and was gone.
Mark started his engine. The wind had got up, whipping the sea into white. He did not like the thought of her driving into the wilds of nowhere in the dark, in what looked like an unreliable car. It was a long time since he had had the chance to feel protective about anyone.
He thought about the lights of a farmhouse with people he did not know waiting for her and felt a pang of jealousy. He could not ring her, and there was a chance she would not find the courage to ring him. He knew this. A day can fade so easily, changing shape, becoming an amorphous thing, a trick of the imagination.
Back in his hotel room, he undid the two small paintings and sat on the bed staring at them.
Cottage before a Storm. There, in front of him, the inherent, inescapable dark night of the soul. Spirituality glimpsed. A loneliness so stark it had to be skilfully transformed into colour and paint; the dark shape of pain captured forever in violent colour. Too recognizable for comfort.
Something lost. This small house dwarfed by the fierce landscape and angry sky, rendering all to a speck, as nothing, impotent to change one aspect of the hidden power of the elements or the isolation of the human spirit.
To understand what it is you have lost. To recognize so suddenly an area of your life you have hidden from yourself; an unease, a pointlessness that has been threatening for some time, is unnerving. Mark, his imagination coloured by whisky, almost believed he had been led to this painting, convinced himself this picture had been painted just for him. An omen. Facing the demon within. He determined to write to this Elan Premore, to explain the impact this small painting had on him.
The sunrise was for another day. The sunrise was full of hope. These two pictures were painted before and after some personal crisis. They belonged together, Mark was sure of this.
Charlie, washing his hands at the sink, turned his wrist to look at his watch.
‘Shouldn’t Gabby be home by now?’ he asked Nell.
‘Any moment, I should think.’ Nell was getting a casserole out of the Aga and peering at it. ‘The last helicopter is about seven or seven-thirty. Is Matt doing the milking?’
‘No; Darren. Matt’s been out at Mendely with me all day today, he’s whacked, I’ve sent him home to Dora.’
‘Oh dear,’ Nell said, ‘I’m sure to bump into Dora in the village.’
‘He’s not as young as he used to be …’ Nell and Charlie intoned together. ‘I hope your Charlie isn’t taking advantage.’ They grinned at each other.
‘I’m dreading him retiring,’ Charlie said, reaching for a towel. ‘The younger lads just don’t have the interest or staying power.’
Nell finished stirring the casserole and put it back in the oven. ‘You can’t blame them, Charlie; low wages, long days in all weathers.’
‘I don’t,’ Charlie said. ‘I just can’t afford to pay more. You’d think the incentive of a tied cottage would be attractive, but not in the middle of nowhere, it seems. I look after those cottages, too. You should see the state of the accommodation John Tresider offers his workers. His houses have to be seen to be believed. It gives all farmers a bad name.’
‘Then it’s a disgrace,’ Nell said crossly. ‘There’s no excuse, they got a huge grant last year. His father was as bad. He couldn’t keep his workers either. I’m surprised the environmental health people haven’t been round to condemn them.’
‘It’s only a matter of time.’
This was a conversation Nell and Charlie often had in different guises, and both fell into comfortably.
The wind hit the window in a sudden squall.
‘I wonder where Gabby’s got to. It’s getting late and there’s a gale coming in. I’m just going out to check on Darren.’
‘Charlie?’ Nell knew Charlie liked everyone safely in before dusk and as Gabby did not like driving in the dark. She was not often late. ‘I do think it’s about time Gabby had a new car. She’s starting to go further afield now and that old Peugeot is not reliable. She really needs something with a large boot to hold paintings.’
Charlie was irritated because he knew Nell was right.
‘Nell, I can’t afford to buy a new car at the moment.’
‘Look, Charlie, Gabby puts everything she earns into the farm. If she didn’t, she could afford a new car for herself. Doesn’t that strike you as rather unfair?’
‘No, Nell. It’s how we survive. We have to pull together like you and Dad did. Gabby only has to ask, you know that, she doesn’t go without.’
Nell stared at him. Sometimes it was hard to swallow her frustration or stifle a sharp retort. It did no good. It had alienated Ted and it alienated Charlie. Once entrenched, neither would budge an inch, and she was never sure whether it was obstinacy or misplaced pride.
In her marriage to Ted she had perfected a duplicity which she guiltily maintained over the years of her marriage. Like Gabby, she had pooled her income back into the farm willingly, but she had withheld a small amount each month for her own needs. She had bitterly resented having to ask Ted for things from money she herself had earnt.
When she had first married she had been nineteen and in those days she was unable to open a bank account until she was twenty-one. For her twentieth birthday she had desperately wanted a portable radio. Her parents had sent her a large cheque so that she could choose her own. Ted had cashed the cheque, but when she found the radio she wanted he refused to let her have the money. He told her it was a sheer waste to spend that much on a radio. He bought her a cheap plastic one and the rest went towards a new bailer.
Nell never forgot or forgave him. The meanness froze her heart. Her mother coming to stay and seeing the cheap radio had been quietly livid. Her generous and liberal parents never made the same mistake again. They had, all their lives, schooled Nell for a career and independence. Even as a child Nell had always had a small allowance and it taught her to budget. From the age of sixteen she had never had to ask anyone for anything. The marriage her parents had thoroughly disapproved of had been a shock.
Nell, on the rebound, had married young, full of hope, captured by a good-looking face; seduced by a long hot Cornish summer and Ted’s single-minded intent which she had mistaken for devotion.
When she became twenty-one she had persuaded Ted it would be a good idea to have a joint account so that she could write cheques on behalf of the farm. Eventually, as she was doing the farm accounts, he had reluctantly agreed, but had made their joint account a business account, while keeping the personal account in his own name, thus keeping control of all domestic transactions. Even then he had perused each statement for evidence of female waste or frippery, but when he saw none he had relaxed.
What he did not know was that Nell often asked to be paid in cash for her restoring, and this money she placed in her own secret account.
‘Good girl,’ her friend Olive had said. ‘Every woman should have a running-away account.’
From then onwards it was Nell’s R.A. account. When Ted died and she saw the amount in his personal bank accounts, she stopped feeling guilty. She just felt sad at a lifetime of endemic meanness. They had had to work so hard all their marriage, then when they could both have slowed down and relaxed, enjoyed what they had, he had let her go on believing they owed the bank money.
He had not even been able to enjoy the money himself, just given himself an early heart attack. She realized she had never really ‘done the accounts’ for Ted, just faithfully added up the milk quota and feed bills Ted put in front of her.
Later, when sadness turned to anger, she had been glad