Another Life: Escape to Cornwall with this gripping, emotional, page-turning read. Sara MacDonald
‘I’d better get to work, Nell, half the morning has gone.’ Gabby preferred her coffee without cat hairs in it. ‘Let me help you get this doughty woman out of her frame before I go.’
They eased the painting out of its frame and laid it carefully on Nell’s table, face up and uncovered to avoid any more paint loss. The portrait was large and had obviously been moved frequently as there were lines of stretcher marks where it had been folded, and the craquelure followed the lines of a stretcher and had caused the most damage.
‘I wonder if she was passed from one family member to another in desperation, constantly being removed from her frame, poor old dear,’ Gabby said.
‘Well, someone loved her enough to commission a huge six-foot painting of her. Removing the overpaint is going to take the most time.’ Nell peered at the woman’s bosoms with a magnifying glass. ‘I’ll remove that varnish with isopropanol. Can you see? There’s a thin layer of discoloured natural resin. I’m going to have to remove most of the more recent restorations. I suspect …’ Nell moved over to the foreground of the lady’s sumptuous dress ‘… that each restorer has altered the tone of the previous overpaint, rather than removing it. I’m pretty sure I’ll find layers concealing more damage …’
Gabby smiled as she watched Nell. She was already caught in the excitement of restoring. Her face had come suddenly alive as her eyes darted to and fro, assessing the damage with a keen and professional eye. It was this, Nell’s passionate interest in her work, that had fired Gabby’s imagination and curiosity all those years ago.
Gabby walked across the farmyard back to the house. Despite the distant noise of the digger a feeling of contentment filled her. She had been afraid when Josh left home that the gap he left would yawn before her, yet slowly but steadily the work had come in to distract her. She had now got to the stage of having to refuse commissions. For the first time in her life she was able to make a financial contribution to the farm, and it felt wonderful.
She walked through the kitchen to her workroom, which was the oldest part of the house with a cobbled floor that had once been Charlie’s office. The window looked out on the small, walled garden which dipped downhill to the daffodil fields.
At the start of every daffodil season Gabby would stand transfixed by the green and yellow sloping fields full of emerging buds and the startling vivid blue of the ocean behind them. The scene was reminiscent of the poster of daffodil pickers that had been stuck on the classroom wall at school. It had been that poster that had enticed her to run away and climb on a coach to Cornwall.
She moved away from the window to the small painting propped up on an easel. She wanted to finish it today. It was the last of her backlog as she had decided not to take on any more commissions until she had seen the figurehead next week.
Ever since Peter Fletcher, the curator from the museum in Truro, had rung her she had felt restless with anticipation. She thought about this lost figurehead making its way from Canada on its last voyage home. She tried not to think how disappointed she would be if she was not offered the job of restoring it.
She picked up a swab of cotton wool on a stick from the jam-jar beside her and started to work, concentrating, engrossed, as her fingers moved deftly, defining detail and discovering small hidden surprises out of layers of dirt. She smiled as she discovered under the old cobbler’s hands, not darkness, but a beautiful drawer of nails.
Gabby set off to see the figurehead at St Piran a week after the digger started to scar the top field. At the top of the hill she got out and climbed onto the gate. She looked down on the farm crouched in the trees, so familiar; and yet, as she gripped the top of the gate all seemed suddenly unfamiliar, as if she was a stranger looking down on a homestead containing the lives of people she knew nothing about.
A small figure came out of the barn and walked across the yard. Charlie? She could not see from here. The odd sensation persisted. The hot, still day pressed down on her, the heat shimmered above the grass and hedgerow. The morning swelled with the sound of bees settling on the honeysuckle in the hedge. Horseflies hovered in petrol-blue clouds over the cowpats in the field beyond the gate.
Still she stood on the gate looking downwards, suspended and held by the day that slowly wound forward to the next minute and the next and the next. In her mind’s eye she saw the hands of a clock crawling round the face in slow motion, so imperceptibly towards something that she was afraid they might stop altogether and she would forever be suspended, held here, above her life, waiting.
The sun bounced and glinted off the sea, dazzling her. Her hands on the gate seemed extraordinarily translucent, her body torpid and yet light as if she might blow away like a leaf, hither and thither across the field having no weight at all. She thought suddenly, I would have no place down there if it wasn’t for Josh. If my child had never existed Nell and Charlie would be a memory only. A memory I reached for in the dark because it reminded me of what I had been running from, that first cold day when I stood here looking down at the pickers bent to the tight green buds of daffodils in a freezing wind.
She stared beyond the gate, away to the horizon, across Charlie and Nell’s five hundred acres below her, then she turned abruptly and got back into the car.
As she drove away from the sea she began to think about the figurehead. Peter Fletcher had told her, briefly, that it had come from a trade schooner called the Lady Isabella, which had set sail from St Piran and foundered in Canadian waters in 1867 with all hands on board.
The figurehead must have been salvaged years ago, but had only recently been discovered by a Canadian historian who had taken the time and trouble to trace a figurehead, from a foreign vessel, all the way back to the small Cornish port from where it had started its journey.
Gabby had been to the library and got out everything on marine figureheads she could find. Nell had given her a list of maritime museums and suggested she go over and visit Valhalla on Tresco to view the collection of figureheads more closely. She had also dug out old restoration books from her lecturing days which she thought Gabby might find useful.
Gabby pored over the photographs, fascinated by the wealth and beauty of the ships and figureheads inside the books she had borrowed. She had surprised herself with her sudden overriding conviction that this figurehead was a commission she must have. It was the first time she had been approached for the sort of work Nell herself had never undertaken and it astonished her that her opinion was being sought; that she had credibility on the basis of her own work, not Nell’s reputation.
Nell was sure that one of the reasons Gabby had been approached was her skill with intricate church panels. Gabby was more patient than Nell had been in her younger days. On wood it was necessary to peel away centuries of wax, stain and varnish, to reveal, after a tiring and lengthy process, if you were lucky, a hidden painting. The moment of discovery, the moment a fleck of colour appeared under your fingers like magic, was incomparable. Gabby never tired of the excitement and anticipation of a discovery. Nell preferred the satisfaction of simply transforming what she was working on to the comparative rarity of finding a concealed painting that had not been ruined.
As Gabby entered the village a small wind gusted from the sea, rocking her car. It carried with it a sudden presentiment that was disturbing. She felt a sharp stab of anxiety that made her breathless. She parked her car near the small museum and walked towards the group of people waiting for her in the porch.
For a moment Gabby hesitated with her hand on the latch of the old Methodist chapel that was now a museum. The group of men waiting for her were in shadow, she could not see their faces.
There was a second when she could have turned and run back to the car, driven away fast, back to the farmhouse lying squat and secure amid small trees all bent one way by the winds like figures frozen in a Russian landscape.
She could have run and never known the possibilities the future could hold. But someone called out and