When Charles tapped on the greenhouse door a few days later I got up too fast, worried, and swayed when my weight went too far on to my bad leg. I’d never known him venture so far from the house. Thinking that it must be an emergency, I pulled the door open for him and moved one of the wooden benches closer to the tiny ceramic stove I was burning twigs in. It gave off just enough heat to keep tropical things alive. He propped his canes against the pottery and sat down on the spare stool, then caught the edge of the workbench when it wobbled. He looked at his hand and brushed the earth off against his trouser leg.
‘Good news,’ he said, and it really must have been good, because he looked cheerful. ‘I’ve a friend near Truro with a parsonage that’s about to be empty. The parson is going to Bristol, apparently. He asked if you’d like to take it. The telegram just came.’
I didn’t know what to say at first. I hadn’t known he had been asking for me, or that he had wanted me out of the house so much. It was like being hit by a cricket ball, nowhere near a cricket pitch or players. I had to sit holding it before I could understand properly. Eventually I said, ‘I can’t be a parson. I thought Deuteronomy was the academic study of Germany till I was eighteen.’
‘It’s only Truro, we’re not talking about Canterbury. There’s a little cottage near the church. Own garden,’ he added, nodding at the seed trays and the grafted saplings. He smiled, properly. He often smiled – he was a beautifully mannered man – but not in private and it made me feel like he hadn’t quite recognised me. ‘I said you’d be delighted, of course. Decent salary, and you can start next month.’
‘I don’t want to be a parson – where did this come from?’
His grey eyes turned hard. ‘One of the gardeners has raised some concerns. I’ve told them all to keep an eye on you. He said that you thought the statue had moved.’
‘It has. Someone moved it.’
‘No one’s moved it, Merrick. The thing must weigh a ton and a half at the inside.’
‘I know that, but—’
‘You’re getting towards the age that Mama was,’ he interrupted. ‘And I’m sure she began by thinking her mind was hiccuping.’
‘Well, if I’m going to go mad I’m sure I’ll find something to fixate on, whether it’s a statue or a tree near a parsonage or whatever. Why not sign me up to the asylum now?’
‘I can’t afford to. You know how much it costs to keep Mama at Brislington? They have silver pheasants wandering the courtyards, for Christ’s sake.’
‘I was joking,’ I said flatly.
‘I know you were. It was in such poor taste that I decided to ignore it,’ he said. He looked out at the grave and the statue. ‘It isn’t good for you to be here, in any case. Perhaps you might fixate on something else, but that wretched thing means something to you and perhaps whatever that is will fade if you don’t see it every morning. There is such a thing as out of sight, out of mind.’
‘If you’d let me oversee the gardens it would bring in a lot more than a parsonage and I wouldn’t be sitting here all day,’ I said, though I knew it was dangerous.
‘If I won’t have you take after Mama, what in God’s name makes you imagine I’d let you take after Jack?’
‘I don’t mean obsessive biannual trips to Peru, I mean keeping what we have. I mean not cutting down rare trees when there are people who would pay money to have cuttings, or even to come and see—’
‘I’m not having anyone wandering through the grounds for no reason and I’m not having you up to your eyes in his memory, and if you ever mention it again, forget Brislington, I’ll take you to the county asylum and let them try out all their interesting new electroshock therapies.’
‘For God’s sake.’
‘I’m trying to keep you safe!’ he snapped.
‘Yes. The county asylum is very safe. I’ll take the parsonage, thank you.’
‘You wouldn’t have to if you’d find yourself some proper work.’
‘I couldn’t stand up six months ago. I can barely get out here. Four hundred yards from the front door. I’m not going to get any better.’
‘If you’d just pull yourself together—’
‘I can’t,’ I said, gently, because he wasn’t being vicious. Until two years ago, he had always been ill and I’d always been strong. That he had no one at all to lean on now had gone even harder with him than nearly losing the leg had with me. I was used to getting on with things by myself. He never had been. Somewhere deep and murky, I disliked him for having let himself get that way and for expecting help all the time when there was none, but I shouldn’t have. Knowing that he had was what stopped me from making the same slide. ‘If you run into a naval bombardment, that’s the last running you’re going to do. And you have to run, to do what I did. People don’t always like East India Company expeditionaries stealing all the good tea and smuggling opium.’
‘Parsonage or asylum, Merrick, choose, because I shan’t have you here any longer,’ he said, more angrily, because he knew he had been wrong.
‘Can I not have a few weeks’ grace in which not to go mad? You’re going to need to hire someone or reshuffle Sarah’s terms if I go, and you can’t do that overnight.’
‘What do you mean, hire someone? Who’s Sarah?’
‘The . . . kitchen girl,’ I said. ‘She leaves at five. Who do you think cooks dinner? It’s only me here at that time.’
He looked honestly taken aback. ‘Three weeks,’ he said. ‘And then I’m calling in a doctor.’
‘I’m not mad now and I won’t be mad then,’ I said. ‘Someone moved the statue.’
‘Anyway, I’ll be getting on,’ he sighed. He didn’t believe me.
I gave him his canes. ‘I’m going to town later. Is there anything you want?’ I said, to try and make peace before he went.
If he had been a hedgehog his spikes would have risen. ‘You’re doing much better if you can walk to Mevagissey.’
‘No, I borrow one of the farm horses. Mr Tobin lets me take one when I need it as long as I saddle it myself.’
His focus passed straight through me. ‘He’s a tenant, Merrick. You can’t borrow a horse from a sheep farmer, it—’
‘Well, no dinner then,’ I said, starting to laugh. ‘You’re a snob but there’s no need to be a hungry snob.’
He stared at me and I stared back, and I think we both saw then what should have been obvious for years: that we belonged to different classes. He was a gentleman, and I never had been. His eyes filled with tears and then I looked away at the hopping crows so I could pretend not to have noticed.
‘You’ve no pride, have you,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing left for you to be proud of.’
‘Well, hold on. We’re neither of us down a tin mine. Own orchard. Large house. Or half of one. That’s . . . pretty good.’
‘I’m selling the orchard.’
Our grandfather had mortgaged a lot of the land for reasons we had never discovered. It hadn’t been a catastrophic move in itself. It would have been nothing but a quirk in the family’s financial history if our father had been canny with money, but he’d had no idea. He had come into the estate too young and made naive investments in the dying tin mines, and instead of paying off the original mortgage he’d had to increase it, to cover the house too. I hadn’t known about any of the money problems for years – growing up, if a place is shabby it just is and I’d never thought twice – but after having left for a while and come back, it had been obvious and then I’d extracted it from Charles one Christmas. The only things we owned here were the plants. But I hadn’t known he was struggling this much.
‘This isn’t really to do with me or the statue, is it? You have to sell the house.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he snapped, but I didn’t push. Although he was tempestuous it was only ever brief, and after his small storms he would freeze over; but the ice was never strong. I came away from the urge to break it and show him I could have and that I was usually quiet from tolerance, not meekness. His eyes were still glittering and he wouldn’t talk to me again this year if he thought I’d noticed. He pushed his hand over his mouth. ‘Although – I am trying to find new positions for some of the gardeners. There’s a new fellow at Trebah. Do you know anywhere else that . . .’
‘There’s another house next to that, big valley garden. Glendurgan.’
‘They’ve a full staff. So does Trelissick.’
‘I’ll write to Kew, they know us. And some of the colleges at Oxford would take people, I imagine.’
He nodded and made an abrupt study of the floor, and I regretted having mentioned Oxford. He had gone to Christ Church College to read classics for three years in a beautiful set of rooms that overlooked the grounds and the almost-tame deer herds there. I’d gone to a naval academy in Bristol.
‘This parsonage,’ I said. ‘Spare room?’
‘I don’t know, I hardly made specific enquiries.’
‘Yours when you want if there is. No interior slugs, no sprouting doors, it’ll be lovely. I might buy some chickens. Parsons do things like chicken competitions, don’t they? You can’t be a parson without prize bantams.’
‘You sound like an Irishman,’ he said, but he didn’t say no. ‘I’ll see you at seven.’ He hesitated in the doorway. ‘No one’s moved that statue, Merrick.’
I sat down, not wanting to loom, but I watched him go. He had an uneven walk because the polio had damaged his left leg more than his right, and there was something unsteady about it; there were always fractional moments where his weight swung just too far to the left and he looked like he should be falling.
After a while, I went out to the statue.
It had used to hold a candle when I was small and, having lit it, you had to make a wish. I took a candle from inside one of the greenhouse lamps and balanced it in the statue’s open palm. I hoped more than wished not to go mad, and not to be seeing things, and that it had been the gardeners after all, or even Charles doing his best to convince me to get me out of the house and save his pride before he had to fold and say we couldn’t afford to stay.
The statue closed its hand around the candle. It didn’t otherwise move and I stood still for a long time, trying to tell if the motion was something I’d imagined after the fact, or if I had seen it. I shut my eyes and opened them again. But the statue was the same. I tried to move its fingers, but there was no give to them whatever and no sign that they had ever been intended to move. I leaned back in to take the India Office letter from its pot. I brought it with me when I went to town. The ride did me good. Being exhausted wasn’t the same as being mad, and I was exhausted, had been for months. The loss of work, of the use of one leg, and the old independence from home and all its mould-ering difficulties – none of that had done my mind any good. I was at two-thirds capacity, at best. It was amazing I hadn’t started seeing things before.
I got a tight feeling in my chest whenever I went to the greenhouse after that, but the statue stayed where I’d left it.