Once back at the harbour I phoned Charlie’s house, but there was no answer. So I rowed myself out to Sunflower and spliced a new rope-tail on to the staysail’s wire halliard.
I’d come home and I’d felt nothing. Not even a tear.
Five days later, at ten o’clock in the morning, the family assembled at Stowey.
Stowey was the family home. Pevsner, in one of his books, called it ‘perhaps the finest late mediaeval dwelling house in England’, which really meant that the family had been too poor to trick it out with eighteenth-century gallimaufry or nineteenth-century gingerbread. Yet, in all truth, Stowey is pretty. It’s a low stone building, just two storeys high, with a battlemented tower at the east end. Halfway through building the house there came the happy realisation that Devon was at peace, so the western wing was left unfortified. Instead it was given cosy mullioned windows which now look out on gardens that bring hundreds of visitors each summer weekend. Today Stowey is a country house hotel, but it was part of the sale agreement that my mother’s funeral party could gather in the old state rooms, and that the funeral service could be held in Stowey’s chapel. The chapel was no longer consecrated, but the hotel had kept it unchanged and the local priest was happy to indulge my mother’s wish. She was to be buried in the family’s vault beneath the chapel, perhaps the last of the family to be so interred, for I could not imagine the hotel’s owners wanting any more such macabre ceremonies. Indeed, they only endured this funeral because they had no legal alternative, but I noted the distaste with which they received the scattered and decaying remnants of the Rossendale family.
That family received me with an equal distaste. “I’m surprised to see you here, John,” one of my least decrepit uncles said.
“Why?”
“Well, you know.”
“No, I don’t,” I challenged him.
He backed down, muttering something about the weather being dreadful and how it always seemed to rain when a Rossendale was buried. “It rained on Frederick,” he said, “and on poor Michael.” Frederick had been my father, Michael my elder brother. He was always ‘poor Michael’ to the family; he’d blown his brains out with two barrels of number six shot and the Rossendales had been lumbered with me instead. My brother Michael had been a dull, worried man, hiding his chronic indecisions behind a bad-tempered mask, but ever since his death he had been something of a hero to the family, perhaps because they preferred him to me. If only Michael had lived, they seemed to be saying with their reproachful glances, none of this unhappiness would have happened.
One member of the family was glad to see me. That was my younger sister who smiled with innocent joy as I walked towards her chair. “Johnny?” She held both hands towards me in delighted greeting. “Johnny!”
“Hello, my darling.” I held Georgina’s hands and bent to kiss her cheeks.
She smiled happily into my face. This had to be one of her good days, for she had recognised me. She had a young plump nun with her, one of the nursing sisters who looked after her in a private Catholic hospital in the Channel Islands. “How is she?” I asked the nun.
“We’re all very proud of her,” the sister said, which might simply have meant that my younger sister was at last toilet trained.
“And Sister Felicity?” I asked. Sister Felicity was Georgina’s usual companion.
“She’s not well,” the nun said in a soft Irish voice, “she’d have liked to have come today, so she would, but she’s not a well woman. We’re all praying for her.”
“Sister Felicity is going to heaven soon,” Georgina said happily. She is twenty-six and has the mind of a backward two-year-old. No one knows why. Charlie put it best when he simply said that God left out the yeast when he made Georgina’s loaf. She’s beautiful, with an innocent face as heart-breaking as an angel’s, and a head as nutty as a squirrel’s larder.
“Sister Felicity’s not going to die,” I said, but Georgina had already forgotten the comment.
“I like it here.” She was still holding my hands.
“You look well,” I told her.
“I want to live here again, Johnny. With you,” Georgina said with a touching and hopeless appeal.
“I wish you could, my darling. But you’re happy at the convent, aren’t you?” The convent hospital specialised in the care of the mentally subnormal. Before my father’s death, and the subsequent collapse of the Rossendale estates, a trust had been established which would provide for the rest of Georgina’s life. It was ironic to think that the only family member who did not have money problems was the mad one.
“I like it here,” Georgina said again with a cruel lucidity. “With you.”
For the first time since my mother had died, tears threatened me. We were a rotten family, but Georgina and I had always been close. When she was a little child I used to make her laugh, and I sometimes thought that it would only take a small miracle to jar the sense out of the place where it was locked so deep inside her head. That miracle had never happened. Instead my mother had found Georgina’s presence oppressive, and so my younger sister had been put safely away, out of sight and out of mind, in her convent home. I crouched in front of her chair. “Are you unhappy?” I asked.
She did not answer. The bubble of sense had burst and now she just stared vacantly into my eyes. I doubted she even knew why she had been brought back to Stowey.
“People are very kind,” she said dully, then looked up as someone came to stand beside me. It was my other sister, my twin Elizabeth, but there was no recognition in Georgina’s eyes.
Elizabeth did not acknowledge Georgina’s presence. Like my mother, she had always been offended by having a mental defective in the family. Whatever, she ignored Georgina and waited for me to disengage my hands gently and stand upright. Elizabeth carried a glass of the hotel’s sherry. Her husband Peter, once my sailing companion, but now a failing Cotswold landowner, glowered at me across the room. I was the ghost at the funeral feast. They all blamed me for losing the family’s money and for bringing the disgrace of poverty on a lineage that had owned this patch of England since the first Rossendale had taken it with his bloody-edged sword. That man had come to Devon in the twelfth century, while now his twentieth-century descendants shuffled with embarrassment in an hotel’s drawing room. All except for Elizabeth, who had a superb if rancorous poise. She drew me away from Georgina’s chair. “I don’t know why she’s here,” Elizabeth said irritably.
“Why shouldn’t she be?”
“She doesn’t know what’s going on.” Elizabeth sipped her sherry, then gave me a long, disapproving examination. “I don’t know why you’re here either.”
“A vestige of filial duty,” I said, a little too lightly.
“You look disgustingly healthy.” Her words were grudging. It was an effort to be polite, to pretend that we were not bitter enemies.
“Sun and sea.” I was glib. “You look well yourself. Are you still riding?”
“Of course.” Elizabeth had very nearly made Britain’s Olympic team as a horsewoman. Perhaps, if that success had come to her, she would have been less bitter with life since.
A flurry at the door announced the arrival of Father Maltravers from London. Father Maltravers had been Mother’s favourite confessor and would now bury her. The sight of the priest made Elizabeth drop her small pretence of politeness. “Will you be taking Mass?” she challenged me.