Black Valley (32 page)

She read one final sentence:

Then she closed the book and got up off the sofa.

There were few cars on the road as she drove into Cardiff. The trees were heavy with blossom, and cow parsley lined the verges of the road. Spring was giving way to summer, but
it was still cold outside. She’d dressed warmly for the outing, in a padded mac and boots, grabbing a knitted beanie of Nella’s, and putting it in her pocket. The studio or gallery or
exhibition space or whatever it was she was going to see would probably be freezing, she reasoned – Elinor didn’t seem to feel the cold at all, or to make any allowances for those who
did.

When she got to the consulting rooms, it was easy to find a space on the street outside. It was Sunday afternoon, and everyone seemed to be indoors – as she should be, she reflected. She
waited in the car, looking out for Elinor. Then she saw her, pulling up in a battered old Volvo a little way further down.

She picked up her handbag, checking that she had her mobile phone and her keys, and got out of the car, locking the door. She crossed the road. When Elinor saw her, she wound down the window and
waved, a wide smile on her face. She seemed pleased and excited, and as Jess got into the car and they exchanged greetings, she found herself caught up in the general air of anticipation.

‘Well, this is fun.’ Jess settled herself in the passenger seat. ‘Where are you taking me?’

‘It’s a secret.’ Elinor gave a mischievous grin. ‘Here.’ She reached over and took a silk scarf out of the glovebox. ‘I know this is silly, but before we
start, I’d like you to put this on.’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘Over your eyes. So you don’t know where we’re going. It’s all part of the concept.’

‘What concept?’ Jess began to feel uneasy.

‘Of this new work.’ She paused. ‘Would you mind?’

Jess hesitated a moment. Then she nodded assent. It seemed like an odd request, but harmless enough.

Elinor leaned over and tied the scarf on, not too tightly but it completely covered her eyes, leaving no more than a tiny gap at the bridge of her nose, where only a small crack of light came
in. Then she heard her start the car, and they began to drive off.

‘So this is all in the name of art, is it?’ Now that she couldn’t see, Jess felt slightly uncomfortable. But, she reasoned with herself, she could easily take the blindfold off
if she wished. She wouldn’t for the moment, though – it would be spoiling the game.

‘’Fraid so.’ Elinor laughed. She seemed happy, Jess thought. Happier than she’d ever seen her before, in fact.

‘How are things, anyway?’ It felt odd having a conversation with a blindfold on, but Jess did her best.

‘Much better.’ The car turned a corner. ‘I feel like a new person now I’ve started painting again.’

‘And the claustrophobia?’ Jess had noticed that the car windows were closed.

‘That’s what these new paintings are about, actually. But you’ll see. I don’t want to spoil the surprise.’

From the stopping and starting at traffic lights, Jess guessed that they were driving out of Cardiff, but she couldn’t say where to. She was enjoying the mystery ride to a degree but she
was also slightly afraid. As a child, games of blind man’s buff had excited her, but there had been an element of fear in the thrill: that feeling of utter dependence, of having to surrender
one’s trust completely; the way that the world suddenly became strange and hostile, familiar objects mutating into dangerous obstacles to be tripped over, and banged against; and the laughing
voices of the other children, innocent and playful, yet with a harsh, spiteful edge to them as the blunders increased.

‘Is it far?’ Jess didn’t want to be rude, but she’d stipulated that she’d need to be back in Cardiff in a couple of hours’ time.

‘Not at all. Should take us about twenty minutes.’

By Jess’s calculation, it only ever took a maximum of fifteen minutes to get from one place to another within Cardiff. Any more and you would have left the city. So the studio, she
reasoned, must be somewhere on the outskirts of town.

As they drove on, Elinor chatted away. She was uncharacteristically relaxed. She talked about the sale of Ebenezer, Blake and Isobel’s former home, and the plans she and Isobel had for
refurbishing the house at Llandaff Green. They were also thinking of changing the direction of the gallery, selling cheaper work by less well-known artists, rather than trying to make a splash with
big new names, as Blake had. She didn’t mention the fact that Morris had left the gallery and gone to Dresler, and Jess didn’t question her on the matter. Neither did she ask questions
about Elinor and Isobel’s rapprochement, or about how Isobel was faring after Blake’s death. This wasn’t a therapy session, and for the time being at least, Elinor was no longer
her client; so she kept the tone light, and Elinor responded in kind.

After a while, the conversation stalled, and they drove on in silence. The stops and starts had ceased, so they were probably out of town now, heading out on a clear road somewhere. They seemed
to be going uphill, judging by the sound of the engine and the gear changes. Then Elinor turned off the main road onto a bumpy gravel path. After a couple of minutes driving up it, she drew in to
the side of the road and parked the car.

‘OK. Don’t get out, you might bump into something. I’ll come round to your side and help you.’

Elinor got out of the car, went round to the passenger door, and opened it. Jess got out, holding on to Isobel’s arm.

‘Now can I take this off?’ Jess pulled at the blindfold.

‘Oh please,’ Elinor giggled. ‘Keep it on. It’ll be so much more fun.’

‘Sorry, but no.’ Jess fiddled with the knot at the back of the scarf, untied it, and took it off.

As the light hit her eyes, Jess realized that even though she’d only been blindfolded for less than half an hour, her senses were heightened. They were standing in a wood where the trees
were a bright, almost luminous green. Above her, she could hear their branches blowing in the wind, not just one or two of them, but seemingly a whole forest; below her feet, as they left the path,
the ground was soft with a carpet of rotting leaves. She could smell their pungent decay, and there was another powerful scent in the air. She sniffed. Wild garlic.

‘Where are we going?’ Jess asked, as Elinor began to walk downhill.

‘We’re just coming up to the site now.’

They walked down the hill, onto a path of beaten earth. Then Elinor asked Jess to wait a moment, and left her side. In that moment, standing alone in the wood, Jess listened intently to the
sounds around her. She heard the rustle of the trees, the muffled crackling of fallen leaves, the drip of rainwater soaking through them. In the distance, she could make out the hum of traffic.

She put her hand down and felt the soft ground they’d just been walking on. It was hollow yet buoyant, like a pocket-sprung mattress. Her fingers found a small plant. She traced its fleshy
leaves, its slender stem, its paper-thin petals. A wood anemone.

In that moment, she knew exactly where she was. She remembered the wood anemones from her walk with Dresler, when they’d tried to track down Hefin Morris. She looked up above her, at the
cathedral of beech trees, shafts of sunlight penetrating the leaves. She was standing on Bryn Cau, the Hollow Hill.

Elinor called over to her. Jess stepped forward and looked down. Elinor was standing next to a pair of heavy iron doors set into the hillside. She’d opened them wide, and
was heaving up a boulder to keep them open.

‘Come on.’

Jess walked down the bank of leaves and stood next to Elinor. This was obviously the place where Elinor was going to show her the paintings. And evidently, the real Morris was about to be
revealed, as either Elinor or Isobel – perhaps even both of them.

‘Be careful now. You might get your feet wet.’

They peered into the tunnel. Water was dripping from the ceiling, the sound magnified by the echo from the walls.

‘So your work is in here, is it?’

Elinor nodded. ‘It’s dry further in. There’s an open space which was originally a blacksmith’s forge. That’s where the paintings are.’

Jess was slightly unnerved. To tell the truth, she didn’t like enclosed spaces. She never went into caves, or mines, or long underground tunnels, if she could help it. She didn’t
even like tube trains, although she forced herself onto them, knowing that to avoid them would exacerbate her fear. But she didn’t want to tell Elinor that. If Elinor’s paintings were
hung in some sort of underground cave in the hill, that meant she’d overcome her claustrophobia. It wouldn’t do to undermine her new-found confidence by admitting to her own mild
claustrophobic tendencies.

There was a small machine by the entrance to the tunnel, mounted on a trailer. Elinor went over to it and flicked a switch. Immediately, it began to emit a low, chugging noise. Up ahead, a bank
of lights came on, illuminating the tunnel.

‘I hired this from a film company,’ said Elinor. ‘Underground lighting. And it powers the film show that runs alongside the artworks.’ She sounded excited as she
spoke.

They walked into the tunnel, Jess rather less enthusiastically than Elinor. The lights lit up the walls of brown rock streaked with ochre. As they went on, the tunnel narrowed, and the air
around them became dank and cold. Their steps echoed around the walls, which seemed to be closing in on them.

‘Are we nearly there?’ Jess asked, trying to quell the nervousness in her voice.

‘Not far now.’ Elinor spoke to her as if she were a bored child on a car journey.

They walked on. From time to time, the lights above them flickered. Jess wondered, if they gave out, whether they’d be able to make their way back.

The tunnel wound on. The further they went, the more restless Jess became. She’d never liked magical mystery tours. Her view was that they always turned out to be a complete pain in the
neck, one way or another. She chided herself for having agreed to take part. But now that she had, she felt she really ought to play along, just for the moment. Elinor was such a child. But a
harmless enough child, she reasoned. Artists were like that, after all, she supposed; people who hadn’t lost their sense of wonder at the world but who hadn’t really grown up, either.
That was their strength, and their weakness.

They walked on into the tunnel, a lot further than Jess had anticipated, or perhaps it was her mounting fear that made it seem that way. Then the tunnel widened and they came to a halt.

Jess looked around her. She was standing in a small recess, hewed out of the rock. Propped up against the walls were three large canvasses. On a video screen a loop of abstract film, showing the
inside of the tunnel, was playing.

Jess stepped forward to take a closer look.

The paintings were all views of the tunnel they were standing in, but abstracted, so that the colours and textures of the rock were foregrounded. There was a strange, eerie hue to them that
mimicked the artificial light of the floodlamps, making the colours sing out. They were joyous, vibrant works, but there was a sense of foreboding in them, too, as if such intense saturation of
colour could not be a part of the natural world above ground – of light, and air,

‘These are yours, are they, Elinor?’

Elinor gave a proud smile.

Jess looked back at them. She couldn’t say she liked them, or disliked them. It was almost as if they were requiring one to enter a new level of experience, one in which one’s likes
and dislikes were irrelevant.

‘They’re extraordinary.’

‘I know.’ Elinor was matter-of-fact. ‘They’re my best work yet.’ She stepped forward and stood in front of the central painting.

‘You see, when Isobel came back, the claustrophobia lifted.’ She turned back to Jess. ‘I was able to come down here again.’ She walked over to the rock wall and ran her
hand over a reddish yellow streak. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by the colour and texture of this rock. They used to mine ochre here as well as iron, you see.’

Jess looked up at the central painting, flanked by the two others. The more she gazed at it, the more it seemed to draw her in, to a mass of pulsating reddish yellow flesh, almost as if she were
travelling up the inside of a vagina, into the cervix, back into the womb, the egg, and thence into nothingness, the state before conception. As far as she could understand it, Elinor was painting
annihilation, but not that of death and destruction; this was another kind of nothingness, that which exists before life, rather than after it.

The void, she thought. The event horizon. Death, at the end of life. Whatever there is before life begins.

‘You’re Hefin Morris, aren’t you?’

Elinor flashed her a brilliant smile.

‘Of course. Hefin is me. Not Isobel.’ She looked up at Jess, her eyes suddenly ablaze with anger. ‘How could you have thought Isobel did those paintings?’

‘Who told you I said that?’

‘Isobel.’ A petulant tone came into Elinor’s voice. ‘I was really upset about it.’

Jess wondered how Isobel knew what she’d told Dresler. Then she remembered the missed call at the hotel. Dresler was in on all this, as she’d suspected. He’d been lying to her,
and to everyone else. Dresler had obviously told Isobel what Jess had said, and she’d passed it on to Elinor.

‘How could you think that?’ Elinor narrowed her eyes. ‘Obviously, it was me doing the paintings. Isobel could never do work as good as that.’

‘Elinor, I know nothing about your work. You told me your paintings were like Gwen John’s. Small, meticulous. You told me Isobel painted in a bolder style. Perhaps more like
Augustus—’

‘Well, you were wrong.’ Elinor came over and stood in front of Jess. ‘I thought you understood me.’