for her round of visits had been concluded. She went to Polperro, its narrow thoroughfares crowded even at the beginning of the holiday season, and rode up the long hill back to the car park in the horse-drawn bus which was the only form of transport allowed to the holiday public. She visited the ruins of the near-perfect thirteenth-century circular keep of Restormel, perched on its hill above the River Fowey.
She went to the elvan-built great house which belonged originally to the Arundell family, the Elizabethan mansion called Trerice, with its scrolled gables, its oriel and lattice windows, its decorative plaster ceilings with their pendants and its splendid fireplaces of 1572 and 1573 in hall and drawing-room.
She also went to look at the even more interesting and important Cotehele, another Tudor house, but of earlier date than Trerice, some of its walls dating from the middle of the fourteenth century, the rest added by the Edgcumbes during the reigns of Henry VII and his son.
She walked the cliff path from the Dodman and, although she did not know it at the time, passed almost under the walls of Romula Leyden’s house before she reached Nare Head, that other vast expanse of turf and sea-views, before going on to Portholland where her chauffeur George was waiting with the car.
She went to Tregony, Grampound, St Austell, Veryan with its five round houses, St Mawes and Truro and she paid a nostalgic visit to the church of St Just-in-Roseland, pausing at the lychgate near which she had left the car and taking in the luxuriantly flowering hillside with its June roses, its rhododendrons, its varied trees and its wealth of plants both cultivated and wild. Below her, at the very foot of the slope, was the church on its little creek and she made her way slowly, by narrow, steep paths, down the hill to where, as the tide was almost out, a red and white cabin cruiser was marooned on the shore. It was perfectly reflected in the shining gleam of shoal water which also
