“Alyson, we are talking now.”
“You do understand about Allen, dear? Why his improved condition makes it impossible for me to accompany you?”
“Of course I do! Quentin and Hester are something else, though. Not that for one moment I need them as companions.”
She shrugged plump and rounded shoulders. “They are free agents, aren’t they? I can’t force them. They expressed no interest— any more she in them. Then they hardly knew her, did they? Oh, dear! Why does everything end up in questions?”
“The simple truth of the matter, Alyson, is the fact she was the end of something. And that something is all tied up with just you and me. We’re the end of the Bryant line. We’re looking at the bare bones, the carcass of what we so long took for granted as the family.”
“You did maybe as a single man. But not my children, not their generation. They’ve been reared so differently. Their values… Well, Davey, surely the whole world has changed.”
“We will still never understand those changes unless and until we’ve all said our goodbyes to what precipitated them. Even your kids came out of something, not just a London limbo.” He could see by the obstinacy giving faint contour to her fleshy features that she was unconvinced. “Anyway, let’s drop it. I’d rather stick with what we have in common than waste time on what pushes us apart. Alyson and Davey…all that’s left.”
She wiggled her ample bottom uncomfortably in the armchair as always, resisting bleakness, fighting harsher realities, realizing if she had capitulated to that in the past it would have broken her. “I suppose in the end, Davey, I’m just a silly old mother. That’s what everything comes back to in the end. I can’t help it. Someone has to think of the shopping.”
He stared at her. How he wanted to admire her, knowing her virtues, her powers of self-sacrifice that he believed far beyond him. But he couldn’t help an irritation welling over her exaggerated mother bit, of her wasting her substance over two kids who already inhabited another universe from the one she understood. Teenagers who were already set to go their own way, leaving her by the way-side. He conceded then and there that he was probably jealous of them. In any event, he knew he had no right to upset her by scoffing at her maternity, however simplistic it sounded. If he even hinted at all that, he knew she would only end up rounding on him as a childless bachelor without either the instincts or experience to understand.
“Here’s to motherhood, old girl,” he said instead, holding up an imaginary glass in toast to her.
“Here’s to us both, Davey,” she responded similarly.
As shortly after that as he could, again carefully avoiding hurting her feelings, he guiltily made his departure, promising her with excessive emphasis that he would call her from their shared birthplace.
On the train the next morning, circuitously heading to Tintagel via Okehampton, it occurred to him that this was the second voyage since leaving home that he was encompassed with a sense of guilt that wouldn’t go away: first, after leaving Ken under less than warm circumstances, and now because of Alyson whom he’d somehow failed to comfort. He emerged from his compartment on the last train leg of the journey in a black depression as he sought to hire a car for the final part of the exhausting trip.
THREE
Davey looked about him over the rows of pitch-pine pews in the squat slate chapel perched on the heathered cliff top. There were five people scattered about the drafty space. For a deceased without immediate family, he surmised, it was the local custom for the coffin to remain in the funeral home until after the service when a hearse would drive it to a churchyard—in this case Pentudy’s—and the undertakers would provide professional bearers before burial. He hadn’t volunteered for the task.
The others were strangers to him. Then Hannah had no relations in Cornwall and only five—if one included Alyson’s three children—in that larger world beyond the windblown headland stubbornly confronting the uninterrupted Atlantic.
In the front row of the sea of empty pews huddled a close-sitting couple. They both looked middle-aged and each wore navy blue belted raincoats. The woman’s head was covered in a gaudy red-and-white kerchief, while her companion, at a dig from her, suddenly pulled off a Donegal tweed hat and placed it on the pew beside him. The action revealed a grizzled head of close-cropped hair. They were wearing rubber boots that evoked the incessant rain prevailing outside. There was something vaguely familiar about the two to the Canadian, and he wondered if, in spite of his conviction that only he and Alyson’s family were left, they might be relatives he’d utterly forgotten. They were both very short, even shorter than he who was only five foot six, and as he eyed them he strove to recall if there had been others in the family who, at a pinch, might have been described as dwarfs. The reflection brought no immediate results, so he turned his attention elsewhere.
Facing the miniscule congregation was their opposite in height—a tall, dank man in a dark brown corduroy suit who announced in a sepulchral voice that he was the local lay preacher on the North Cornwall Methodist Circuit. Davey guessed he might also be the local undertaker. His ashen skin certainly looked as if he’d spent most of his days burying the dead under sunless skies and in driving rain.
Behind and above the preacher’s bobbing, balding head with its few flat strands of carefully arranged hair was a sign curving over the generous pulpit space he occupied. It read COD IS LOVE. Davey took a moment or two to realize that the bar of the G had fallen off or worn away. He sniffed his satisfaction. His sense of geography evidently hadn’t let him down. He recalled that the isolated spot where the chapel was defiantly situated was only a mile or so south of the fishing village of Poltiddy, itself south of Tintagel, where any species of fish, along with the local mackerel, lobster, and crab, provided the fishermen contingent of the local inhabitants with a precarious living. COD IS LOVE seemed more germane there as a source to pray to than obeisance to some remote and distinctly unfishy deity.
The service struck the deceased’s nephew as indecently short. He was subconsciously expecting, if not a full-blooded requiem, at least something that bespoke departure. Along the lines, say, of “Farewell, Thou Christian Soul,” In his mind there were vague echoes of Edward Elgar’s stately Dream of Gerontius, a composition, based on Cardinal Newman’s poem, of which he and Ken were extremely fond. Instead the chapel was filled with the staccato squawks from a dumpy harmonium now pressed into service by a white-haired woman in mackintosh to match, who hunched over her modest instrument in that Spartan Methodist tabernacle as if she were Wanda Landowska at the harpsichord.
But there now reluctantly stirred in Davey a bundle of memories that had been quiescent, if not suppressed, since he’d first headed for North America in the company of Ken. He was remembering the pull from the distaff side of his family of that Primitive Methodist Connection that had determined his youthful attendance in Trelinney Chapel for Sunday Morning Service and Sunday School.
There now vividly returned divers recollections of the battery of onerous Sunday sorties to chapel that had been dovetailed into the equal Sabbath obligations of Anglican Mass and Evensong. As the tiny congregation bawled—with little seeming relevance to the circumstances of Great-Aunt Hannah (or, indeed, the weather)—the sprightly chorus of “Jesus, wants me for a sunbeam,” Davey’s thoughts turned to an onerous past; to those infinitely dull annual Sunday School outings to the surf (forbidden to enter) and sand (only the top part which the tide rarely washed) of Polzeath Beach instead of the church’s more exciting expeditions to more distant places such as St. Ives, Penzance, or Land’s End.
From “Sunbeams” the creaky harmonium led the congregation to the hymn “All Glory, Lord, and Honour,” after which the exhausted throats were reminded by the preacher that “Methody was born in song.” They were then asked to inform their Wesleyan God just how happy they all were to have known his saint, Hannah Bryant, who had valiantly darkened the doors of Cornish Bethels since her remote childhood. This was a detail that was news to Davey who had vaguely been under the impression that her “remote childhood” had been