Buried in Cornwall Read Online Free PDF Page A

away.
    Rose had finally been accepted. She had, after all, married a Cornishman and kept his name and she had not tried to impress but had made a slow integration into the community. Doreen Clarke, a more recent friend, once told her, ‘You’m all right, maid, you don’t give yourself no airs and graces like they London people.’
    Rose did not bother to explain that she came from Gloucestershire and had lived in the middle of nowhere, surrounded only by verdant English countryside and cows and sheep, and that trips into Swindon or Cheltenham were a rare treat. Her father had been a country farmer who had lived through the good times before BSE and European intervention; he had hunted with hounds and had, so her mother told her, been on a protest rally against the anti-hunting campaign. Rose found it hard to believe that her conventional, ratherself-effacing father had put himself so much in the limelight. He had retired whilst still in his fifties and sold the farm. He and his wife had then bought a small stone cottage with a manageable garden and spent the intervening years doing all the things they had not had time for before. Rose saw the problems other people her age had with elderly parents who were frail or senile and knew she was lucky. On the other hand she suspected a lot of it was to do with their attitude. They did not believe themselves to be old or incapable of doing anything they chose. There was, she had long ago realised, no point in discussing her past at all with Doreen, who would not recognise the difference between London and the Gloucestershire countryside because anyone from across the Tamar was ‘one of they’ and therefore a Londoner.
    As Rose loaded the washing-machine, changed the bed and tidied up, the sun came up, a wintry yellow but promising another fine day. She finished some paperwork until the washing-machine had ended its cycle then piled the clothes into a basket and took them outside to hang on the line she had strung from the shed to the highest branch of a tree. Towels flapped in the breeze coming off the sea, an easterly breeze, she noticed, no wonder it was colder.
    The shed at the back of the garden had been cleared out and the rubbish taken to the dump. Anything serviceable she had given to the charity shops in Penzance. With a Calor gas heater installed and the door and windows made draught-proof, it was where she had recently taken to working if the light was right. At other times, if she wasn’t painting in the open air, she used the attic which she had had converted many years previously. One half had been partitioned off to use as a dark-room for her photography work, although it was little used lately, and the other half with the sloping window in the roof was perfect for colouring her sketches as it was at the side of the house and therefore faced north.
    The last item of clothing had been pegged firmly to the line just as she heard the familiar voices of Trevor and Laura, who had arrived on foot. Their faces were pink and they were both in heavy jackets. Laura, despite her height and thinness, was typically Cornish in appearance. She possessed deep, dark eyes and naturally rosy cheeks and her long dark hair, loose today, flew about her face in untidy clumps. She had never been able to control the natural wave. Trevor was an inch shorter than his wife, his face weathered with lines radiating from his brown eyes. Hishair, too, curled and was worn long although of a lighter brown than Laura’s. Through the beard he had not shaved off in all the years that Rose had known him, his lips were red and full. A tiny silver cross dangled from his left ear.
    ‘What’ve you broken this time, Rose?’ were his words of greeting.
    ‘The boiler won’t light. It just went out. I didn’t touch it,’ she added defensively although she had fiddled with it that morning.
    ‘I’ll take a look.’ With the familiarity of an old friend Trevor let himself into the house and went straight