by Bea Green
Leo patted her reassuringly on the shoulder as Frederick started to laugh.
‘Elinor, don’t worry. I know I could commission you to paint me a picture any time and you know what that would be of.’
Elinor nodded breathlessly in agreement, suddenly feeling very foolish. The only painting Leo would ever ask her for would be one of Warren Cove, which was where the ashes of his wife, Elinor’s Auntie Lowena, had been laid to rest.
‘Which just goes to show you, Elinor, that you don’t value yourself enough,’ scolded Leo as she straightened up again. Elinor groaned inwardly as Leo became fired up. ‘Somebody here clearly liked your painting so much they paid ten grand for it! Ten grand! It’s bloody fantastic. And there I was thinking we’d have to take your book to the British Museum soon to earn you some kind of a living!’
‘What are you talking about, Leo?’ interposed Frederick, totally confused by this conversation. ‘What book?’
As Leo started to explain to Frederick how Elinor had discovered a potentially valuable book, Elinor caught sight of Barbara waving vigorously at her from the entrance to the gallery. Obediently, she walked over to her, grabbing another glass of champagne on the way.
‘Elinor, where did you go? I’ve had a lot of people asking me who you are,’ complained Barbara, instantly making Elinor feel bad for escaping temporarily from the polite chit-chat. ‘They’ve been so intrigued with your work. And I hear one of your paintings has sold too! That’s wonderful, darling!’
‘I know! I still can’t quite believe it. I’m struggling to imagine a painting of a surfer would be of interest to anyone.’
‘It’s certainly an unusual subject but you’ve done it beautifully. You deserve to sell both those paintings. They’re absolute masterpieces.’
Elinor blushed, not used to getting such lavish praise from someone as acclaimed as Barbara.
‘Barbara doesn’t hand out such fulsome compliments very often. You’ve clearly impressed her,’ said a quiet voice in Elinor’s ear.
Elinor looked up and smiled at Tony who was standing next to her, looking smart in a navy suit and a pale blue tie. Elinor was finding it increasingly funny to see everyone so dressed up. It seemed to add to the superficiality of the evening. All of them were acting a part that bore no relation to their everyday reality.
‘Have you just arrived, Tony?’ asked Barbara.
‘We have,’ affirmed Tony, cordially.
Hearing Tony say ‘we’, Elinor peered behind him and saw Jennifer standing there, looking absolutely stunning as usual in a full-length, light blue dress. The soft chiffon material floated downwards in loose, swirling layers. It was the kind of dress that would have made Elinor look like a frumpy matron but on Jennifer, who was tall and slim, the garment looked regal and imposing. Jennifer and Elinor smiled politely at each other, Elinor assimilating Jennifer’s presence with mixed feelings. She was pretty sure that Tony and Jennifer were only mates, but there’d always be a niggling doubt in the back of Elinor’s mind telling her that they could conceivably be something more. It didn’t seem possible to Elinor that any red-blooded male wouldn’t be physically attracted to a natural beauty like Jennifer.
‘You need to go and look at the exhibition and see if you can reach into those deep pockets of yours, Tony,’ teased Barbara.
Tony grinned at her affectionately, his eyes creasing at the corners in friendly amusement. As more guests came up to talk to Barbara and Elinor, Jennifer and Tony moved off in tandem to saunter around the gallery.
By the time the crowd had died down slightly, Elinor had managed to work her way through five glasses of champagne, three of orange juice, and numerous canapés. That’s it, she thought, as she gazed down at her bloated stomach, I have to get back into my running tomorrow. Since she’d started working on the mural at The Hut she hadn’t done any exercise and she was worried she was going to lose all the fitness she’d built up so persistently over the preceding months.
Weariness was overwhelming her. She’d spent the better part of six hours standing on a ladder in The Hut earlier that day, and now spending the entire evening standing in her high heels was killing her legs. After a quick survey of the room, she decided to give herself some much-needed respite and disappeared into the storage room at the back of the gallery. She’d been in there earlier in the evening and had spotted a comfortable chair to sit down on.
She sank gratefully into the cushioned chair as soon as she walked into the cluttered room and quickly removed her high-heeled shoes, ruefully observing the red lines imprinted on the skin of her feet. She leant her head backwards, closing her eyes with a relieved sigh. Before long, she found herself drifting off into blessed slumber so she didn’t hear the door to the room open forty minutes later.
She was woken up by the sound of giggles resonating close to her. She opened her eyes and stared in shock at the little crowd in front of her. Frederick, Leo, Barbara, Tony and Jennifer were watching her with a great deal of hilarity.
Elinor sat up hurriedly, feeling a deep blush creeping up her cheeks as she strived to pull herself together. She quickly flattened her hair and reached for her shoes before remembering she’d tossed them to the other side of the room in disgust.
‘Are you looking for these?’ asked Tony humorously, dangling the pair of silver stilettos in front of her.
Elinor grabbed them ungraciously, quickly putting them on to cover up her ungainly feet, by now red and swollen. To cap it all off, the toes of her tights had ripped open and she had a huge ladder working its way up her leg.
‘Has everyone gone?’ she asked eventually, looking up at the small crowd of spectators.
‘Yes, dear. Everyone’s gone. It’s been a wonderful evening. I’m just sorry you missed the end of it. We didn’t know where you’d got to but thankfully someone said they thought they’d seen you come in here. Otherwise you could’ve been locked up for the night!’ exclaimed Barbara, looking distressed at the thought.
The others clearly didn’t feel a similar concern. It didn’t escape Elinor’s notice that they were all looking like they were gallantly trying not to laugh at her. She was going to have to tell José about this tomorrow. It was almost as though she was following in his footsteps by falling asleep on the job, although with considerably less danger to the public in her case.
She stood up and stretched into a big yawn.
‘I’m sorry to have missed the end of the show but I think the six hours of painting at The Hut finished me off today. I’m definitely ready to go home now.’
‘Good. That means poor Godfrey can lock up his art gallery and we can all go home for some well-deserved rest,’ said Barbara firmly.
Godfrey, who was the gallery owner, poked his head in the door.
‘OK, everyone? Ready to go home now?’
Everyone murmured their assent and as one they all walked back out into the main gallery.
After effusive thanks and goodbyes to Godfrey they all split up, Elinor and Leo getting into Leo’s old Volvo to drive home to Trenouth. Before they drove off, Barbara bent down quickly to speak to Elinor through the car window.
‘Elinor, I want you back in the studio soon. You need to immerse yourself into making paintings again. You’re much too talented to be wasting your time on a café mural.’
Flattered, Elinor nodded her agreement.
‘Sure, I’ll be back at the studio soon. I promise. Thanks for everything, Barbara. You just earned me seven thousand pounds tonight.’
‘No, Elinor,’ corrected Barbara adamantly. ‘You just earned yourself seven thousand pounds.’
Barbara then stood back and waved as Leo and Elinor drove off.
Watching Barbara in her side mirror, Elinor saw her tall, solitary figure standing for a long moment under the street light, diminishing slowly as the car sped away until she was just a tiny dot on the horizon.
> 40
Elinor was sound asleep when she was awoken by the tendrils of light sneaking into her bedroom and tracing a pattern on the curtains on the other side of the room. She sat up in her bed, thoroughly confused. She knew it wasn’t morning. Why was the hallway light on?
She felt hideously tired. They’d arrived home from the art exhibition at half past eleven, she’d fallen asleep at twelve o’ clock and yet it felt like she hadn’t slept at all.
She heard a noise in the hallway that sounded ominously like Leo was putting his heavy boots on. Elinor jumped out of bed and raced to open the bedroom door.
She walked rapidly to the front door of the house and, sure enough, found Leo sitting on the hallway bench and working his tight-fitting boots onto his feet.
Leo looked up at her apologetically.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.’
‘What on earth are you doing?’ asked Elinor impatiently.
‘I had a call from Sheila Burns.’
‘Sheila Burns?’ repeated Elinor stupidly, wearily rubbing her eyes and trying to remember who she was.
‘Yes. Sheila Burns. Don’t you remember the old lady who lives next to the wheat field?’
‘Oh! Yes. Her. So what’s she doing calling you at...’ Elinor looked quickly at her watch. ‘Two in the morning... Two in the morning! Has she totally lost her marbles?’
‘We told her to call if she saw something suspicious, remember?’ explained Leo patiently.
‘Ah, yes! What has she seen then? Some badgers conga dancing along the road? A fox playing tig with a colony of rabbits?’ asked Elinor sarcastically.
‘No, although I have to say that would be worth seeing,’ said Leo calmly. ‘She says the white van’s back again.’
With this, Leo bent down and shifted his second boot onto his foot.
Elinor looked at him in exasperation.
‘Leo, you can’t go searching out there on your own. It’s the middle of the night. You’ve no idea what’s really going on or what you could be getting involved in.’
Leo glanced at her amusedly as if to say, ‘Do you want to try and stop me?’
Elinor sighed. She knew that look.
‘Listen. Give me five and I’ll join you. At least two of us will be safer than just one.’
‘Elinor, I’m not going to boss you around,’ said Leo, pointedly referencing her earlier attitude. ‘But are you sure you want to do this? I’m just thinking of your anxiety.’
Unoffended, Elinor smiled back at him.
‘Yes, I know. My anxiety with a capital “A”. It’s always the elephant in the room, isn’t it? Well, screw my anxiety. Since I’ve come down to Cornwall my anxiety hasn’t stopped me doing anything I’ve wanted to do. So it’s not going to now.’
And with that, Elinor turned around and went back to her room to get changed.
Ten minutes later they were walking quietly down the road bordering the field of cows, only using the light of the moon to guide their steps even though Leo had his torch with him. They could see the white van glimmering at the far corner of the wheat field with its headlights on and the engine running.
Whatever was going on, it certainly wasn’t the most secretive of operations. The rumbling noise of the van’s engine echoed intrusively in the silence of the night. No wonder Sheila Burns had been woken up by it.
Leo and Elinor walked into the wheat field by opening the stiff wooden gate and soon found themselves hidden by the high Cornish hedge, which was an effective barrier between them and the van on the other side.
Leo switched on his torch when they stumbled over the tilled earth at the entrance of the field and he began to slowly sweep its light from side to side.
As they started to walk in a single file down the middle of the field, slowly heading diagonally towards the van in the corner, they tried as much as they could to follow the furrows in the ground so as not to damage the wheat too much.
Her senses sharpened by her apprehension, Elinor could feel the spiky burrs of the wheat heads rasping and catching on her trousers and she could vividly hear the quiet swish of the wheat stalks brushing against their legs as they walked through the field. But it was the steady pulsing of the van’s engine that dominated the quietness of the night and relegated all the other collective noises to the background.
Elinor felt the tension hit her in the solar plexus. Her legs felt strangely unstable and weak, her neck wobbling like that of a puppet on a string. She felt propelled forward by an irrational impulse while a sensible voice in her head screamed at her to go home and rest in the relative safety of Trenouth.
She started to chew her lip in an effort to calm her nerves, tasting the metallic flavour of blood on her tongue as her dry lips split under the relentless pressure of her teeth.
In her tired and confused state she nearly bumped into Leo as he came to a halt halfway down the field.
She stopped walking and looked cautiously around the enormous field but she still couldn’t see what had stopped him in his tracks.
‘Elinor, look over there,’ whispered Leo, pulling her to him and pointing his torch towards a hawthorn bush at the very end of the field in front of them.
Elinor strained her eyes, trying to figure out what her eagle-eyed uncle had spotted.
She suddenly saw the hawthorn bush move to one side and a figure of a man literally pop out of the ground like a Jack in the Box.
The man scrambled up, letting the bush fall back into place again. Once he was standing, he suddenly caught sight of their torchlight and stood rigidly still as he stared across at Leo and Elinor in stunned surprise. He was young, possibly in his early twenties, and dressed conventionally in jeans, trainers, a thick black jacket and a woollen red hat.
After a nerve-racking minute in which they all remained curiously static, the man lifted up the torch he was carrying loosely in his hand and pointed it directly at them, blinding Leo and Elinor with its powerful light in the process. As they blinked in the torch’s fierce glare, they could see the man studying them and then they saw him turn to look anxiously back at the hawthorn bush.
Within moments the bush moved again and a second man came up the same way as the man before him. The second man exclaimed loudly when he caught sight of them but the other man shushed him angrily, still keeping a watchful eye on Leo and Elinor as they stood immobile in the middle of the wheat field.
Elinor looked at Leo apprehensively, wondering how this face-off was going to end. She had no idea what these men were doing coming out of the ground at this hour but whatever it was it couldn’t be an innocent occupation, given they were doing it under the dark cover of night.
Elinor pulled on Leo’s sleeve.
‘I think we should go, Leo,’ she whispered urgently, even as a third figure pulled himself up from behind the roughly used hawthorn.
Leo nodded his agreement silently. Taking hold of Elinor’s elbow he quickly led her back the way they’d come.
She tripped continually on the uneven mounds of earth and wheat as she tried to keep up with Leo’s breakneck speed. She also kept twisting around frantically, trying desperately to keep a cautious eye on the men behind them.
She really didn’t like feeling vulnerable and completely exposed to danger. And the truth was that she and Leo were walking away now with their backs towards a strange group of men who’d suspiciously gathered together in the dead of night.
Even though the men were congregated at the other side of the wheat field, she figured it wouldn’t be too hard for them to catch her and Leo up if they decided they wanted to. Elinor’s ears strained as she listened out for any sudden indication that any of the men might be running after them.
By the time she’d turned around for a third time she could see there were now six dimly discernible figures standing bunched together at the other end of the fi
eld, flashing their torches towards her and Leo, watching them carefully as they made a quick exit out of the field.
Once out of the wheat field, Leo and Elinor walked up the road circling the cow field at a tremendously fast pace. The thick, shrouding darkness of the dense night made it difficult for them to see the black tarmac of the road clearly, but it didn’t slow them down one iota.
Elinor felt her apprehension and fear begin to subside once they were safely through Trenouth’s entrance and back in their front garden once more. Only then did she have the courage to turn around one last time to look at the white van purring away on the other side of the cow field, still with its front lights blazing a yellow path in front of it.
‘Elinor, you go in. I’m going to stay up and see what happens with that white van. It can’t be staying there all night.’
‘Leo, what the hell’s going on with those strange men appearing in the field like that?’
‘I’ve no idea. But I do know I’ll be speaking to Richard Glynn as soon as I get a chance, and I’ll be asking him a few pointed questions.’
‘You think he knows what all this is about?’
‘To be blunt, Elinor, yes I do. It’s his wheat field. If there’s a secret entrance into it he’d be the most likely candidate to know about it.’
Elinor worriedly eyed her uncle’s worn and wrinkled face, with his thick grey hair standing up in tufts; he obviously hadn’t had time to brush it down after getting up from his bed. He was getting too old for this kind of caper.
‘Would you like a hot drink?’
Leo nodded as he sat down heavily on the slate steps leading to their front door.
‘Yes, I’d love a black coffee with a dollop of whisky in it, please.’
Elinor glanced down at him anxiously as she put her key in the front door. Leo must be unaccustomedly concerned about what he’d just witnessed to be asking for whisky at this time of the night.