He grabbed the plate and book and went upstairs to his room. He kicked off his shoes, groaning with exhaustion, removed his torn windbreaker and regarded himself in the mirror, his face scratched and flecked with bits of greenery.
“What a mess,” he murmured, and collapsed onto the bed.
He downed one of the bottles of ale and most of the bread and cheese. Outside, light leaked from a sky deepening to ultramarine. He heard the boom and sigh of waves, and for a long while he reclined in the window seat and stared out at the cliffs, watching as shadows slipped down them like black paint. At last he stood and got some clean clothes from his bag. He hooked a finger around the remaining bottle of ale, picked up the book Thomsa had left for him, and retired to the bathroom.
The immense tub took ages to fill, but there seemed to be unlimited hot water. He put all the lights on and undressed, sank into the tub and gave himself over to the mindless luxury of hot water and steam and the scent of daffodils on the windowsill.
Finally he turned the water off. He reached for the bottle he’d set on the floor and opened it, dried his hands and picked up the book. A worn paperback, its creased cover showing a sweep of green hills topped by a massive tor, with a glimpse of sea in the distance.
Jeffrey whistled softly, took a long swallow of ale and opened the book. It was not a novel but a collection of stories, published in 1970—Cornish folktales, according to a brief preface, ‘told anew for today’s generation’. He scanned the table of contents—’Pisky-Led’, ‘Tregeagle and the Devil’, ‘Jack the Giant Killer’—then sat up quickly in the tub, spilling water as he gazed at a title underlined with red ink: ‘Cherry of Zennor’. He flipped through the pages until he found it.
Sixteen-year-old Cherry was the prettiest girl in Zennor, not that she knew it. One day while walking on the moor she met a young man as handsome as she was lovely.
“Will you come with me?” he asked, and held out a beautiful lace handkerchief to entice her. “I’m a widower with an infant son who needs tending. I’ll pay you better wages than any man or woman earns from here to Kenidjack Castle, and give you dresses that will be the envy of every girl at Morvah Fair.”
Now, Cherry had never had a penny in her pocket in her entire young life, so she let the young man take her arm and lead her across the moor…
There were no echoes here of The Sun Battles, no vertiginous terrors of darkness and the abyss; just a folk tale that reminded Jeffrey a bit of ‘Rip Van Winkle’, with Cherry caring for the young son and, as the weeks passed, falling in love with the mysterious man.
Each day she put ointment on the boy’s eyes, warned by his father never to let a drop fall upon her own. Until of course one day she couldn’t resist doing so, and saw an entire host of gorgeously dressed men and women moving through the house around her, including her mysterious employer and a beautiful woman who was obviously his wife. Betrayed and terrified, Cherry fled; her lover caught up with her on the moor and pressed some coins into her hand.
“You must go now and forget what you have seen,” he said sadly, and touched the corner of her eye. When she returned home she found her parents dead and gone, along with everyone she knew, and her cottage a ruin open to the sky. Some say it is still a good idea to avoid the moors near Zennor.
Jeffrey closed the book and dropped it on the floor beside the tub. When he at last headed back down the corridor, he heard voices from the kitchen, and Thomsa’s voice raised in laughter. He didn’t go downstairs; only returned to his room and locked the door behind him.
He left early the next morning, after sharing breakfast with Thomsa at the kitchen table.
“Harry’s had to go to St. Ives to pick up some tools he had repaired.” She poured Jeffrey more coffee and pushed the cream across the table toward him. “Did you have a nice ramble yesterday and go to the Tinners?”
Jeffrey smiled but said nothing. He was halfway up the winding driveway back to Cardu before he realised he’d forgotten to mention the two bottles of ale.
He returned the rental car then got a ride to the station from Evan, the same man who’d picked him up two days earlier.
“Have a good time in Zennor?”
“Very nice,” said Jeffrey.
“Quiet this time of year.” Evan pulled the car to the curb. “Looks like your train’s here already.”
Jeffrey got out, slung his bag over his shoulder and started for the station entrance. His heart sank when he saw two figures arguing on the sidewalk a few yards away, one a policeman.
“Come on now, Erthy,” he said, glancing as Jeffrey drew closer. “You know better than this.”
“Fuck you!” she shouted, and kicked at him. “Not my fucking name!”
“That’s it.”
The policeman grabbed her wrist and bent his head to speak into a walkie-talkie. Jeffrey began to hurry past. The woman screamed after him, shaking her clenched fist. Her eye with its bloody starburst glowed crimson in the morning sun.
“London!” Her voice rose desperately as she fought to pull away from the cop. “London, please, take me—”
Jeffrey shook his head. As he did, the woman raised her fist and flung something at him. He gasped as it stung his cheek, clapping a hand to his face as the policeman shouted and began to drag the woman away from the station.
“London! London!”
As her shrieks echoed across the plaza, Jeffrey stared at a speck of blood on his finger. Then he stooped to pick up what she’d thrown at him: a yellow pencil worn with toothmarks, its graphite tip blunted but the tiny, embossed black letters still clearly readable above the ferrule.
Hungerford Bridge
I hadn’t heard from Miles for several months when he wrote to ask if I wanted to get together for lunch. Of course I did, and several days later I met him at a noisy, cheerful restaurant at South Bank. It was early February, London still somewhat dazed by the heavy snowfall that had recently paralyzed the city. The Thames seemed a river of lead; a black skim of ice made the sidewalks treacherous—I’d seen another man fall as I’d walked from Waterloo Station—and I wished I’d worn something warmer than the old wool greatcoat I’d had since college.
But once settled into the seat across from Miles, all that fell away.
“You’re looking well, Robbie,” he said, smiling.
“You too.”
He smiled again, his pale eyes still locked with mine, and I felt that familiar frisson: caught between chagrin and joy that I’d been summoned. We’d met decades earlier at Cambridge; if I hadn’t been a Texan, with the faint gloss of exoticism conferred by my accent and Justin boots, I doubt if he would have bothered with me at all.
But he did. Being chosen as a friend by Miles carried something of the unease of being hypnotized: Even now, I felt as I imagine a starling would, staring into the seed-black eyes of a krait. It wasn’t just his beauty, still remarkable enough to turn heads in the restaurant, or his attire, though these would have been enough. Miles looked and dressed as though he’d stepped from a Beardsley drawing, wearing bespoke Edwardian suits and vintage Clark shoes he found at charity shops. He still wore his graying hair longish, artfully swept back from a delicate face to showcase a mustache that, on special occasions, would be waxed and curled so precisely it resembled a tiny pair of spectacles perched above his upper lip.
On anyone else this would have looked twee. Actually, on Miles it looked twee; but his friends forgave him everything, even his drunken recitations from Peter Pan, in which he’d played the lead as a boy.