The Little Country by Charles de Lint
“Have you asked him?”
“I haven’t had much of a chance yet, have I?”
The Gaffer folded up his paper and laid it on the table. “What is it you want, my fortune?”
“If I could have anything at all?”
The Gaffer nodded.
“For us to live here with you—both Felix and I—for most of the year. To make records together. To tour a couple of times a year. Have some babies—but not too soon.”
“And Felix? What does he want?”
“I. . .” Janey sighed. “I don’t know.”
“Well, my love, it seems you know your own mind—at least as well as you ever do. So now it’s time you sat down with Felix and found out what he wants. But mind you—”
“Don’t quarrel with him. I know.”
“I was going to say, mind you really listen to him,” the Gaffer said. “Half the quarrels in this world come about because one side or the other simply isn’t listening to the other.”
Though he didn’t come right out and say it, Janey knew he was referring to her. She had the bad habit of being so busy getting her own points across that she didn’t pay much attention to what anyone else was saying. That, combined with her unfortunate temper, had made more than one important discussion all too volatile.
Rolling up his paper, the Gaffer stuck it in the inside pocket of his jacket.
“Well, I’m off, my love,” he said as he stood up. “I promised Chalkie I’d come ’round and give him a hand mending that old wall in back of his cottage. You’ll be all right?”
“Just brill. Don’t worry about me.”
“And you’ll remember what I said when you talk to Felix? Lads like an emperent sort of a woman, my flower, but there’s a grand difference between cheekiness and simply being wayward.”
Janey had to laugh. “Did you ever think of writing an advice column for the paper?”
Out came the rolled-up newspaper to be tapped on her head.
“I’ll tell the world that my old granddad beats me,” she warned him.
“Old, is it?”
Up came the paper again, but Janey was out of her chair and had danced away before he could reach her with it.
“And cantankerous,” she said from across the room. “Or should I say—what did you call it?—wayward?”
“If I didn’t have business elsewhere . . .”
He tried hard to sound serious, but the threat was an empty one. Smiling, he put away his paper.
“Come give this old man a kiss before he goes,” he said.
When she came, it was cautiously, but he neither tickled nor pinched her as she’d feared.
“When you do talk to Felix,” he said, “don’t push too hard. And that’s the last unasked-for bit of advice I’ll give you, my heart. Leave sparking couples to their own, my dad used to say.”
Janey watched him go from the front window, then settled back down at the table to have some toast. She took her time, hoping that Felix would be back soon, but finally returned to her own rooms when it got to be twelve-thirty and he still wasn’t back. She tried playing some tunes, but wasn’t in the mood for music. Picking up the Dunthorn book, she sat down with it by the window overlooking the backyard, but found she wasn’t in the mood to read either.
Instead, she idly flipped the pages of the book and stared out at the yard, watching a stonechat hop from branch to branch in the blackberry bushes that hedged the small square of lawn. After a time, she felt the beginnings of a tune stirring inside her.
Usually when she composed, tunes grew out of a practice session. They were rarely planned. A misplayed phrase from one tune might spark the idea for a new one. Or the lift and lilt of a particular set might wake the first few bars of an original piece. Rarely did the tunes arrive whole cloth as it were. And never did she hear them the way she could hear this one.
It didn’t seem to come so much from inside her, as from without, as though she heard someone playing from just over on the other side of a hill, the music drifting across to her, faint, vaguely familiar, but ultimately unknown. And while normally she only needed to hear a tune through once or twice to pick it up, this one remained oddly elusive.
She hummed along with it, her fingers no longer flipping the pages of the book. Setting the book aside, she took her mandolin down from the wall and tried to capture the order of notes. She got one phrase, then another. The third wasn’t right. It went more like—
The Gaffer’s bell rang next door, breaking her concentration.
Ignore it, she told herself, but when she turned back to her instrument, the music was gone.
“Oh, damn,” she muttered as she put the mandolin down.
But then it might be Felix, she thought as she went to see who it was. So don’t be cross with him. There was no way he could have known that he’d be interrupting you.
Still, it was a shame. Because the tune had been a good one. Although it was odd that she couldn’t remember any more than those first two bars of it now.
Keeping a smile firmly in place, she opened the door between her little courtyard and the Gaffer’s only to find a stranger standing by the Gaffer’s front door.
There was nothing threatening about him. He was slender—no, quite thin rather, she corrected herself—with longish dark hair and that certain kind of pale, but bright eyes that always reminded her of Paul Newman. He wore corduroys and a dark blue windbreaker, had a camera in its case slung over one shoulder, a couple of cases on the ground beside him.
He could have been anybody, he was undoubtedly innocent of any bad intention, but the first thing Janey thought as she looked at him was, he’s after Dunthorn’s lost book.
It was too late to undo the smile that had been meant for Felix, and there was—for all her premonition—something too infectious about his own smile for her to stop.
“Janey Little?” he asked.
She nodded warily, for all that she was still smiling like a loon.
“I hope I haven’t come at a bad time,” he went on. “My name’s Mike Betcher; I’m with Rolling Stone.”
“What? The magazine?”
Betcher nodded. “I was hoping I could interview you.”
For a long moment Janey didn’t know what to say. She looked at him, glanced down at his cases to see that one of them was for a portable computer, then met his gaze again.
“You can’t be serious.”
Betcher laughed. “We don’t just do Madonna and the like.”
“I know but . . .”
“If I’ve come at a bad time, I can come back.”
“No, it’s just. . .”
Just what? Ludicrous that Rolling Stone would want to do a piece on her? That was putting it mildly.
“I’m doing a piece on alternative music, you see,” Betcher explained. “I’m over here on holiday and thought I’d like to get a few interviews with some British artists who I admire to round out the article. At the moment it’s got too much of a Stateside slant.”
“Yes, but. . .”
“You can’t pretend that you don’t know you have a following in the States,” he said.
“Well, no. It’s just that it’s so low-key. . . .”
“And that’s exactly what I’m hoping to change with this piece,” Betcher said. “There are a lot of artists like you—on small independent labels, doing their own music—who remain relatively unknown to the general record-buying public. And that’s not right. Take yourself. You’re a headline act in Europe—”
“In small halls.”
“Doesn’t matter. And didn’t your last tour of California sell out?”
“Yes, but I was only playing in small clubs.”
Betcher shook his head. “Maybe I’ll run that as the headline: ‘The Modest Little.’ ”
Janey couldn’t help but laugh. “That sounds redundant.”
He shrugged. “So help me come up with a better one. Look, it can’t hurt to give it a
“You said you were on holiday anyway.”
“Okay. But it’s still a long way from London. I’ve been almost six hours on the train.”
She should just invite him in, she thought, because, as he’d said, she had nothing to lose and everything to gain. To get some coverage in a national paper like Rolling Stone . . . it was as good as being on the cover of the NME over here. But something still bothered her about his landing on her door just now.
First that American woman looking for the Dunthorn book.
Then Felix showing up.
Now a reporter from Rolling Stone. . . .
It all seemed a bit much. So, no. She wouldn’t have him in. But she’d be a complete ass to just send him on his way.
“Just let me get a jacket,” she said, “and we can go for a cup of tea. Would that be all right?”
“Absolutely.”
She left him there and hurried back upstairs.
A reporter from Rolling Stone. Right here in Mousehole. To interview her. What a laugh. She could hardly wait to tell someone about it.
A quick glance in the mirror stopped her. God, she looked awful. She put on some eye shadow and lipstick, worried over what might be a pimple but proved on closer inspection to be just a bit of dried skin, then brushed her hair. It took her a few moments to dig up her jacket from underneath the clothes she’d dumped on it last night. As she put it on, her gaze fell on the Dunthorn book that lay on the couch by the window.
It wouldn’t do to leave that lying about. She had to hide it, only where?
Looking around her rooms, she realized that there really wasn’t any foolproof safe place it could be hidden. So taking her cue from Poe, she merely stuck it on her bookshelf beside his other books. Hidden in plain sight, she thought, pleased with her own cleverness.
Catching up her purse, she went back outside, locking the door behind her and pocketing the key.
Now that felt odd, she thought. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d locked her door.
Pushing the feeling aside, she rejoined Betcher by the Gaffer’s front door.
“Where to?” he asked.
“Pamela’s Pantry. They’ve got the best cream teas in town.”
And ’round about this time of year, she thought, just about the only ones as well, but she wasn’t about to admit that to him. Let him think that quaint though it was, Mousehole had as much to offer as any place up country—which was what the Cornish called the rest of England.
“Cream tea?” Betcher asked as he hefted his cases. “What’s that?”
“You’ll see.”
2.
The Cornish Coastal Path is 268 miles long and runs from Marshland Mouth on the Devon border, around the coast past Land’s End, and all the way on to the shores of Plymouth Sound. It is the central part of the 520-mile South West Way, the longest continuous footpath in England.
Much of the Cornish section is based on the tracks marking out the regular beats walked by Coastguards. In 1947, when a new National Parks Commission first suggested that a continuous pathway ’round the British coast was a possibility, it was seen that Cornwall presented the ideal conditions for it, but it wasn’t until May of 1973 that the Cornish Coastal Path was officially opened.
Like the whole of the South West Way, the Cornish Coastal Path is usually walked from north to south, a psychological “downhill” journey that leads the walker southwest from the six-hundred-foot cliffs at Marshland Mouth to the granite shoulders of Land’s End, then back east to follow the gentler south coast. When Felix walked it that morning, however, he went the opposite way.
He walked up Raginnis Hill in the west part of Mousehole and past the Wild Bird Hospital and the Carn Du Hotel to where the road turned right. A smaller road continued past a cluster of stone cottages into a narrow lane bordered by blackberry hedges. A handful of cows grazed placidly in the pastures behind the hedges on the left, while beyond them was the sea. When the lane ended, a footpath led on through the fields, heading west to Lamorna.
Felix walked all the way around Kemyel Point and Carn Du to Lamorna’s sheltered cove. The path was rugged, climbing up and down the steep cliffs with sometimes no more than two-foot-wide stands of gorse between himself and the drop below. The wind came in from the sea, bringing a salt tang with it. The long grass was bent over, dried and brown from the salt. Gulls wheeled overhead, and except for them, he had the path to himself. As he neared Mousehole on his return, he stopped at a kind of stone armchair that jutted from a granite outcrop just before the Coastguard lookout behind Penzer Point. There he sat and gazed out over Mount’s Bay.
Somewhere below him and to the left was the Mousehole Cave that he and Janey had explored on another walk a few years ago. There was a haze in the air so that St. Michael’s Mount was only a smudge and the long line of the Lizard coast was completely hidden from view. On a sunny day, and he’d been here on such days, you could see the houses of Marazion and the large dish aerials of the Goonhilly satellite tracking station when the sun caught them just so.
Plucking a long stem of stiff grass, he twisted it between his fingers and thought of Janey, of the letter that had brought him here, and wondered just what he should do. When he thought of how their relationship had ended . . . He didn’t want to go through those last few months again.
But what if it could be different? He’d never know if he didn’t try, and wasn’t Janey important enough to him for him to make the effort?
No question there. He just didn’t think he could handle it all falling to pieces around him again.
He sighed, dropped the twist of grass, and plucked another stem.
Talk it out with her, he told himself.
He looked down the path towards Mousehole, his heart lifting when he saw a figure making its way through the fields towards him. It’s Janey, he thought. But then the figure’s cane registered and he knew it wasn’t her. It was Clare Mabley.
He waited patiently through her slow progress until she’d reached him, then stood up and gave her a hug.
“It’s been a long time,” he said as he stepped back.
Clare lowered herself onto the seat he’d so recently vacated and gave him a smile.
“Hasn’t it, though?” she said. “But I got your letters, so I didn’t feel as though you’d simply dropped off the edge of the world. You never did visit though—and you promised.”
Felix shrugged. “I wasn’t ready yet. How’d you know I was in town?”
That ready smile of Clare’s reappeared. “Have you been away that long? Mr. Bodener told Greg Lees—he delivers the milk now that his dad retired—and Greg told my mum. Edna next door also heard it from Mr. Hayle who got it from the Gaffer.”
“Some things don’t change.”
“Well, it’s a bit of excitement, isn’t it?”
Felix nodded. “I suppose.”
He sat down on a nearby rock and plucked another grass stem, which he began to shred.
“I thought I’d find you here,” Clare said after a few moments of silence.
Felix looked up.
“Well, it’s where you used to come the last time you and Janey were having your rows.”
“We haven’t had a row.”
Not really, he thought. Not yet. But that was because they’d barely had a chance to talk.
“Didn’t you? That’s good. But I saw you walking past the house earlier this morning—by yourself. It didn’t seem a good sign.”
Clare had been Felix’s confidante when he and Janey were breaking up. She was Janey’s best friend, but she’d become Felix’s as well. Like the Gaffer, she’d hated to see the two of them making a muddle of their lives, but unlike the Gaffer, she hadn’t been shy about giving Felix advice when they’d talked. Unfortunately, while he listened attentively and never seemed to mind her concern—he called her “Mother Clare” when she went on too
“We haven’t got together enough to break up again,” Felix said.
When Clare lifted an eyebrow, he looked away across the bay once more. For long moments he said nothing, then finally he began to tell her how his return to Penwith had come about.
“For God’s sake, Felix,” she said when he was done. “You have to tell her how you feel.”
“I know.”
“And if she gets angry, be angry back. I don’t mean you should start bullying her, but you know Janey. She only really listens to those who talk louder than she does. She doesn’t mean to be so bloody obstinate; it’s just her nature.”
Felix knew that, too. And he’d always been the sort who was willing to accept a friend’s faults. But that didn’t change the basic differences that underlay all of his disagreements with Janey.
“But why won’t you tour?” Clare asked when he brought that up. “You’ve never told me and you’ve probably never told Janey either. You love music, so what’s so bad about making your living playing it? It must be better than hauling about cargo on a freighter or whatever it is that you do on those ships of yours.”
Felix wouldn’t meet her gaze.
“Oh, come on, Felix. If you can’t tell me, then how will you ever be able to tell her? Is it like the way Dinny feels? That if he plays for money he’s going to lose the crack?”
Again, silence. Still he wouldn’t meet her gaze.
“Felix?”
He turned finally.
“It scares me,” he said. “It scares me so much that I get sick just thinking about it.”
He could see the surprise in her eyes and knew exactly what she was thinking: A great big strapping man like himself—scared of something so trivial?
“But. . . you don’t have any trouble playing at sessions,” Clare said.
“It’s not the same.”
“Still, people are watching you just as though you were on stage, aren’t they?”