Days Before Christmas
Morvellan Mine is an invention. It is, however, clearly based on the spectacular and historic mines scattered along the rugged cliffs of West Penwith, Cornwall. The tin and copper mines of Botallack, Geevor and the Levant were particular inspirations.
Tin has been extracted from Cornwall for maybe four thousand years. At the age of ten my maternal grandmother Annie Jory worked as a ‘bal maiden’ – a girl employed to crush rocks with a hammer – in the rich mines of St Agnes, North Cornwall.
This book is, therefore, written in memory of my Cornish ancestors: farmers, fishermen, smugglers and miners.
Morning
The tunnels go under the sea. It’s a thought I can’t easily dismiss. The tunnels go under the sea. For a mile, or more.
I’m standing in the Old Dining Room, where the windows of my enormous new home face north: towards the Atlantic, and the cliffs of Penwith, and a silhouetted blackness. This dark twinned shape is Morvellan Mine: the Shaft House, and the Engine House.
Even on a cloudless June day, like today, the ruins of Morvellan look obscurely sad, or oddly reproachful. It’s like they are trying to tell me something, yet they cannot and will not. They are eloquently muted. The rough-house Atlantic makes all the noise, the booming waves riding the tides above the tunnels.
‘Rachel?’
I turn. My new husband stands in the doorway. His shirt is blinding white, his suit is immaculate, nearly as dark as his hair, and the weekend’s stubble has gone.
‘Been looking for you everywhere, darling.’
‘Sorry. I’ve been wandering. Exploring. Your amazing house!’
‘Our house, darling. Ours.’
He smiles, comes close, and we kiss. It’s a morning kiss, a going-to-work-kiss, not meant to lead anywhere – but it still thrills me, still gives me that that scary and delicious feeling: that someone can have such power over me, a power I am somehow keen to accept.
David takes my hand, ‘So. Your first weekend in Carnhallow …’
‘Mmm.’
‘So tell me – I want to know you’re all right! I know it must be challenging – the remoteness, all the work that needs doing. I’ll understand if you have misgivings.’
I lift his hand, and kiss it. ‘Misgivings? Don’t be daft. I love it. I love you and I love the house. I love it all, love the challenge, love Jamie, love the way we’re hidden away, love it love it love it.’ I look into his green-grey eyes, and I do not blink. ‘David, I’ve never been happier. Never in all my life. I feel like I have found the place I was meant to be, and the man I was meant to be with.’
I sound totally gushing. What happened to the feisty feminist Rachel Daly I used to be? Where has she gone? My friends would probably tut at me. Six months ago I would have tutted at me: at the girl who gave up her freedom and her job and her supposedly exciting London life to be the bride of an older, richer, taller widower. One of my best friends, Jessica, laughed with sly delight when I told her my sudden plans. My God, darling, you’re marrying a cliché!
That hurt for a second. But I soon realized it didn’t matter what my friends think, because they are still there, back in London, sardined into Tube trains, filing into dreary offices, barely making the mortgage every month. Clinging on to London life like mountaineers halfway up a rockface.
And I am not holding on for dear life any more. I’m far away, with my new husband and his son and his mother, down here at the very end of England, in far West Cornwall, a place where England, as I am discovering, becomes something stranger and stonier, a land of dreaming hard granite that glistens after rain, aland where rivers run through woods like deep secrets, where terrible cliffs conceal shyly exquisite coves, aland where moorland valleys cradle wonderful houses. Like Carnhallow.
I even love the name of this house. Carnhallow.
My daydreaming head rests on David’s shoulder. Like we are halfway to dancing.
But his mobile rings, breaking the spell. Lifting it from his pocket he checks the screen, then kisses me again – his two fingers up-tilting my chin – and he walks away to take the call.
I might once, I guess, have found this gesture patronizing. Now it makes me want sex. But I always want sex with David. I wanted sex the moment my friend Oliver said, Come and meet someone, I think you’ll get on, at that art gallery, and I turned around and there he was, ten years older than me, ten inches taller than me.
I wanted David on our first date, three days later, I wanted him when he bought me the very first drink, I wanted him when he then told a perfectly judged, obviously flirtatious joke, I wanted him when we talked about the rainy March weather and he sipped his champagne and said, ‘Ah but where Sergeant March is skirmishing, Captain April will headquarter, and General