The House at Mermaid's Cove(12)

“Hmm.” He went over to the door and opened it. Brock, who had been waiting patiently outside, came bounding in and jumped up to lick my chin. “I have to go now.” Jack clipped a leash onto the dog’s collar. “Come on, old boy—leave her alone.” He gave the leash a gentle tug. “Get some rest,” he said. “We’ll see how you are tomorrow. When you’re well enough I’ll take you up to the farm and show you the ropes.” He turned back as he reached the door. “Is there anything else you need? Anything you want to ask?”

“What’s this place called?” I angled my head toward the shelves that held the tide tables. “I know that we’re in south Cornwall, and that we’re near the mouth of the Helford River—but does this little bay have a name?”

“It has a Cornish name. Porthmorvoren. In English, it’s Mermaid’s Cove.”



Jack had left a pile of logs outside the boathouse. By laying a folded blanket on top of it, I made a comfortable seat. It was pure pleasure spending a whole day doing nothing but reading a novel and watching the comings and goings of the seabirds.

The cove was deserted. As far as I could tell from the limited movement my injured foot allowed me, the only human tracks in the smooth, sea-washed sand were Jack’s. I spotted a couple of small fishing boats—they looked very much like the ones I remembered from the old days in Dublin. I wondered if the people on board could see me, and whether they’d heard Jack’s story about me being his cousin. I quailed at the thought of them coming ashore. How could I keep up the pretense of being a relative of Jack’s when I knew so little about him?

But the day passed without anyone else setting foot in Mermaid’s Cove. The only living creature I saw, apart from the gulls wheeling overhead, was a robin who flew down from its perch among the clumps of pink sea thrift that clung to the rocks. It seemed unafraid of me—and when I threw crumbs of bread onto the sand, it came closer and closer, until I could have reached out and touched it.

As darkness fell, I went to get undressed. My old chemise had fallen onto the floor when I’d pulled the blanket from under it. I bent to pick it up. It felt stiff and coarse compared to the silk nightdress Jack had given me. Looking at it made me think of a snake that had shed its skin. The scales of my old life had fallen away—and now I had this new, shiny skin that felt soft and strange and would take time to get used to.

I turned back the collar of the chemise, looking at the number stitched inside the neck. Nine-three-seven. If I lived to be a hundred, I doubted I would ever forget that number. As a novice in Dublin, I was told that it had previously belonged to a missionary nun who was murdered while serving in the same part of Africa that I would eventually be sent to. I’d seen the face of this nun, Sister Marie-Louise, in the convent’s magazine. Over the years I’d often wondered what she would have thought of me. I felt I could never live up to a woman who had paid the ultimate price for her commitment to serving God. Every time I thought of her, I felt like a traitor.

Was I truly called? That question was on my mind so often in Africa. It wasn’t when I was with a patient or traveling to the clinics out in the bush—it was when I was on my knees in the chapel, my mind on the case the bell had dragged me away from instead of the words of the prayers I was mechanically reciting. How could I know the answer to that question when the self I was seeking to be true to had been left behind in Ireland, buried in the walls of the convent?

Now, as I clambered into my sailcloth bed, I thought about the life I’d left behind. I stared at the shadows thrown onto the ceiling of the boathouse by the glow of the stove. The roof of the building where I’d slept in Africa wasn’t slate like this one. It was made of galvanized iron lined with timber. Lizards and snakes were able to climb into the gap between the two layers. I used to listen to them rustling around, hoping they wouldn’t drop onto my head in the middle of the night. It had happened once—not when I was asleep but when I was sitting up, writing in bed. A boa constrictor—just a baby, luckily—had landed on my shoulder. The shriek I’d let out had brought my twenty-three bald-headed, bleary-eyed roommates leaping to the rescue.

I remember thinking, after it happened, that the snake had been a sign. I’d been jotting down the mea culpa when it dropped on me. This was the twice-daily self-examination that had to be written in notebooks in pencil. It meant “I accuse myself.” That evening I’d been writing about temptation. Of wanting to take more of the delicious, ice-cool mango that Kalulu had brought me when I came out of the operating theater, of wishing I could join two of the doctors who had been invited to a weekend house party at the home of a mineowner upriver, of thinking of excuses to visit the orphanage attached to the hospital—for my own reasons, not the medical needs of the children. The snake was like the devil on my shoulder, hissing contempt at my miserable failings.

I turned over in my boathouse bed, trying not to catch the bandages on my feet as I did so. What would I have written about today, I wondered. I accuse myself of looking in a mirror, of not saying grace before eating, of reading a forbidden book, of failing to notify the convent that I’m alive, of planning to lie about my past . . . The list went on and on. I imagined reading out that catalog of imperfections to Sister Margarita, the Mistress of Postulants in Dublin. As a novice, I used to break into a sweat just thinking about revealing my shortcomings. My faults seemed to repeat themselves week after week. You master one imperfection and ten others sprout like dragons’ teeth. I could picture Sister Margarita shaking her head, hear her sucking in her breath.