‘So where are the documents now?’
Basili frowned. ‘Sohag, I think? Does it matter? Brother Kelada didn’t want them here, I don’t know why. So he told Qulta to take them back where they came from, where they were found – some cave in the desert. That’s what I heard. That’s all I know.’
Again, the frustration returned, but also the excitement. Sohag, Middle Egypt. The Red Monastery, or the White, or the Monastery of the Martyrs, the Monastery of the Seven Mountains. Which? But it made sense. Sohag was not far from Nag Hammadi, where the Gnostic gospels were found.
‘Where in Sohag? There are many monasteries. Please let me speak to Brother Kelada. He can tell me.’
The Australian monk shook his head. ‘Impossible.’
‘What?’
‘He died three days ago.’
‘But how?’
Basili looked faintly contemptuous.
‘We had to bury him outside, near the trees. Suicide is the worst of sins.’
The walk to the Methodist chapel for her mother’s funeral took Karen Trevithick past grey, pinched, tin-miners’ houses that probably once belonged to her extended family. She was descended from generations of Cornish tinners. And Cornish wreckers, smugglers and fishermen, for that matter.
Cornwall was her homeland, this was her home. Carnkie was the hearth of that home.
Yet she didn’t feel at home. Not at all.
‘All right, Karen, my dear? So sorry to hear about Mavis.’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘How is the littl’un?’
‘Ellie is OK, staying with Julie, my cousin’s wife in London – they have kids.’
‘Ah yes, nice for her to have playmates. ’Specially now.’
‘Yes. Yes it is.’
Who was this polite elderly Cornish gentleman who had stopped her in the street? Karen ransacked her memory. She couldn’t place him: some distant third cousin? A friend of her mother’s? The man smiled at her, kind and gracious, and laid a consoling hand on her elbow. She thanked the nice old gent once again, and walked on, around the drizzly corner, to the chapel, a dour grey granite pile, a building of deliberate and penitent ugliness.
Karen’s mother, a widow since her fifties, had returned to this old village, Carnkie, a few years back: retreating from an increasingly lonely London to the emotional comforts of Cornwall.
At the time, Karen had confessed mixed feelings about this. She was glad her mum was retiring to the country she loved, but she was selfishly sad her mother was leaving as that meant less free childcare for Ellie; she couldn’t work out why her mother chose Carnkie of all places, even if it was the ancestral hamlet.
Much of Cornwall was lovely, from the sheltered yachting harbours and languid creeks of the south, to the rawly beautiful cliff-and-thrift coasts of the north; but Carnkie was in the brutal, ugly middle of Cornwall, a place of wind-scraped moorland – and dormant, decaying mining townships. Like Carnkie.
The mourners were gathered at the gate that led to the chapel door.
‘Hello Karen.’
‘So sad, so very sad. So young as well.’
‘I tell ’ee, sixty-two?’
Barely listening, Karen took one last look at the view. A typical Cornish fog, half-drizzle, half-mist, was rolling down from old Carn Brea, shrouding the rocky moorland above the village. It murked between the granite-built tin-mine stacks, making them look, even more than usual, like classical ruins.
Karen turned, and entered. The interior of the chapel was notably better than the façade: it was airy and spacious. But the spaciousness underlined the fact there were so few people here. At least she could see her cousin Alan at the front, in a pew; he saw her, too, and waved her over.
‘All right, Kaz?’
‘Yes,’ she sighed, sitting down next to her cousin. ‘Fine. I mean. Ish.’
Apart from Alan there were maybe ten or eleven people, their paltry numbers exaggerated by the vastness of the chapel. This was a place built for hundreds of lustily singing miners and their ruddy-faced wives and many, many kids, a place built at the height of the tinning boom in the nineteenth century, when places like Carnkie were churning out more copper and tin than anywhere else on earth, when places like Redruth, Carnkie and St Just were allegedly the richest square miles on the planet, though all the real money disappeared to London with the owners and the landlords.
Now it was all dead. The chapels were empty, the mines were closed, the people were old and the children had gone. And now even her mother had been taken and swallowed by the mizzle, reducing her immediate family to just two people: herself and her six-year-old daughter.
She realized, with a kind of surprise, that she was crying.
‘Hey now, come on.’ Alan handed her a tissue.
‘Sorry. Look at me. Train wreck.’
‘No need to apologize. Just remember, you’re nearly through. The crem is usually the worst bit.’
‘I’m glad we did it first.’
‘Yes.’
The cremation had been yesterday: this was the service. Karen already had her mother’s ashes in her car, sealed in a faintly farcical pot, itself in a supermarket carrier bag. She had no idea what to do with them. Scatter them at sea? But her mother had distrusted the sea. Like many older Cornish people she had never even learned to swim, even though she lived in a peninsula surrounded by the churning Atlantic.
Where then? Up on Carn Brea, next to the castle? That was better – the view across to St Agnes Beacon, and the sea beyond, was immense and glorious; but the grieving wind hardly ever stopped.
Incongruously, Karen considered the disaster that might ensue if she scattered the ashes in a typical blowy Carn Brea morning.
‘We are gathered here to celebrate the life of Mavis Trevithick.’
The vicar was doing his thing. Karen barely listened. She imagined her mother’s reaction to the news that her mortal remains had been ritually distributed across a bank of Lidl shopping trolleys.
She’d surely have laughed. Like many Cornish people, her mum had possessed, or inherited, a wry and salty sense of humour: that kind of wit was the only way to deal with tough lives down the mines, or on bitter moortop farms.
‘Can we all sing Hymn 72, “Abide with Me”?’
Oh God. ‘Abide with Me’? Karen was entirely immune to religion; she believed none of it – that’s why she’d left Alan to arrange the service – but this one hymn always got her. Something in the tune – it mined her soul, found the motherlode of human grief, every time.
The organ hummed, the frail voices joined in. Karen put the scrunched-up tissue in her fist to her trembling mouth and closed her eyes. Hard.
Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,