Their banter was affectionate, and utterly familiar, and I felt myself relaxing in the way one only did when in the company of friends.
Susan let Mark score that last point and shrugged as she told him, ‘Just drop that suitcase here for now, Claire said to bring you both round to the cottage when you got here. She’s made sandwiches.’
Mark did as he was told and then fell in behind as Susan, with the dogs bouncing round her as though they’d caught some of her energy, led the way along the front walk of the house and down the long green sweep of hill towards the sea, to the place where the old narrow coast path, trampled hard as rutted pavement by the feet of countless ramblers who came up along the clifftops from Polgelly, disappeared into the Wild Wood.
I’d given it that name the summer Claire had read me Kenneth Graeme’s timeless tales of Mole and Rat and Mr Toad. A chapter a night of The Wind in the Willows and never again could I enter that old, sprawling tangle of woods without cocking an ear for the scurrying footsteps of small unseen creatures and feeling a touch of the magic.
I still felt it now, as I followed Mark into the dim, sudden coolness. The air changed. The light changed. The scent of the woods, dank and earthy and rich, rose around me. The wood was an old one, and where it was deepest it stretched down the hill to the edge of the cliffs, but the trees grew so thickly I lost my whole view of the sea. I was closed round in branches and leaves – oak and elder and blackthorn and ghostly pale sycamores, set amid masses of bluebells.
The coast path, which entered the woods as a narrow track, broadened a little in here so two people could walk side by side, as though those who came into these woods felt more comfortable walking that way in this place where the shadows fell thick on the ferns and the undergrowth, and the high trees had a whispering voice of their own when the wind shook their leaves. But I’d never felt fear in these woods. They were peaceful, and filled with the joyously warbling songs of the birds tending hidden nests high overhead.
Susan, leading us through, turned to tell me, ‘We actually do have a badger. Claire’s seen it.’
If it was anything like the reclusive Mr Badger who had ruled the Wild Wood in The Wind and the Willows, I didn’t hold out too much hope that I’d catch a glimpse of the creature myself, but it didn’t stop me looking while we walked.
I caught the sharp scent of the coal smoke from Claire’s cottage chimney before we stepped into the clearing, a broad semi-circular space blown with green grass that chased to the edge of the cliff, where again I could have a clear view of the sea.
I knew better than to go towards that cliff – there was a wicked drop straight down from there, all unforgiving rock and jagged stone below – but the view itself, framed by the gap in the trees with the flowers and grass in between, and the glitter of sun on the water far out where the fishing boats bobbed, was beautiful.
And facing it, set tidily against the clearing’s edge, the little cottage waited for us with its walls still painted primrose-yellow underneath a roof of sagging slates.
The cottage had been rented out to tourists when I’d come here as a child, to earn a bit of extra income for Trelowarth, but apparently Claire had decided just this past year to move into it herself with all her canvases and paints, and leave the big house for her stepchildren. I couldn’t really blame her. While Trelowarth House was wonderful inside, it was an ancient house with draughts and rising damp and tricky wiring, and it took a lot of work, whereas this little cottage had been put here in the Twenties and was snugly made and comfortable.
There wasn’t any need to knock. We just went in, the three of us, and all the dogs came with us, spilling through into the sitting room. Claire had been reading, but she set aside the paperback and came around to fold me into the third hug of warmth and welcome that I’d had this afternoon.
Claire Hallett was a woman who defied the rules of ageing. She looked just as fit approaching sixty as she’d looked those years ago. Her hair might be a little shorter and a paler shade of blonde now from its whitening, but she was still in jeans and giving off that same strong energy, that sense of capability. Her hug seemed to be offering to carry all my burdens. ‘It’s so good to have you here,’ she said. ‘We were so very sorry when we heard about Katrina.’
Then, because I think she knew that too much sympathy on top of my reunion with the three of them might lead to tears I wasn’t ready yet to cry in front of anybody, she turned the talk to other things: the cottage and the decorating projects she had planned for it, and the next thing I knew we were all in the kitchen and sitting at the old unsteady table with its one leg shorter than the others, drinking Claire’s strong tea and eating cheese and pickle sandwiches as though it had been months, not years, since we’d all been together.
Susan raised the subject of the tea room she was planning. ‘Mark’s against it, naturally,’ she told me. ‘He was never one for change.’
‘It’s not the change,’ Mark said, with patience. ‘It’s the simple fact, my darling, that there’s really no demand for it.’
‘Well, we’d create one, wouldn’t we? I’ve told you, if we opened up the gardens more to tourists, we could bring them by the busload.’
‘Buses can’t come through Polgelly.’
‘So you’d bring them in the other way, across the high road from St Non’s. The tourists go there anyway, to see the well – they could come on here afterwards, for lunch.’ Her tone was certain, as she turned to her stepmother. ‘You’re on my side, surely?’