The Rose Garden

‘Yes.’

‘I can’t imagine. Me, I’ve got three sisters and two brothers. Breed like rabbits, we do. Every time I go home for a visit it seems that I’ve got a new nephew or niece.’

‘Where’s home?’ I asked her.

‘Somerset.’

It surprised me she wasn’t from Cornwall. She looked Cornish enough, with her dark hair and eyes and her small, tidy figure set off to advantage in jeans and a form-fitting shirt and the gypsy-like scarf that today bound her curls in a long swinging ponytail. She’d picked up a bit of the accent as well, the distinctive and musical cadence of West Country speech, and I wouldn’t have known that she wasn’t a native.

‘It’s not all that far away, really,’ she told me, ‘though when I first came down here it seemed like a different world, like I had crossed some great divide.’

‘You did,’ I said. ‘You crossed the Tamar.’ And I told her what my mother had told me about the crossing of the river Tamar and how it affected those with Cornish blood.

‘Well, I must have an ancestor from Cornwall then,’ she said, ‘because I definitely felt it. I was on a summer holiday with friends, and I had one more year to finish uni, and all that time the only thing I thought about was how to get back here. And in the end I just packed up and came. No plans. My parents thought I’d gone completely mad. They still do,’ she said, ‘but they’ve given up trying to cure me. I’ve told them, it’s Cornwall. There’s no way to fight it.’

I knew what she meant. There was something about this remote western corner of Britain that captured the soul and refused to let go, something ancient and wild in the moors and black cliffs and the voice of the sea that spoke always of something unseen and enchanted.

Felicity tried to express it in words. ‘In Cornwall,’ she told me, ‘one truly feels magic could actually happen.’

I thought of those words as I walked down The Hill after lunch on my way to the bank in Polgelly. There was no one but me on the road. Which was just as well, really, since there would have been little room for a car to push past me, especially once I got under the shady green canopy of the arched trees, with the steeply-banked hedges of stone, turf and tangled growth rising to block out my view of the fields at both sides. As the breeze shook the leaves overhead I remembered the strong sense of magic I’d felt here myself, as a child.

I’d been sure there were fairies concealed in the soft nodding bluebells that peered from the grass of the verge, and I’d trodden with care so as not to disturb them. Each stir of the breeze through the leaves had, to my childish ears, seemed to carry a faint lilting music, not meant for the grown-ups, that beckoned me on. I had often imagined the tunnel of trees was the doorway to fairyland, and I’d been certain that one day I’d step out the other side into some wonderful place.

It hadn’t happened to me then. It didn’t happen now. But still, I felt a thrilling echo of that old anticipation as I passed out of the trees and started down into Polgelly. Here, I thought, was all the magic one could need.

I felt like a child in the summer again at the first sight of the whitewashed shops and houses on the twisting streets, the rooftops stacked like toy blocks up the hills around the harbour where the gulls, drawn by the smells of fish and seaweed, circled with their plaintive cries.

The tide was out. Along the closer edges of the harbour all the smaller boats lay drunkenly tipped over on their hulls in the wet mud, still at their moorings while they waited for the sea’s return.

The harbour was a classic smuggler’s haven, curving like a finger inland, shielded at its entrance by the jagged rocks along the coast. If there had been no houses here to mark the spot it would have been impossible to know there was a harbour in behind those rocks, and even as it stood it took a bit of skill and luck for any tourist who tried navigating in by sailboat.

The street that ran along the harbour wall looked very much as I’d remembered it. The bank had undergone a change of name, but it still sat on the same corner, and the same strong scents of polished floors and paperwork were there to greet me as I entered. The new accounts manager, Mr Rowe, was a patient and thorough man who walked me through all the forms that I had to fill out. I had kept my British passport and was still a British citizen, which made things somewhat simpler.

‘And you’re living at Trelowarth, now, you said?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’ll use that as your local address, then. And how much money would you like me to arrange to have wired over from your bank in California?’

I said, ‘All of it,’ and handed him the printed details of my two American accounts. He raised his eyebrows at the sum, but didn’t comment. All he said was, ‘Very good, I’ll have this all approved and let you know when we receive your money.’

‘Thank you.’ With a handshake, I went out again, crossing the road to the fudge shop.

The little bell still rang as I went in, and as I crossed the threshold I felt ten years old again, transported by the sweet assault of wondrous smells too rich and varied to be numbered or identified. I bought half a pound of my old favourite flavour, mint chocolate, and took it out with me, intending to indulge in more nostalgia and enjoy it while I sat among the tourists on the sun-warmed harbour wall, but my eye was caught instead by the green chemist’s sign a little further up the winding street. Felicity had said her own shop was beside the chemist’s, so I tucked the rattly paper bag of fudge into my pocket and went up to have a look.