all that I must

We hadn't planned it properly. That was the thing about Peter — he didn't plan trips the way other people did, with itineraries and bookings and a folder of printed confirmations. He planned the way water plans: downhill, toward the sea, by the path of least resistance. One evening he'd said, "You should see Polperro," and two days later we were in the car.

His old Toyota smelled of salt and dog hair, though he hadn't owned a dog in years. The dashboard had a crack running across it like a river on a map, and the heating only worked on the driver's side, which Peter considered a feature rather than a fault. "Keeps the driver awake," he said. "Everyone else can sleep."

Tima was in the back, strapped into the car seat we'd wedged in at an angle because it didn't quite fit. She was fifteen months old and had the particular gravity of someone who has recently arrived in the world and hasn't yet decided whether to stay. She could walk — if you could call it walking, that lurching, determined, arms-out stagger that looked like a very small person crossing the deck of a ship in heavy weather. She had a handful of words: Papa, da, no, muh (which meant either "more" or "milk" depending on the pitch), and hiya, which she said to everyone and everything including, on one occasion, a traffic cone.

She was asleep within twenty minutes of leaving, her head tilted sideways, her mouth slightly open, one hand gripping the ear of a stuffed rabbit whose name was notionally Rabbit but whom she addressed, when she addressed him at all, as Ba.

Peter drove the way he did everything — steady, unhurried, with the quiet competence of someone who had never seen the point of rushing toward a destination when the road itself was the thing. He didn't use the motorway. He took the A-roads, the ones that bent through villages and dipped into valleys and ran alongside hedgerows so thick and old they were practically geology.

"Never understood motorways," he said, not for the first time. "Getting somewhere fast just means you miss the bit in between. And the bit in between is usually the point.

I watched Cornwall arrive through the windscreen — not suddenly, the way a border arrives, but gradually, the way a mood shifts. The hedges grew taller, wilder. The stone in the walls changed colour, from grey to a darker grey that held the light differently. The sky opened up, wide and restless and layered with clouds that looked like they'd been painted by someone who was very good at clouds.

"We'll stop at Crumplehorn," Peter said. "Can't take the car in."

"Into where?"

"Polperro. No cars. You walk down."

The car park at Crumplehorn sat at the top of the village like an anteroom before the real thing. We unfolded the pushchair — a second-hand contraption with a squeaky wheel that Tima tolerated rather than enjoyed — and began the walk down.

The lane narrowed almost immediately, dropping between cottages that pressed in from both sides, their stone walls thick with moss and ivy, their windows small and deep-set, as if the houses had been built not for looking out of but for sheltering within. The River Pol ran alongside us, shallow and fast, its water clear enough to see the stones on the bottom — smooth, dark, polished by centuries of running.

Tima woke as we descended. She sat up in the pushchair and looked around with the focused, unblinking attention she gave to anything new. Her hand came up — the pointing hand, the one that was always reaching for something — and aimed at the water.

"Da," she said.

"That's a river, love," Peter said, without slowing his pace.

"Da," she said again, more firmly, as if correcting him.

The village opened around us like something remembered rather than seen for the first time. Fishermen's cottages packed tight along streets so narrow the eaves almost touched overhead. The smell of the sea arriving before the sea itself — salt, seaweed, the mineral breath of wet rock. Hanging baskets outside pubs. A cat asleep on a windowsill. The particular quiet of a place that has been lived in for eight hundred years and has made its peace with being exactly what it is.

And then the harbour.

It appeared at the end of the street like the punchline of a very old joke — sudden, complete, perfect. The inner harbour, walled and still, where fishing boats sat at angles on the mud at low tide, their hulls bright with paint: red, blue, white, green. The outer harbour beyond, where the water moved and the light came in off the Channel and made everything glimmer. The quayside lined with net lofts and old warehouses that had been converted to galleries and tea rooms but still looked like they'd rather be storing pilchards.

Tima pointed at a gull.

"Da!"

"That's a gull," I said.

"Da," she confirmed, satisfied.

Peter stood at the harbour's edge with his hands in his pockets, looking at the water with the expression he wore whenever he was near the sea — not exactly happy, not exactly peaceful, but settled, as if something inside him that was usually slightly misaligned had clicked into place.

"Used to come here as a boy," he said. "Dad would drive us over from St Just. Took ages. Roads were worse then. He'd park up and walk straight to the pub and my mam would take us down to the harbour and we'd throw bread at the crabs."

"Did it work?"

"Never once. Crabs aren't interested in bread. But it kept us busy."

The B&B was up a side lane, a narrow stone cottage with a blue door and a window box full of geraniums that looked like they'd survived several administrations. The woman who ran it was called Margaret, or possibly Margery — Peter addressed her as "Marge" with the easy familiarity of someone who had either known her for decades or had decided, in the first thirty seconds, that formality would be a waste of both their time.

The room was small and clean and smelled of lavender and something baked. A double bed, a cot borrowed from a neighbor, a window that looked out over rooftops to a wedge of harbour. The ceiling was low enough that Peter had to duck through the doorway, which he did without comment, as if he'd been ducking through doorways his entire life, which he probably had.

Tima inspected the cot by gripping its bars and shaking them experimentally. Whatever test she was conducting, it passed. She sat down in it and looked at us with an expression of calm ownership.

"Right," Peter said. "Pub."

The Blue Peter Inn sat on the quayside with the harbour directly in front of it and the kind of weathered, low-beamed, thick-walled solidity that suggested it had been absorbing the stories of fishermen and smugglers since before anyone started keeping track. The sign outside was storm-faded. The door was painted navy and propped open with a chunk of granite.

Inside, it was warm and dark and smelled of ale, woodsmoke, and the sea. The ceiling beams were black with age and close enough to touch. The bar was a thick slab of oak polished by generations of elbows. The light came from wall lamps that gave everything a copper glow, as if the whole room had been dipped in evening.

Peter ordered without consulting the menu — a pint of something local and a pasty. I had the same. Tima was in the pushchair, already drifting, her eyes doing that slow-blink, heavy-lid thing that meant she'd be gone within five minutes.

We sat by the window that looked out onto the harbour. The tide was coming in. The boats that had been resting on the mud were beginning to lift, to right themselves, to remember what they were for.

Peter took a long, slow pull of his pint and set it down.

"Smugglers' port, this was," he said. "Eighteenth century. There was a man — Zephaniah Job, they called him — ran the whole operation from his house just up the hill. The Smugglers' Banker. French brandy, tobacco, silk. Half the village was in on it. Revenue men couldn't touch him."

"What happened to him?"

"Died in his bed. Eighty-three. Which tells you something about the difference between crime and enterprise in Cornwall.

I laughed. Peter didn't — he just let the corner of his mouth shift slightly, which in Peter's emotional register was approximately equivalent to someone else falling off their chair.

Tima was asleep. The glow from the harbour lights came through the window and caught on the side of her face, and she looked, as she often did in sleep, like someone much older — ancient, even — as if the act of sleeping returned her briefly to wherever she'd been before she arrived.

Peter watched her for a moment. Then he said, quietly, "She's got a good face."

I nodded.

"I mean it. Some children look like children. She looks like she's been here before."

The pasties arrived. We ate. The tide continued to fill the harbour. Somewhere outside, a halyard clinked against a mast in a rhythm that could have been a clock or could have been music.

"My dad never left Cornwall," Peter said, apropos of nothing. Or apropos of everything, depending on how you listened. "Not once. Born in St Just, died in St Just. The sum total of his geographic ambition was Penzance on a Saturday and Truro at Christmas."

He paused, looking at the harbour.

"I used to think that was small. Limited. You know? The world's out there and he never went to find it. I was angry about it when I was young. Thought he was afraid."

"Was he?"

Peter shook his head slowly. "No. He wasn't afraid. He just — he knew something I didn't. It took me thirty years to understand it, and I'm still not sure I've got it right."

"What was it?"

Peter didn't answer immediately. He turned his pint glass on the table, a quarter turn, precisely, the way he did when he was working something out.

"That the ground under your feet is the only thing that's real. Everything else — ambition, travel, the idea that meaning is somewhere you haven't been yet — that's just weather. It passes. The ground stays."

He took another drink.

"The miners knew that. Literally. You go down into the earth and you work the rock and the rock is real. It's not an idea, it's not a plan, it's not something you can argue with. It's just there. And you either work it or you don't."

The fire crackled. Tima shifted in her sleep, her hand opening and closing around nothing, grasping at something in a dream.

"I'm not saying he was right," Peter said. "I'm saying he wasn't wrong. And there's a difference."

We sat with that for a while. The pub was quiet now — a few locals at the bar, a couple in the corner, the barman reading a paper with the unhurried absorption of someone who had all night and intended to use it.

"Do you know the word hiraeth?" Peter asked.

I shook my head.

"Welsh word. No English equivalent. It means — well, it doesn't mean anything exactly. It's the longing for something you've lost, or something you never had, or something you can't quite name. A place, a time, a version of yourself that existed somewhere you can't get back to."

"Like nostalgia?"

"No. Nostalgia's soft. Hiraeth has weight. It's the thing that sits in your chest when you stand at Cape Cornwall and look west and know there's nothing between you and America but water and all the years that have already happened."

He paused.

"The Cornish have it too, though they don't have a word for it. They just carry it. In the way they walk. In the way they drink their tea. In the way they look at the sea."

I thought about this. Outside, the harbour was full now, the boats floating, their reflections rippling beneath them.

"Is that what your dad had?"

Peter looked at me. For a moment, something shifted behind his eyes — not pain, not sadness, but a kind of recognition. As if I'd found a room he hadn't realized he'd left unlocked.

"Aye," he said. "That's what he had."

Tima made a small sound in her sleep — a sigh, or a word that hadn't quite formed yet, something between a breath and a name. Peter reached down and adjusted the blanket over her, his big hands impossibly gentle, and the gesture contained more than any sentence he'd spoken all evening.

We finished our pints. We walked back through the dark streets to the B&B, the harbour murmuring behind us, the pushchair's squeaky wheel marking time on the cobblestones.

Tima didn't wake. She had the gift of sleeping through transitions that most people spend their whole lives trying to learn.

The road from Polperro to St Ives took the better part of a morning, because Peter didn't believe in direct routes and Tima didn't believe in staying asleep past seven. We left after breakfast — a full Cornish that Margaret served with the quiet authority of someone who had been feeding people properly since before we were born and was not about to stop — and drove west along roads that seemed designed by someone who had wanted to show as much countryside as possible in the least efficient way.

Peter drove with the window cracked, letting in a ribbon of salt air that mixed with the car's permanent scent of leather and warm dust. The radio was off. Peter didn't use the radio in Cornwall — he said it interfered with the landscape.

Tima was in the back, awake this time, engaged in the serious business of eating a rice cake with the methodical determination of someone defusing a bomb. She had rice cake in her hair, on her cheeks, on the car seat, on Ba the rabbit, and — through some mechanical process I couldn't fathom — on the back of Peter's headrest.

"She's impressive," Peter said, glancing in the mirror. "Thorough."

"Muh," Tima said, holding out the demolished remnant.

"You've still got some."

"Muh."

"She wants more," I said.

"She's got more. She's wearing most of it."

The landscape changed as we moved west. The rolling green of the south coast gave way to something starker — high hedgerows thick with foxglove and campion, then open stretches of moorland where the gorse burned yellow against the grey-green of heath. Every few miles, the road would crest a rise and the sea would appear — sudden, immense, impossibly blue for England — and then vanish again behind the next hill, as if it were following us at a distance, checking we were still heading the right way.

"St Ives is different," Peter said, as we wound through the lanes above the coast. "Different feel. Different light."

"Different how?"

"You'll see. It's the light that gets people. Always has. Turner came for the light. Hepworth stayed for it. There's something about the way the sea wraps around the town from three sides — it bounces the light back and forth, makes everything look like it's been polished. Artists went mad for it. Still do."

We came into St Ives from the south, along the road that runs above Carbis Bay, and then there it was — sudden, steep, cascading down to the harbour in a tumble of narrow streets and stone walls and slate roofs, with the sea spreading out beyond in every direction, bright and flat and throwing light back at the sky with the generosity of something that had more than it needed.

Peter was right. The light was different here. It wasn't just bright — it was present, like a fourth dimension that everything existed within. The stone walls glowed with it. The water held it. Even the shadows seemed lighter, as if the darkness here had reached an accommodation with the sun and both had come out well.

The B&B was on a lane behind the harbour — another small stone cottage, this one painted white, with a steep staircase and rooms that were small and clean and looked out over rooftops and chimneys to the harbour below. Two nights, Peter had arranged, with the vague declaration that "St Ives needs two days. One for looking, one for seeing."

I didn't ask what the difference was. With Peter, these things tended to explain themselves.

We unpacked — which with a fifteen-month-old meant distributing nappies, wipes, spare clothes, snacks, milk, Ba, a traveling cot, and a selection of small objects Tima had collected along the way (a pebble from Polperro, a leaf from somewhere near Truro, a wooden spoon she'd liberated from Margaret's kitchen by the ancient toddler method of picking it up and refusing to give it back).

Then we walked down to the harbour.

The streets were cobbled and steep and not designed for pushchairs, so Tima went on my hip and the pushchair stayed at the B&B and Peter carried nothing but himself, which he did in the way he always did — upright, steady, his long stride shortened slightly to match the descent, his eyes taking in everything with the practiced attention of someone who had been looking at the world carefully for a long time and had not yet found the bottom of it.

The harbour opened before us — the curve of the sea wall, the fishing boats rocking gently at their moorings, the wide sweep of Harbour Beach where the sand was pale gold and the water was the kind of turquoise that you associated with warmer countries and felt mildly offended to find in England. Beyond it, the headland — St Ives Island, which wasn't really an island but a grassy promontory that pushed out into the sea like a shoulder.

Tima saw the beach. She went stiff on my hip — the full-body attention of a toddler who has identified her next objective and is preparing to deploy all available resources toward reaching it.

"Da," she said, pointing with her whole hand.

"Sand," I said.

"Da!"

I took off her shoes and set her down at the edge of the beach. She stood for a moment, bare feet on the sand, and looked down at the ground with the focused incredulity of a scientist who has just discovered a new element. She curled her toes. She bent down — slowly, carefully, the way a deep-sea diver descends — and placed one hand flat on the sand.

She stayed like that for a long time. Just her hand on the sand, feeling it. The warmth of it. The way the grains shifted under her palm. The texture — gritty, soft, alien, familiar.

Then she picked up a handful and held it up toward me, her face luminous with the discovery.

"Da!"

"Sand," I said.

She opened her hand. The grains fell through her fingers. She watched them go — every single one — with an attention so total and so serious that it made the rest of the world seem frivolous by comparison.

Peter sat on the sea wall and watched her. He didn't say anything for a while. When he did, it was quiet, almost to himself.

"That's the thing about children. They do what we've forgotten how to do. They see a thing for the first time and they give it everything. No reservations. No context. No comparison. Just — this. Whatever this is. And it's enough."

Tima was now attempting to eat the sand, which brought the philosophical moment to an abrupt and practical end. I fished a grain out of her mouth. She protested. I distracted her with a shell. She examined the shell with the same intensity she'd given the sand, then tried to eat that too.

The afternoon unspooled in the way that afternoons with very small children do — slowly, erratically, shaped entirely by someone else's needs. Tima napped in the pushchair under a cafe awning while Peter and I drank tea and watched the harbour. She woke, ate a banana, dropped the banana, cried about the banana, was given a new banana, ate half of it and posted the other half into my shirt pocket. We walked along the harbour front. She pointed at every boat. Every gull. Every dog. Every human being who passed within pointing range.

"Hiya," she said to an elderly woman with a walking stick.

"Hiya," she said to a fisherman mending a net.

"Hiya," she said to a bollard.

The bollard didn't reply, but Tima didn't seem to hold it against it.

In the evening, after Tima was asleep in the cot — a process that took forty minutes, two stories (both improvised and both terrible), and the gravitational presence of Ba pressed against her cheek — Peter and I sat in the small kitchen of the B&B with mugs of tea and the particular kind of silence that happens between two people when neither is in a hurry to fill it.

It was Peter who spoke first.

"Do you know the Mabinogi?"

I shook my head. I'd heard the word, maybe — a fragment, caught somewhere and not followed.

"It's the oldest collection of stories in Britain," he said. "Welsh. Not English — older than English. Written down in the twelfth, thirteenth century, but the stories themselves go back further than anyone can say. They were told before they were written. Told around fires in the dark, in a language that was old before the Saxons came."

He wrapped his hands around his mug.

"Four Branches, they call the main ones. Four stories, all connected. Pwyll, prince of Dyfed. Branwen, daughter of Llŷr. Manawydan. Math, son of Mathonwy. Names that sound strange if you're not used to them, but once you hear them a few times, they start to sound like the land. Like they grew out of the same rock."

"What are they about?"

Peter thought for a moment. "Everything. Nothing specific. Love, betrayal, magic, transformation. Cauldrons that bring the dead back to life. A woman made of flowers who is turned into an owl. A child stolen and found again. But underneath all of that — underneath the myth — they're about what it means to belong to a place. To be part of something that's been going on for so long that your own life is just a sentence in a much longer story."

He drank his tea.

"My dad didn't read much. But he knew the stories. Everyone in St Just did, the old ones at least. They'd come through — in the place-names, in the way people talked. Bosworlas, outside the town — that means 'the Dwelling of Gorlois.' Gorlois was the Duke of Cornwall in the old stories. The one before Arthur. The real one, if there was a real one."

"Before Arthur?"

"Before the Pendragon. Before all of it became a story about a king and a sword and a table. Before that, it was about the land. The people who worked it. The men who went under it."

He paused. Outside, the harbour was quiet, the boats settled, the water still.

"My dad never told these stories the way I'm telling you now. He didn't sit you down and explain. He just — they were in him. In the way he named things. The way he looked at a ruin and knew what it had been. The way he'd stop on a walk and not say anything and you'd understand that the silence wasn't emptiness, it was the story being told in a different way.

I said nothing. I was learning, by now, that Peter's silences were as important as his sentences, and that the worst thing you could do was fill them with your own.

"I've been thinking," he said, after a while. "About what stays. What lasts. The mines don't last — they close, they flood, they become memories and then postcard images and then nothing. The men don't last. Their wives don't last. The cottages get sold to people from London and the harbours get cleaned up for the tourists and the whole thing becomes a — a theme park of itself."

He set down his mug.

"But the stories last. The Mabinogi is still here, after a thousand years. Taliesin is still here. The names are still in the rock. And maybe that's the only thing that does last — the telling. Not the tin. Not the engines. Not even the people. The telling."

Tima cried out once in her sleep — a single, sharp note — and then was silent again. We both turned toward the sound and then back to each other, and Peter smiled, small and quiet, and the conversation was over for the night.

The second day in St Ives began with Tima standing in her cot at half past five, talking to Ba in a language that didn't exist yet but was clearly, to her, entirely functional. She held the rabbit up to the pale square of the window and narrated something — a long string of vowels, a rising inflection, a pause, a deeper sound, then a laugh. Ba received this information with his usual stoicism.

I lay in the narrow bed and listened and felt the thing I sometimes felt in the early mornings when she was like this — the sense that she was operating on frequencies the rest of us had lost access to. She wasn't babbling. She was saying something. It just wasn't for us.

Peter was already up. I could hear him downstairs, the hush of a kettle, the soft percussion of a cupboard being opened and closed. He was one of those people who woke fully — no transition, no stretching, no blurred negotiation with the day. He simply went from asleep to awake as if someone had turned a switch, and by the time anyone else emerged he'd already been up for an hour and done the quiet work of making a space ready for other people.

I changed Tima and brought her down. She was in the dense, warm, crumpled state that toddlers have first thing — flushed, her hair flattened on one side and wild on the other, smelling of sleep and milk and the particular sweet biscuit smell that small children generate from nothing. She saw Peter and pointed at him.

"Hiya."

"Morning," he said, and handed me tea.

We ate breakfast at the small table in the kitchen — toast, eggs, fruit that Peter had bought the evening before from a shop on the harbour. Tima ate a quarter of a banana, threw the rest on the floor, picked up a blueberry, studied it, put it in her ear, removed it, ate it, and then spent five minutes moving a piece of toast from one side of her tray to the other as if solving a spatial problem of profound importance.

"I thought we'd walk out to the Island this morning," Peter said. "The headland. It's not far. There's a chapel up there — the old one. And the coastal path runs east from it. You can see all the way to Godrevy if the weather holds."

The weather held. It more than held — it was the kind of morning that Cornwall produces occasionally, as if to remind everyone that it can do more than just rain and blow, that it has this other register, this still, golden, luminous mode that makes the place look like a painting of itself. The sky was high and clean. The sea was flat calm. The harbour reflected itself with the precision of a mirror.

We walked through the town and out onto the headland — the Island, as they called it, though it had been connected to the mainland for as long as anyone could remember. The path climbed through thick grass where the wind had bent everything toward the east, and at the top there was a stone chapel, small, ancient, open to the sky.

"St Nicholas," Peter said. "Or what's left of him. Been up here since the fourteenth century, maybe earlier. Fishermen used to come up here before they went out. Light a candle. Not for God, really. For the sea. For themselves and the sea."

Tima was on my back in the carrier now, her chin on my shoulder, looking out at the world with the serene authority of someone being transported by staff. She pointed at a gull that hung in the air ahead of us, motionless, riding nothing.

"Da," she said.

"Gull," I said.

She pointed at another one.

"Da."

"Still a gull."

"Da."

This went on for some time. Everything was da. The sea was da. The rocks were da. The grass was da. A beetle crossing the path was da. Tima was conducting an audit of the visible world and filing everything under the same category, which was: things that exist and that I am pointing at.

Peter watched her with the small, steady attention he gave to most things. Then, as we walked the coastal path east from the Island, the sea broad and still on our right and the town falling away behind us, he said:

"Do you know about Taliesin?"

"Taliesin. I don't think so."

"He was the first poet. Or the greatest. Depends who's telling it. Taliesin Ben Beirdd — Chief of Bards. Sixth century. There are poems attributed to him that are real — praise songs for real kings. Urien of Rheged, Cynan Garwyn. They're some of the oldest surviving poetry in any European language outside of Greek and Latin."

He walked for a while. The path was narrow — single file — and his voice came back to me over his shoulder, carried by the light wind.

"But there's another Taliesin. The legendary one. The one from the story."

"What story?"

"There was a woman," Peter said, "called Cerridwen. She had a son who was beautiful and a son who was ugly — the ugliest boy in the world, the story says. Morfran, they called him. And Cerridwen, because she loved this ugly son, decided she would brew a potion for him. A potion of inspiration and knowledge, so that even though he was hideous, he would be the wisest and most gifted man alive, and the world would have to respect him for what he knew rather than what he looked like."

A stonechat landed on a gorse bush ahead of us and sang — that sharp, bright, two-note call like two pebbles being clicked together.

"So she set a cauldron to boil. A great cauldron, over a fire, with herbs and roots and things gathered at precise hours of the day and night. And she set a boy — a servant boy, Gwion Bach, Little Gwion — to stir it. For a year and a day he had to stir it. Every hour. Without stopping."

Tima had fallen asleep in the carrier, her head heavy against my neck, her breath warm and regular. I could feel the weight of her — not heavy, but present. Real. The warm specific gravity of a sleeping child.

"And at the end of the year and the day," Peter said, "three drops flew out of the cauldron. Just three drops. And they landed on Gwion Bach's thumb. And he put his thumb in his mouth — just reflex, anyone would — and in that instant, he received everything. All the knowledge, all the inspiration, all the vision that had been meant for Cerridwen's son. And the rest of the cauldron turned to poison."

We had come around a bend in the path. Below us, a cove — small, rocky, unreachable from the path — where the water was so clear you could see the sand beneath it, bright as bone.

"Cerridwen found out, of course. And she chased him. And this is where the story goes into the deep part — the transformation part. Gwion turned himself into a hare to escape. Cerridwen became a greyhound. He became a fish. She became an otter. He became a bird. She became a hawk. And finally — finally — he became a grain of wheat, and hid on the threshing floor among thousands of other grains. And Cerridwen became a hen, and she ate every grain on the floor until she swallowed him."

Peter stopped walking. He turned around, and his face had that expression I was learning to recognise — not excitement, exactly, but a kind of charged stillness. The face of someone arriving at the point of something.

"But she didn't destroy him. He grew inside her. Nine months later, she gave birth to a child so beautiful she couldn't bring herself to kill him. So she wrapped him in a leather bag and threw him into the sea."

He held my gaze.

"And the bag washed up. And a man called Elffin found it, and opened it, and saw the baby's face — the most radiant face he'd ever seen — and he said, Taliesin. Shining Brow."

He turned and started walking again.

"That's the story. The boy who was nobody. The boy who tasted three drops by accident. Who was chased, transformed, devoured, reborn. Who went into the dark and came out shining."

We walked in silence for a while. The path curved above another cove. A cormorant sat on a rock below, its wings spread to dry in the sun — that strange heraldic pose, like a small black coat of arms.

"Peter," I said. "Why are you telling me this?"

He didn't answer straight away. He stopped at a point where the path widened and there was a flat rock to sit on, and he sat, and looked out at the sea, and I stood beside him with Tima asleep on my back, and waited.

"Because," he said, slowly. "Because the story isn't really about magic. It's about — what do they call it in the stories — awen. Inspiration. But that's a bad translation. Awen isn't ideas. It's not cleverness. Awen is the thing that comes through you when you stop trying to be anything and just let what's there pass through. It's what happened to Gwion. He wasn't special. He was just stirring. He was just doing the work. And the drops found him."

He picked up a pebble and turned it in his fingers.

"My father didn't have a word for it. He wouldn't have said awen. But he had the thing. When he was underground — when he was down in the seams with the drill and the dark and the water — he used to say that there were moments when the rock told him things. Not in words. Not literally. But you learn to read it. The grain of it. The sound it makes when you tap it. The way the air moves in a certain passage. You learn to listen to the ground the way a poet listens to the language. And if you listen well enough, it speaks to you."

He threw the pebble. It clicked against the rocks below, a small, sharp sound swallowed immediately by the sea.

"He'd never have put it like that. He'd have said he was just doing his job. But that's the thing about awen. It doesn't announce itself. It just — it comes through. Through the doing. Through the showing up and stirring and paying attention."

In the afternoon, we went back into town. Tima woke ravenous and ate most of a cheese sandwich, a pot of yoghurt, half a peach, and several handfuls of my chips, which she extracted from my plate with a speed and precision that suggested natural selection had favoured this behaviour. She sat in the highchair at the pub with juice on her chin and the ancient contentment of someone who has eaten well and knows it.

Peter drank a pint of Doom Bar and told me about the Pendragon.

"People think it's a name," he said. "Arthur Pendragon. Like a surname. It isn't. It's a title. Pen Draig. Head of the Dragon. Head warrior. Chief of chiefs."

"So it's like a rank."

"More than that. It's a — it's a weight. It's the thing that gets placed on you when you're the one who has to stand at the front. Not because you're the strongest, necessarily. Or the cleverest. But because you're the one who can carry it."

Tima dropped a chip on the floor and leaned over the side of the highchair to look at it with philosophical regret.

"Uther Pendragon — Arthur's father. The story says he saw a dragon in the sky, a comet, and took it as his sign. Pen Draig. But the word pen — in Welsh, in Cornish — it doesn't just mean head. It means the top of something. The summit. The headland. Pen means the point where the land runs out and there's nothing left but sky and sea."

He looked out the window. St Ives was gold in the afternoon light, the harbour throwing sun back at the buildings, the buildings throwing it back at the harbour.

"My dad was a Pendragon. Not that he'd have known the word. But he was the one who carried it. Whatever it was — the family, the work, the knowledge of how to be a miner in a place where the mines were dying. He carried it to the end. And when Geevor closed in nineteen-ninety, when the last tin mine in Cornwall shut its gates and the men walked out into the light for the last time — he carried that too. Didn't complain. Didn't rage. Just — carried it. The way the headland carries the weather. Because it's what's there. And it's not going anywhere."

He finished his pint.

"Pen Draig," he said quietly. "The headland of the dragon. The place where the carrying happens."

Tima had fallen asleep in the highchair, her head tilted at an angle that would have hospitalised an adult, her hand still loosely gripping a chip. I eased it away from her. She frowned in her sleep but didn't wake.

Peter watched her.

"She'll carry things too," he said. "Everyone does. The question is whether anyone tells you what you're carrying, or whether you have to work it out on your own."

We left St Ives after breakfast — later than Peter had wanted, because Tima had decided that this particular morning was for walking up and down the stairs of the B&B. Up, turn, down. Up, turn, down. Holding the banister with one hand and my finger with the other, her face set with the concentration of an alpinist. I lost count at twelve. Peter waited in the car, patient as stone.

The road west from St Ives — the B3306 — was not a road the way most people understand roads. It was a negotiation between the land and someone who had once tried to put a track across it and had been only partially successful. It climbed over moors, dropped through valleys, wound between stone walls so close you could have touched them from the window. The verges were thick with wildflowers — thrift, sea campion, kidney vetch in yellow clusters — and every few hundred metres, a gap in the hedge would open up and there would be the sea, the Atlantic, vast and grey-green and patient.

Peter drove differently here. Not faster, not slower — differently. His hands were easier on the wheel. He took the bends without hesitation, the way you navigate a place you've walked in the dark. This was his country.

"Morvah," he said, as we passed through a tiny hamlet. A church. A handful of houses. Nothing else.

"Pendeen." Another village. A memorial cross on a green. A shop with a hand-painted sign.

"Botallack." He slowed. To our left, the land fell away sharply toward the sea, and on the cliff face — impossible, implausible — two stone engine houses clung to the rock above the water, like the remains of some civilisation that had built not for beauty or defence but for the single purpose of getting at what was underneath.

"That's Crown Mine," Peter said. "The two engine houses. Lower one's the pumping engine, upper one's the winding engine. The shafts go out under the sea. Half a mile out, some of them. More. Men worked under the ocean floor with candles."

I looked at the engine houses. They were beautiful in the way that only functional things can be — no decoration, no ornament, just stone and purpose, shaped by what they had to do and by the wind and rain that had been trying to erase them for two hundred years and had not yet succeeded.

"My grandfather worked Botallack," Peter said. "Before it closed the first time. Before Geevor took everyone in. He used to say you could hear the sea above you. Not always. Just sometimes, when the swell was big and the tide was high, you'd hear it — a boom, through the rock, through the ceiling. Like the ocean knocking."

Tima was awake in the back, investigating her own foot with the focused intensity of someone who has only recently discovered she has feet and is still not entirely convinced they belong to her. She looked up when Peter spoke, as if his voice was a thing she was tracking.

"My dad heard it too. At Geevor. Same sound. Same sea. He said it was the thing they all knew and nobody talked about — that the only thing between you and the Atlantic was a few feet of rock that someone had been drilling through for generations. You trusted the rock because you had to. Not because it was trustworthy. Because the alternative was not going down, and not going down was not an option."

He said this the way he said most things about his father — evenly, without weight, as if he were reporting the weather. But I'd learned, over the past few days, that the evenness was the weight. The lack of emphasis was the emphasis. Peter didn't understate because he felt things lightly. He understated because the things he felt were so heavy that putting more language on them would have been a kind of lie.

St Just appeared the way it always appeared in the stories Peter told — suddenly, after a bend in the road, the town gathered on its high ground above the Penwith moors, the church tower showing first, then the rooftops, then the square. The most westerly town in mainland Britain, though you wouldn't have known it from the look of the place — it was modest, contained, a working town that had stopped working in the way it was built for but hadn't yet decided what to become instead.

Peter parked on the square — the Plen an Gwarry, though I didn't know that yet.

"This is it," he said. "This is the playing place. Plen an Gwarry. Medieval. They performed miracle plays here. The whole town would come. Before television, before radio, before any of that — this was where you came to see stories told."

It was a small square. Stone houses around it, a few shops, a bank, a pub — the Star, closed at this hour. A war memorial in the middle. Nothing about it said ancient performance venue or the place where stories were told for six hundred years. It just looked like a town square. But Peter stood in the middle of it and looked at the buildings and the sky and the road leading away to the west, and I could see that for him it was not just a square. It was a coordinate. A fixed point in whatever map he carried internally.

"Come on," he said. "I want to show you something."

We walked. Tima was in the pushchair, eating a breadstick with her usual combination of dedication and destruction, scattering crumbs like a blessing. Peter led us through the town and south, along a lane that climbed through fields toward the coast, and the land opened up — wide, empty, the fields giving way to rough heath, and ahead the sea again, always the sea, that constant presence that everything in west Cornwall eventually resolves toward.

We came to Cape Cornwall.

It was not what I had expected. The name suggested something dramatic — a promontory, cliffs, grandeur. And there was grandeur, but it was a quiet grandeur. A conical hill rising from the coast, topped with a chimney stack — another mine, even here — with the sea on three sides and the Brisons, two dark rocks, sitting a little way offshore like sentries.

"Only cape in England," Peter said. "Not Land's End — everyone thinks Land's End is the important one. But Cape Cornwall is the cape. The point where the tides divide. North from south. The water that goes to the Bristol Channel and the water that goes to the English Channel split here. Right here."

We stood on the hillside. Tima had stopped eating and was staring at the sea with that absolute attention she gave to things that were bigger than her — which was everything, but some things she seemed to recognise were bigger in a different way. The sea here had a quality to it. It wasn't the friendly postcard blue of St Ives. It was dark, muscular, working. You could feel the pull of it even from the cliff top.

Peter sat on the grass. I sat beside him. Tima sat between us, plucking at the grass, occasionally holding up a blade for inspection.

"Da," she said, offering me a piece of grass.

"Beautiful," I said.

She ate the grass. I removed it. She cried. Peter gave her another breadstick. Diplomatic incident resolved.

"Bosworlas is over there," Peter said, nodding inland. "The farm. Bosworlas. It means 'Dwelling of Gorlois.' In the stories, Gorlois was the Duke of Cornwall. The real duke. Before Uther. Before Arthur. Before all the Pendragon business. He was the one who held this land, and Uther took it from him. Took his castle, took his wife, took his name, took his title. Pen Draig. Chief of the Dragon. That title didn't start with Arthur. It started with the taking."

He pulled a strand of grass between his teeth.

"I've always thought about that. The Pendragon story isn't the story they tell in the films. It's not a noble inheritance. It's a theft. A betrayal. Gorlois killed so Uther could have Igraine. And then Arthur is born from that — from blood, from violence, from a lie. The greatest king. Born from the worst thing."

He was quiet for a while.

"My dad used to say that nothing good in Cornwall came easy. The tin didn't come easy. The fishing didn't come easy. Even the farming — look at this soil, look at this wind. Nothing comes easy. And the stories are the same. The good thing always comes from the hard thing. Taliesin from the cauldron. Arthur from the betrayal. The beautiful from the brutal."

Tima had pulled herself up on my arm and was standing, swaying slightly, looking out at the Brisons with the grave, still expression she sometimes wore — the one that made her look not like a baby but like something much older, something that had been here before and had come back to check on things.

"Peter," I said. "Is that what this trip is about?"

He looked at me. Direct. The blue eyes that always seemed to carry more sky in them than was reasonable.

"What do you mean?"

"The Mabinogi. Taliesin. Pendragon. Your father. The mines. You've been — this whole trip, you've been telling me things. Showing me things. And I don't think it's just because you like Cornwall and want me to see it. I think there's something you're trying to — I don't know. Transmit."

He didn't say anything for long enough that I thought he wasn't going to.

Then:

"All that I must," he said.

"What?"

"All that I must. That's a phrase my mother used. When someone asked her why she did the things she did — the washing, the cooking, the mending, the keeping going when my dad was ill and the money was nothing and the mine was closing — she'd say, all that I must. Not all that I want. Not all that I should. All that I must."

He stood. Brushed off his trousers.

"I don't have children. You know that. I won't have them. It's just — the way it is. And I've made my peace with that, or something close to it. But there are things I know — about this place, about these stories, about what it was like to be a boy in St Just with a father who went underground and came back up every day smelling of rock and water and something you couldn't name — and those things have to go somewhere. They can't stop with me. That's not how it works."

He looked at Tima. She was still standing, still facing the sea, still wearing that ancient expression.

"You're a writer. Or you will be. And Tima will be — whatever she'll be. And I am showing you these things because someone has to carry them forward, and I've decided it should be you. Not decided, exactly. Known. The way the rock knows where the seam runs. You follow it because it's there."

I didn't know what to say. I still don't know what to say, all these years later, about that moment — Peter standing on the headland above Cape Cornwall, the sea dividing behind him, telling me that what he'd been doing this whole trip was handing me the weight. Not as a burden. As a trust. The way you hand someone a child — not because you're tired of holding them, but because you want them held.

"All that I must," he said again. "Show you. Tell you. Walk you through it. So that when the time comes, you can do what I cannot."

Tima fell down. She did this often — the standing, the swaying, the sudden topple, with the resigned grace of someone who understands that gravity is a persistent adversary and today is not the day she defeats it. She landed on her bottom in the grass and looked at me and laughed — a full, open, bell-clear laugh — and the moment broke or maybe the moment completed itself, and Peter picked her up and held her on his hip with the ease of a man who doesn't have children but has carried many things, and we walked back to St Just.

We stayed for the afternoon. Peter took us to the Star — which was open now, low-ceilinged, dark, the kind of pub that doesn't need to try to be atmospheric because it's been accumulating atmosphere for three hundred years and couldn't get rid of it if it wanted to. He drank a pint of Tribute. I drank tea, because Tima was in the demolition phase of her afternoon and required constant supervision to prevent her from dismantling the furniture, the table settings, and the structural integrity of anyone within reach.

She was tired. You could see it in her — the way her movements got bigger and less precise, the way her eyes went wide and glassy, the way she cycled between euphoria and despair with the rapid frequency of someone tuning through radio stations. She pulled a beer mat off the table. She stacked it back. She pulled it off again. She offered it to Peter.

"Hiya," she said, holding out the beer mat.

"Thank you," Peter said, taking it.

She stared at him. She wanted it back. He gave it back. She offered it again. This went on for ten minutes. It was, as far as I could tell, the most satisfying social interaction either of them had had all day.

Peter looked around the pub — at the stone walls, the low beams, the small windows that let in just enough light to see by and not enough to disturb anything — and something in his face settled. Not relaxed, exactly. Arrived. He was here and he knew it, and the knowing was enough.

"My dad used to drink here," he said. "Every Friday. After shift. One pint, sometimes two. Never more. He wasn't a drinking man — not in the way that sometimes means in mining towns. He just liked the ritual. The walking in. The ordering. The sitting. The going home."

He turned his glass on the table, a slow quarter-turn.

"After Geevor closed, he still came. Every Friday. Same time, same seat if it was free. Drank his pint. Went home. And nobody said anything about it. Nobody asked him why he still came, now that there was no shift to come from. Because everyone understood. The pub wasn't about the drinking. The drinking was about the being here. And being here was about — continuing. Keeping the shape of a life even after the thing that shaped it was gone."

Tima had given up on the beer mat and was now asleep in the pushchair, her head at its usual impossible angle, Ba clutched in one fist, the other hand open and loose like a flower. She slept the way children do — completely, irrevocably, as if she'd decided that consciousness was something that happened to other people and she was done with it for now.

We finished our drinks and walked through the town — back through the Plen an Gwarry, past the church with its fifteenth-century tower, past the rows of cottages that were built of granite so dark it looked like the stone was still holding the mine inside it. Peter pointed out things as we went — his cousin's old house, the school he'd gone to before his family moved, the wall where he'd sat as a boy and watched the miners come up from the day shift, their faces grey with dust, their boots ringing on the road.

"It's all here," he said. "Still. Even though it's not here. You understand what I mean?"

I did.

We left Cornwall in the late afternoon, the sun still high, the shadows just beginning to lengthen. The road out of St Just ran through Penzance and then east along the A30, retracing the route we'd come by, but in reverse it felt different — the landscape closing behind us like a book, the moors and the hedgerows and the granite churches folding back into the distance.

Tima was asleep before we reached Hayle. She'd been awake for the leaving — she'd pressed her face to the car window and watched the fields go by with what I could only describe as attention, as if she knew, on some level that was below thought but above instinct, that this was a place and they were leaving it and that deserved marking.

Peter drove. He hummed, very quietly — a melody I didn't recognise, something without words, just a line of notes that rose and fell and went nowhere in particular and everywhere at once. It was the first time I'd heard him do this. The whole trip — the talking, the stories, the showing — had been deliberate, measured, offered in portions. But the humming was not offered. It was leaked. It was the thing underneath the things he'd said, the current below the words.

The evening light came in through the windscreen, gold and long and full of dust motes. Tima slept with her mouth open. Ba had fallen off her lap and lay on the car seat beside her, staring at the ceiling with his button eyes.

"Peter," I said, after a while.

"Mm."

"Thank you."

He glanced at me. "For what?"

"For all of it. The stories. The places. Polperro, St Ives, St Just. Taliesin. The Mabinogi. All of it."

He said nothing for a mile or so. The road unreeled ahead of us, straight now across Bodmin Moor, the sky enormous above the open land.

"There's a thing in the old stories," he said. "About Taliesin. After he was found — after Elffin pulled him from the water and saw his face and said Tal Iesin, Shining Brow — the boy began to speak. And the first thing he said wasn't a poem, wasn't a prophecy. He just told Elffin who he was. Where he'd been. What he'd been through. The cauldron. The chase. The dark. The being swallowed. The being born again."

The moor stretched out around us, darkening at the edges.

"He didn't tell it because Elffin asked. He told it because the telling was the point. The whole journey — all of it, every transformation, every terror — happened so that there would be something to tell. The story was the purpose of the story. Do you understand?"

"I think so."

"All that I must," he said, and this time when he said it, it sounded different. Lighter. As if the phrase had been carrying a weight and now the weight had been set down. Not dropped. Placed. Carefully, on someone else's shoulders. On mine.

We crossed into Devon as the sun touched the horizon. The sky went through its colours — gold, copper, rose, violet — with the unhurried thoroughness of something that has done this every evening for four billion years and is not about to cut corners now. Peter's humming had stopped. The car was quiet except for the engine and the wind and the soft, deep breathing of a child.

Tima woke at the Devon border, as if a change in the geology had registered somewhere in her sleep. She blinked. She looked at me. She looked at Peter. She looked at the sky, which was the colour of a bruise and a blessing, and she said:

"Da."

"Home soon," I said.

She reached for Ba. I picked him up from the seat and handed him to her. She held him against her face and made a sound — not a word, just a sound, a low hum, almost exactly the same melody Peter had been humming an hour before, though that was probably coincidence, probably just the engine note translated through a small body into something that sounded like music.

Probably.

Peter heard it too. He looked in the mirror, and for a moment his face did something I hadn't seen it do before — it opened. Not a smile, not exactly. More like a door that had been closed for a very long time swinging open just enough to let the light in. And then it closed again, gently, and he was Peter, and the road was the road, and we were going home.

All that I must show you, so that you can do what I cannot.