‘No trouble with the trains?’ he asked.
‘No, they were all on time.’
‘A miracle.’ He took my suitcase from me, though he left me with my shoulder bag, I think because he knew from what I’d told him on the phone what I’d be carrying inside it.
The station didn’t even have facilities, it was so small, and the car park wasn’t much more than a levelled bit of gravel with a payphone at one side. Mark’s van was easily identifiable by the ‘Trelowarth Roses’ logo on its side, ringed round by painted vines and leaves. He noticed me looking and smiled an apology. ‘I would have brought the car, but I had to run a late order to Bodmin and there wasn’t time to stop back at the house.’
‘That’s all right.’ I liked the van. It wasn’t the same one his father had driven when I’d come down here as a child, but it had the same mingling of smells inside: damp earth and faintly crushed greenery and something elusive belonging to gardens that grew by the sea. And it came with a dog, too – a floppy-eared mongrel with shaggy brown fur and a feathered tail that seemed to never cease wagging, it only changed speed. It wagged crazily now as we got in the van, and the dog would have crawled right through onto the front seat and settled itself on my lap if Mark hadn’t with one gentle hand pushed it back.
‘This is Samson,’ he told me. ‘He’s harmless.’
They’d always had dogs at Trelowarth. In fact they had usually had three or four running round through the fields with us children and traipsing with muddy feet through the old kitchen and out to the gardens. Mark’s stepmother, Claire, had forever been washing the flagstone floors.
Scratching the dog’s ears, I asked how Claire was doing.
‘Much better. She’s out of the plaster now, up walking round on the leg, and the doctor says give it a few weeks and she’ll be as right as rain.’
‘Remind me how she broke it in the first place?’
‘Cleaning gutters.’
‘Of course,’ I said, sharing his smile because we both knew how independent Claire was, and it was no surprise that, even now that she’d moved from the manor house into the cottage, she still tried to do all the upkeep herself.
‘It’s a good thing,’ said Mark, ‘it was only the gutters, not roof slates.’ The dog pushed his way in between us again and Mark nudged him back, starting the van and reversing out onto the road.
Cornish roads were like none anywhere. Here by the coast they were narrow and twisting with steep sloping banks and high hedges that block any view of what might lie ahead. My father had shaved several years off my life every time he had driven down here, at high speeds, simply honking the horn as we came to a corner and trusting that if anyone were approaching unseen round the bend they’d get out of the way. When I’d asked him once what would have happened if somebody coming towards us had chosen to do the same thing he was doing, to honk without slowing down, Dad had just shrugged and assured me it never would happen.
And luckily for us, it never had.
Mark drove a little less recklessly, but I nonetheless needed some kind of distraction from watching the road, so I asked him, ‘Is Susan still living at home?’
Susan being his sister, a little bit younger than me.
‘She is.’ Mark pulled a face, but he didn’t convince me. I knew they were close. ‘We got rid of her once. She was living up near Bristol, but that didn’t stick and now she’s back, with plans to start some sort of tea room or something to bring in the tourists. She’s full of ideas, is Susan.’
‘You don’t want a tea room?’ I guessed from his tone.
‘Let’s just say I don’t think there’ll be too many tourists who want tea that badly they’d brave the hike up from the village to get it.’
He did have a point. We were entering the village now – Polgelly, with its huddled whitewashed houses and its twisting streets so narrow they were closed to all but local traffic and the taxis that each summer ferried tourists to and from the trains. Mark’s van, as compact as it was, could barely squeeze between the buildings.
Polgelly had once been a fishing port of some renown, but with the tourist influx into Cornwall it had changed its face from practical to picturesque, an artist’s haven full of shops that sold antiques and Celtic crafts, and Bed & Breakfast cottages with names like ‘Smuggler’s Rest’. The old shop near the harbour where we’d always bought our fish and chips still looked the same, as did the little fudge shop on the corner. And The Hill, of course, remained the same as ever.
From the first time I’d walked up it I had thought of it like that – The Hill, for surely there could be no other hill on earth that could with more perfection test the limits of endurance. It was not its height alone, nor just the angle of its slope, though both were challenging. It was that, once you started up it, there seemed not to be an end to it – the road kept rising steadily through overhanging trees on stone and earthen banks, a punishing ascent that made the muscles of your thighs begin to burn and left them shaking for some minutes when you’d finally reached the top.
Yet being children, and not knowing any better, we’d gone down it every day to play with Mark and Susan’s school friends in Polgelly and to sit along the harbour wall to watch the fishermen at work, and in the cheerfully forgetful way that children have we’d pushed aside all thoughts about The Hill until the time came round again for us to climb it. Mark had actually carried me the final few steps, once, which was no doubt why I’d developed such a crush on him.