‘You remember that thing we watched the other night, with the soldier who got involved with MI6 and they had him hanging from the London Eye with his shirt off?’ Daisy blushed slightly. She would be thirteen in a couple of weeks and I’d known it was only a matter of time before she discovered boys, but it appeared to be happening already.
‘The fat bloke with long hair?’ Mum screwed up her face, trying to remember.
‘No, Nana,’ said Daisy impatiently. ‘You’re thinking of the wrong film. The one where they chase him through the underground and then trap him on the London Eye, and then he jumps into the river and escapes. The young black guy with the six-pack.’
‘I never quite worked out how he ended up without his shirt on,’ I said. ‘Apart from the fact it showed off his abs, which obviously made quite an impression on you.’
‘No!’ Daisy protested hotly. ‘So what if it did, anyway? I bet you fancied David Hasselhoff or someone cheesy like that when you were my age.’
‘The Hoff? How old do you think I am?’ I asked, offended. ‘It was Mr Darcy…’
‘Yeah, you do know he’s a fictional character, right?’ Daisy looked at me as if I were some kind of weirdo. Which was probably fair enough.
‘They did it on the telly,’ I explained. ‘Colin Firth coming out of the lake with a wet shirt on was a very special moment in my formative teenage years.’
‘Ooh now, that Colin,’ said Mum. ‘He’s a lovely-looking fella. I wouldn’t mind sharing my electric blanket with him.’
‘Mum!’ I said, exasperated.
She laughed. ‘You can’t tell me you’d rather curl up in bed with a good book than with Mr Darcy himself! I’d even get a trick hip fitted for him.’
‘Honestly, you’re— What do you mean, a trick hip?’ The minute the words left my mouth I regretted it; I did not want to know what a trick hip was, not coming from my own mother.
‘You know Margery? Married to Alf the butcher? The one with the facial hair?’ I nodded. Poor Margery did indeed have an unfortunate amount of chin fluff, far more than her pasty-looking husband. ‘She had a new hip done a couple of years ago but it never healed right. She told me it pops out of the socket when they…’ She gave me a meaningful look and a nod.
Daisy and I looked at each other, aghast.
‘I feel nauseous,’ said Daisy, laying down the piece of toast in her hand with a pained expression. ‘I may never eat again.’
‘Always a good idea to keep the man in your life happy,’ said Mum. ‘How do you think she got her new dishwasher?’
I hadn’t been to Penstowan Cross for years. It was one of those nothing places you only went to if you lived there. It was basically a remote country crossroads, on the four corners of which sat a church, a rundown pub, an even more rundown garage (one petrol pump for cars, one for tractors), and a handful of houses. It was a toss-up whether the pub or the church attracted more visitors, but neither did as much business as the garage, and all three had seen better days. None of the four roads that made up the cross led anywhere particularly interesting, apart from (or maybe including) the one that led back to Penstowan itself. And of course the one that took you to Polvarrow House.
I piled everyone, including the dog, into the car and we set off.
‘Margery and Alf,’ began Mum. Daisy and I shuddered at the thought of the gymnastics Margery had apparently done to get her new dishwasher. ‘They live out this way now, on the new estate.’
‘What new estate?’ I asked. The crossroads lay up ahead.
‘The new owners of Polvarrow sold off some of their land, didn’t they?’
‘I dunno, did they?’ Mum seemed to forget sometimes that I’d been away for the best part of twenty years, and the ins and outs of life in her little bit of Cornwall didn’t tend to make it onto the London evening news.
‘Yeah, they’ve proper brought the area up,’ said Mum. She wasn’t kidding.
The pub had had a massive makeover. The paintwork was fresh, tables were dotted about cheerfully on the grass verge out the front, and I could see round the side that the beer garden was looking, well, like a beer garden, rather than a Cold War-era No Man’s Land. Hanging baskets decorated the front of the building, still full of flowers despite it being very much autumn. The old garage had been taken over, rebranded with in-your-face corporate signage, more pumps (with higher prices), and an on-site supermarket. And despite the fact that you can’t really give a church a makeover as such, it still managed to look brighter and more welcoming; a place to gather and give thanks, rather than to confess terrible sins and get a dose of hellfire.
I turned the car towards Polvarrow House. I’d only been to the house once before, when my ex-husband Richard, a.k.a ‘that cheating swine’, and I were planning our wedding. I’d had these big ideas of having the reception at a country house, and on a trip down to visit my parents (on my own, as usual) I’d heard that the owners were thinking of making it a wedding venue to help with the costs of running the house. I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone – to be honest, I was torn between having the big dress and the fancy wedding, and just going off somewhere hot and getting married on the beach (in the end we did neither) – and I’d taken myself off for an afternoon to have a look around.
It had been awful. The house had looked decent enough(ish) from the outside, although the grounds were slightly wilder than I had expected, with none of the neatly clipped box
