Trenouth

by Bea Green

  ‘Elinor, are you all right, my love?’ asked Barbara, with concern in her voice.

  Elinor looked up from her painting. As soon as Barbara saw her ravaged face, she dropped her paintbrushes and walked purposefully across to where Elinor was seated.

  Without demanding a word of explanation, she wrapped her arms around Elinor and at that point the floodgates opened. Elinor sobbed uninhibitedly into the comforting arms holding her. Barbara helpfully said nothing, but kept a firm grasp on Elinor’s shaking shoulders.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Barbara, I thought I was ready for this. But I’m not. It’s too painful,’ whispered Elinor, after a while.

  She reached across and grabbed the paper towel she’d been using for her painting. Oblivious to the paint marks on it, she blew her nose and wiped her sticky face. She’d no idea how much time had passed since she’d started crying.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Elinor. This is precisely why you should be doing this. You’re never going to heal if you continue burying things, or running away from them. Avoiding the pain doesn’t heal you. You need this.’

  There was a silence as they sat there, next to each other on the bench, with their arms wrapped around each other. Barbara looked at the painting Elinor had been working on.

  ‘Darling, you’ve got phenomenal talent. I guessed that already from what Leo told me, but still... That’s going to be a beautiful painting. All the more so because of the pain you’ve had to slay in order to do it.’

  Elinor tried to assess the painting impartially. It was shaping itself nicely. As always when she inspected a painting, her fingers itched to amend and change little flaws she alone could identify. She didn’t just work from the photographs but also from the image she would fix in her mind at the start of a painting. That image always stayed with her throughout her art projects, dictating her brushstrokes.

  Elinor sighed and looked at her watch. It was nearly six o’clock.

  ‘I’d best get going or Leo’s going to start worrying about me.’

  Barbara laughed.

  ‘It’ll take a Category 5 typhoon to get that man worried. Stay and have some dinner with me before you go. Let’s leave things on a high note. I’ll text Leo.’

  Elinor nodded submissively. Her tears had left her spent and drained.

  Twenty-five minutes later she was tucking into a beautiful sirloin steak. Barbara had a healthy appetite and expensive taste in food and drink. They drank liberally from a bottle of Camel Valley wine, apparently from an award-winning Cornish vineyard in Bodmin.

  Barbara’s Siamese cat made an appearance, by which Barbara informed Elinor she should be greatly honoured. Apparently, Brindle didn’t make himself known to people unless he felt comfortable about it.

  ‘I’m sure Leo would’ve scared the living daylights out of poor Brindle. He’s got such a very deep voice,’ Barbara said, as she stroked the purring cat.

  ‘Doesn’t he try to jump onto the table?’ asked Elinor, thinking about her remaining piece of steak.

  ‘No, he’s been well brought up. He knows I’ll always offer him leftovers. Plus, with what he catches outside, I suspect he’s full enough.’

  ‘Are there any other members of the household I haven’t met?’ wondered Elinor, looking around surreptitiously to see if there were any photographs (always a clear giveaway) in the kitchen.

  ‘No, I’m afraid it’s just Brindle and me. You must know that I really do sympathise with your feeling of desolation, Elinor. I haven’t always lived here on my own. My partner, Glenn, died six and a half years ago, from bowel cancer. It still feels like yesterday. Sometimes, I wake up at night and instinctively reach over to touch him and then, suddenly, realise he’s not there any more.’

  Elinor looked at Barbara compassionately. She was always so caught up in her own troubles, she’d lost sight of the fact that there were people everywhere going through their own individual traumas.

  ‘I haven’t managed my pain very well, to be honest with you. How did you keep your sanity?’ asked Elinor, quietly.

  ‘I’m a bit of a hermit, so alone time works wonders for me when I’m under pressure. My painting saved me I guess, in that respect. My sister, too. She lives in Penzance, and I’m in daily contact with her.’

  Elinor nodded and drank some more wine. She’d already decided she was going to get a taxi home. Not only was she now over the limit for driving, she could also feel herself getting steadily more lightheaded. Even if she’d tried walking home she’d have become utterly lost within a short space of time.

  It had been such a long, long time since she’d had an alcoholic drink. Mark had died at the hands of a drunk driver and in her rage she’d refused to drink any alcohol since then, but now she was feeling liberated and unrestrained. The shackles of the past had dropped away from her, at least for a brief moment in time. She was going to freely drown her sorrows in some Cornish wine tonight.

  Barbara seemed to be matching her glass by glass, so clearly the pair of them were setting themselves up for a rough ride in the morning.

  It was only later on in the evening that she suddenly remembered the medication she was on and wondered what impact the alcohol would have on it. As far as she could remember, when he’d prescribed her medication the doctor hadn’t warned her about drinking. She decided not to worry about it. Which was an exhilaratingly unusual stance for a hypochondriac like her.

  By this point she was in a taxi and on her way home. She was replete with wine and good food, and feeling she’d made a new friend in Barbara. As the taxi crawled its way around the twisting and narrow corners of the hedged roads, she looked out at the drab winter landscape and decided Cornwall was proving to be her place of healing.

  She smiled to herself. Her mother was going to get a shock when she saw her again.

  23

  At eight thirty the next morning, as the light was beginning to dawn, Elinor was woken up unexpectedly by the loud sound of rotor blades turning.

  For a moment, she wondered if she was hallucinating. Her head was heavy from the wine she’d imbibed the night before with Barbara, and her mouth was dry. Her eyes were sore, too, no doubt also craving some moisture.

  After a minute listening to the peculiar noise, she jumped out of bed and pulled back the curtains.

  She gasped.

  In front of her was a helicopter, hovering right above Warren Cove. On the edge of the cliff, at a safe distance from the helicopter, she could see the bulky figure of her uncle.

  She scrambled over to her chest of drawers and pulled on the first items of clothing she came across. She bundled her hair into a woolly hat, fully aware that the draft from the helicopter’s blades was going to be turbulent. She wanted to see what was going on and didn’t want to get blinded by her long hair slapping her in the face.

  She ran out into the chill morning air and circled the house, making her way to the Cornish hedge. She leapt and scrambled up the uneven side of it. Soon she was sitting up on the wall’s grass-padded top. Securely on her perch, she looked up at the machine thundering above her.

  Outside, without the cushioning of the double-glazed windows, the noise of the helicopter was deafening.

  The helicopter appeared to be winching up a red padded sleeping bag on its rope. Inside the bag there was, very clearly, a human body.

  Leo was coming along the cliff towards her. The expression on his face was harshly rigid. She could see that even from a distance. She wondered what was going on.

  She turned and continued to watch the helicopter.

  Slowly and painstakingly, the sleeping bag reached the helicopter’s open door, and then suddenly it disappeared into its cavernous stomach. The helicopter continued to hover above the cove and it was evident it was communicating with someone down below. Shortly afterwards a rope, with a harness attached, was dropped down from the helicopter into the cove a
gain.

  Elinor was surprised. She’d expected to see the helicopter fly straight off to hospital with its injured casualty. She was struggling to figure out what was going on. Surely if someone was injured they’d be off by now?

  Instead the helicopter winched up another man from the cove. He was latched into a secure harness and was hanging and turning in the air like a curious mobile. This man had on a bright orange jumpsuit and a helmet, so he was obviously one of the rescue workers.

  Once he’d been carefully winched up into the helicopter, it tilted at an angle and flew rapidly away into the horizon.

  Elinor watched it until it was just a minuscule black dot in the sky and then turned to Leo, who was standing on the other side of the wall.

  ‘What the hell was that all about?’

  ‘That was a neighbour, apparently. I didn’t know him. He lived down at that house,’ Leo said grimly, pointing with his finger at a two-storey, grey stone house, a little further down the slope, and a little nearer to Pepper Cove and Treyarnon Bay than they were.

  ‘Was? Are you saying he’s died?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes. He’d been battling terminal cancer for some time. He couldn’t take it any more and, so they tell me, he decided to take matters into his own hands last night.’

  Elinor looked at him in horror.

  ‘Do you mean he took his own life?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. He threw himself over the cliff edge, with his dog too, apparently. That’s what the police said earlier this morning. At least it’s been early enough not to attract any rubberneckers. Apart from the two of us, that is.’

  Stunned and shaken, Elinor stared fixedly at the cliff edge, as though by doing so she’d get more answers. But all there was now, in the empty space above Warren Cove, was a solitary seagull floating on a buoyant cushion of air rising up from the cove below.

  Her mind, wayward as ever, refused to focus on the reality of the situation. All she could do was to wonder, irrationally, why this neighbour hadn’t chosen a cove nearer his own house. Why right outside their home? And why did he take his poor dog with him? The whole situation was hideous.

  Leo stood next to her, standing as still and immobile as a heron. With his thick grey muffler wrapped around his neck and his grey wool coat, he didn’t look unlike one, either.

  ‘The government really has to start to listen to people suffering from terminal illnesses. It should introduce changes to the laws in this country,’ commented Leo, eventually. ‘People should have the right to choose how to die when they face terminal illnesses and a high degree of physical discomfort.’

  Elinor didn’t say anything. Mark’s life had been snuffed out in an instant. It seemed to cheapen the value of one’s life to go that quickly, so she was inclined to think life must be worth fighting for.

  She shuffled around so she was no longer facing the cliff. She felt strangely empty and hollow. She was stunned to think someone would have had the resolution to jump off a cliff edge like this one. What kind of pain must he have been carrying inside?

  Leo had his back to the cliff too and was looking pensively down at the grey house, which seemed peaceful and ordinary enough at this early morning hour.

  The field in front of their house was covered in a silver sheen of dewdrops. The cows had their heads down to the grass, oblivious to the dramatic scene that had unfolded a few metres away. Elinor wondered if they’d had a fright when the helicopter appeared. If so, they now seemed remarkably composed.

  ‘No one should ever feel that they have to take matters into their own hands. There are better ways to die than throwing yourself off a cliff. We treat animals with more compassion, in that respect, than humans. If they’re suffering we put them down...’ muttered Leo angrily to himself.

  ‘You seem to have very strong opinions on the matter, Leo,’ commented Elinor, surprised to see her normally placid uncle so worked up.

  ‘Yes, I do, I’m afraid. My grandfather, that’s your great-grandfather, had motor neurone disease. Basically, you end up suffocating to death. He would’ve liked a say on how his life ended but he had no choice. And I know I don’t want anyone keeping me alive, at any cost, when my time comes.’

  Elinor pondered this for a while and in the end decided she agreed, for the most part, with her uncle.

  She felt humans craved control over their lives and so often didn’t have it. No one expects to be diagnosed with a terminal illness, but once they are, giving people a measure of control and choice over their demise was bound to give some relief from the agony of uncertainty.

  So many were ready to let go, but were waiting at the whim of their physical bodies. Nursing homes were bunged full of residents, living a limited, imprisoned life, and kept going with a cocktail of medication and medical care that preserved life when there was no longer any quality to it.

  Leo started to stamp his feet vigorously, as though suddenly realising how cold he was.

  ‘I’m sorry for being so morose, Elinor. Let’s go inside and get the kettle on. We could do with some coffee and warm toast. Things like this take time, and reflection, to recover from.’

  ‘I totally agree with you on that one. I’m not going to forget this in a hurry, if ever,’ said Elinor, jumping down from the wall and wincing at the excruciating pain erupting in her head when she hit the ground. ‘Actually, I could do with a full cooked breakfast this morning, Leo. Would you fancy some? I’ve got a raging hangover.’

  Leo looked at her in surprise, but tactfully didn’t say anything. It wasn’t clear if he approved or not, but, as ever, he avoided interfering. Which is exactly what Elinor loved about him.

  24

  Later on that morning, Elinor stood on the slate steps outside Trenouth for a moment, before bending down and tying the shoelaces on her trainers a little bit tighter. She knew she was procrastinating, as she always did before a jog. Even though she’d become a lot fitter recently, she still found it a challenge to motivate herself to go out running.

  She’d resolved this dilemma by sticking an unattractive photo of herself in a swimsuit on her bedroom mirror. Looking at it usually did the job.

  On her first run along the coast, she’d only managed ten minutes before she was wheezing like an asthmatic. Ignoring the concerned looks of other walkers on the clifftop, she’d carried on running, determined to break the barriers her lungs and heart were putting up. She was sure at some point her protesting heart was going to give up on her, but fortunately it didn’t.

  It wasn’t many days before she was finding, to her surprise, she’d reached a level of endurance she didn’t know she was capable of.

  After the horrible start to the morning when they’d been witness to a lifeless body being uplifted from their cove, both Leo and Elinor had gulped down a hearty amount of food for breakfast. They’d savoured each mouthful, each silently recognising that their deceased neighbour would no longer have the pleasure of doing so.

  But once she’d eaten the enormous cooked breakfast and drunk several glasses of water, she could feel the edible fuel lodged in her stomach and knew she had to run some of it off.

  Besides, a heavy lump of sadness had also settled at the pit of her stomach and she wanted to shake it off. There was going to be no better cure for her acute emotional pain than pushing her body to the limit. The physical exhaustion of her run would ease the mental tiredness she always felt when she was in low spirits.

  She briskly zipped up her velour running top and set off. Once over their wall, she raced ahead down along the cliff path to Treyarnon Bay. As she jogged along the edges of the bay, she noticed some surfers were out in the ocean.

  Ignoring them she ran on, following the path along to Constantine Bay. She made her way to the edges of Trevose Golf Course, trying to keep an eye out for the ancient Constantine chapel and well.

  Soon, she could see from a distance
the pyramid shape of the well’s roof.

  In amongst the carefully groomed grass there was a modern stone structure with a slate roof – all its sides open to the elements – and inside were the old remains of the well. Elinor ran up to it and rested beside it for a moment to get her breath back.

  She looked down at the clear water.

  Of course, people had superstitiously thrown in numerous coins of various denominations, as people have done with wells or fountains for centuries. Some of the coins had landed around the edges of the well and Elinor wondered if the greenkeepers ever profited from this unexpected largesse. She doubted this ancient well would reach the profitability of Rome’s Trevi Fountain, where supposedly up to 3,000 euros were thrown in every single day.

  Close by were the remains of the old chapel, buried underneath heavy gorse bushes. A couple of greenkeepers were busily employed cutting down the undergrowth from around the chapel’s archway.

  Elinor politely said hello to them and then turned to head back towards the coastal path.

  She didn’t like loitering for too long on the golf course because it was busy and popular. Sometimes the golfers tended to get annoyed when she jogged across the fairway, and she’d hear them yelling at her from afar. But living down here in Cornwall she was fast developing a thick skin, and would just give them a rude gesture before carrying on. She was sure one day some pompous twat was going to corner her with a golf club official, but so far she’d escaped any reprimand.

  She ran along the coastal path that skirted the edges of Booby’s Bay, the beach nearest to Trevose Head, feeling the soft grass cushioning her heavy tread.

  From a distance, Trevose Head looked like a slumbering green lizard, with its head sticking out and dipped into the ocean’s water. Its physical presence was strangely docile and benign, even though it charismatically dominated the horizon.

  Trevose Head was the focal point for any clifftop within a five-mile radius and the protruding land mass drew your eye, like a coquetting young lady craving attention. You could clearly see Trevose Head even when you looked out from Leo’s house.