“But, George,” Elaine said, “that’s the point. You’re not a child. We love spending time with you and Lizzie. And we wouldn’t have to be together every minute. We’d just walk together. We have it all planned.”
Lizzie got up from the chair she’d been sitting in and started clearing the table. She loved the idea of spending more time with Elaine and Allan; their presence would dilute the icky stickiness of the whole honeymoon experience. Besides, did she and George really need to be alone together on a honeymoon? Lizzie thought not. They were already alone together for much of every day. “I think going to Cornwall is a great idea. It would be much more fun if we all went together. I say yes.”
It appeared to be three against one and George was smart enough to recognize a fait accompli when he met one.
“I guess we could look at it as an amusing story for our children. ‘Daddy, what did you do for your honeymoon?’ ‘Well, kiddos, we went walking in Cornwall with Grandma Elaine and Grandpa Allan. We all had a blast.’ ‘But, Daddy, isn’t a honeymoon supposed to be just for the bride and groom?’ ‘Normally yes, but in this case Grandma and Grandpa asked us to make an exception. And your mommy wanted them to go with us. Oh, yeah, and Grandma and Grandpa paid for it too.’”
“Very funny,” Elaine said. “Just don’t think about it as a honeymoon but rather a vacation that we’re all taking together. It doesn’t even have to be connected with your wedding at all.”
George ignored her and said, “I can see that this will give us lots to talk about at dinner parties for the foreseeable future too.”
This reminded Lizzie of the time when she and Andrea had said almost exactly the same thing about the Great Game, and look how that worked out. She started rinsing the dishes so she wouldn’t have to hear the rest of the conversation.
They planned to go the following May, but because of the deaths of Mendel and Lydia earlier that year, there was some discussion about whether they should cancel their trip. Lizzie had never known a family that discussed as much as the Goldrosens did. Depending on the topic and the participants’ feelings about it, they chewed over, considered the pros and cons of, or thrashed out everything that came up.
Allan thought they should postpone going to Cornwall out of respect for the Bultmanns, while George and Elaine agreed that going ahead with their original plan would take Lizzie’s mind off the deaths of her parents. Lizzie didn’t particularly care. Her parents’ deaths hadn’t seemed to make any difference in her life at all. In the event, they went as planned and everyone had a wonderful time. Lizzie thought that she might never again be as happy as she was on the walk. Although the Post (Great) Game show was still going on in her head, the hours of walking in the sunshine muted the voices. Most of the time she couldn’t make out much of what was said, and what she did understand—“loser,” “inadequate,” “fraud”—didn’t have nearly the power to hurt her, or at least not so badly. Once, though, she distinctly heard someone call her name, and she stopped so suddenly that Elaine ran into her from behind.
Plus, since they met almost nobody on the path, either going their way or coming toward them, Lizzie thought the odds were excellent that Jack was not in Cornwall, also trudging along the Coast Path, so she could stop thinking about what she’d say to him if he suddenly appeared in front of her.
They walked for ten days, staying at different B&Bs each night. Starting off about nine each morning, they made their way from St. Ives to Falmouth on a path that was sometimes stony and sometimes just dirt. Sometimes they had an easy time of it, sometimes they had to climb over wet rocks where the path had been diverted because of heavy rain, or clamber up and down the cliffs overlooking the water. Lizzie soon discovered that she didn’t care for edges and ledges, so occasionally she found the going extremely scary. Elaine and George tended to stride on ahead fearlessly, with Lizzie and Allan bringing up the rear.
When the walk wasn’t too frightening or she wasn’t harassed by the voices in her head, Lizzie found she loved being so close to the water. She marveled at how it was one shade of blue close to the base of the cliffs and then subtly changed hues the farther you looked out. It was when she was struck by the changes in the colors that Lizzie thought most acutely of Jack, how he should be there with her, rather than the troika of Goldrosens. Oh, wait, it was a quartet, wasn’t it? She was now a Goldrosen too. Lizzie shook her head and kept walking. They couldn’t get too far off the path, and certainly not lost, if they kept the ocean on their right, George told them solemnly. They passed coves far below them where surfers braved the waves and the icy water, paddling far out and then triumphantly coming back in for another go. The sun shone hotter as the days went on. Lizzie got a farmer’s tan—her ankles and feet below her socks were stark, winter white. George insisted everyone slather sunscreen on their arms, face, and legs at least twice a day, prompting Elaine to wonder if maybe he shouldn’t have gotten a job hawking Coppertone instead of going to dental school. “Or,” she asked, “did you take some of the money you two got for wedding presents and buy Bayer stock?”
The day before they were to fly home, they took a train to London and stayed at a small hotel near Hyde Park Corner. They sat around at dinner and reminisced about the trip. They remembered the time in Porthcurno when a bee unaccountably dived into Lizzie’s cider and the man at the table next to them advised her to “drink up, luv, that’s good protein for ye.” And the time Allan was so busy looking at the map that he fell farther and farther behind the other three and soon lost sight of them entirely, at which point he mistakenly took a turn inland. The ocean was no longer on his right. By the time Elaine finally noticed that Allan was missing, he had gone some distance in entirely the wrong direction. George ended up rushing back the way they’d come to try to find him. It turned out that Allan was so busy looking at the map that he hadn’t seen that the path turned one way while he went the other. “Sort of like missing the trees for the forest,” George said, sighing. After that they all decided it was best for Allan not to hold the map while they were walking and to stay in the middle of the group, not the back.
When dessert came they moved on to reciting the limericks they’d composed together along the way. Limerick writing began after lunch one afternoon in a pub in Mousehole (which, Allan told them, was pronounced Mauzel), when the first line of a limerick presented itself to Lizzie, and they all spent the rest of the day working on it. They found that writing the limerick took their minds off some especially fiendish climbs and descents. Finally, late in the day, they came up with one that they all agreed should be the finished version. After this success, they vowed to write limericks about all the towns they stayed in.
Their two favorites were:
A lusty young sailor from Mousehole
Hied home for his rights: they were spousal.
His wife acquiesced,