A Deep Deceit

Six

I could not travel. I certainly could not go abroad. I had never been abroad in my life. I did not even have a passport.

But Carl used to take me with him to his homeland. Through his wonderful stories I felt as if I had toured the Florida Keys, driven over the Seven-mile Bridge, drunk in the bars of Key West, visited Hemingway’s house, ridden the Conch Train, basked in the tropical sun and even danced in the streets after dark in the hazy hippieland of Carl’s childhood.

Carl had such a wonderful way of bringing it all to life.

He told me stories of how he grew up with the smell of oil paint in his nostrils. From when he was a very little boy he used to sit at his father’s feet as he painted and was allowed to visit the studios of many of the other painters, including Eugene Otto, who became perhaps Key West’s first really well-known painter.

Carl’s childhood sounded so exciting to me, although I knew it had not actually been a very happy one. His father had never achieved the success he hoped for as an artist and as a result – or that was his excuse, Carl used to say – had consoled himself with drink and drugs. As time passed the days spent painting were increasingly replaced by days passed in a drunken drugged haze.

‘What about your mother?’ I had asked him once as we sat together in the little public garden on the cliffside off the road to Hale, where a splendid Barbara Hepworth bronze stands proudly before the backdrop of what must be one of the most beautiful sea views in the world.

Carl’s eyes grew wistful. But he just shrugged. ‘In the beginning she often used to join in. I suppose it was fun to start with, that’s how it is with drugs, isn’t it? She smoked dope, but I never saw her do anything else, not like him...’ Carl shuddered. ‘Anyway, it meant I had plenty of time to myself...’

Indeed, from what I could gather the young Carl was more or less ignored by both his parents most of the time. He ran free in the streets, learning to cook and fend for himself from an early age, and even, when things got really bad, how to hustle and beg from tourists.

‘I was good at that,’ he told me, smiling.

‘I’m surprised you didn’t turn into a druggie yourself.’

Carl was as reasonable and logical as ever. ‘I suppose you go one way or the other,’ he replied quietly. ‘I’ve known people who regularly smoke dope and even do coke who are just fine. It wasn’t like that with my folks, that’s all...’

He didn’t mind telling me tales of the folklore and history of Key West, in fact, I think he positively enjoyed doing so, but when it came to confiding in me about his family that was about as far as he ever went. There was a lot of pain there for Carl.

None the less I knew this unique and crazy city, closer to Havana than Miami, shrouded in history and mystery just like Cornwall, still held a place in his heart, otherwise he could not have made it so special for me.

‘Cayo Hueso,’ he whispered to me. ‘Island of Bones. That’s what Key West was first known as. They reckon the Caloosa Indians used it as a burial ground. From a cemetery to a playground for presidents, that’s Key West. Built by fishermen, poets and pirates, sailors, soldiers, rum runners and treasure salvagers...’

‘Treasure salvagers,’ I interrupted him. ‘Is that American-speak for wreckers?’

He grinned. ‘I guess.’

The more he told me about Key West, on the southernmost tip of America, the more it reminded me of Cornwall, on the southernmost tip of Britain.

‘I know,’ he agreed. ‘I think it’s what drew me here, from the moment I came to the UK I knew I wanted to end up here. I can’t explain, just something about this county...’ He paused. ‘The people are the same, you know, I swear it.’

I laughed. That could be going too far, I reckoned.

‘No, I mean it,’ he said. ‘There’s the artists and the deadbeats, of course, plenty of those in both places. But Key West folk, they’re different from other Americans, like the Cornish are different. In 1982 Key West declared independence, you know, founded the Conch Republic, created a flag. They celebrate their own Independence Day every year.’

It was my turn to laugh. ‘A joke, I assume,’ I said.

‘Maybe,’ said Carl. ‘But don’t tell me the Cornish wouldn’t be quite capable of doing something like that.’

I had to admit he was probably right. In any case I loved his stories, and I pretended to myself that one day I would be able to go there and see it all for myself, with Carl by my side. I did have good dreams as well as the unspeakably bad ones and Key West often featured in the good ones.

I would picture myself standing on Mallory Dock at sundown, along with the jugglers, mime artists, musicians and the dancing, jostling crowds Carl told me gathered there every evening to celebrate. I imagined myself holding Carl’s hand and drinking exotic cocktails while we watched the sun sink into the Caribbean sea just eighty miles away from Cuba.

I knew why Carl had left his homeland and why he felt he could never go back, but I also realised how much he still missed it. Carl had been married before and his wife had left him for another man. I could not understand how anyone could leave so loving and caring a person as Carl, and I knew that this betrayal still broke his heart. It was, he said, the reason he had sought a new life in a new country.

Simple, straightforward and a big overreaction, some might think. But Carl was like that. I knew well enough the extent of his loyalty, the lengths to which he would go for someone he loved. He would naturally expect that kind of commitment the other way round and for it to last for ever. I knew that was what he expected from me, and it was what I wanted to give him.

Although Carl was so strong in so many ways there was also an insecure side to him, which I believed stemmed from all that had happened to him before our time together. I understood that all right. Few of us can ever truly escape from our own pasts. And how I wished that I could escape from mine.

But Carl had given me a new life, and six years I could look back on with joy. I loved him with all of my heart and mind, and I really would not have known what to do without him there to guide me. Among the sweetest of my memories was the moment when we arrived in St Ives together for the first time. It was a beautiful late-September night and he had driven straight to the harbour. We parked the van and walked to the waterside. The moon had been high and bright, and the sky full of stars. The tide was low and several of the boats moored there had bottomed out and lay crookedly on the sand basin, their masts creating a crazy pattern of angular shadows.

It was almost midnight and St Ives was already asleep. Momentarily the moon was covered by a passing cloud and the sky turned black as coal. I was used to the bustle of London where darkness never really falls and the silence overwhelmed me. Indeed, the sense of peace was such that it felt as if we might be the only two people awake in the whole world.

I breathed in the smell of the sea. You could taste the salt in the air. A slight breeze was blowing inland. It made the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand up and sent a shiver down my spine.

‘My Lady of the Harbour,’ Carl whispered in my ear.

He put his arm round me and I snuggled up to him, unsure of what was going to come next but happy just to be with him.

‘This is the start of our new life,’ he murmured. ‘Tomorrow we will find ourselves a new home.’

As ever, whatever Carl promised seemed to come true.

We slept in his old van, which he had driven all the way from London, wrapped a duvet round ourselves and huddled as close together as we could get on seats divided by a gear lever. We would have been more comfortable stretched out in the back, but the van was stuffed full of our various possessions – mostly things belonging to Carl, like all his painting gear and completed paintings. I had brought little from my previous life except a few clothes – but there was my red bicycle, Gran’s bike, of which I was so proud.

The next day we bought the local newspapers so that we could study the property pages and toured the estate agents.

Rose Cottage, on a hill at the back of the town just off the beginning of the main road out to Penzance, was the second place we saw. Whatever roses it might originally have taken its name from had long gone. It didn’t even have a garden. The front of the granite-built cottage, its highly suspect roof stained with lichen, veered steeply upwards directly from a narrow cobbled alleyway. The front door led straight into a small, dark living room. Another door, open on our arrival, led into a poky kitchen and through the glazed kitchen door at the rear we could see that there was just a tiny backyard, enhanced only by a washing line and a dustbin rather than the blooming display of roses we had allowed ourselves to hope for. This was not a two-up-two-down. This was a one-up-one-down, with a lean-to bathroom and kitchen tagged on downstairs. The window of the downstairs living room directly faced the living room of the cottage opposite, no more than five feet away. No wonder the rather grimy net curtains looked as if they remained perpetually drawn.

At first glance Rose Cottage, although quite picturesque in its way, did not appear to be a very attractive proposition at all. I had already discovered that this was fairly predictable. Landlords of the better St Ives properties are inclined to prefer to plug in to the lucrative summer market rather than settle for the much lower weekly rent of an all-year-round let.

Carl and I glumly took in the grubby two-seater sofa, an elderly gate-legged table and a collection of four odd dining chairs, about all the room would take, before allowing ourselves, without enthusiasm, to be led up the rickety staircase in one corner.

It was then that everything began to change. Rose Cottage’s only bedroom boasted two windows, a large picture window at the front, which just cleared the roof of the cottage opposite and below – such was the steep slope of the hill on which they were both built.

The view over rooftops took in the whole of St Ives bay. I felt my breath catch in my throat. It was late afternoon on a bright, sunny day. The cottage faced west and we could see the sun glowing orange and beginning to fall into the sea. The only outlook from the window at the back of the room, which I realised must face east, was the blank wall of the cottage above – but there was space enough in between to retain the sense of privacy and, I felt sure, to allow the morning sun to stream in. Also, the room seemed slightly larger than the one below. I couldn’t quite work out how but the estate agent explained that old St Ives had been built in such a higgledy-piggledy fashion that buildings often more or less slot into each other.

The town is not badly planned, it was just never planned at all. The reason for the tangled network of alleyways often leading to dead ends, occasional outcrops of rock, unexplained bulges in walls, and ancient cottages displaying impossible curves and angles, is simply that the early builders put a house anywhere they could find a location. Then the later builders filled in the gaps.

Maybe all this added to the magic, for Rose Cottage certainly cast some kind of a spell over Carl and me. I could feel him clutching my hand tightly. We did not speak. Instead, we allowed ourselves to be taken downstairs again, shown the kind of bathroom in which it would clearly be quite possible to sit on the toilet, wash your feet in the undersized bath and brush your teeth at the same time, then out through a tatty little lean-to kitchen into the yard. And there was the clincher.

Alongside the wall, which divided the tiny cottage from the property next door and to the right, somebody had built another lean-to, a curious makeshift construction made up of a brick base with steel panels above, framing a line of ill-fitting windows, its roof of corrugated iron punctuated by large glass skylights, which probably stood where there had once perhaps been flower beds. It was not very big – quite long, maybe fifteen or sixteen feet, but no more than six feet wide – and should in no way be confused with a modern double-glazed conservatory. Indeed you could almost see the gaps around some of the sadly deficient glazing through which the wind would surely whistle on chilly winter days. However, to both Carl and me the place practically screamed ‘Studio’. Its glass-panelled roof sloped directly towards the clear north light that artists so love and it was big enough, surely, for just one painter to work in. Particularly if he were organised and tidy, and Carl was both. Extremely so. I had seen that in London where he had worked in just a corner of a flat, which comprised only one big room. If he made a mess he cleared it up at once, his paints and brushes were kept in meticulous order in a large mahogany box, and his work was always scrupulously catalogued and neatly stored. I glanced at him. I could almost see him erecting his easel in his head.

We needed no discussion. Rose Cottage had sold itself to us. And the good news was that we could move in straight away. Indeed, when Carl offered to pay a month’s rent as deposit and three months’ in advance, the need for references no longer seemed to apply and Rose Cottage was ours. Carl had already told me that cash was not an immediate problem. He had brought with him from London a leather document case, in which he had habitually kept whatever money he had earned and managed to save, which had been concealed beneath the floorboards of his flat. He did not trust banks, he had explained to me.

We drove the van up the hill from the car park by the harbour where we had parked it, and caused traffic chaos when we had to block the road in order to unload. Rose Cottage seemed pretty well perfect to us and we had rented it ever since from an absentee landlord apparently quite content to receive a regular small income from tenants who gave him no bother.

That was the beginning. And at first almost all its promise, all of our dreams, were realised.

The first six years of our life together passed uneventfully and, by and large, were remarkably content. The early memories in particular were such happy ones, because they had brought with them a sense of peace and a degree of loving companionship that I had never thought possible.

You can’t deny your own past, of course, not to yourself, anyway. But Carl and I succeeded in settling into Rose Cottage so easily and completely that it was almost as if the place had been built specially for us – which Carl insisted it had been, albeit 200 years or so earlier.

The cottage had everything we wanted. We bought a futon sofa and turned the glorious upstairs room into a kind of bedsit. We found some wonderful old pale-gold curtains in a charity shop, which we hung in the dull downstairs room that we used as a dining room in the evenings, when we could pull the curtains and mask the room’s ugliness with candlelight.

The studio in the backyard suited Carl perfectly. We even discovered, when trying to brighten up the shabby little kitchen by replacing the decaying brown linoleum that covered the floor with a dazzlingly colourful material, that there was a small, apparently forgotten, cellar below. Its entrance was protected by a piece of old stone right by the sink, which had at first seemed no different from the rest of the floor but which had given a slightly hollow ring when Carl had tapped the new floor covering in place. He had been delighted when he succeeded in prising up the stone with a crowbar to reveal a seven-foot-square cellar, which gave him an excellent hiding place for his cash earnings and also somewhere to store completed paintings. I had been pleased too, because, having both a vivid imagination and a love of history, I immediately conjured up an image of our cellar housing stashes of illicit contraband brought there by Cornish smugglers.

Mostly we led a very quiet life, our love for each other all that really mattered to either of us, and even the arrival of the letter did not alter that. Not to begin with. We were determined, at the end of that fateful year, that Christmas would not be spoiled. We enjoyed special occasions. We celebrated alone, as was our habit in most things, with roast pheasant and a bottle of good claret, after spending a jolly – and mercifully Fenella-Austen-free – lunchtime hour in the Sloop.

By the end of January both Carl and I had almost begun to dare to believe that perhaps both the van incident and the letter had not really meant anything. Certainly I had still somehow managed to keep any further nightmares at bay. But the peace I so hoped we had found was shattered when, one dark and cold morning, the postman brought another letter.

I suppose I had been kidding myself that there wouldn’t be any more. That it had ended as abruptly as it had begun. After all, two months had elapsed since the first letter arrived so to receive one again, just like that, was a greater shock than ever. This time the message was not only devastating but also devastatingly appropriate. ‘YOU CANNOT HIDE FROM THE TRUTH ANY MORE’, it said.

Carl and I both tried to pretend to the other that we were able to take it in our stride, but I knew deep down that neither of us was as calm as we pretended to be.