The Four of Us Read Free

knife-edged purity about her jaw line. Only the expression in the green-gilt eyes was ages old and world weary.
    Aware that Artemis and Geraldine must also occasionally see photos of Kiki in magazines or on posters she wondered if, when they did, their memories also went spinning back through time to when the four of them had been young and inseparable: always together either at school or in the garden of the house at Petts Wood. Not that their memories of Petts Wood would be the same as hers. Even after all these years, a flush of colour touched her cheeks. Even then – even from the friends who had been as close to her as sisters – she had had secrets.
    Well aware that no one seeing her now would ever imagine what those secrets had been, she rose to her feet. Easter was well and truly over and Kiki would no longer be in St Austell or even, perhaps, in England, for she remembered reading in one of Lucy’s pop magazines that the majority of Kiki’s time was spent in America.
    She walked back to the car and in another ten minutes was back on the A390, motoring happily towards Truro, her excitement rising as she headed ever deeper towards the toe of Cornwall.
    She continued towards Helston and then, before reaching it, turned off on to a B road. The road was pretty and it grew prettier and prettier, winding through first one small village and then another. A right turn and then a left and she was crossing the thickly wooded shores of the Helford River at Gweek, on the Lizard Peninsula proper. She slowed down, taking from the glove compartment the directions that Marcus Black had given her.
    Another village and a little beyond it a left turn. She wound her window down, revelling in the smell of the sea, so near yet still out of sight.
    To the right of her now was the signpost for Calleloe. The road towards it dipped down steeply and she caught a glimpse of slate-roofed cottages huddled around a harbour. ‘Calleloe is, I believe, where Mrs Surtees did most of her shopping,’ Marcus Black had told her. ‘There’s a general shop there, a post office, a licensed hotel and a restaurant, two cafés, a couple of craft and clothing shops and a prestigious art gallery owned by an American.’
    With her heart beginning to hammer somewhere up near her throat, she ignored the road leading down to the harbour and continued on the narrow road that, from a distance of a quarter of a mile or so, continued to follow the line of the coast. Deep in its chine Calleloe slid out of sight and then, as the road again approached high ground, the trees began to thin and suddenly on the left-hand side of the road was a narrow turn-off and the signpost she had been looking for. PRIVATE. NO THROUGH ROAD, it read.
    With knots of nervous tension almost crippling her, Primmie turned left. Head-high hawthorn bushes and tall purple-headed thistles scratched at the Corsa’s sides and then, after about fifty yards or so, the road made a final twist and there, on the left-hand side, set in the hedgerow, were rusting double gates. There was nothing else. In front of her the single road ran out over a long, low headland to where, almost at its tip, a small church stood in splendid isolation. Beyond the church there was nothing but marram grass, sea and sky.
    On unsteady legs she got out of the car and walked towards the gates.
    Only by standing close up to them could she see the faded lettering: Ruthven.
    Beyond the gates an unmade track meandered up a slope towards a house that looked nothing at all as she had imagined it would. Instead of being long and low, with pretty whitewashed walls, the house, a farmyard and outbuildings to one side of it, was foursquare and built of sombre Cornish stone. There were green-painted shutters at either side of the long-paned windows and the front door was porched, its roof golden-green with lichen.
    She opened the gates wide and walked back to the car. It was nearly six o’clock and