The Choice

by Valerie Mendes

  She watches Felix walk down the High Street towards her. He, too, has dressed for the occasion in a lightweight suit and a sharp blue tie. She holds out her hand.

  Felix raises it briefly to his lips. “Did you sleep well?”

  “Like a log.” Eleanor’s heart races with delight.

  “And you haven’t changed your mind about selling me The Hideaway?”

  “I gave you my word, Felix.” Eleanor’s cheeks flame beneath his gaze. “And you kept yours. The cottage belongs to you.”

  “Thank you, Eleanor. You’ve made me the happiest of men.”

  James can scarcely contain his delight. “I can’t believe I’m looking at the two of you together!” He pulls out their file. “Walter would have been beside himself with joy.”

  “I’m glad you think that.” Suddenly Eleanor wonders whether her father had deliberately intended to bring her and Felix together.

  “Several people expressed an interest in the property,” James babbles happily. “But I assume you’d like it taken off the market?”

  Eleanor and Felix nod.

  “That’s wonderful! I wish all my properties sold so fast.” James glances at Eleanor, a faint anxiety in his eyes. “Will you be going back to Woodstock immediately, Miss Drummond? Agnes said you’d received bad news.”

  Eleanor blushes. “I’ll stay on for a few days longer. Mr Mitchell and I need to discuss the paintings. I’ll leave on Wednesday.”

  “Then may I give you my inventory?” James ferrets for a ream of paper. “Could you check through it? I’ll write to your Woodstock solicitor again. The contract will be ready when you get home.” He holds out his hand. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Miss Drummond. Walter would have been proud of you.”

  Eleanor and Felix stand together in the street outside the office.

  “I feel like whooping for joy.” The colour’s high in Felix’s cheeks, his eyes shine. “Racing barefoot over the sands… Splashing in the sea… Drinking champagne.”

  “That sounds like a good idea – the champagne, I mean.”

  “Let’s go back to The Sloop. And before we get too tipsy, I’ll take you to my favourite café. Their chef will give us a proper Cornish lunch. I recommend the fishcakes, and the treacle tart.”

  Eleanor looks up at him. “On one condition.”

  “Name it.” He takes her arm.

  “This time, I’m paying.”

  Red Taffeta

  St Ives, Cornwall, 1936

  As they settle in The Sloop, Felix looks directly at Eleanor.

  “Are you really going to stay until Wednesday?”

  “I’d always meant to have a fortnight’s holiday, as well as getting through the business side of the trip. The minute I’m home, it’ll be back to work, looking after Mummy, deciding what to do with the money from The Hideaway.”

  “Then I know how we could spend some of the time.” Felix raises his glass. “I’d like to paint your portrait. Every morning, in my studio, let’s say for five sittings – Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday – for a couple of hours each time. How does that sound?”

  “I’d love it.”

  “Good. I’d like you to wear something different every morning. I make dozens of preliminary sketches and choose the best. The light in my studio is different every day. I’ll take you there after lunch. And on Saturday night we’ll go to the Palais de Danse and jig up and down to the Rhythmonians Band. Do you dance?”

  “I don’t often get the chance.”

  “We’ll pay ninepence each to get into the Palais and I’ll dance you off your feet… In the afternoons we can walk along the cliffs. The path towards Zennor is my favourite. Its views are magnificent. You can almost get lost in the sky. And if it rains, we’ll shelter in the picture house and listen to ‘the incomparable tenor’ Richard Tauber in Heart’s Desire. We’ll cram lots of good things into the next few days.”

  Felix clinks his glass against Eleanor’s. He inspects her face, as if he’s already putting her image onto canvas and smiles at her. “Whatever the weather, I promise you a week to remember.”

  An hour later they walk down The Digey, full of food and alcohol.

  Felix marches up to the side of Driftwood. “This is my entrance.” He pulls out his key. “It’s more private this way, even though my landlady lurks by the window!” He unlocks a heavy oak door. “Welcome to my home.”

  He leads Eleanor up a steep flight of wooden stairs into a narrow hallway.

  “Bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, in that order.” He gestures towards the rooms. “All pretty chaotic, though sometimes I make an effort to tidy up. The next floor is where I spend my working hours, and where my models sit for me. Come on up.”

  A spacious attic room greets Eleanor, filled with light.

  The afternoon sun streams in from two large windows, bathing the room with yellow beams that dance with motes of dust. She can see the harbour, the coastline, the sea and sky, racing clouds and the faint line of the horizon.

  The room is sparsely furnished – a lumpy sofa, two battered armchairs, a screen embroidered with scarlet poppies, and the wild jumble of Felix’s working equipment litter the floor – but it feels modern and stylish.

  “What a fantastic place to work.”

  Felix stands behind his easel, checking his latest sketch. “I’ll miss it when I move. But I’ll put a skylight into the studio of The Hideaway.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Here.” Felix beckons Eleanor to the far corner of the room. “This is the painting Walter bought. You can take it home.”

  She picks her way across the floor, trying not to tread on an assortment of empty cups, bottles of turpentine, paintbrushes and half-finished canvases. She finds herself staring at a portrait of her father, so brilliantly deft and lifelike it takes her breath away. Walter stands in this very room, looking out of a window. Felix sits behind him, sketching at his easel. The two men share a joke. Between them throbs a palpable moment of harmony.

  Tears spark in Eleanor’s eyes. “It’s marvellous of you both. I love it.”

  “And what will you tell your mother?”

  “The truth.” She dashes a hand across her face. “The whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

  “She won’t like it much.”

  “She won’t have any choice.”

  “Isn’t that a bit brutal?”

  “What do you suggest? Either I invent a series of lies, which would be complicated and pointless, or I don’t tell her anything, which will look suspicious and underhand. It seems to me I don’t have any choice.”

  Felix carries the painting to The Hideaway. They check through James’s inventory, agreeing that Felix should keep the furniture, Moira’s watercolours and Walter’s three portraits of her. Eleanor will take Walter’s other paintings home.

  Felix keeps glancing at the bureau. Eleanor asks him whether he wants to look inside. He nods gratefully.

  “I remember Walter telling me it was Mama’s special desk, that he’d locked it and hidden the key. Then he couldn’t remember where it was!”

  Together they rifle through its papers. Disappointed, Felix gives her a brief smile. “There’s nothing here I haven’t seen before. I’d hoped it might give me a clue to Mama’s disappearance. I’ll just have to stop hoping, won’t I?”

  ***

  They walk to The Portman Gallery, where Felix introduces Eleanor to the owner and she buys Walter’s landscape. Felix tucks it under his arm as they return to the cottage.

  “It’s like retrieving the last piece of my father,” Eleanor says. “I’ll give it to a friend of mine in Woodstock. He was meant to drive down to St Ives with me, but at the last minute he had to pull out.”

  “Oh?” He guides her across Fore Street. “Do
I gather love is in the air?”

  “God, no… Nothing like that.” Eleanor blushes. “I work in Jonny’s antiques’ shop but he’s only a good friend.” She glances at Felix, half-frightened to ask. “I bet you’ve had a string of lovers in St Ives.”

  “I’ve had one or two affairs here, but nothing serious… There was a girl in Newlyn, older than me. I had a crush on her while I was still at school. Then at my London art college I met Rachel. I liked her, but she loved big cities. Coming to live down here with me was never on the cards.”

  They reach the bottom of St Andrews Street.

  “The trouble is—” Felix hesitates. “It’s crazy, I know, but I loved Mama so much and then she vanished. I’m frightened of falling in love in case the woman who steals my heart switches herself off like a light, and leaves me on my own again in silence and darkness.”

  That evening it rains. Eleanor sits in the picture house with Felix, watching Richard Tauber in Heart’s Desire. Before the film, a Pathé Gazette newsreel, announced by the crowing cockerel, has shown brief retrospective snippets of the Prince of Wales’ life: on the Italian front in 1917, talking to soldiers; on tour in Canada in 1919, surrounded by adoring women; visiting a miner’s home in County Durham in 1929. He was not only the people’s prince but the people’s friend, concerned about the problems of poverty, anxious to alleviate the miners’ plight.

  As they walk back to The Hideaway, Eleanor tells Felix how ironic it is that the new King is always shown on the British news without Wallis Simpson. Felix has never heard of her.

  “But surely, the King will marry her and keep his throne,” he says when Eleanor describes the royal affair. “He’ll get the best divorce lawyer for Wallis, and wriggle his way around the establishment’s rules and regulations. We’ll have a Queen Wallis by this time next year. Edward is popular here. We’d never allow him to give up everything for a woman, even if she is an American divorcée.”

  Sitting as a model is a new experience for Eleanor.

  She learns how to remain still and silent for several hours at a time, watching Felix work, his face intent and serious, his hair flopping onto his forehead. She listens to the scrape of his charcoal, seagulls calling to the wind and sky. She imagines how he and Walter would have walked and talked together, and wonders what might have happened if Moira had ever returned. Would her father have offered his wife and daughter belated explanations and raced back to his first love, rejoicing?

  On Friday afternoon, after luncheon, Eleanor and Felix take the cliff path towards Zennor, returning an hour later for tea at The Hideaway, windswept and glowing. Eleanor’s lips taste of the salt of the sea.

  On Saturday afternoon, Eleanor catches the bus in St Ives. It rumbles through Carbis Bay, across the fields of Lelant and Hayle, to the boats and bustle of Penzance.

  “If you want me to jig up and down with you, I’ll have to go shopping.”

  She finds a small dress-shop on the High Street in Penzance and chooses a frock made of red taffeta with a plunging neckline, tight sleeves and a full skirt. It swishes when she moves, filling her with excitement. Silk stockings and a pair of black patent-leather pumps complete the outfit.

  Back in The Hideaway, she battles with hot water and the bath tub, washing her hair, scrubbing her back and singing “If You Were the Only Girl in the World” to the kitchen walls. She tries unsuccessfully to banish the weird feeling she always has in the basement kitchen of some terrifying ghost.

  True to his word, Felix dances Eleanor off her feet.

  As he whirls her around the floor, his eyes shining with delight, his arm firmly around her waist, Eleanor realises that for the few days in which she’s known him, Felix has taken over her world. She has scarcely thought about Anne or Vera or Jonny, and she pushes to one side all thoughts of her return to Woodstock.

  But as Sunday drifts into Monday and then Tuesday, Eleanor knows she’ll have to tear herself away from a man who has become increasingly important to her: and from feelings strange and new.

  They spend Sunday morning quietly in Driftwood. He tells her that most people in St Ives are devout Weslyans who assiduously keep the Sabbath, refusing to allow any boats to be launched, or artists to pitch their easels on the harbour. One miscreant who had disobeyed, and had sat sketching the French crabbers with their bracken-coloured sails, was hurled unceremoniously into the Sunday sea.

  Eleanor laughs. Felix’s eyes sparkle in response.

  Monday’s skies are dark. After luncheon Eleanor and Felix are forced back from their walk towards Zennor by a driving wind and heavy rain. Thunder begins to rumble deep in the darkening skies.

  Felix clutches Eleanor’s hand. “Storms frighten me,” he confesses. “They remind me of the day Mama disappeared, of the journey Walter and I made, stumbling home without her. Let’s get back as fast as we can.”

  In The Hideaway, Felix flings off his mackintosh, his face wet with rain.

  Eleanor goes down to the kitchen to dry her hair and make a tray of tea. When she carries it upstairs to the living room, Felix has fallen asleep on the sofa.

  For half an hour Eleanor sits opposite him, her eyes on his face, the long lines of his body, his slender hands. She watches the rise and fall of his shirt. She realises with a beating heart how much she wants the past few days to continue, exactly as they have, in the same timeless pattern, without change or interruption from the world…

  A seagull swoops onto the balcony. Its piercing call wakes Felix.

  He gives a start, meeting Eleanor’s eyes, smiling at her, stretching out his arms.

  “How rude of me… I’m so sorry… You should have woken me.”

  And in that single fleeting moment, Eleanor realises she is deeply in love.

  On Tuesday afternoon, after Eleanor’s final sitting, they eat together in The Copper Kettle. Felix walks her back to the cottage.

  “I’ll help you load Walter’s paintings into your car. But I won’t stay. I hate goodbyes. I’ll keep everything short and sweet.” Felix pushes his hair out of his eyes. “And please, Eleanor, keep your keys. If you ever want to come back here, The Hideaway will always be your home.”

  Eleanor watches Felix walk away down St Andrews Street, willing him to turn and wave to her, retrace his steps, run towards her, catch her in his arms.

  But he does not look back.

  She closes the front door, biting her lip, forces herself to climb the stairs. She opens the wardrobe, pulls out her clothes, folds them into her suitcase, the red taffeta frock on top. She’d worn it on Sunday morning, too.

  “I must paint you in that!”

  She cleans the kitchen floor, throws away some mouldy cheese and slices of stale bread. She leaves the tins of tea, coffee and sugar, the ginger biscuits in their packet. She’s only too aware she’s handing over The Hideaway to Felix, not merely closing it down. She dusts the living room, rakes the fire, fills the bucket with fresh coal. She stares at the gaps where Walter’s paintings had hung, and rearranges Moira’s watercolours on a single wall.

  Eleanor hangs the last one with a sigh of relief, but she’s enchanted by its sharp beauty. It’s a still life of a melon, cut jaggedly in half, sitting in its oval dish on a table surrounded by two russet apples and a banana. The skins and flesh of the fruit gleam against a curtain patterned with cornflowers. Eleanor imagines Moira working on it in the studio, Felix playing at her feet, Walter beside them sketching a new portrait.

  A happy family on a normal day? Or one on the verge of disintegration?

  Swiftly, uncomfortably, Eleanor turns away from the painting, trying to ignore her thoughts. The silence is deafening and terrible. The mantelpiece clock chimes six.

  And suddenly Eleanor cannot bear The Hideaway without Felix a minute longer. Everywhere she looks, she can see him. His red woollen scarf, with its faint scent of turpentine, ha
ngs on a peg. His notebook lies on the table, a box of charcoal beside it. His battered slippers crouch by the hearth. Eleanor remembers him peering out of the window to check the weather; rifling through the papers in Moira’s bureau; bending to light the fire, pouring a cup of tea. Lying on the sofa, asleep.

  And then she remembers the moment he’d woken, stretching out his arms and smiling up at her. Her moment of absolute certainty.

  Perhaps she should climb into the Morris this very minute? Escape before she could say or do something she might live to regret?

  She drags her suitcase down the stairs. By the front door she hesitates, paralysed, confused, her heart thumping with indecision.

  And then she knows she’s leaving – not for her car and the steering wheel. An inner voice says to her: You have a choice. Choose. Quickly. This very minute. Take courage. Choose now…

  She lets go of the suitcase, flings on her coat, snatches up her bag. She closes the front door and locks it, her fingers trembling with impatience. She starts to race down St Andrews Street, along Fore Street, into The Digey, praying that Felix will be home. If he’s already in The Sloop, she’ll feel too shy to find him.

  But as she rounds the corner to Driftwood, she sees Felix hurtling towards her.

  She says, “Thank God… There’s something I meant to tell you—” but he takes her in his arms, pressing his fingers to her lips.

  “Let me speak first.”

  She struggles in his embrace. “I should have said—” She looks into his eyes.

  Felix says, “I loved you from the moment I saw you in the doorway of The Hideaway.”

  Eleanor catches her breath with joy.

  “I love you for listening with such compassion to the story of my beautiful Mama. I love you for the way you sat for me, in such silence and stillness, lost in your thoughts. I love how you walk, and the way you told me about your life, and ate fishcakes and treacle tart. I loved you dancing in that stunning red frock. I love you for the way you turn your head to think. For the dimples that tuck shadows into your cheeks… And now I love you more than ever because you’re leaving me.”