Band of Angel (9 page)

Eleri Holdsworth’s house was built in the side of a hill, with an uninterrupted view of the sea. As the gate closed behind her with a click, Catherine felt suddenly nervous and almost changed her mind. Then she saw Eleri, sitting on her own outside her cottage, perfectly still in a battered chair. Beside her, a table with a drink on it, some paint, and what looked like a bundle of sketches. It would be rude to turn back now.

“Good afternoon, Miss Holdsworth.” She had to shout above the sound of the sea. “Forgive me . . . are you working?”

Eleri looked at her calmly. “Yes, but I’m very happy to see you.” The hand she put on Juno’s shoulder was sunburned and splattered with paint.

“I’ll take him. You go inside and make yourself at home.”

She pointed toward the door and Catherine walked into the cottage to find herself in a kind of studio-cum-bedroom with a beamed roof and simple whitewashed walls. The worktable, on which were neatly arranged sheets of paper, pens, and paints, was set in a bay window overlooking a huge sweep of sea and dominated the room. Beside it were bookshelves bursting with books, a collection of bird feathers arranged in three small glass vases, and some seashells.

“I like your room,” she said when Eleri joined her.

“I too,” said Eleri. “Would you like a glass of elderflower cordial?”

“Thank you,” murmured Catherine. She sat down on the bed, but leaped up with a screech as her hand encountered something bristly and alive.

“Oh dear, I’m sorry, it’s Flo.” Eleri pulled a badger out from under the cushions. “The hunt gave her to me; one of the hounds holed her up by mistake. She likes to get me up at midnight to run around in circles on the cliff tops.”

Catherine smiled at the thought of this old lady (Eleri was at least fifty) dancing in the dark with a badger. Mother would have loved that.

“That’s better, your face looked as long as a boot before. Now
take your hat off and unlace your boots. You’re trussed up like a chicken.” She smiled as she left the room, and came back carrying a tray with two glasses of cordial and a plate of bread and jam. Then, to Catherine’s amazement, she sat down on the floor beside the fire, stretched her legs out like a man, and lit a pipe.

“Now,” she said, “we can listen to the waves or we can talk. You choose.”

To give herself time, Catherine asked Eleri how she came to live here. Eleri told her that ever since she was about three or four she had wanted to be a painter. Each summer, her family had rented a house in Aberdaron, and one day, while out sketching with her father, a London surgeon, she had seen this house for sale.

“It had six acres and cost twenty-five pounds, and as soon as I saw it, I said, ‘Papa, I’ve found my place,’ and to his credit, he gave me the money and allowed me to stay.”

“What a very remarkable man,” said Catherine. “But, forgive me asking you, why did he let you stay? It must have been very unusual then. I mean . . . now as well, too. But it was a long time ago . . . oh dear.”

“It’s all right,” said Eleri, laughing at her confusion. “He was,
is
remarkable. He’s a great supporter of women and a good surgeon and he watches people very closely and with great interest. Do you remember the Parable of the Talents? Well, it’s still his favorite. He believes that people who ignore their gifts do so at great peril to themselves. Your mother, incidentally, I might put into this category. Have a look at that picture over there, near the door. She painted it.”

“She painted it!” Catherine couldn’t have been more amazed. “Are you sure?”

“She came up to sit for me. I liked her a great deal, we talked, and at the end of our sessions she asked if she could sketch me.”

“But it’s good.” It was a charcoal sketch, a few dashed lines, but she’d caught in them the shrewd kindness of Eleri’s expression, the wildness of her hair.

“It’s very good,” said Eleri. “I told her so at the time, but she didn’t believe me.”

Catherine’s hands were trembling with emotion. Her mother had done this painting.

“Was she good enough to be a painter? I mean, more than a woman who painted?”

“I’m not sure.” Eleri puffed on her pipe as she thought about this. “Very difficult to say: a gift doesn’t just turn up while you sleep like a ha’penny from the tooth fairy. It’s a decision, part of the journey of your life, something that you must seek and work hard for and be ruthless about once you have found it. I did some poor man a very great service by not trying to make myself into a wife. I would have been a monster. Now—” Eleri seemed not to do small talk. “What about your mother? I should have painted her more . . . she was so beautiful . . . you, too . . . shame, shame.”

Catherine left a gap here for her to say the usual things about going on to better places . . . heavenly rests and so forth, but Eleri just kept on smoking, one hand wrapped around her knee.

“I was with her at the end, when she died.”

“Oh good, a great relief, a bonus,” said Eleri. “Did you not find it so?”

“No. I was hopeless,” said Catherine. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“A-hum.” More smoke curling around Eleri’s head and a sudden boom from the waves hitting the rocks outside.

“Now my aunt lives with us. She is . . .” Catherine searched for words that might convey the meals, the sulks, the furniture-moving. “It is so different and difficult. We miss Mother dreadfully.” She felt disloyal but had a great need to clear her head.

“I keep feeling I must go away. I’m so restless; I’m driven to distraction by the sound of the drovers leaving. Do you hear them from here? You do! And oh, I don’t know, I feel a great longing to go somewhere where I can learn. Where people talk. Nobody talks at home anymore.”

Eleri looked at her for a while, then took a long drink.

“Have you ever been to Bardsey Island?” she asked eventually. “You can see it from this window if you stand on a box.”

Catherine felt a wave of anger and embarrassment wash over her. She had opened her heart, and now this good woman was going to try and distract her with scenic wonders.

“I will take you there one day if you like,” said Eleri.

“That would be very kind,” said Catherine numbly. She wished she could leave now.

“It is supposed to be a magic island: twenty thousand saints buried there—or two thousand, depending on who you are talking to—people for centuries walking from all over Britain to get there. They say Merlin the Magician is buried there inside a glass house.”

She talked on for a while about other magic islands, places with trees that were always in bloom, filled with birds that never stopped singing. Catherine saw her mouth moving but hardly heard a word. If she was late home Father would never let her out again.

“The Welsh, all of us, love these stories,” she went on. “They take our minds away from how hard life really is—again, it’s the idea of life suddenly turning up ready-made for you like a present left at the door.”

A sharp wind had got up and was rattling the windows and outside, even though the sun was shining, it had started raining.

“Ah,” said Eleri, getting up to close the window, “sun and rain together. The Devil, or so another legend goes, is beating his wife.” Her eyes were shining now in the darkening room. “But if thunder is heard while the moon is shining, the devil is beating his mother. To a Celt, the Devil is almost as important an idea as the idea of God.”

“I think I really must go home,” said Catherine.

“And God help you if you find the Water Horse,” said Eleri, “he looks so lovely and he’s deadly.”

“Do you believe in him?” Catherine was interested at last. “I think about him every time I see the sea.”

“No.” She put down her pipe. “No, I don’t. But I do believe he shows us what we fear.”

“What?”

“Well, there he is: beautiful, extraordinary. He stands placidly by the water’s edge. We try to mount him, and sometimes you can ride him and you feel so powerful, so wonderful, and the next time he bolts back into the sea with you and you die a horrible and frightening death. What could be clearer?” Eleri’s eyes were shining in the dusk. “It’s our fear of being out of control. He’s the one who tells you to stick with the ordinary, don’t move, everything else is
dangerous and nothing possible, but the problem is that if you fear everything you can’t control, you’ll never do anything that matters to you.”

When Catherine looked up Eleri was frowning at her. “You are very self-absorbed,” she said. “Many people of your age are. Let us suppose for a moment that you did have a hand in your mother’s death. What have you done about it since? I mean, apart from walking on the cliffs and feeling misunderstood.”

“I have a plan,” Catherine said angrily. “That’s why I’m here.”

“All right, I’ll keep my mouth shut,” said Eleri. “I talk too much. It’s one disadvantage of being on your own.”

“No, don’t.” Catherine leaned across and touched Eleri’s hand. “Please don’t stop.”

“Well?”

“Well—” Her mouth went dry. “I want to be a doctor. I do know your father is a surgeon and I want to go to London,” she blurted out. “I want to be a doctor. I want to save some woman somewhere from the misery my mother went through. She shouldn’t have died like that.”

“Lots of women do.”

“I know.”

The room grew quiet for a while, only the boom of the sea.

“I used to watch you sometimes,” Eleri said eventually, “with that drover’s boy on the cliff. I heard you once tell him your pony had a toothache, you’d tied its jaw in a bandage.”

“Oh no.” Catherine covered her face in confusion.

“No, no, no, don’t. It was so charming, it made my day to see it, and then you both bolted down the beach to pick up some more patients. How you survived I’ll never know. All that rushing into the sea with wooden swords.”

“Oh dear.” Catherine went scarlet.

“Don’t be embarrassed, you were such warriors. It did my heart good to see you.”

Catherine looked at her. “So what do you think?”

“Oh Lord.” Eleri sighed. “Now you’ve absolutely ruined the point of my little homily by setting yourself an impossible task. There aren’t any woman doctors.”

“There must be.”

“One, Catherine. One, I think, in the whole of London. My father knows her, she’s an ancient spinster like me and as fierce as a man. I’m sorry, there is no point in encouraging you to do something that will ruin you.”

“Are there any other proper jobs for women in London?”

“You could be a governess, but again what a life! My father visits at a place in Harley Street. I can’t remember the exact name—a something, something, for the care of Sick Gentlewomen in Distressed Circumstances. He says they’re such sad creatures— exhausted, poor.”

“But at least a life of their own.”

“To some extent, though most would prefer someone else’s.”

“But they earn their own living.”

“They earn their own living.”

“Who runs that home?”

“I know nothing about her, apart from the fact that father says she is well-born and quite bossy.”

“Perhaps I could stay there, a respectable place.”

“Yes, respectable.” Eleri stood up and lit a lamp.

“You did what you wanted to do, even though it seemed mad to everyone else.”

“Look, Catherine,” said Eleri. “It’s not impossible, nothing is, and if you are not afraid of going down the social ladder you might gain practical experience as a nurse and study as you go along. But I can’t recommend it as a way of life—” She broke off. “Have you spoken to your father about the idea?”

“No.” Catherine’s heart sank. “He won’t be in favor of it.”

“My father would be,” said Eleri suddenly. “He believes that it is high time nursing attracted more respectable people. He is also that rare thing: a man who genuinely admires women.”

“Might I speak to him?” Catherine cried.

“Possibly.”

“Can I come and see you again?”

“Yes, but don’t come in the morning, I like to paint then.” It was the first time Catherine had ever heard a woman state how a day could be arranged to suit herself. She took one of Eleri’s brown,
paint-flecked hands in her own and kissed it. “Thank you,” she said.

At the bend in the road, she turned in her saddle to wave. Eleri was at the gate.

“Good luck,” Eleri shouted. “Be brave.”

The wind blew back her white hair, revealing the pink of her scalp. Against the vast sky and empty fields, even handsome, vigorous Eleri looked small and temporary. But soon she would walk back into her house and turn up the lamp and begin her work.

Catherine rode down the track to the beach where a lump of lichen-covered driftwood, about three-foot high, had washed up on the beach. She shortened her reins and pointed Juno toward it. As they gathered speed, her mind, as it always did, flashed to the shock and the pain of a fall, the sand slamming into her wet face. Then the moment of suspended joy as she and Juno whooshed through the air to an elegant landing. So often, the bad things you imagined happening did not, and now she had a way forward, not clear, not easy, but better than staying and going mad. But first she must speak to Deio.

When they were children, he liked building fires for her. When they took the ponies out, his pockets were always stuffed with papers and twigs and a tinderbox. They’d find a hollow, get their food out, and he’d lay down a ring of stones and crumple the paper, crisscross the wood, and select this or that bit of driftwood to wedge it all into place. When they sat in front of the flames, he’d take note of the tall cliffs, and the mountains behind them, and the sea below, and a feeling of quiet ecstasy would come to him and an idea that he would protect her forever.