“Oh, and Miss Drummond.” The manageress has flushed scarlet. “If you ever want to visit St Ives again, may I suggest you find somewhere else to stay?”
Eleanor creeps to her room, feeling guilty, and then defiant. The Porthminster Hotel will survive without her – and anyway she’ll probably never return to St Ives. She’s seen little of the world. There are so many places she wants to visit, were she ever free – and rich enough – to travel. But for the moment, The Hideaway calls to her, demanding and urgent.
As Eleanor unpacks her suitcase the next morning, a thrill of excitement grips her. A sense of holiday. It’s Friday. The weekend lies ahead. She’s free to do exactly as she likes. The sun’s shining, lighting a thousand colours in the sea, giving St Ives an extraordinary beauty.
She’ll walk on the beaches again, explore beyond the sands, eat lunch and supper in new cafés, such as The Shore Café and The Copper Kettle. She’ll buy eggs and bacon for breakfast, fresh flowers to replace the wilting daffodils, a hot-water bottle to warm her sheets, gifts of Cornish fudge and shortbread for Jonny and Vera.
She’ll visit The Portman Gallery, and buy her father’s marvellous lake landscape. Yesterday, she’d noticed the Scala Theatre is showing China Seas with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow: “a mighty melodrama of fierce lives, intense hates and dangerous intrigues on the seething China Seas”. She’ll buy some toffees and go to a matinée. She’ll pretend she has all the time and freedom in the world.
Then on Monday morning she’ll go back to James’s office, phone her mother, make sure everything is running smoothly. She’ll ring Jonny, ask about Mrs Giffen, give him her own news. How proud everyone will be of her. She feels so grown-up. Here she is, in her own cottage, running her own life. Fancy free…
In control of her destiny.
“Good morning!” A slim girl with a beautiful complexion and a mass of curly chestnut hair greets Eleanor in the estate agent’s office. “How can I help you this bright Monday?”
“I’m Eleanor Drummond—”
“Of course you are! St Andrews Street. I’m Agnes, James’s daughter… Have you had a lovely weekend?”
“Wonderful. I’ve been staying in The Hideaway. Yesterday I walked for miles on the cliffs and the weather’s been perfect.”
“And what can I—”
“May I use your phone?”
“There’s one in the office at the back, through that door. Take all the time you need.”
Eleanor walks through to a cramped room at the end of a narrow corridor. A black telephone stands on a dusty desk. She picks up the receiver and dials home.
“Vera?… It’s me.”
“Eleanor! Thank God you’ve rung, dear heart. We’ve been trying to speak to you.”
“What’s happened? Is Mummy all right?”
“She’s fine… We rang The Porthminster on Friday night but they said you’d left. They’d no idea where you were.”
“I moved into The Hideaway.”
“Ah… We thought you might have done.”
“But it’s got no phone… I’m ringing from the estate agent’s. Vera, you sound upset. Is anything the matter?”
“Not with us, dear heart. Your mother’s shopping. She’s fretting about you, but she’s fine. It’s Jonny. Bad news, I’m afraid. Mrs Giffen had to have an operation. The doctors thought she’d pull through. But there were complications. She died during surgery.”
Eleanor stares blindly around the room, feeling sick and giddy.
“Eleanor? Are you there?”
“She was a sweet old lady, Vera. Jonny was devoted to her—”
“He’s devastated. He told us on Friday afternoon, said he’d tried to ring you. Your mother was mortified when she didn’t know where you were.”
Eleanor swallows. “Can you go to see him, Vera? Give him my love. Tell him I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
“Of course, dear heart… As long as you’re safe, we’ll stop worrying.”
Eleanor stands for a moment in the middle of the room. Summoning her courage, she dials both Jonny’s numbers. The ringing tones scream through her head. There’s no answer.
She walks back to the office.
Agnes looks up from a file. “Did you get through?”
“I did, thank you.” Eleanor clears her throat, feeling as if she’s swallowed a teaspoon of sand. “But I’ve had bad news. I need to drive home to Woodstock as soon as possible. Could we discuss the financial details on The Hideaway? I’d like to put it on the market right now.”
Eleanor walks down to the harbour, her head spinning. The fresh sunlight of early morning has sucked away into a sullen sky. She has spent such a carefree weekend when Jonny must have suffered the worst of his life. What will it be like working in the shop without Mrs Giffen’s friendly face with her welcome cup of tea?
She feels so guilty. She should have rung Jonny from Exeter, or at least tried his number again at The Porthminster, later that first evening. It looks as if she has hardly bothered to think about him and doesn’t really care.
Neither is true. She has often thought about Jonny over the past few days, planning what she’ll tell him, and spotting furniture and trinkets in the Cornish shops he might like. All she can do now is travel back to him as quickly as possible.
She had agreed on an asking price for The Hideaway. Agnes thinks it’ll fetch at least eight hundred and fifty pounds and recommends that Eleanor leave its furniture, but not the paintings. Apparently James has lots of contacts looking for such properties, so there’ll be no need to put up a FOR SALE sign. Best keep the whole transaction private.
Could Eleanor be available over the next few days to show people around? Only those James has vetted personally, of course. He’ll telephone Michael Humphreys in Woodstock to put him in the picture.
After Eleanor has closed the agency door behind her, Agnes picks up the phone.
“Is that Mr Penrose? Agnes Lanham here. Good morning to you, sir. Listen, I have some excellent news. We have a cottage that’s exactly what you’re looking for… St Andrews Street. Wonderful place, in great condition. Sea-views, private balcony, fully furnished, vacant possession and, best of all, no onward chain.”
Eleanor asks directions to the Post Office, waits impatiently in a queue and writes out a telegram, bitterly remembering the one she’d sent from Woodstock to Somerville College that frozen January morning:
Shocked and very upset to hear your news stop putting cottage on market stop will be home as soon as sale is agreed stop thinking of you jonny stop love eleanor
It’s lunchtime, but she has no appetite. She’ll go back to The Hideaway, make the bed, wash the dishes, mop the kitchen floor. Soon her little Cornish retreat will belong to a stranger: it makes her feel even more miserable. The cottage has captured her heart. It was difficult, listening to Agnes Lanham’s description of it, with the hard-headed estate-agent jargon.
By mid-afternoon the cottage is sparkling and Eleanor’s starving.
She eats high tea in The Copper Kettle. Then she buys enough food to last the next few days, and two novels from the Fore Street bookshop: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. She knows them both from school, but it’ll be good to read them again.
As she reaches the bottom of St Andrews Street she stops in her tracks. A man wearing floppy blue trousers and a leather jacket is standing against The Hideaway’s ground-floor window, shading his eyes with one hand and peering in. He’s the same man Eleanor had seen outside The Portman Gallery. But before she can call out or catch him up he turns, walks swiftly to the end of the street and disappears.
The nagging feeling that she has seen him before returns, this time with absolute conviction. But once again she hasn’t seen his face. She can’t place him. So, infuriatingly, she’s none the wiser.
“About the cottage”
St Ives, Cornwall, 1936
James and Agnes Lanham have lots of contacts.
By five o’clock the next day, twelve people have visited The Hideaway. They arrive singly or in pairs, ask pertinent questions, open cupboards and mutter in corners. Some complain that there’s no bathroom, the bedrooms are small, the balcony lacks shade and privacy, the kitchen’s dark and poky, and its range old-fashioned.
Eleanor’s astonished by how passionately she wants to leap to its defence. But she bites her tongue. Others exclaim at the beautiful sea-view. They adore the cottage’s location, admire its compact layout.
“You must have an artist in the family,” one crusty old gentleman tells Eleanor, tipping his sailor’s cap to the back of his head. Bleakly, she agrees.
Everyone says they’ll “think about it”. They nod, smile and wander off. None ask if they might see the cottage again. Nobody mentions money.
On Wednesday morning, a young couple with two small children poke around. They tell Eleanor they need a garden for their giant poodle and lots more space for their mother-in-law. She’s heartily glad when they leave.
In the afternoon, nobody comes at all.
***
Eleanor paces up and down the living room. She washes some underwear and hangs it above the kitchen range, hoping nobody will notice dripping knickers. She makes more cups of tea than she wants but can’t be bothered with luncheon. She starts to compile an inventory of the paintings: Man with a Walking Stick, Drinks with a Friend, but stops when she reaches the portraits of her father and the baby. Wondering whether the child really is Walter’s son – her own half-brother, for heaven’s sake – has become too painful to think about.
She picks up the novels, but fails to concentrate.
By half-past five she’s had enough. She dreads spending the next few days hanging around, with no firm offer on The Hideaway, not knowing whether to stay or go. For today, at least, she’ll fling caution to the wind. Desperate to walk along the beach before the sun’s guttering warmth has vanished, Eleanor pulls on her hat and coat. She opens the front door.
The man wearing floppy blue trousers and a leather jacket stands on the doorstep, his hand raised, as if he’d been about to knock. This time, Eleanor can clearly see his face: its thin angles, high cheekbones, the piercing hazel eyes. He pulls off his straw hat, flicking his dark-gold hair away from his forehead.
A shock of recognition jolts Eleanor back to Woodstock, to St Mary Magdalene’s on a bitterly cold and painful January day.
“Miss Drummond? I’m Felix Mitchell—”
“What?” Eleanor’s legs feel weak as a child’s.
“How do you do?… I’ve come about the cottage.”
Speechless, Eleanor stands aside.
Felix pushes past her and steps over the threshold. “I’m sorry it’s so late.” His voice is dark and rich, with the soft Cornish burr Eleanor has heard so often since arriving in St Ives. “I’ve been terribly busy. I ran into Agnes Lanham yesterday. She told me to get here as quickly as I could.” He looks anxiously at Eleanor. “You have your hat and coat on… Are you going out? Should I come back tomorrow?”
Eleanor answers his questions with a bewildered one of her own. “My father left his money to Felix Mitchell. Are you—”
Felix flushes. “Yes, I am. Walter told me at Christmas—”
“And am I dreaming, or have I seen you before? Were you at Daddy’s funeral?”
A shadow of sorrow flickers across his face. “I wondered whether you’d noticed me. I was standing at the back, in a terrible state.”
“But why?”
He gives Eleanor a wry smile. “How could I not be there? Walter was my father too.” In response to her gasp of astonishment he holds up his hands. “I need to qualify that statement. For the first six years of my life, Walter was a father to me in every possible way. My ‘real’ father was a Frenchman, Pierre Tessier. I never met him – at least, not that I can remember… It’s a long story.”
“And your mother?” Eleanor’s tongue feels swollen with hope. “What is your mother’s name?” She holds her breath, waiting for the words she needs to hear.
“My mother was Moira Mitchell… Does that mean anything to you?”
Eleanor’s heart skips several beats. A swell of relief seems to lift her body above the floor. “Indeed it does. The name Moira has been haunting me. When Daddy had his accident, he made me promise to find her. I thought he was delirious – I’d never heard Moira’s name before, I’d no idea who he was talking about.” Sweat breaks out on her forehead. “So can you tell me where she is?”
“I only wish I could. The fact is, I’ve no idea. It’s all very sad and complicated. But those three portraits hanging over there are certainly her beautiful face… Miss Drummond! Are you all right? You’re not going to faint, are you?” Felix takes Eleanor’s arm, guides her to a chair. “Would you like a glass of water?”
Eleanor shakes her head, unable to speak. The room seems full of swooping black and white sparks diving towards her eyes.
“Something stronger perhaps?”
“There’s not much to eat or drink in the cottage.”
Felix crouches on his haunches, looking up into Eleanor’s face. He smells of turpentine. “Then may I take you for a drink?”
“That sounds wonderful.” Eleanor hauls herself to her feet, desperate for the dizziness to pass. “What about The Hideaway? Can I show you around?”
Felix tilts back his head and laughs. “I used to live here. I know every nook and cranny.” He glances around the room. “I see you haven’t changed anything. Thank goodness for that!” He starts to walk towards the door. Then, abruptly, he stops by the table, looking down at the clutter of daffodils, maps, papers and dirty plates – and at the red leather purse. He picks it up.
He turns towards Eleanor, his face draining of blood. “Where in God’s name did you find this?”
“In Woodstock, in Daddy’s studio. After he died I had to tidy it up.” Eleanor’s voice trembles, remembering. “He’d stuffed it into a drawer. The key inside it fits the bureau over there.”
Felix looks down at the purse, his hands shaking. “It belonged to Mama. Walter found it in that bureau, the evening she disappeared. It was terribly important to him. He kept it in his pocket as if it were a lucky charm that would bring her back.” He turns the purse over and over, smoothing its rough edges, flicking at the rusty clasp.
Eleanor moves closer to him. “Would you like to keep it?”
He gives her a look of such gratitude that her heart thumps against her ribs.
“I would, very much indeed. You have no idea how much it means to me.”
The first thing Eleanor notices when they are out in St Andrews Street is how good it feels to be beside Felix. They move in step together, as if they’ve spent hours as walking companions. She glances up to look at his profile, at the graceful slope of his shoulders, and then sideways at the long, lean hands swinging by his side.
Her head clears. The narrow streets have a sharper focus now; the sounds of the sea and the chatter of voices from people they pass come clear and light. As they reach the harbour, a radiant cream and turquoise sunset takes her breath away.
Felix guides her along the harbour until its final dip by the pier. “Shall we have a drink here? I come to The Sloop a lot. It’s a great haunt, particularly for artists. It’ll get rowdy later, but for now we’ll be able to hear each other speak.”
The place is empty, filled only with wooden tables and the pungent smells of beer and tobacco. Eleanor sits by a window, watching Felix ordering their drinks, sharing a joke with the landlord. He brings the glasses to their table and sits opposite her, looking directly into her face.
“You look so like Walter it pulls at
my heart. The colour of your eyes, the shape of your nose and mouth… Talk about ‘spitting image’!”
They smile at one other.
He says, “I was too cut up to speak to you at the funeral. Anyway you were surrounded…”
“I’d no idea then you even existed.”
“So Walter never talked about me?” Felix’s soft burr hardens with disappointment.
“Never.” Eleanor sips her brandy. It burns her mouth but revives her. “The first time Mummy and I ever heard your name was at the reading of Daddy’s will. Our lawyer wasn’t allowed to tell us anything about you.”
Felix bites his lip. “I’m sorry—”
“And the first time Daddy ever mentioned Moira to me was the night he died.”
“So who did you think she was?”
Eleanor takes another gulp. “I thought she was probably Daddy’s first wife. I think my mother was his third. Am I wrong?”
“Yes, but only by a technicality. Walter and Mama never married. She said she couldn’t love him more than she did, and a piece of paper wouldn’t make any difference… In many ways Mama was very unconventional. But she and Walter lived as man and wife – and I was very much their child.”
Eleanor stares into her brandy. “Could you tell me the whole story? I loved Daddy more than anyone. I never suspected anything like this.” She looks bravely into her companion’s eyes. “Could you begin at the beginning? And don’t stop until you get to the end?”
Felix looks shocked and troubled. “That’s a very tall order, Miss Drummond.”
“Please, Mr Mitchell… I really need to know. Put me out of my misery.”
Felix says slowly, “I agree on one condition.”
“Name it.”
“That you sell me The Hideaway. I want to live in it again more than words can say.” He moves his hand across the table to touch Eleanor’s. “Agnes gave me your asking price. I agree to it outright. Walter left me some money, as you know. And I’ve been saving like crazy. I had my first exhibition at The Portman Gallery last December—”
The Choice Page 20