2
The Bonny Banks
My knight in shining Burberry was Edie, the owner of a small local hotel, who’d been giving her Pomeranian a bedtime stroll. She was a brisk, acute, businesslike woman somewhere in her late fifties, five foot two of pugnacious Scottish determination, though with a soft centre for waifs and strays.
‘Not such a wee lassie after all,’ she said as I stood up and towered over her and then, once she’d grasped the essence of my situation, whisked me back to her hotel.
There, she thawed me out with hot soup and consigned me to bed in an empty room in the staff quarters on the top floor, with the admonition that I was not to worry, things would seem better in the morning.
When I finally got a chance to phone Lola next day to assure her I was fine, she confessed that she’d got cold feet and told her mum everything, even where I’d been heading.
‘But of course, I didn’t know exactly where you were going,’ she explained. ‘Only that it was Cornwall.’
‘It took a lot longer to get down here than I expected, so when it started to get dark, I thought I’d better get off at the next seaside town we stopped at,’ I said.
‘Mum said she wished you’d told her right away and she wants you to come back and live with us, until we go off to university, Alice.’
‘That’s really sweet of her, but I don’t want to go to university any more,’ I said. ‘I only agreed to apply for teacher training courses because I couldn’t think of any other option after I was turned down for fine art.’
Whatever art departments were looking for these days, it appeared it wasn’t a girl who strongly resembled the Pre-Raphaelite muse Lizzie Siddal, but drew a contemporary world with fairy-tale echoes and a hint of horror in ink and wash, like a nightmarish Arthur Rackham. I could possibly have tried for a degree in literature and creative writing, but I didn’t see the point – I read everything I could get my hands on and you certainly couldn’t say my modern takes on traditional fairy tales weren’t creative.
Then I told Lola that I was living in a small hotel on the seafront called The Bonny Banks, and the owner, Edie, was going to try me out in various jobs to see what I was best at.
I’d already discovered that it wasn’t making beds.
We quickly found that my métier wasn’t cleaning, either (too prone to fall into a dreamy trance), or waiting at table, since I was not only very reserved, with a full-lipped mouth that made me look permanently sulky, but when I did utter, tact didn’t seem to be my middle name. I expect I was too used to giving back as good as I got, having grown up with Nessa, the expert in barbed and belittling remarks.
I think Edie was starting to worry that her lame duck would never turn into a decent swan, until finally I came into my own – in the kitchens. For thanks to Lola’s mum’s cookery lessons, I could make cakes and pastries to die for and if my mind was wandering in a warped fairyland while I was dreamily rubbing the fat into the flour, then that must have been a good thing, for there was always a touch of magic in my baking.
Predictably it was Dolly, Lola’s mum, who drove down to see me a couple of weeks later. Though I knew she would have told Nessa where I was, there had still been no word from her, so I assumed she’d washed her hands of me.
I hadn’t really expected the Wicked Witch to get on her broomstick and fly down there to check that I was all right, but still, it was another total abandonment. First my birth mother, then Dad (even though he couldn’t help dying, I was still angry with him for doing it), and now Nessa had finally cast me adrift. Or maybe I cast myself adrift and she simply decided not to toss me a lifejacket.
It seemed I was right about that. Dolly, once she’d had a chat with Edie, took me out for tea and told me that she’d been round to talk to Nessa as soon as I’d told Lola where I was.
‘I thought she’d be desperately worried about your safety and relieved to know you were all right,’ she said. ‘But she told me you’d accused her fiancé of such dreadful things that she wouldn’t have you back under her roof again.’
‘I did, but it was all true.’
‘Yes, I told her that you’d always been such a truthful girl that if you said he’d made a pass at you, then he had.’
‘Did you say fiancé?’ I asked. ‘She’s marrying that creep?’
‘Apparently, and they’re moving to London once the house is sold. There’s already an estate agent’s board up in the garden.’
I felt a pang of sadness – not so much for the house as the studio in the garden, which held so many happy memories of Dad. But in any case, by now the entire contents had probably been loaded into a container and shipped off to America.
‘I really don’t understand how any mother can behave that way,’ Dolly said, shaking her head sadly so that fine, silky strands of white-blond hair came loose from a mother-of-pearl butterfly clip and fell around her face. ‘She’d already packed up all your belongings and was about to give them to a charity shop until I said I’d store them. They’re in my attic now, though Lola’s sent you a few things she thought you might need.’
‘You’re so kind,’ I said gratefully, wishing not for the first time that she was my mother, rather than the Wicked Witch.
‘Well, we all love you, darling. You know you could come back with me right now and go off to college in the autumn with Lola, don’t you? And, of course, you’d make your home with us during the holidays.’
I was so touched I felt choked. She meant it from the heart, I was sure of that. But still, I didn’t want to be the bit of jigsaw that didn’t really fit into their happy family picture, but had to be squeezed in somehow.
‘I’ll be OK,’ I assured her. ‘I’m going to stay in Cornwall and work, and get a place of my own eventually. And there are evening art classes and writing groups I can join … I like it here.’
Which was true, because it was a lovely place. Of course, it wasn’t really my place, any more than our village near Shrewsbury had been. Nowhere was.
Not even Haworth, once the Avalon I’d both longed and feared to visit – a fear arising from a suspicion that it wouldn’t live up to Dad’s comforting stories about my abandonment. For now I knew that I’d been left out on the moors, probably miles away, I could have come from anywhere.
But I settled in Cornwall for the next few years, even if my roots were never more than shallowly put down.
Edie became a good friend, despite the difference in our ages, and Lola’s family provided support and a bolthole I could always return to, sure of a warm welcome.
Of the Wicked Witch I heard nothing more, once the house was sold and she decamped to London. It felt as if all those years she’d only been pretending to be my mother … which actually, I suppose, was the truth. She was thrust into the role but the run was lengthier than she’d hoped for.
Lola went off to university the following autumn to study history but then, instead of carrying on and doing a postgraduate teaching course as she’d intended, fell in love with a visiting historian older than her father and settled in Hampstead to raise three children. She said Harry, her husband, had a young soul and the same sense of humour, which, when I met him, I discovered was true. They were genuine soul mates and, if the stars were not quite in alignment regarding their ages, then they were prepared to take what happiness they could together.
Meanwhile, I drifted from job to job, baking in a café, working as a pastry chef in a big hotel, torturing icing into edible fantasies for a celebration cake maker … all kinds of things. In between, I’d return to Edie, where my room was kept ready for me and I was always welcome. In my spare time I took painting classes and accepted that my talents lay more in illustration than fine art, tried on several writing groups for size and socialized in one of the artier pubs with a group of bohemian and often transient friends.
And that’s where I eventually met and fell for Robbie … though by then I’d become so used to having my own space that I never actually moved in with him. I’d climbed up the housing ladder slowly, from rented room, to bedsit, to minute flat. It wasn’t easy to find anything affordable in a tourist resort on my wages.
Robbie was a bit like my father, I suppose, in that he was a big, easy-going and comforting bear of a man, given to warm, wonderfully consoling hugs. He was a dentist, of all things, though his real love was surfing, kayaking, hang-gliding or any sport that had a dangerous edge to it. I was always afraid I was going to lose him, though not in the way I finally did, when he emigrated to Australia.
He wasn’t big on permanent commitment and though he suggested I follow him out there once he’d found his feet, I didn’t believe for one minute that he really meant it. In any case, I didn’t want to go. I mean, I have ghost-white skin, red hair and wilt even in mild sunshine, so I’d have to live the life of a vampire to survive in a hot country.
The day he flew off, leaving me with his old and sea breeze-blasted Beetle car, with the hippie-style daisies painted up the side, as a keepsake, it felt like yet another abandonment.
Still, as Lola pointed out to me when I was staying in London with her and Harry soon after Robbie left, my life was also a series of lucky breaks: against all the odds I’d been discovered alive after my abandonment, I’d had a wonderful father, and Edie had rescued me on my very first night in Cornwall from who knows what danger.
‘And you and your family have always been there for me,’ I said gratefully. ‘I’m OK about Robbie really, because I can see now that we were just drifting along together and he was never going to commit to marriage or a family, but we did have some good times.’
I looked back at over a decade spent in Cornwall and added, surprised, ‘You know, when I moved down there I didn’t think I’d be spending my life working in café kitchens! Somehow, I imagined I’d magically be able to earn my living from writing and painting.’
‘You have sold some of your paintings and you’ve had short stories published,’ she said encouragingly.
‘I’ve given up trying to sell my pictures, because in my heart I know now I’m not that good, and all my novels have been rejected.’
‘I think your pictures are great, but probably a bit of a niche market,’ she suggested tactfully. ‘And I expect readers just aren’t ready for dark, adult fairy tales yet. Perhaps you should try a change of direction?’
And I did, though not quite in the way she meant. In the spring of 2007 I loaded my entire worldly possessions into the old Beetle car and upped and moved to Scotland, to work in Dan Carmichael’s Climber’s Café.