by Bea Green
Elinor was starting to wish the floor would swallow her up.
‘My name’s Barbara Bligh,’ said Barbara, holding out her hand but at the same time glaring at Morwenna aggressively.
They shook hands fleetingly, as if each found the other contaminated by a hideous virus.
‘I’m Morwenna, Elinor’s mother. I’m sure she’s told you all about me. We’re so close,’ effused Morwenna, grabbing hold of Elinor’s arm and clinging to her determinedly.
‘Mum! Get off! What’s got into you?’
‘What do you mean, my darling?’ asked Morwenna, wounded. ‘I was just giving you a motherly cuddle.’
She spotted Elinor’s painting and sidled up to it.
‘Ah, yes, this one I can see is by you, Elinor. There’s no comparison. The talent in this one is so evident. It’s of such superior quality...’
Elinor gasped at the malice in her mother’s voice. Her mother was never malicious or mean. She always stood up to bullies of any kind. What on earth had come over her?
‘Elinor, would you and your mother like a cup of tea or coffee?’ asked Barbara in a resigned voice.
‘Ehh. Yes, that would be nice,’ said Elinor, flummoxed by her mother and struggling to think straight any more.
There was suddenly a loud crash as something big collided with the tiled floor.
Barbara was staring in disbelief over Elinor’s shoulder. Elinor whirled around and saw her painting lying face down on the tiles.
‘Mum, what have you done?’ yelled Elinor in distress.
She raced across the floor to pick up her painting and as soon as she lifted it up she saw it was ruined. Oil paint always took a long time to dry and the picture had been freshly painted a couple of days earlier. It was now smeared from top to bottom and had left half its paint on the red floor tiles. The painting was unrecognisable and completely ruined. Elinor felt like sobbing. Her clumsy mother, in a matter of seconds, had destroyed hours of work.
Barbara still looked utterly appalled but Morwenna seemed to recover from the shock of the ruined painting pretty quickly. She walked rapidly across to Elinor and gave her a big hug.
‘Don’t you worry, darling. I’m sure it’s fixable. You’ll get it back to what it was. I’m so sorry. I hadn’t realised how unstable the easel was,’ she said, glancing across at the fallen object, which had toppled forwards onto the floor.
Elinor shook her mother off angrily and went across the room to place the painting safely against the wall in the corner. She then ripped off a large quantity of paper towel and poured white spirit onto it, falling onto her hands and knees to wipe up the sticky oil paint from the floor. She scrubbed ferociously at the stains. Tears had started to her eyes and she couldn’t speak she was so distressed. Each oil painting was a unique work of art and she knew, no matter how hard she tried, it would never be the same as the one she’d lost on the tiled floor.
‘My goodness, you’ve certainly managed to shake things up since you’ve arrived,’ commented Barbara, in an arctic tone of voice.
‘I don’t need any sarcasm from you,’ answered Morwenna crossly. ‘You poor excuse for an artist.’
‘Barbara! Ignore her, please!’ called Elinor from the floor, where she had sat back up in surprise at the words coming out of her mother’s mouth. Barbara, who looked like she’d been a hair’s breadth from pouncing on Morwenna and beating her to a pulp, took a deep breath and moved to the other side of the studio.
Elinor stood up.
‘OK, Mum. We’re leaving now. Enough’s enough. I don’t know what’s come over you,’ said Elinor, her voice starting to break with emotion. ‘Your personality’s completely changed and I really don’t know who you are any more. If you carry on like this, I’m going to have to take you to the doctor to get tested for Alzheimer’s.’
‘Good idea,’ chipped in Barbara from her corner, unable to resist the temptation to stick her oar in.
Elinor pushed her mother out of the door before she had a chance to say the last word.
As they walked up the side path and towards Leo’s Volvo, Elinor felt her anxiety building as she wondered what had happened to her normally kind mother. When Elinor had seen her at Christmas she had been her normal, bouncy self but it seemed that within the space of a few months she’d turned into a complete stranger. One, moreover, who seemed to be completely unaware how antisocial her behaviour was.
She had to talk to Leo about this when she had the chance.
55
‘I love palm reading, Mrs Campbell!’ enthused Elena, looking at Morwenna with childish eagerness. ‘I even went one year to the Mind Body Spirit festival in London. It was amazing. So interesting! There was everything there from graphology to yoga to tarot reading. Mindfulness, of course, and Buddhist teaching. And then of course, the paranormal people... I wasn’t so sure about them. They were a little weird.’
‘There’s plenty of the paranormal enthusiasts in Scotland. Edinburgh especially,’ said Morwenna with a modicum of pride. Elinor didn’t see how having a city full of ghosts was something to brag about but she kept quiet, happy to see the two enthusiasts gelling over a cup of coffee. Her mother had been very unpredictable recently so it was nice to see traces of her old self finally emerging.
‘Nowadays there’s even what’s called the Extreme Paranormal Underground Ghost tour in Edinburgh,’ said Morwenna confidentially. ‘They go to Greyfriars Kirkyard as part of the tour. You know, Greyfriars Kirkyard is supposed to be the world’s most haunted cemetery after dark. And in the Old Town there are the underground vaults where apparently they sealed in people dying of the plague. Loads of ghosts seen there.’
Elena shivered dramatically, enjoying herself hugely.
‘That is too scary for me! I’d die of a heart attack if I went on that. I know I would! Mrs Campbell, I think we should do a palm reading event here! What do you think? We could get some of the surfers along. Many of them like this kind of thing.’
And just like that it was agreed that a palm reading afternoon was to take place on Friday that week, at The Ninth Hole. Elena was going to send out emails to everyone who’d signed up for The Ninth Hole’s newsletter, inviting them along for an afternoon’s palm reading and tea.
Elinor could only be thankful that her mother had a focus for her stay now.
Things had been fairly uneventful for the last couple of days, much to Elinor’s relief, but she had a feeling that, like a volcano, the other side of her mother she’d seen recently was bound to erupt to the surface again.
Pleased that her mother had the palm reading event to occupy her mind with, she felt a little more comfortable leaving her to her own devices for a bit. Her mother never did things by half so there would be things like the palm reading costume to be decided on, products like hand sanitiser to be bought, and Elinor was certain Morwenna would be reading up on palmistry to make sure she was on point during Friday’s sessions. Now that her mother seemed to be on good form once more, Elinor started to relax a little for the first time since her arrival.
Leo had burst out laughing when he’d heard about the horrible morning Elinor had endured at Barbara’s studio with her mother. He bluntly dismissed Elinor’s fears that her mother might be starting to have Alzheimer’s, telling her not to be stupid. He tried his best to reassure Elinor, explaining that Morwenna had a very responsible job and there was no way she would’ve been able to get away with having Alzheimer’s when so many people depended on her.
So everything more or less seemed to be on an even keel until the day Tony was due to return to Trenouth.
That day was a Wednesday in the middle of March and the early morning had been full of promise.
Elinor had opened up her curtains and gazed out at the blinding sunshine, feeling her heart open up like the petals of a flower unfurling in the warmth of summer. The seagulls were showing off their be
st acrobatics in front of her, diving and twisting like miniature aeroplanes, weaving expertly on the different air currents. Thrift was covering their Cornish hedge in a pretty pattern of pink pom-poms, the oversized heads bobbing and wobbling in the wind.
Everything on the coast seemed to be screaming out, ‘It’s spring at last!’
Elinor took in a long, deep breath and loosened the muscles in her neck. Her wrist cast had been taken off the week before and she was looking forward to chasing the waves in Constantine Bay once more. Her surfboard had been in the garage, unused, for almost seven weeks. Too long... Elinor decided to go and check it over later and make sure it was ready for its next outing.
She threw on her dressing gown and slippers and left the room to have some breakfast.
Elinor realised her mother wasn’t at home, which was a little odd. She wandered slowly into the kitchen, noticing the bungalow was strangely silent without her vibrant presence. She quickly made herself a cup of coffee and then went to open the front door so she could sit on the slate steps and bask in the sunlight.
As soon as she opened the front door she saw Leo’s Volvo had gone, which presumably explained her mother’s absence. Elinor couldn’t see her mother going for a morning stroll along the cliffs or down to the beach. She was the most sedentary person she knew.
Elinor swallowed the last dregs of her coffee and then left her mug on the slate steps.
She walked over to the garage and, with a great deal of effort, twisted and lifted the big metal door. Leo never locked the garage because in his view there was never any need. In all the years he’d lived on the clifftop his house and garage hadn’t been broken into once.
She walked into the dusty space, brushing past the cobwebs that seemed to be an integral part of the garage and heading towards the back wall where the surfboards were positioned.
She placed her hands on her surfboard, checking expertly to see if it needed a new coat of wax and if any damage had occurred while she’d last been out to sea with it. During her last surf she’d been so consumed with the pain in her wrist, she’d never actually checked her surfboard afterwards.
She ran her hands gently across the surface of the board and when she reached up to its nose she perceived a bumpy ridge stretching across it. She turned the surfboard around and saw that the nose had completely cracked from side to side.
Elinor frowned.
Surely Tony would have warned her there was obvious damage to her surfboard? It wasn’t the kind of thing a dedicated surfer would miss or forget because all of them formed close bonds with their surfboards. It was just the way it was. People became attached to their cars in much the same way.
Anyway, she was clearly going to have to take it to Newquay for repairs, at the first available opportunity.
She put the surfboard carefully back against the wall.
It was time for a jog along the coast to shake the fidgets out of her before her mother arrived back at the bungalow. With this in mind she raced to get dressed and within ten minutes she was jumping down from their Cornish hedge onto the narrow path that bypassed the clifftop.
She wandered along to the side of Warren Cove to have a look and see what mood the ocean was in, an unbreakable habit since she’d begun to surf.
As she watched the waves, rocking back and forth, she heard a shrill, faint wailing coming from somewhere close by. It puzzled her. It certainly wasn’t a seagull’s rasping cry. She was still struggling to place it when suddenly she heard the vigorous flapping of birds’ wings.
She was familiar with that sound. The flock of doves that normally resided inside the cave roof at Warren Cove had been disturbed and in a blurred flurry of white they circled the cove and flew off at breakneck speed.
Elinor walked further along the cliff for a better view of the cove. She strode past the old grass trenches that were the remains of an ancient clifftop fort and looked down into the cove once more.
The tide was coming in, that much was obvious.
And on the pebbled beach, far below, there was a little boy, who could only be at most eight or nine years old, sobbing his heart out.
She recognised him. He was the next door neighbour’s grandchild, who often stayed with his grandmother when the need arose for some childcare. Why he’d be here on a Wednesday when he should’ve been at school, Elinor had no idea. But there wasn’t time to think about that now.
‘Hellooo!’ she called down into the cove.
The boy stopped crying suddenly and looked up in confusion. He soon managed to spot Elinor’s head protruding from the side of the cliff, with the sharp sight small children so often have.
‘Are you OK?’ yelled Elinor. It was a stupid question to ask but she wasn’t sure if anyone else was down there with the boy.
‘I’m stuck,’ shouted back the boy tearfully. Elinor’s heart sank at his words. ‘I got down here but I’m too scared to climb up. I’m scared...’
The boy began to break out into gulping sobs again.
God, thought Elinor, I don’t know if I can climb down the steep cliff path. Leo would’ve done it in a flash but then again Leo wasn’t at home. She knew Warren Cove had one of the easier cliff paths around this part of the coast but she had no head for heights, as had been proven the last time she tried to descend it.
She looked down again and noticed that already the seawater had inched up the beach. It wouldn’t be much longer before the path out of the cove would be cut off completely. When the tide was fully in, the water was deep and dangerous in this cove, with strong currents at the entrance waiting to pull the unprepared out to sea.
Elinor ran up to the start of the path and started to climb down, not allowing herself to think about what she was doing. It was purely an instinctive response and she yielded to it. She knew that even if she’d left the boy to find help, she would never have been able to live with herself if something had happened to him while she was gone.
She had no choice but to climb down into the cove.
56
The start of the descent was easy enough. The top half of the cliff was earthy, with clumps of tough coastal grass to hold onto if she needed to. At the beginning the path was a gently descending zigzag, but before long she reached about a third of the way down and then it became steadily steeper and rockier.
Loose pieces of slate slipped away from the cliff face as she climbed downwards. She could hear the small fragments chinking against the cliff face as they bounced down hundreds of metres to the cove below.
It was at this point that Elinor began to stiffen with fright.
When she felt the hard, uneven granite under her hands and had to stretch with her feet to find a foothold, she began to panic. Stopping for a brief moment, she took deep breaths to try and steady her pulse.
The sobbing at the bottom of the cove had ceased, which gave her the encouragement to keep going. The boy clearly had faith in her accomplishing the descent and helping him out of the situation he found himself in. Somehow this implicit trust in her made her feel braver and encouraged her to believe she could manage what only a day ago would have been unthinkable.
She crawled slowly down the steep cliff face, not daring to look down but focusing solely on securing a safe grip for her hands and her feet. The mass of water at the entrance of the cove was heaving heavy sighs as it lapped and sucked at the rocks around it.
Seagulls were perched on precipitous ledges on the cliff wall, preparing for nesting time. They watched her descent with cold eyes, utterly scornful of her feeble and awkward movements, totally unthreatened by her poor agility.
At last, Elinor felt her hands touching the rough barnacled surface of the cliff rock and knew she was safe once more. She’d reached that lower fringe of rock that was always underwater when the tide was in.
Jelly-like, red-brown beadlet anemones dotted these slippery rocks, shaking li
ke tiny blancmanges and belying their aggressive, hidden strength until the seawater covered them and their tentacles emerged to prey on drifting food.
Coloured periwinkles were scattered across the rock face too; some were large and barnacle-encrusted whereas others were delicate, miniature shells. Their shell colours ranged from deep, chocolate brown to lighter creamy brown, white tinged with green algae to Elinor’s favourite bright orange or yellow.
The sturdy, pyramid domes of limpets also decorated these granite rocks, as did the blue-purple mussels. Thin, frail threads attached the mussels to the rock, whereas the limpets’ muscular feet were bound to the rock with such strength it was like breaking through adhesive glue to pick one up.
Elinor moved downwards until she felt her feet touch the shifting stones of the beach.
At that point she stood up and looked back up at the sky. The cove seen from this angle, with its steep, dark grey walls encircling and towering above her, made her feel very claustrophobic. Elinor soon discovered that down here at the bottom of the cove, the noise of the pounding seawater, the seagulls’ screams and the shifting loose beach pebbles all echoed and were magnified threefold. It was like standing within an amphitheatre.
‘Hello.’
Elinor turned around quickly and looked at the small boy behind her. His freckled face was tear-stained but he was smiling happily at her now. His spiky short brown hair reminded her of a half-fledged bird, as did his thin knobbly knees.
‘Hello. What’s your name again? Your grandmother’s told me but I’ve forgotten.’
‘I’m called Conan.’
Elinor had to restrain a smile. She didn’t think anyone could possibly look less like Conan the Barbarian. She shook her head angrily. Her mind was drifting off at random tangents again, as it was prone to do when it was stressed.
‘Hello, Conan! I’m Elinor Campbell. Your granny’s next door neighbour. She’ll be wondering where you are, so I think we should try and get you up to the top again, don’t you?’