Where the Wild Cherries Grow
Prologue: there is a cliff to be climbed. Below there are sea-washed rocks, and above there are sounds of merrymaking from a town. In between, a wild cherry tree has found a space where it has taken root. Readers must remember this lovely image as they read this novel.
Is Emeline Vane alive, or did she die on the night in 1919 when, aged nineteen, bereaved, wretched and unstable, she vanished from Hallerton? Fifty years later, a youthful solicitor, Bill Perch, is looking for clues in this lonely house on the windswept Norfolk coast. The house is a ruin, but the land is valuable, and the property cannot be sold while Emeline—the owner—may still live. Emeline and Bill tell their stories turn by turn, and the drudgery Bill expected, of dust-filled rooms and crumbling files, becomes a thrilling quest as the conventional young man retraces Emeline’s journey from Paris. His own journey is one of setbacks and apparent dead ends. In a desperate escape from lifelong incarceration in a mental institution, Emeline had fled south to the coast, where she entered into the life of the hardworking fisher folk. There she was eventually accepted and rewarded with passion and joy. But at what cost? That is Bill’s final discovery at the end of his own journey and the end of Emeline’s story, in which there is some unrestrained sensuality, especially when succulent meals can be involved.
Railway travel gives this novel extra conviction, pace and tension. The author must surely have taken the same route even if, unlike her desperate young protagonists, she paid for a ticket.
