The Fire Child. S. K. Tremayne
shading and hatching. He is a very good artist, probably a much better artist – as I am realizing – than me. More naturally talented. I can draw a little but not as skilfully as this, and certainly not as fast.
Discovering David’s artistic side has been one of the unexpected pleasures of this summer. I’ve known all along he was interested in the arts: after all, I first met him at a private view in a Shoreditch gallery. And when we were in Venice he was able to show me all his favourite Venetian artworks: not just the obvious Titians, and Canelettos, but the Brancusis in the Guggenheim, the baroque ceiling of San Pantalon, or a ninth-century Madonna in Torcello, with its watchful eyes of haunted yet eternal love. A mother’s never-ending love. It was so lovely and sad it made me want to cry.
Yet I didn’t properly realize that he was good at making art until I moved here to Carnhallow. I’ve seen some of David’s youthful work on the Drawing Room wall, and in his study: semi-abstract paintings of Penwith’s carns and moors and beaches. They are so good I thought, at first, that they were expensive professional pieces, bought at a Penzance auction house by Nina. Part of her painstaking restoration, her dedication to this house.
‘There,’ he says. ‘Nose done. Now the mouth. Mouths are easy. Two seconds.’ He leans back and looks at the drawing. ‘Hah. Aced it.’
He sips some peach-and-lemon contentedly. The sun is warm on my bare and tanning shoulders. Birds are singing in Ladies Wood. I wouldn’t be surprised if they went into close harmony. This is it. The perfect moment of good luck. The man, the love, the sun, the beautiful house in a beautiful garden in a beautiful corner of England. I have an urge to say something nice, to repay the world.
‘You know you’re really good.’
‘Sorry, darling?’
He is sketching again. Deep in masculine concentration. I like the way he focuses. Frowning, but not angry. Man At Work. ‘Drawing. I know I’ve told you this before – but you’re seriously talented.’
‘Meh,’ he says, like a teenager, but smiling like an adult, his hand moving briskly across the page. ‘Perhaps.’
‘You never wanted to do it for a living?’
‘No. Yes. No.’
‘Sorry?’
‘For a moment, after Cambridge, I considered it. I would have liked to try my hand, once. But I had no choice: I had to work, to make lots and lots of boring money.’
‘Because your dad burned up all the fortune?’
‘He even sold the family silver, Rachel. To pay those imbecilic gambling debts. Sold it like some junkie fencing the TV. I had to buy it back – the Kerthen silver. And they made me pay a premium.’ David sighs, takes another taste of juice. The sun sparkles on the glass tilted in his hand. He savours the freshness and flavour and looks past me, at the sun-laced woods.
‘Of course, we were running out of money anyway: it wasn’t all my father’s fault. Carnhallow was absurdly expensive to run, but the family kept trying. Though most of the mines were making losses by 1870.’
‘Why?’
He picks up the pencil, taps it between his sharp white teeth. Thinking about the picture, answering me distractedly. ‘I really must do you nude. I’m embarrassingly good at nipples. It’s quite a gift.’
‘David!’ I laugh. ‘I want to know. Want to understand things. Why did they make losses?’
He continues sketching. ‘Because Cornish mining is hard. There’s more tin and copper lying under Cornwall than has ever been mined, in all the four thousand years of Cornish mining history, yet it’s basically impossible to extract. And certainly unprofitable.’
‘Because of the cliffs, and the sea?’
‘Exactly. You’ve seen Morvellan. That was our most profitable mine, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it’s so dangerous and inaccessible.’
‘Go on.’
‘There’s a reason Morvellan has that strange architecture – the two houses. Most Cornish mineshafts were exposed to the air, only the pumps were protected, behind stone – because machinery was deemed more important than men, perhaps. But on the cliffs, above Zawn Hanna, the Kerthens had a problem: because of the proximity of the sea, and consequent storms, we had to protect the top of the shaft in its own house, right next to the Engine House.’ He stares at me and past me, as if he is looking at the mines themselves. ‘Creating, by accident, that poignant, diagonal symmetry.’ His pencil twirls slowly in his fingers. ‘Now compare that to the open-cast mines of Australia, or Malaysia. The tin is right there, at the surface. They can simply dig it out of the ground with a plastic spade. And that’s why Cornish mining died. Four thousand years of mining, gone in a couple of generations.’
His cheerfulness has clouded over. I can sense his darkening thoughts, tending to Nina, who drowned at Morvellan. It was probably my fault, letting the conversation stray in this direction. Down the valley. Towards the mineheads on the cliffs. I must make amends. ‘You really want to do me nude?’
His smile returns. ‘Oh yes. Oh, very much, yes.’ He laughs and peels his finished drawing from the volume, and slants his handsome head, assessing his own work. ‘Hmm. Not bad. Still didn’t get the nose right. I really am better at nipples. OK’ – he tilts a wrist to check the time – ‘I promised I’d take Jamie to school—’
‘At the weekend?’
‘Soccer match, remember? He’s very excited. Can you pick him up later? I’m seeing Alex in Falmouth.’
‘Of course I will. Love to.’
‘See you for dinner. You’re a great sitter.’
He kisses me softly before striding away, around the house, heading for his car, calling out for Jamie. Like we are already a family. Safe and happy. This feeling warms me like the summer weather.
I remain sitting here in the sun, eyes half-closed, mind half-asleep. The sense of sweet purposelessness is delicious. I have things to do, but nothing particular to do right now. Voices murmur in the house, and on the drive. The car door slams in the heat. The motor-noise dwindles as it heads through those dense woods, up the valley to the moors. Birdsong replaces it.
Then I realize I haven’t looked at David’s drawing of me. Curious, maybe a little wary – I dislike being drawn, the same way I dislike being photographed: I only do it to indulge David – I lean across and pick up the sheet of paper.
It is predictably excellent. In fifteen minutes of sketching he has captured me, from the slight sadness in my eyes that never goes away, to the sincere if uncertain smile. He sees me true. And yet I am pretty in this picture, too: the shadow of the hat flatters. And there in the picture is my love for him, vivid in the happy shyness of my gaze.
He sees the love, which pleases me.
There is only one flaw. It is the nose. My nose is, I am told, cute, retroussé, upturned. But he hasn’t sketched my nose at all. This nose is sharper, aquiline, more beautiful: this bone structure is from someone else’s face, someone else he drew a thousand times, so that it became habitual. And I know who. I’ve seen the photos, and the drawings.
He’s made me look like Nina.
Afternoon
The drawing lies on the grass, fallen from my hand. I am awake, and surprised that I slept. I must have drifted off in the indulgent warmth of the sun. Gazing about me, I see nothing has changed. Shadows have lengthened. The day is still fine, the sun still bright.
I sleep a lot in Carnhallow, and I sleep well. It is like I am catching up, after twenty-five years of alarm clocks. I sometimes feel so leisured that my latent guilt kicks in, along with a hint of loneliness.
I haven’t got any proper friends down here yet, so these last solitary weeks when I