the back windows were of a superb stretch of the Cornish coast and there was no garden or surrounding wall or fence and no approach except for an unmade-up track just wide enough to take the car and the tradesmen’s vans. The outbuildings consisted of a double garage, the stables which housed three well-bred horses, two large kennels for the guard-dogs and a cottage shared by the chauffeur and his sister who groomed the horses. Her name was Mattie, but she preferred to be called Matt. She wore men’s clothes, whistled through her, teeth and was a regular customer at the pub in the village, where she slapped people on the back, stood her round and was the local darts champion.
The house in which Romula’s grandson Garnet lived was very much smaller than Headlands. It belonged to him and he shared it with his sister Bluebell, her husband Parsifal Leek and their adopted son Gamaliel. The house was called Seawards and was as romantically situated as its name suggests, for it was built literally on the coast and from the back of the house a slipway for boats ran down to a strip of rough beach and the opening of a tiny cove. Built originally towards the end of the seventeenth century, it had been altered and added to by its various owners until its original builder would hardly have recognised it.
Seawards was approached downhill. A short slope curved down to it from the road which led to the village, the hotel and, further off, the pub. An iron gate near the culvert over a small but noisy waterfall opened on to a garden with crazy paving, florabunda roses, fuchsias and lavender. Against the stonework of a high wall, the tall stems, broad leaves and sinister flowers of monkshood made a patch of green and purple in an angle of the steep-stepped little enclosure.
At the back of the house, which faced the sea, strong wooden shutters were attached to the windows to offer a defence against the winter gales. From the french-windows, unshuttered in the lovely June weather, there was a wide view of the Channel, for the house was on a curve of Veryan Bay. From these french doors, which were on the second and third floors, steps led down from the balconies to a long, stone-flagged back garden, walled on the one side, but bounded on the other by the small stream which rushed in a waterfall past the side of the house and down to the cove and the sea.
The stream was nowhere very wide. It could be crossed by stepping stones and then a long ascent of narrow steps, cut into the hillside and mounting steeply upwards led to an overgrown track which marked what had been the smugglers’ path to the inn. The inn, since those days, had been greatly enlarged and was now a holiday hotel, although the oldest part of the building was still in use, thanks to extensive renovation and repairs.
In spite of their grandmother’s wealth, neither Garnet nor Bluebell was comfortably endowed. Each received an allowance from the old lady, but they felt it was grudgingly given and even after their father’s death it had not been increased. Romula had forgiven her daughter Maria for marrying, but she could not bring herself to forgive Garnet and Bluebell for being Vannion Porthcawl’s children.
Almost needless to say, the inhabitants of Seawards boasted no servants except a daily char and a weekly washer-woman and lived plainly.
Parsifal, Bluebell’s husband, was a minor poet whose romantic Christian name was off-set by his less poetical surname of Leek. Apart from his wife’s allowance from her grandmother, he kept the wolf from the door by publishing an occasional slim volume, begging sycophantically from Romula when the big bills came in, and also by writing verses to be printed on Christmas and birthday cards and, when he could get the work, by doing research for authors too busy, too incompetent or too lazy to do it for themselves. He lived his own life and wandered about the countryside in search of what he called inspiration.
Bluebell was a painter who sold an occasional picture to the summer visitors to the hotel. Her brother Garnet wrote moderately successful romantic novels under the pen-name of Gertrude Fosseway, and bore most of the household expenses.
Bluebell’s adopted son, the negro boy Gamaliel, was still at school. He was a beautiful and intelligent lad, a splendid swimmer and the school boxing champion. His hero was Muhammad Ali, and his immediate ambition was to be chosen for the next Olympic Games. He saw this as the best means of turning professional later on and becoming world champion at his weight whatever, in adulthood, that weight turned out to be.
He kept these ambitions mostly to himself, being well aware that they differed very considerably from Bluebell’s conception of his future. She wanted a university scholarship for him and a professional career of a very different sort from that which he had mapped out for himself. He was down on the school register as Gamaliel Leek, but he detested both names and always called himself Greg Ubi on the covers of his exercise books, the name under which he intended to fight later on.
He was popular with the masters and particularly so with the women teachers to whom he was always courteous and cordial; thus he was allowed to get away with his assumed name, the staff and the head teacher feeling sympathy, no doubt, with one who disliked his adoptive cognomen so much.
The registers were never called, the easy-going staff being content to cast a non-militant eye over the class, put a black zero against the names of any absentees and fill in all the red markings on Friday mornings while the school was at hymn practice in the hall with the head teacher. It was not a school which gained university scholarships, but nobody had told Bluebell that, and, as the school was in a town fifteen miles away and she had no car, she had made no enquiries, content to thank God for the school bus which made farepaying for Gamaliel unnecessary.
Only to Garnet did the lad ever unburden himself and only occasionally at that. He would sit on Garnet’s bed while the novelist tapped away at a typewriter set on a table in the window and remain there, silent and unwinking as a statue, for perhaps a couple of hours or more. When Garnet knocked off work they would drink beer together, eat ginger biscuits and sometimes talk, sometimes not. Gamaliel had taught Garnet to swim. In return, Garnet had dedicated a book to him:
Gamaliel had not read the book, but in his own room he mouthed the dedication over and over again. As neither Parsifal nor Bluebell ever read Garnet’s books, they never asked who Greg Ubi was.
On the other side of the hills, high up, since it was built on top of the cliffs although some fifty yards inland, stood the rambling, somewhat decrepit Edwardian house known as Campions. Here lived the rest of Romula’s relatives, Rupert Bosse-Leyden, his wife Diana and their twelve-year-old twins Quentin and Millament, when the last-named were not away at boarding-school.
There was nothing unusual about the house except that it stood on land belonging to the National Trust. Rupert and Diana lived rent-free in return for keeping the environs free of holiday makers’ litter and the surrounding footpaths clear so that the public could have access to the cliffs and the impressive and beautiful views.
To help with the work involved, the occupiers gave free lodging at Easter to students who were willing to lend a hand with clearing and opening up woodland paths and in summer by going out early in the morning tidying up cans, bottles, cartons and paper left by holiday visitors. They also good-naturedly helped with the household chores and exercised the owners’ three dachshunds.
At other times of the year Diana was bored. She had never wanted children and when, in the second year of marriage, she produced twins, she was highly resentful of having to tend two babies instead of one. After the
