Chapter 8
If Cora told herself it was fresh air and wide spaces she was after, well then, that was true enough.
The grass around the hut had been neatly cut recently and the daisies and dandelions had not yet grown back. As far as Cora could tell, the place was deserted.
She stared at it from the path and then made her way towards it carefully, treading down the brambles to reach the green railings.
She clutched them till her knuckles whitened and rested her hot face against the sun-warmed bars.
If she squinted hard enough at the dusty windows she fancied she would see the German prisoners moving inside and they would notice her and stop what they were doing and cluster at the window, seeing her as a brief reminder of what they were missing back home.
Holding onto the fence, she closed her stinging eyes.
She felt old and heavy. She was exhausted.
She desperately wanted to go home to bed, close the curtains and slip out of the day unnoticed, but she couldn’t face seeing Elisavet again, not right now, anyway; she’d had as much emotion as she could deal with.
She walked slowly around the perimeter of the camp, killing time.
She reached the road and plodded along to the Spar shop where she wandered up and down the aisles and in the end bought a Battenberg cake.
She went to the library, sat at one of the tables, and broke bits off the cake surreptitiously while reading the local papers.
What a world, the things people got up to, bad and good.
After a while she felt it was safe to go home.
The kitchen smelled of Flash. The white envelope lay on the table where she’d left it and when she picked it up she realised immediately that Elisavet’s cash was still inside. ‘Hello?’ she called out cautiously.
No reply.
She went from room to room, and each one had that wonderful glossy purity about it that Elisavet brought to her home. Which meant she’d cleaned, but hadn’t taken the payment. Because of the Royal Doulton boy, of course.
Cora checked the pedal bin for the pieces but it was empty apart from a fresh bin liner. ‘More complications,’ she said aloud.
She looked in the kitchen drawer for Elisavet’s card from Mr Patel’s, with the address, 15 Queen’s Lane, the phone number and the instruction: Ask for Jelisaveta. She picked up the phone and it occurred to her that, in the circumstances, Elisavet might not want to take a call from her.
She put the envelope and the money in her bag with a sigh, and reluctantly postponing the peaceful comfort of home, she left the house again.
Heading to Elisavet’s, Cora stopped on the Old Bridge that crossed the River Ogmore. She leant her weight against the sun-warmed stone, grounding herself for a few moments, watching the silver river tumble on its ceaseless journey towards the sea.
She always found the bridge’s great age and permanence profoundly reassuring. It put her troubles into perspective, knowing it had been here for centuries before she existed, surviving floods and bombs, horses and footfall, and would be here long after she had gone.
It was on the pilgrims’ route to St David’s Cathedral and she imagined tired feet driven by light hearts as they trudged over these cobbles in their quest for help with life’s difficulties.
Treading the same path, she straightened up with determined optimism and patted the bridge wall fondly. ‘Old friend.’
Queen’s Lane was a thoroughfare rather than a destination.
For some reason the house numbers went up on one side and down on the other, no rhyme nor reason to them.
Number fifteen was in the middle of a terrace.
The small front garden was paved over, green with moss and decorated by a rusted bicycle frame chained to a drainpipe.
Cora rang the bell and listened to it echo inside. It was some minutes before the door was opened by a skinny, bare-chested man in baggy jeans who looked dazed, as if he’d just woken up.
‘Who are you?’ he asked her accusingly, as if he’d been expecting someone different altogether and she’d appeared under false pretences.
‘Is Elisavet in, please?’
‘Number three,’ he said, pointing with his elbow and jerking his head for her to come in.
Cora hadn’t given any thought to where Elisavet might live.
It took her a moment to adjust to the shabby gloom in the hall.
She’d assumed it would be some spotless haven, clean and shiny, rather than somewhere with scuffed skirting boards, a plasterboard wall punched in and a door with a splintered lock.
The shirtless man stood in his doorway, watching her suspiciously with his thumbs curling in his belt loops as she knocked on the door of number three.
There was enough of a gap that she could slide the envelope under the door and she was bending down to do just that when the door opened and Elisavet was standing over her.
Crouched, Cora saw a wheelie suitcase lying open on a single bed with an orange bedcover.
Despite its narrowness, the bed seemed to take up half the available space and all Cora’s grief, fear and indignation over that spiteful sweep of the yellow duster faded as she straightened up with the money in her hand. ‘You forgot this.’
The balance of their relationship shifted again.
Who was this woman? Cleaning lady, lawyer, refugee. Each time, Cora had adjusted her manner to suit, but now suddenly she had the peculiar feeling that she’d slipped into Elisavet’s skin: she could feel her dark hair loose around her face, her chin high and stubborn, her eyes old and angry at fate.
Cora saw herself through Elisavet’s eyes – a mature, grim-faced woman with a quizzical look, holding out the white envelope like a summons or a sacking or a request for compensation.
‘Thank you,’ Elisavet said and took the envelope from her. The edge of the sticking plaster was curling on her finger.
Cora opened her mouth to say not at all, she’d earned it, but she didn’t want to say the wrong thing so she took a deep breath and, with an immense effort of will, managed to say nothing.
Elisavet’s dark eyes were wide and unblinking, as if she too was on the brink of a sentence. She chewed the inside of her cheek, creasing the corner of her mouth.
Their gaze met, flickered uncertainly, settled.
Cora gave a nod and turned to go.
‘I’m sorry,’ she heard Elisavet whisper as she closed the door.
The bare-chested man gave her one last, suspicious look and closed his door too.
‘Right, that’s it,’ Cora said briskly once she was back on the road again. ‘If I don’t talk to someone right now, I’m going to explode.’
She stopped at Gladdie’s on the way home.
Gladdie came to the door wearing a blue-and-white-striped butcher’s apron and holding a paintbrush between two fingers like a cigarette. Her pink hair was anchored back from her face with three hair grips.
‘Come in! I’m making my own greetings cards, I am, Cora,’ she explained. ‘￡1.99 your birthday card was, and I bet you hardly looked at it.’
‘Of course I looked at it! It said To a Special Friend. Some kind of a patched-up stuffed toy on it, holding a bunch of flowers.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s on my windowsill.’
‘Is it?’ Gladdie was gratified. ‘Fair play then. I take it back.’
‘I’ve come about Elisavet, I have,’ Cora said, following Gladdie into the kitchen.
Gladdie groaned. ‘I knew it was something,’ she said gloomily. ‘She hasn’t been stealing, has she? Because I tell you what, Cora, I don’t want to know. She’s marvellous in the bathroom. She’s got my grout looking like new.’
‘Of course she hasn’t been stealing,’ Cora said irritably. ‘The opposite, in fact.’
‘She’s been leaving you things?’ Gladdie asked smartly, swishing her paintbrush in a murky mug of water.
‘She forgot to take her wages. So I took them round to her and she lives in this hostel in Queen’s Lane, in what I can only describe as a boxroom. Awful for her,’ Cora said. ‘She used to be a lawyer.’
‘She said she did, but she could say anything, couldn’t she?’
‘And she’s a long way from home,’ Cora said, trying to justify Elisavet’s behaviour to herself, but from now on, when Elisavet was around she’d be walking on eggshells.
She leant over the table to look at the card that Gladdie was painting: lurid splashes of red against a brown background.
It looked like a bloody hunting scene in a dark forest. ‘Is that what I think it is?’
‘It’s a robin.’
‘Oh, right. Anyway, I think she’s unhappy, and – she’s a stranger in a strange land. We should do something to cheer her up.’
‘Feel free!’ Gladdie snorted. ‘Don’t you think I’ve tried?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been jovial till my cheeks ached. And Megan’s baked a fruit cake for her, but she wouldn’t touch a slice. I’ll tell you something though, she looked happy enough at your party, didn’t she?’
‘Did she?’ Cora hadn’t noticed, so this statement came as a pleasant revelation. ‘I suppose she’s lonely.’
‘Bound to be,’ Gladdie said. ‘Anyway, what I was going to say before you interrupted was that I’m starting an art club and I’m going to invite her to join, for company.’
This was news to Cora. First she’d heard of it. ‘What do you know about art?’
‘Excuse me! I’m a prize-winning artist, Cora.’
‘Are you? Since when?’
Gladdie left the kitchen and came back moments later and handed her a gilt-framed watercolour in a green mount of the back of her bungalow with the curtains shut. The emerald lawn was neatly cut, and in the foreground a pink rhododendron bush was in full flower.
‘Turn it over, have a look at the back.’
A white sticker read:
The Garden.
Original watercolour by Gladdie E. Griffith.
brIDGEND AND DISTRICT AGRICULTURAL SHOW, August 1987. THIRD PRIZE section F Art class number 39, watercolour.
‘Third prize,’ Cora said soberly. ‘My word, there’s a modest boast for you.’
‘I’d forgotten all about it, to be honest,’ Gladdie said, ‘but Elisavet gave it a good clean and once I’d seen it with new eyes it gave me the inspiration to start the class. I’ll expect you and Megan to come. And Elisavet. Just the four of us to start with, unless it gets popular.’
‘You can leave me out, I can’t paint a picture to save my life,’ Cora said.
‘What are you talking about?’ Gladdie said, exasperated. ‘It’s not about painting! We can show her the countryside, take her to the beach, bring her out of herself. Even you can put a few daubs on a sheet of paper and call it abstract.’
Cora studied Gladdie’s watercolour critically at arm’s length.
It was a nice enough representation of Gladdie’s garden, but no masterpiece, which was encouraging.
‘Abstract,’ she said thoughtfully, putting the picture on the table.
‘I could manage abstract. But you’re not going to start being bossy and critical with us, are you? ’
‘No,’ Gladdie said. ‘As if!’
Cora thought of Elisavet’s small room with the narrow bed. It was true, she could do with getting out a bit. They could show her the countryside and open her up to all the loveliness of it.
‘All right then, as it’s in a good cause you can count me in.’