Page 41 of A Sky Painted Gold

“Why not?” I ask, and my voice is little more than a whisper. There is something underneath Bernie’s words, something slippery and secret.

“Caitlin is … a trifle delicate.” Bernie shifts beside me. “Which is why I wanted to talk to you, to make sure…” He leaves his sentence trailing in the air, but this time the meaning is clear. He wants to make sure I won’t hurt her.

“I—” I begin, and I take a deep breath. “I’m not completely sure what you mean,” I say, although I do think there’s more going on with her than meets the eye, but I want to reassure Bernie somehow. “But, if it helps … I just want to be her friend.” The words sound small, but they are true, and they mean something to me.

I think Bernie understands that. I think neither of us has a large group of friends – not real, true friends anyway. I have always had Alice, I suppose, so I’ve never really thought about it, but Bernie’s reasons must be different.

“Good.” He throws the cigarette to the ground, grinding it under his shoe. The smile he gives me now reaches his eyes. “Then I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. We all do.” With that he takes my hand and lifts it to his lips with exaggerated chivalry.

I feel like I have passed some kind of test. Bernie tips his hat to me once more and saunters off down the path, back towards the causeway. He looks so untroubled that it is as if the conversation never took place. I stand for a moment, looking out at the island before turning for home.

Over the top of all the emotions stirred by my conversation with Bernie, one thought clamours to the front. I am going back. Tomorrow. I hug the news tightly to my chest. They do want me. Aunt Irene is wrong about them, just as she is wrong about me. I feel something heavy lifting off me as a fierce desire fills my body.

Change is coming, I can feel it crackling in the air around me, and I know that I am dancing on the edge of something new and deliciously unknown. The rest of the summer reaches out before me and I decide that I will take everything it has to offer with greedy, outstretched hands.

Part Two

“There was music from my neighbor’s

house through the summer nights. In

his blue gardens men and girls came and

went like moths among the whisperings

and the champagne and the stars.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

CHAPTER

TWELVE

August, 1929

It has been five weeks since that first party and I have barely been home. At first I stay over at the Cardew House for the odd night, but soon I begin to disappear from the farm for three or four days at a time. Caitlin has renamed the blue room “Lou’s room” and each time I arrive there seems to be some new little luxury waiting for me – a silk scarf, some chocolates, or a new bottle of scent. Waking up in that big cloud-like bed – just as comfortable as I hoped it would be – I marvel at how lucky I am and, although I know it can’t last for ever, like Cinderella I am happy simply to enjoy the time I have at the party – every last bit of it.

The Cardews plan to leave Cornwall and return to London at the end of the month, which leaves me three more weeks of freedom. It’s strange that I think of it that way, I suppose, but I do – here, I’m gloriously free from reality, free from decision-making, free from all thoughts of the future. If there is one thing that the Cardews and their friends really excel at, it’s living in the moment. Why think about tomorrow when there is so much pleasure to be squeezed out of today?

Plans are rarely made, but whims are often followed. We burn the candle at both ends, and even at our most languorous and lazy – even when it seems we are doing little more than lolling about – I feel an electric pulse running through us all. Perhaps it is the weather, so hot as to make me feel feverish, but there is an undeniable energy about the place that crackles more and more intensely as the weeks pass. We are a powder keg waiting to explode.

And if we are all burning, then Caitlin is burning the brightest. She is always moving, always talking, always dancing. She is also thinner than she was when she arrived, and I rarely see her eat anything – although a drink is never far from her reach. I notice that Robert sometimes prepares food for her, quietly peeling fruit and placing it next to her so that she eats it, absently, without pausing in her excited conversation. It’s one of many small actions that remind me of Bernie’s word, delicate.

People come and go from the house, and Robert is away often, for days at a time, seeing to the murky and mysterious world of “business” in London. He comes back from these trips more tightly wound, more serious. As a result, I haven’t seen as much of him, but we are getting on a little better, our bickering only occasionally erupting into something more serious. Between his surprising tenderness towards his sister and his love of Gothic fiction I am beginning to think it’s possible that I might have judged him a little harshly. At least, I start to until he says something to deliberately antagonize me.

Caitlin has yet to leave the island at all. She has firmly planted herself here, and she surrounds herself with people. They buzz around her all day like little bees around their queen.

There has been plenty to enjoy. More parties, of course, and dinners, and – when Robert is home – trips to Penzance in the shiny blue car with the roof down. There has been swimming, and games on the beach, and music in the evenings, and cocktails on the lawn. There has been dancing around the sitting room to the latest records, playing cards and trading jibes, and curling up in corners reading all the new additions Robert has bought for the library. My life has, in short, turned into one long, pleasure-seeking holiday, and why on earth would I be anything other than ecstatic about it?

The island keeps us safe in our fantasy – cocooned, and far removed from the brisk realities of the outside world. When the tide comes in and the water kisses the sand down in the cove I breathe a sigh of relief that I have been marooned again. I feel the hours slipping dreamily through my fingers, and the pleasure and pain of it is almost too much to bear.

The evenings that I enjoy best of all are the ones where all the guests disappear and Caitlin, Robert, Laurie, Charlie and I eat dinner outside, at a long table pulled out underneath a cloud of honeysuckle. Moths reel overhead, drunk on moonlight, as we talk until the candles on the table gutter and burn down. The evenings are warm and intoxicating, and we laugh and use our fingers to tear into the perfectly ripe figs that the orchard offers up like a gift.

One afternoon at the beginning of August, though who knows precisely which, as the days melt effortlessly into one another, I am on one of my visits home when Alice drops by. Every so often I duck back to the farm to show my face and take care of some of the chores that I have been wilfully neglecting, while placating Freya, who has taken over quite a lot of them on the promise of payment in books and new fabric for her Medusa costume. I should feel guilty about it, I know, but I don’t really. Perhaps it’s because without my presence, the farm and everything on it seems to continue to run just fine; in fact, it has been rather bruising to my ego how dispensable I seem to be.

Pa seems largely oblivious to my whereabouts anyway, and Midge accepts my disappearances without question. At first I feel I need to ask her permission, but after a while she tells me that she has enough to worry about, what with Freya and Tom trying to kill each other, the triplets wriggling their way into mischief at all hours of the day and night, and the baby teething. I am a sensible girl, she says, I can do what I like. I am glad that Midge thinks this, but I certainly don’t feel sensible. What I feel is giddy and reckless. I feel like turning cartwheels in the sand.

At this particular instant I am having a rare moment of quiet, sitting in the meadow in front of the house alone and writing in my journal. A shout splits the air and I look up to see Alice cutting along the path through the field towards me. Her hair spills over her shoulders and her pale blue dress is hiked up as she walks barefoot along the dusty path. She looks for a moment like she has dropped out of another century, she is such an ideal picture of a rural beauty – almost as if she should be holding a crook and followed by a line of gambolling little lambs. I haven’t seen much of Alice in the last few weeks, and that feels odd, agitating – like an itch I can’t scratch. It is difficult to put my finger on what has shifted in our relationship, but it is clear that something has, something important.