The ringing of the telephone woke me. It was just before 9:00, Christmas morning. I let it ring a couple of times, so that I wouldn't sound half asleep when I picked up the receiver.
"Hello."
"Merry Christmas, Dad!"
"Merry Christmas, Lou. Have you opened your presents yet?"
"Just now. Grandma & Grandad said I couldn't open any until after breakfast, so I made them breakfast in bed at 8:00!" Ever my bright and practical daughter.
"Did you like what I bought you?"
"Yeah, it was really pretty. Thank you, I love you." I'd bought her a gold watch, very delicate and grown up, just right, I hoped, for a 12 year old little lady.
"What are you doing later on, anything good?"
"I'm going to church with Grandma in an hour, then we'll be having dinner this afternoon, I'm going to help Grandma with the cooking. Aunty Julie and Uncle Sean are coming, with Katie and Siobhan." My sister-in-law and her family, Lucy would be happy to see them, I knew, she always got on well with her cousins, one a year older than her, the other a year younger. I was the only child of two only children who had married late and had both died relatively young, so I had very little in the way of family.
"Well, you have a good time, sweetie, I might speak to you again later on."
"You have a good time too, Dad - I hope you're not feeling lonely."
"I'm fine, Lou, don't worry about me. Just get busy enjoying yourself."
"OK, I will. Mum's here, she wants to speak to you."
There was a longish pause, broken only by a stage whisper from Liz to Lucy "Close the door on your way out, please."
"Dan?"
"Hello Liz, Merry Christmas."
"Merry Christmas. Did Lucy wake you?"
"Yes, but it was time I was up, anyway."
"Sorry, I told her it was too early. You know what she's like. Why did you buy her such an expensive Christmas present?"
It wasn't the next question I'd been expecting. My reply was probably a little sharper than it should have been, especially on Christmas Day.
"Why, am I not supposed to spend money on our daughter? It wasn't that much, anyway, it probably looks dearer than it actually was. I just thought she'd like it."
"There's no need to jump down my throat, I was only asking. You always seem to read more than there is into everything I say these days."
"Sorry, I've only just woken up. Have you got any news?"
There was a long silence, much longer than I would've expected after a superficially simple question.
"Yes, Dan. I have," she said slowly. "You remember Suzanne?"
"Your schoolfriend who came to our wedding? I don't think I've seen her since."
"That's her. I've only seen her a couple of times, she moved to London. I bumped into her in town when I was doing some last minute shopping for Mum the other day, and we went out for a drink the night before last, she came back here and we ended up talking until 2:00 in the morning."
"You had a lot of catching up to do."
"You could say that. She's a millionairess now, she owns a chain of travel agents, built the business up herself from nothing. She's back home for Christmas, to see her family, but she's on business as well, apparently her firm is taking over a local travel company, coach hire, coach holidays, that kind of thing. She's offered...."
The flow of words stopped abruptly.
"Go on."
"She's offered me the job of managing the company, and...and I've accepted. You've always said I should have used my qualifications, so now I'm going to."
"Where are you going to be based?" I had to ask the question, even though I was 99% certain I already knew the answer.
"Here. The depot and offices are just on the edge of town. It was an old family firm, Suzanne has bought it lock, stock and barrel, so there's even a house for us to live in on the site, at a peppercorn rent."
"Us?"
Another awkward hiatus. "Lucy and I. I didn't think you'd be interested, you said you didn't want to move up here."
I teetered on the brink of completely losing my temper, of shouting down the phone, asking her who the hell she thought she was to pull the plug on our marriage and take my daughter away from me, but it suddenly struck me that, firstly, she'd just hang up on me, and, secondly, I wasn't that bothered. It was as though a light had been switched off in my mind, or another, brighter one had taken its place.
"What does Lucy think about it?"
"She doesn't know yet. I wanted to talk to you first."
"Well, don't you think it might be a good idea to tell her?"
"Of course, I'm going to speak to her later on today. Dan, I'm amazed that you're taking this so calmly."
"Frankly, so am I. I told Lou I might speak to her again later, but I think it would be better if you get her to ring me when she's had time to digest everything. It's going to be a big upheaval for all of us."
"Dan...I'm really sorry." The tone of her voice had changed, softened, the old Liz I'd been in love with for so many years was somewhere near the surface. "If it hadn't been for...what happened to you..." her voice tailed off, and I heard a stifled sob.
Tell me about it, I thought. So there it was. I'd woken up at 9:00 a husband and father, and by 9:45 I was, apart from the legal niceties, an ex-husband and parent with access rights to be decided. Merry Christmas, indeed.
****
It was all pretty amicable, our parting of the ways. Over the winter, Liz and Lucy moved to their new home, and new job and school respectively, our house was put on the market, we had a big going away party, mostly for the benefit of Lucy's friends, and I began looking for my new 'bachelor pad', with the vague idea that I might like somewhere that could double as an artist's studio. After what had been a pretty disastrous old year, the new year began with a huge stroke of luck. I happened one day to be reading our regional daily newspaper, something that was far from being a regular occurrence, when I spotted a classified advertisement for a forthcoming property auction. One of the lots caught my eye, a holiday cottage, 'in need of renovation and modernisation' , as the estate agents' jargon had it, in a village on the North Cornwall coast. Given that I still couldn't drive, it led to a tortuous journey by public transport, two trains and two buses each way, a fourteen hour round trip, to go and have a look at it, but as soon as I saw it, I knew it was the place. It was the end house in a row of five cottages, presumably fishermen's cottages when they were originally built, on a steep hillside overlooking a sandy bay well known for surfing. It had belonged to a company that had used it to give their managers the perk of a weekend break by the sea, but the company had gone into liquidation - too many weekend breaks, and not enough work, I guessed! - and the cottage, along with the company's other assets, had been put up for sale. Apart from the basic 'two up, two down' cottage accommodation, the hillside site of the house had brought another benefit, from my perspective - a large cellar, on the downhill, garden side of the house, which had been converted into a sun room with huge picture windows opening onto a decked patio, to take advantage of the sea view. My studio, I thought. The elephant in the room, of course, was that it would probably sell for way above any price I could realistically afford, especially as the 'renovation and modernisation' that was required was actually fairly minimal, but I contacted the selling agents and registered my interest. I had to pay a deposit of 10% of the estimated selling price, and that was as close to 'my' house as I expected to get. On the day of the auction, as I'd decided not to attend myself because of my still less than robust health, but bid by phone using an agent, the call was set up and I sat, literally on the edge of my seat in the living room of our soon to be sold family home as the auction progressed, until, to my astonishment, my last bid wasn't trumped by anything higher, I heard the sound of the gavel falling over the phone line, and then heard the agent say "Congratulations, you're the new owner of Guillemot Cottage."
It was another couple of months before everything was finalised, but the big move was set for the beginning of April. That had given me the chance to finish my art course, towards the end of which the teacher suggested that I enter one or two of my paintings in a local exhibition for amateur artists. I'd found that landscapes were my best subject, so I put a couple of those forward, and was surprised and flattered when not only did one of them receive a 'highly commended' award in the landscape category, but that the exhibition organisers had received a few enquiries as to whether my pictures were for sale. Thus encouraged, I spent more money than I probably should have done on buying equipment and materials for the studio, but it kept me occupied during those early days at the cottage.
Lucy made her first visit to the cottage during the Whitsun half term holidays, despite her mother panicking that she wasn't old enough to make such a long journey on her own, but it passed off successfully and she came down fairly regularly from then on, although the distance meant that it wasn't worth her coming just for a weekend, so I didn't see quite as much of her as I would've liked. That, and the fairly perfunctory and more or less amicable divorce proceedings Liz and I went through apart, I spent my first summer in Cornwall as a virtual recluse. The other 4 houses in the same terrace as mine were all rented out as short stay holiday cottages, so that I was the only permanent resident in the 'street'. By the time I'd got onto nodding terms with my neighbours, they'd be gone and replaced by another set. I had to go to the general hospital in Truro every 3 months or so for physical and neurological tests, but apart from my 'zombie' moments, which were becoming less common as time went on, I was living a reasonably normal life, apart from the fact that I still couldn't get my driving license back. I'd got to know a local art dealer, who had a gallery in the village aimed at the relatively well-heeled tourists, weekenders and second home owners who shared the area with the surfer dudes, and he'd taken a few of my landscapes, and one or two more abstract things I'd started to experiment with, for sale - with a handsome commission for him, of course. I would've been starving in my garret if I'd been relying on the money from the pictures I sold to live, but I was making enough, when taken with my pension, to be comfortably breaking even.
So life rolled on for the next couple of years. I was becoming better known as an artist, some of the second homers' friends began to ask where they had bought their pictures, so that by the third summer, I was starting to receive an occasional commission. My health, while it was never going to return to what it had been, was good enough not to cause me any insurmountable problems, and my neurologist was even starting to concede that "we might get you back behind the wheel, sooner rather than later." Even that wasn't too much of an issue, I didn't really want or need to go anywhere else too often, and when I did, a combination of the intermittent local buses and the taxi company based in the nearest town five miles or so away rendered the necessary service. Anything I couldn't buy in the handful of shops in the village, I simply ordered on the internet, mostly my artist's materials and birthday and Christmas presents for Lucy. Life was, not to exaggerate too much, pretty idyllic, and nothing seemed as though it was going to change. Until the Sunday morning in August when the past arrived on my doorstep.
****
Enjoyed part two also, now on to part three....
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