EQMM, June 2012 Read online

  (According to Mrs. Bolitho, there were plenty of guests—even the old ones—who were quite capable of “trying it on” with a young chambermaid. Without putting it in so many words, she implied that the experience was not unknown to her herself. She also implied, darkly, that over the years she'd known chambermaids who'd been “up for it” to make “a few bob on the side.” The suggestion was even there that she “wouldn't put it past” one or two of the current staff . . . prompting furious speculation from Hayley-Jane as to which ones she was talking about.)

  But there was nothing of that kind about Mr. Tarplee. In a sudden access of information one afternoon in the linen room, Mrs. Bolitho confided to Hayley-Jane that he'd “lost the one great love of his life.” The girl's Mills & Boon-tuned antennae were instantly alerted. Mrs. Bolitho's implication was that this disaster had put Mr. Tarplee off further romantic adventures, but Hayley-Jane had to wait awhile to be vouchsafed the next part of the story.

  It was some three or four days later that the two women were once again alone in the linen room. The weather had turned brutal, as it could in October, the wind so wild you could see why every coastline tree cowered away from the sea. Blinding rain swirled around, seeming to attack the Penwillan Castle Hotel from every direction at the same time. From the linen room at the top of the house in what used to be the servants’ quarters, the Pollack's Head, mentioned in the brochure and on the Web site, was invisible. Ancient bored guests in the sun lounge could no longer fill the time with circular discussions as to whether the rock did actually look like the head of the fish it was meant to resemble.

  Through the driving rain even the little clifftop shelter that looked out onto the Pollack's Head could only be seen as a hazy outline. When Hayley-Jane walked back along the cliffs to her parents’ house, she crossed behind that little structure. Though it was usually empty by the time her shift finished, she knew that the shelter had at least one regular visitor.

  “He won't be out there in this, will he?” she asked.

  “Who?” Mrs. Bolitho knew the answer perfectly well. This was just another little necessary detour in her storytelling routine.

  “Mr. Tarplee.”

  “He'll be there,” the old woman replied histrionically. “He'll be there. Every day of the week he's here Mr. Tarplee sits in that shelter of an afternoon. He won't let a little bit of weather change his routine.”

  “Where does he come from?” asked Hayley-Jane.

  “America now,” said Mrs. Bolitho. “Before that, here. Ben Tarplee was brought up around here. Penwillan boy he is, born and bred.”

  This was the first time the autumn visitor had been given a first name. Hayley-Jane folded the arms of her chambermaid's uniform snugly around herself. She sensed that the old woman was in informative mood, and that she might be in for a Mills & Boon moment. “Did you know him then, Mrs. Bolitho?” she asked.

  “Oh, goodness, yes. I've known Ben Tarplee all my life. Though he was older than me. Handsome boy, he was. Good few lasses round here wouldn't have been averse to Ben Tarplee taking an interest in them.” Mrs. Bolitho spoke almost wistfully, hinting that she might have been among that number. To Hayley-Jane it seemed incongruous that a woman of that age could even have memories of sexual interest.

  “What did he do? Did he work round here?”

  “Oh yes. Mind you, there weren't many jobs in this part of the world, even back then. The mining was long finished, and the fishing . . . well, if you weren't born into one of the fishing families, there wasn't much chance of getting in there. A lot of the young people gave up hope of finding employment down here. Lots of them couldn't wait to get out of Cornwall. . . .”

  “Just like they do now,” volunteered Hayley-Jane.

  “Yes, well, maybe. . . . Anyway, Ben wasn't like that. He loved Cornwall . . . which is one of the reasons why he always comes back.” There was an obvious cue from Hayley-Jane to expand on that, but she didn't take it, instead going on, “Anyway, Ben was a bright boy, hard-working too, had a lot about him. Very good with taking photographs, he was, developed his own and all . . . that was before all this digital nonsense came in, of course . . . before people had cameras on their digital phones . . . and what a ridiculous idea that was. . . . Who'd ever want to take photographs while they're talking on the phone . . . ?”

  Mrs. Bolitho drew a deep breath, stopping herself from embarking on another of her regular rants. “Anyway, another thing young Ben Tarplee had was real green fingers. Good at gardening. That's how he got work at Trevennor House.” Hayley-Jane's expression betrayed her ignorance. “You must know Trevennor House. Well, it was gone by the time you were born, but your parents must have known it.”

  “We only moved here from St. Austell when I was twelve.”

  “Oh, of course. Then they might not have known it. Well, you know Trevennor Heights . . . ?”

  'The holiday flats?”

  “Yes. Well, they were built on the site of Trevennor House after . . . well, after things went wrong in Ben Tarplee's life.”

  Once again Hayley-Jane was aware she was being played like a fish, with Mrs. Bolitho completely in charge of the pace of her narration. After a carefully judged pause, the old lady took pity. “Trevennor House had been very grand at one stage, been in the Trevennor family for generations. Lots of servants, they used to have. But things got more difficult after the war—Second World War that is I'm talking, Hayley-Jane. In some parts of the country owners of houses like that couldn't find the staff. No problem like that down here—lots of people needing jobs—but old Mr. and Mrs. Trevennor just couldn't afford to employ them. I think they'd lived on investment income and something'd gone wrong there. . . . I don't know. And they didn't want to sell Trevennor House, you know, because it had been in the family so long . . . and then again, property prices were depressed after the war. They probably wouldn't have been able to sell the place even if they'd wanted to.

  “Anyway, result of all this was . . . more and more the Trevennors was having to look after themselves . . . or to be more accurate, their daughter Tamsin was having to look after them. She ended up like their cook/housekeeper. Wasn't what she was brought up to, mind, but Tamsin just knuckled down and got on with it like a good ‘un. Only thing she couldn't manage on her own was the garden . . .”

  “Which is where Ben Tarplee came in,” suggested Hayley-Jane.

  She was rewarded by a peevish tug at the corner of Mrs. Bolitho's mouth, another small telling-off for trying to hurry the story along.

  “Yes,” the old woman conceded. “He came to help Tamsin Trevennor with the garden. And it was soon after he started there that tragedy struck.”

  Hayley-Jane was too cowed by her recent reprimand to offer another prompt, and a full minute ensued before Mrs. Bolitho spoke again. “Mr. and Mrs. Trevennor had driven up to London, to see some stockbroker or bank manager, I think it was . . . something to sort out their finances, anyway. And they were driving back, and they were only a couple of miles from Trevennor House . . .” The old woman paused for effect once more. “The lanes were narrower then. That new road out of St. Ives wasn't built. And Mr. Trevennor did always drive liked he owned the whole county . . . and of course in the past his ancestors had owned quite a bit of it.

  “They met a tractor coming the other way. Tractor driver was shaken and a bit bruised, but those things're built tough. The Trevennors’ car, though . . . head-on impact, crushed like a matchbox. . . . They didn't stand a chance.

  “Most of the county came out for the funerals. Though they'd been hard-up in later years, there was still a lot of respect for them. Not much proper aristocracy in Cornwall, of course, but the Trevennors was held in that kind of respect.

  “Result was . . . Tamsin's left alone in that big, draughty, expensive old house ... with no company ... except, of course, for young Ben Tarplee. Tamsin was well into her thirties by then, everyone had long before written off the chances of her ever getting hitched . . . and suddenly there's an
announcement in the Western Morning Post of her engagement to Ben Tarplee!”

  Hayley-Jane hugged herself. The story was getting more Mills & Boon by the minute.

  “As you can imagine, that was enough to set the gossip mills running round here. Tamsin Trevennor was . . . well, not to speak ill of the dead, but looks wasn't her strong suit . . . and Ben Tarplee, handsome lad, at least fifteen years her junior . . . A lot of people reckoned he was after her money. She still had a bit, but Trevennor House, even in the state it was in, had to be worth more than the likes of Ben Tarplee was going to make in a lifetime.

  “But just when the gossip was getting out of hand, a strange thing happened. Ben let it be known that he'd contacted his fiancée's solicitors and was having an agreement drawn up whereby he would inherit nothing when Tamsin died. But if they had children, everything would go to them.

  “Well, that news caused quite a shock round here, as you can imagine. Acquisitive people, the Cornish, not used to folk making grand gestures like Ben Tarplee had just done.

  “But, of course, it had the effect he'd wanted. Stopped all the gossip about him being a gold digger stone dead. People came to realise that it must be love, real love drawing Tamsin Trevennor and Ben Tarplee together.” Hayley-Jane almost purred as the old woman went on, “And together they would work to revive the fortunes of Trevennor House, two people who loved Cornwall, joining together to preserve one of the most beautiful estates in the county. And the people who'd started all the gossip—I wasn't among them, I hasten to add, Hayley-Jane . . . well, they all started to look a bit sheepish, I can tell you. . . .

  “Anyway, the wedding happened, just over a year it was after Tamsin's parents had been killed. Wasn't such a big turnout as there had been for the funerals—the Great and the Good of Cornwall weren't so impressed by Tamsin Trevennor tying her fortunes to a Penwillan village boy. But it was a happy affair—more relaxed, probably, without all the bloody Great and Good of Cornwall—and the new Mr. and Mrs. Tarplee had planned to spend the week of their honeymoon here in the Penwillan Castle Hotel.

  “Lovely weather it was that October . . . still felt like midsummer during the days, though the evenings got chilly . . .” Mrs. Bolitho looked out at the darkening swirls of rain, measuring the contrast. “And there was a kind of happiness about the place. Somehow, after the grim years we'd been through . . . the war, Mr. and Mrs. Trevennor's deaths . . . it was like something new was starting, new hope perhaps . . . ?

  “But of course that hope wasn't destined to last very long . . .”

  Hayley-Jane waited frustrated through the inevitable silence. Now at last Mrs. Bolitho's story was reaching its climax.

  The phone in the linen room rang. It was the hotel manager. An elderly guest had been taken ill with a diarrhoea and vomiting bug. She'd been whisked away in an ambulance, but the bedding in her room needed changing. Very urgently.

  By the time that was sorted, it was the end of Hayley-Jane's shift. She didn't see Mrs. Bolitho again that day.

  Or the following day. The bug that had struck the guest had also laid low the redoubtable Mrs. Bolitho.

  So, as it turned out, Hayley-Jane got the rest of the story from an even closer source.

  * * * *

  In a typically Cornish way, the next day dawned bright and sunny, a bit like the Indian summer which Mrs. Bolitho had said shined on Ben Tarplee and Tamsin Trevennor's wedding. There was a mock innocence about the brightness, the Cornish weather denying that it ever behaved any differently, that, whoever had caused the terrible rainstorms of the previous day, it must have been someone else.

  Because of Mrs. Bolitho's absence, the chambermaids’ daily rota had been reorganised by one of the hotel's assistant managers, with the result that Hayley-Jane found, to her surprise and delight, that her shift ended at two in the afternoon. A suspicion formed in her mind, not for the first time, that Mrs. Bolitho's time-honoured scheduling system was deliberately inefficient, giving the illusion more work needed doing than there actually was.

  Anyway, a result of the day's revised schedule was that, soon after two, Hayley-Jane found herself walking through the hotel grounds to the clifftop path that led her home. And passing the back of the shelter that faced the Pollack's Head.

  She wasn't conscious of making the decision, but she knew she was going to go round the front to see if Mr. Tarplee was ensconced in his usual vantage point.

  He was, of course. The papery skin of his face wrinkled into a smile as he saw her.

  “Ah, now you did tell me your name, young lady, but I'm afraid I've forgotten it.”

  Though overlaid with a twang of American, his voice still betrayed a Cornish burr.

  “Hayley-Jane.”

  “Of course.”

  She stated the obvious. “You're here in your usual place.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “It must have memories for you.”

  His pale eyes caught hers shrewdly. He knew she was not just generalising, but talking from specific information. “Ah, you've been talking to Mrs. Bolitho, have you . . . ?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Or, to be more accurate, Mrs. Bolitho's been talking to you.”

  They smiled at the shared joke.

  “She told me about your wedding,” Hayley-Jane continued boldly, “and how you'd had your honeymoon at this very hotel.”

  Mr. Tarplee was silent, and she was worried that she had offended the old man, but when he did speak, there was no resentment in his tone. Just a deep sadness.

  “Yes,” he said. “This is where I last saw Tamsin alive.”

  “Here at the hotel?”

  “Here in this very spot. Facing the Pollack's Head. This place brought me great happiness.”

  Hayley-Jane wasn't sure whether Mr. Tarplee would resent prompting as much as Mrs. Bolitho, but she risked asking, “What happened?”

  The faded eyes came back from a great distance away and refocused on her young face. “Throughout my life,” Mr. Tarplee said, “I've always been a very keen photographer. . . .”

  “Mrs. Bolitho mentioned you was good at it.”

  “And here . . .” He gestured to the view ahead of them, the Pollack's Head rising from the deep blue sea, garlanded with a ring of pure white waves. “Here was the perfect spot for the perfect photograph of my bride. We'd had the reception here at the hotel. The guests had all gone by four . . . weddings didn't go on into the evening back then, not like they do now. And Tamsin and I came down here, because I wanted to take this one perfect photograph . . . Tamsin lined up in front of the Pollack's Head, framed, if you like, in the pollack's jaws.”

  Now he said that, for the first time Hayley-Jane could see how much the rock did look like the head of a fish. And yes, there was a perfect V-shape into which someone on the clifftop could be viewed.

  No longer worried about prompting him, Hayley-Jane asked breathlessly, “What happened?”

  Mr. Tarplee let out a long sigh, which seemed to ripple through his slender frame.

  “I've always been a perfectionist,” he said. “Probably my most enduring fault, being a perfectionist. And I wanted that photograph of Tamsin, my bride, to be perfect. I wanted it to freeze that moment, the moment of my greatest happiness, so that I would always have it with me. But of course I hoped I'd always have Tamsin with me as well.”

  The washed-out eyes once again sought out something on the far horizon.

  “I set up the camera. Cameras were bigger then. The one I used I always put on a tripod. And zoom lenses weren't as sophisticated then as they are now—at least not the ones I could afford. And I spent a long time lining up Tamsin in the shot.

  “She didn't mind my dithering about. She was as happy as I was. We had a whole lifetime ahead of us. We could afford a few minutes to get a photograph perfect.”

  Another silence. Then he went on, “Tamsin was some way away from me . . . well, you can see where the cliff edge is there . . . and I think she must have misinterpreted
my gesture. I was indicating for her to move a little to the right. She thought I wanted her to step back. . . .”

  An even longer silence ensued. “By the time I clicked the shutter Tamsin was no longer in the picture.”

  Hayley-Jane knew exactly what the old man meant, but shock would not allow her to process the information for a moment or two. Then she said, “But you never thought of staying here in Cornwall?”

  The old eyes looked at her bleakly. “After that?”

  There was no answer. “So that's why you come here every year?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Tarplee. “It's my ritual. It's my way of saying thank you to Tamsin.”

  * * * *

  Hayley-Jane thought it was the most romantic story she had ever heard. Better than any Mills & Boon. She had been on the way to making the decision anyway, but now she was absolutely determined to dump Bazza. She could do better than that. And do better than that while still staying in Cornwall. She wasn't going to move. She loved Cornwall. It was the most romantic place in the world.

  When Mr. Tarplee checked back into his suite at the Las Vegas hotel where he was a long-term resident, he felt, as ever, purged by his annual visit to the Penwillan Castle Hotel. He was a creature of ritual, and that was one of his most necessary rituals.

  He did, after all, genuinely want to thank Tamsin. Nothing in the rest of his life would have been nearly as happy if he hadn't pushed her off that cliff opposite the Pollack's Head on their wedding day.

  Needless to say, though he'd spread the rumour about having himself excluded from his wife-to-be's will and had the legal document drawn up, he'd never signed it. And she did have a little money that wasn't tied into Trevennor House, enough for him to set himself up in America, enough for him to get the hell out of bloody Cornwall.