Chapter 23: Penhallow

The key was still under the third flowerpot, where my mother had always put it.

I stood at the garden gate on the first of April with the sea wind pulling at my coat.

The tenants had gone the day before, and they had left the grass cut and a note on the table.

The cottage looked smaller than I remembered.

The slate roof was green with moss.

The front door was the blue my father had painted it, gone pale and flaking.

My name was on the gate, cut into a bit of driftwood in his square capitals: PENHALLOW.

I put my hand on it.

For three years I had been Mrs Wrenfield on everything, and here I was a Penhallow on a gate.

I opened the door.

It smelled of woodsmoke and cold stone and old damp, and under that, faintly, of my mother's lavender polish.

The kitchen had the same scarred table and the same stove.

Her apron still hung on the hook behind the door.

I sat at the table in my coat for a while.

Then I stood up and opened every window.

By dark I had scrubbed the range and carried in a basket of logs from the shed.

Then I lit the stove myself.

It took four matches, and I swore at it in my mother's words.

When the fire caught, I stood in the kitchen with soot on my face and heard myself laugh.

Nobody had come running to see what the noise was.

Nobody had told me to lower my voice.

I ate a tin of soup standing at the stove.

I had never made so much noise in a house in my life.

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