by Bea Green
Elinor shrugged, still staring intensely into Tony’s deep brown eyes.
‘People, they’re everywhere. There are fewer and fewer places in the world where you can be truly alone. I love the feeling when it’s just nature and me. When there’s nothing else out there. That’s when I can breathe.’
Tony grinned at her passion.
‘It still wouldn’t suit me. We’re different in that respect. It’s just as well I like being with people as my job means I’ve to work with patients all the time.’
Elinor bent down and kissed him on the nose.
‘Come on; let’s not waste the morning. Let’s get out there and enjoy the day.’
Tony reached out and caressed her breast softly, feeling its contours tenderly and rubbing her nipple with his thumb until it hardened.
‘I don’t see this as wasting the morning, Elinor,’ he said, determinedly reaching over to kiss her on the lips.
Elinor gave up. She let the softness of his lips melt into the deepest part of her mind as she gave way to the urgings Tony was deliberately stirring up in her. She might be lost under the enchantment of the ocean but this man, who’d broken through all her barriers and stolen her heart, also bewitched her...
52
Elinor soon learnt that Tony liked springing surprises on her. Her habitual anxiety meant she liked to control every aspect of her life so living with Tony’s unexpected outings took some adjusting to. But in the end she decided it was good for her to adopt some flexibility and to have a more chilled-out attitude towards the unpredictable events in her life.
Tony always tried to bear in mind her particular wishes and desires. If it hadn’t been for that she would have given him a much harder time. How could she ever be annoyed with him when he’d gone to huge efforts to organise something he thought she’d enjoy? And for the most part he succeeded.
Their relationship had a strange elasticity to it. Elinor could only picture shoelaces to properly describe it. At times she and Tony were tied up tightly together, synchronising their time together with fierce intensity, and at other times the laces of their relationship were hanging loose, each of them doing their own separate thing and getting involved in their own interests and work.
She wondered if one day, once her wrist was fully healed, whether they’d be able to co-ordinate their passion for surfing. But that was an intriguing question for the future. Despite not being able to surf she often did go and sit on the beach, watching the surfers cruising on the waves with a hidden longing.
On the days Tony went out surfing, she would arrange to meet him afterwards to go to The Ninth Hole for a bite to eat. Often they found they needed to book a table because, as Elinor had envisaged, the golfers had discovered the comfortable eatery on their way around the golf course. So now the golfers were in direct competition with the surfers for a seat at The Ninth Hole, much to Tony’s disgruntlement.
But Elena and José, of course, were delighted with this state of affairs and Elinor loved to see their cheerful demeanour as they served their clients.
Emotionally, Tony touched sensitive and vulnerable chords in Elinor that hadn’t been played for a long time. Sometimes in his unconscious way he pushed things too far, his expectations of her were at times too high, and Elinor felt the shadow of failure and self-recrimination hover over her mind. But Tony, like Leo, never over-thought or over-analysed things, and so her mind was never encouraged to spiral out of control. Like the Biblical parable of the house built on the rock, Elinor felt she was on solid ground with the stability Leo and Tony brought into her life.
One Saturday Tony surprised her with a trip to the Minack Theatre in Porthcurno. It was an open-air theatre built into the rock which was in the most romantic location imaginable, perched high up on the cliffs with a stunning backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean.
The atmosphere was strangely informal, with people bringing picnic baskets and bottles of wine to the performances.
Tony and Elinor sat in the theatre at the end of March, in eager anticipation, to watch a production of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.
Concentrating on the performance, Elinor found herself identifying strongly with the role of Laura, the mentally fragile sister in the play. In the production, Laura played with her glass menagerie, which was in itself a metaphor for her extreme vulnerability. Elinor found she was relating completely to Laura’s desire to isolate herself from the outside world and to shield herself from its unkindness.
As the light darkened, the backdrop of the sea started fading and the lights focused everyone’s attention on the actors, so Elinor felt herself increasingly sucked into the play in a most unhealthy way.
Later on, she didn’t feel able to explain to Tony how she’d found the performance deeply moving but also extremely painful, tearing away at parts of her that she’d tried so hard to keep strong and complete.
She sat silently in the car on the way home, feeling raw and exposed but Tony, as was the norm with his forthright character, bludgeoned his way through her defences.
They’d been driving home for twenty minutes when he suddenly stopped the car on a side road and switched off the engine.
‘What’s wrong, Elinor?’
‘I’m a little tired, that’s all.’
Tony reached across and turned her chin towards him, searching her face with his anxious gaze.
‘Not true. What’s happened?’
Elinor lifted up her hand and pulled his hand away.
‘Nothing, Tony. Nothing’s wrong,’ she said adamantly. ‘We should get going.’
After an awkward moment, during which they sat in total silence, Tony started up the car and drove off. He drove them back to his flat in Wadebridge as had been arranged between them before the theatre showing.
He quietly lifted Elinor’s rucksack out of the car boot and they walked soberly up the stairs to his flat.
He opened the door and let Elinor in first. Elinor didn’t miss his surreptitious glances at her as she walked wearily into the hallway.
As Tony disappeared into the bedroom to dump Elinor’s bag, she wandered slowly down the corridor like a dazed sleepwalker. As soon as she reached the lounge she sank down into her favourite chair, the leather recliner. She gazed despairingly out of the window, trying to distract herself by watching the lights of the town below her. The tiny square lights outside the sitting room window were sharp little points of humanity, bravely fighting against the insidious darkness, reminding Elinor there was still life out there and a life worth living.
Insensibly, Elinor began to feel slightly better.
‘Elinor, what are you doing sitting in the dark? You’re starting to really worry me,’ said Tony, perturbed, as he entered noisily into the lounge, disturbing the stillness of the night with his vibrant presence.
He walked up to Elinor’s chair and leant over the top of it. Elinor reached up and grasped hold of his hand, pulling it to her cheek, taking comfort from its warmth.
‘I’m sorry, Tony. But that play was a little too close to the bone. It gets me every time I read that play, but seeing a live performance like that, it shattered me with its pathos. The Glass Menagerie is a stroke of genius. Those glass figurines... It’s exactly what you feel when you come out of a nervous breakdown. Broken, shattered, splintered. And even when they patch you up with medication, psychologists and psychiatrists, you’re still damaged, fragile goods and always will be.’
‘I’m sorry, Elinor. I should’ve researched the play a little more, but I’m no student of English Literature, as you can see from my bookcase.’
Elinor smiled wryly. Tony’s bookcase consisted solely of sports biographies, mixed in with a few specialised books and files on medicine.
She stroked his hand, loving the feel of his solid fingers and the veins that stood out firmly from his skin.
‘It’ll be fine,
Tony. Anxiety’s totally unpredictable and irrational. How’s it possible I can go surfing and nearly drown in a crazy, wild sea without having a single panic attack and yet suffer and struggle through a theatre performance? It makes no sense.’
‘I understand what you mean. I see a lot of patients that find the unpredictability of their mental health the hardest thing to deal with. They don’t know from one week to the next what is going to trigger the next episode, if they’ll manage a week of work or not. Anything associated with anxiety is a horrible mental illness to have.’
‘In one way having a relationship with you is hard because although I know you deal with patients with mental health issues, it’s never the same as living it. And yet I am so thankful you’re so grounded and rooted in yourself. It’s a trial, I am sure, for you to have me by your side.’ At this point Tony made a grunt of denial. ‘But you’re so substantial it helps me to break through the lies my mind feeds to me. Your presence pulls me out of the alternate reality I live in during my worst moments...’
They both stared out of the window silently for a few minutes.
‘Are you going to make some space for me, greedy guts?’ asked Tony eventually, getting down to what mattered to him the most and dealing with things, as always, in a more practical frame of mind.
Elinor smiled delightedly and stood up so Tony could take a seat on the recliner. She then dumped herself on his lap, letting him wrap his arms around her in a cocoon, sheltering her from the adverse winds roaring inside her mind.
By the time they went to bed her mind was shrouded in tranquillity once more, which promised to lead to a good night’s sleep. Consigning what had been an unsatisfactory evening to oblivion, she willed herself to look ahead to the future. Tomorrow was another day...
53
The following day Tony and Elinor let themselves into Trenouth and made their way to the kitchen for a cup of tea. Tony would be heading back to Wadebridge later to prepare for the start of his working week but he liked to linger as long as possible once he’d dropped Elinor off at Trenouth.
They both enjoyed jumping down from the Cornish hedge and making their way along to Fox Cove for a breathtaking view of the surrounding countryside. Fox Cove was a beautiful cove with a sparkling white sandy beach at low tide and a long oblong rock in the middle of it that to Elinor’s mind looked like an exact copy of a granite submarine. It was their favourite spot and Tony liked soaking up the beauty of it before beginning a hectic day in the enclosed environment of the surgery.
Today, as Tony and Elinor walked along the corridor to the kitchen, Elinor suddenly heard a familiar and feminine voice shout out:
‘Is that you, Elinor?’
Elinor’s heart dropped to her feet and she quickly clasped Tony’s hand, looking up at him with horrified eyes. Before Elinor could say anything to him, a rotund woman with strawberry blonde hair appeared in the doorway to the dining room and grinned at the pair of them. She was dressed in a miniskirt and a revealing top, her face liberally plastered with make-up. Her bold appearance was similar to what you’d expect of a madam from an upper-class sauna.
She came forward quickly with her arms open and gave Elinor a hearty embrace, squeezing her inanimate body with a great deal of vigour, before turning to Tony and subjecting him to the same treatment without the least hint of bashfulness.
‘Hello, my darlings! I’m so, so happy to see you both.’
‘Mum,’ said Elinor, shell-shocked and struggling to get her words out. ‘I wasn’t expecting you. I mean, Leo said nothing.’
‘I know,’ said Elinor’s mum, smirking with self-satisfaction. ‘He had no idea! I took a flight to Newquay this morning and gave him a call from there.’
‘Morwenna, stop frightening your child,’ scolded Leo, making an appearance at the doorway. Elinor turned and fixed Leo with a meaningful look, which Leo returned complacently with a twinkle in his eye.
Elinor let her shoulders drop as her mind assimilated her mother’s unexpected arrival.
‘Tony, this is my mother, if you hadn’t already guessed.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs Campbell,’ said Tony courteously.
‘Oh, gosh! Isn’t he lovely, Elinor?’ gushed Morwenna, batting her eyelids coyly at Tony in the most provocative way.
Tony looked completely taken aback and for once was speechless.
Mortified, Elinor gave her mum a determined push towards the dining room.
‘Hands off, Mum! Honestly, you’re an absolute embarrassment.’
They walked through to the sitting room, with Morwenna turning around briefly and giving Tony a lurid wink as he brought up the rear.
Once the others had sat down, Tony took a hot drinks order and escaped to the kitchen to get the kettle boiling.
Elinor turned to her mother and shook her head disapprovingly.
‘You’re going to frighten him off, Mum. You’re overdoing it.’
‘No, really, Elinor. I’m sure he’s taking it in the spirit it’s meant. It’s not every day I get to meet such a handsome young man.’
‘I can hear you!’ shouted Tony through the kitchen hatch, before any more embarrassing confidences were shared.
Morwenna chuckled loudly.
‘That’s OK, Tony,’ she yelled back. ‘I’ve nothing to hide. And I’ve always been very attracted to modest young men.’
Elinor groaned.
‘Mum, what are you doing here? And how long are you staying for?’
For the first time, Morwenna seemed to be a little disconcerted.
‘I’m here to see you, of course! A week at Christmas wasn’t enough for me. I never dreamt that you’d make Cornwall your home or that you’d stick to the place like a limpet. That wasn’t my intention when I asked Leo to take you in.’
She turned heavily on the sofa to look at Leo.
‘I blame you, Leo. You’ve taken my daughter from me.’
‘I’ve restored your daughter to you, you mean,’ growled Leo, unimpressed by his sister’s accusation.
‘Mum, are you sure there’s nothing else going on?’
‘All I wanted to do was to visit my only daughter,’ protested Morwenna indignantly, not quite meeting Elinor’s eyes.
‘I presume you’ve taken time off work?’ asked Elinor, puzzled and wondering why her mother would turn up in the middle of the semester.
Morwenna worked as a hugely popular and successful lecturer in moral philosophy at Glasgow University. University rumours had it that Morwenna once managed to convert two-thirds of a first year class to vegetarianism during one of her lectures.
Subsequently, there’d been several complaints made to the department from the students’ disgruntled parents, but these were brushed off by Morwenna as the result of society’s latest creation: ‘helicopter parenting’.
Morwenna bent her head to one side and looked at her daughter pensively.
‘My students are on study leave this week, my love, and my PhD students can be managed remotely in any case... Thanks for the concern, though,’ she added sardonically.
Tony brought through the drinks and handed them out. There was an uneasy silence as they all drank from their mugs.
Elinor pondered what kind of things would occupy her restless and dynamic mother during her stay. She didn’t think walks along the coast would have much appeal. Anything could happen when her volatile mother was at a loose end, so it was important to find something to distract her.
‘Elinor tells me you’re interested in palm reading,’ said Tony, curiously, after a few minutes.
Morwenna leaned over to him enthusiastically.
‘Yes. Would you like me to read yours?’
Tony quickly tucked his hands into his pockets.
‘No, I’m fine, thank you. But a lot of the surfing community are very into that kind of thing. That New Age stuff
’s big business here in Cornwall.’
‘There’s nothing “new” about palmistry,’ rebuked Morwenna. ‘It’s been around for thousands of years. From before Christ was born, in actual fact. But, yes, I’ve heard that mystical things are immensely popular here in Cornwall.’
Silence fell once more until Tony eventually stood up and gathered up the mugs.
‘Right, I’d best get going, Elinor. Nice to meet you, Morwenna.’
‘Likewise,’ said Morwenna, nodding at him with a small smile on her face.
Elinor was disappointed. She knew Tony had been expecting to stay longer at Trenouth. He was beating a hasty exit and she had no idea what his reasons were for doing so, but she sincerely hoped her mother wasn’t scaring him away. Her mother’s bark was always worse than her bite. Although on this visit she seemed to be even more full-on and over the top than usual. Strange. What was she up to? Elinor didn’t know why but she could already foretell that her mother’s visit was only going to bring trouble and misery.
54
Watching Barbara and her mother greet each other was like watching two stags circling each other, eyeing up each other’s weaknesses, and ready to lock horns on the slightest pretext. Barbara, normally so friendly and effusive, was bristling with hostility. It didn’t help that that Morwenna, almost as soon as she’d walked in the door of Barbara’s studio, had chosen to aim the most insulting and barbed criticisms at Barbara’s half-finished painting.
‘Oh, Elinor. Please don’t tell me this horrific, psychedelic painting is yours? My darling, what’s happened to your art? I mean, look at it! It looks like a two year old has been having fun with a box of crayons. And what’s it of, anyway? It looks to me a bit like a dustbin with its lid on the ground...’
‘It’s actually my painting and it’s of Bedruthan Steps,’ said Barbara, between tightly compressed teeth.
‘Oh! Oh dear! I’m so sorry. I’m really mortified,’ said Morwenna, holding her hand to her mouth in dismay. ‘It was such a shock to see that painting, you see. Elinor’s work has always been so refined and detailed...’