To Love and Be Loved(3)
Digby had listened to her reasoning that even when they were married, there was no question of living anywhere other than Port Charles. To try to carve out a life among the crowded streets and throngs of strangers in a city held no interest for her. This village was her home. The buildings along the shoreline were markers, navigational aids and the pillars around which the cottages had sprung. Homes for fishermen and tin miners alike. Nearly all were small and crooked, whitewashed and pretty. Now, with most of the fishermen and the tin miners long gone, the shutters and doors were painted in ice-cream shades and in the summer, scarlet geraniums, crowded into window boxes, danced in the warm breeze, providing visitors with a photo opportunity at every narrow twist of cobbled street and each glance from the windows of their snaking cars, as they navigated the ever-narrowing lanes. Lanes designed for horses, not cars, and for men on foot with fishing nets, not out-of-towners with heavy suitcases full of finery for which there was no venue suitable and no one who either knew or cared about their value. Yes, this was where she belonged and where they would stay and raise their family.
What was it Digby had said? ‘I’d live anywhere with you – anywhere. Because where you are is home for me.’ Her heart jumped at the thought.
‘Merrin! For the love of God, will you please come in!’ her mum called excitedly from the window of the rectangular room with the sloping ceiling that spanned the depth of the house.
‘I’m coming!’ She let her eyes take one last sweep of the bay before heading inside.
Her mum, Heather, still in her nightclothes, made her way over from the range, which pumped out heat in all weathers, which was why the front and back doors were nearly always open, allowing the odd dog, several neighbourhood cats and sometimes a chicken or two to wander freely from the small backyard into the warm space. The room had its own particular odour, a welcoming combination of woodsmoke, baking and the wheaty tang of animals. The kitchen-cum-parlour was the heart of the house, and whilst by no means spacious, was still the biggest room, where the family gathered to celebrate or commiserate.
‘I’ve put the curling tongs on and I can do your hair while Dad’s in the bathroom, but there’s no time for dawdling. You can’t be late.’
Her mum, it was fair to say, seemed a whole lot more agitated about the day, the timings and the detail than Merrin was herself. Not that she’d say it out loud, but she’d have been just as happy to have eloped, to have stood on a beach or in a register office or even a little plastic chapel with an Elvis lookalike officiating. How they became man and wife didn’t really matter to her, all that mattered was that they be joined in matrimony, in sickness and in health. She loved Digby Mortimer to the point of obsession, fascinated by every aspect of him: the way he looked, the way he sounded, his small unconscious movements, the way he pushed his hair back over his forehead, the flat square of smooth skin at the base of his wrist . . . Just the thought of these jigsaw pieces that made up the whole of him was enough to send a bolt of longing right through to her very core. This feeling was as intoxicating as any liquor.
She reaffirmed her decision to take the day in her stride and not get flustered: confident and unharried in the way that being truly happy had made her. The truth was, no matter the enormous expectation placed on this, her special day, it felt like no more than the final hurdle, and one she and Digby would sail over. After all the calm resistance, questioning, wide-eyed tuts of disapproval and the rationalising of objections raised by both sets of parents –‘You need to live a little first!’ ‘You’re from very different worlds!’ – how hard was it going to be to put on the fanciest frock she had ever worn and waltz up the aisle on the arm of her dad?
‘Don’t you worry. I’ve no intention of being late, Ma.’
She reached for the hot mug of tea nestling on top of the Raeburn. Who it belonged to didn’t matter. Tea, like most things inside the cramped cottage, was communally shared. ‘Lord above! You’re heating all of bloody Cornwall!’ her gran, Ellen Kellow, was fond of yelling every time she nipped in from her home at number two Kellow Cottages next door, tapping on the door frame with her walking stick and hefting the door shut with her ample bottom.
Pulling her towelling dressing gown around her, Merrin gripped the tea in her palm and took her place at the rickety pine table that had also, for as long as she could recall, lived on the rag rug in the middle of the room. The bathroom, from where her dad now whistled, was at the back of the cottage, once ‘outdoors’, now ‘indoors’ by virtue of the lean-to her Grandpa Arthur had put up in the nineteen sixties. The two bedrooms could be found at the top of the steep, wooden stairs.
Port Charles was ever-changing. Restaurants, bars, pop-ups, concessions and businesses with expensive interiors and grinning merchants came and went with the seasons. More often than not, those same merchants who arrived in paradise were, by the end of the summer mere months later, out of pocket and cursing all they had invested, financially and emotionally. Smiles were replaced with tears as they packed up their wares along with their dreams, positioning the large ‘For Sale’ sign in the window, hoping to attract another dreamer with high hopes and deep pockets. Then they would throw the keys on to the estate agent’s desk, before trundling back up-country to wherever it was they had once planned to escape from. She would never understand how they could bear to leave this little slice of heaven.