Black Valley (4 page)

Elinor leaned over and opened the window a little wider. But not, Jess noticed, as wide as she had before. Then she lay down on the couch and gazed out at the tree outside. Eventually, she
spoke.

‘I did try to go down to the studio last night.’

‘The studio?’

Jess pictured a room cluttered with painting paraphernalia. Elinor’s private zone.

‘It’s separate from the house, at the end of the garden. That’s where I found my mother’s body that day,’ Elinor went on. ‘It was no good, though. I
couldn’t go in.’

She passed a hand across her forehead, then kneaded the skin over her temples. She had beautiful hands, Jess noticed, long and slim with tapering fingers. Artist’s hands.

‘I don’t know what to do. Ever since . . .’ Her voice trailed off. ‘I just can’t seem to get back on track.’ She put her hand down from her face, and began to
fidget with her scarf. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t try and work in the evening. It stops me sleeping.’

She paused, as if expecting advice, but Jess didn’t voice an opinion.

‘The thing is, I can’t seem to find time during the day.’ Elinor sighed. ‘There are so many interruptions. Isobel comes round, always fussing about this or that, stuff to
do with the estate – should she do up the house in Italy and rent it out or put it on the market straight away? Why can’t I help with it all?’

Jess waited for Elinor to tell her who Isobel was, but she didn’t. She seemed to assume that she already knew, which was a little odd.

‘And then there’s this bloody policewoman calling to ask me all sorts of stupid questions.’ Elinor sighed again. ‘I really wish she’d let it go, give us some
peace.’

There was another silence. Jess waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. Eventually, she prompted her.

‘A policewoman, you say?’

‘She’s nice enough, I suppose, but she seems a bit dense. She doesn’t seem to understand that the painting was worth an awful lot of money. It’s not surprising that
someone would . . . you know.’ Elinor’s voice trailed off for a moment, then resumed. ‘But she can’t see that. She obviously knows nothing about art whatsoever.’

There was a silence.

‘I suppose she’s just doing her job,’ Elinor continued after a while. ‘I mean, we all want to find the person who killed my mother.’ She paused. ‘But the way
this woman goes on, you’d think it was one of us.’

Her words hung in the air.

‘One of us?’

‘Yes. Me. Or Isobel.’ There it was again, that name without any explanation. ‘Or Blake, her husband. It’s a pretty small family, when you come down to it. And even
smaller now, without Ma.’ Elinor’s voice trembled slightly.

She shifted her position on the couch, adjusting the cushion behind her head. Then she said, ‘I suppose you want to know all about the details of the murder? And then go into all the
problems of my childhood, my relationship with my mother, and all that?’

There was a slight hostility to her tone.

‘I don’t want anything, Elinor.’ That wasn’t quite true. Jess was inquisitive by nature, and her curiosity was more than piqued by this dramatic story of murder and
robbery. She was also fascinated that the police had been continuing to ask questions, evidently not satisfied with the family’s account of events. But through long experience, she’d
learned to put such thoughts to one side, bracket them, for the time being. They got in the way of listening properly to her patient, which was the task at hand.

‘It’s for you to decide what you want to do here,’ Jess continued. ‘What kind of help you want.’

‘I was hoping you might have some suggestions.’ The hostility was still there.

‘If I did, would you follow them?’

‘Probably not.’ A smile played briefly on Elinor’s lips, but she repressed it.

Once again, silence fell.

‘OK, then.’ Elinor paused for a moment. ‘This is what I want to talk about. I know it sounds awful, given that I’ve just lost my mother. But all I keep thinking about is
that painting. It was a Gwen John, rather an important one, actually.’

Jess had seen Gwen John’s work in the National Museum. She was the sister of Augustus John, who in his day had been much more famous. She painted quiet, rather disturbing portraits of
unknown women sitting in darkened rooms with their hands neatly folded. They spoke of frustration, confinement, of a cloying, domestic sphere, yet there was an intensity to their muted tones that
was, in its way, more powerful and seductive than her brother’s flamboyant work.

‘It hung in my bedroom as a child, mine and Isobel’s, and I used to look at it when I woke up in the morning, before I got out of bed.’

Jess guessed that Isobel must be Elinor’s sister.

‘It was of a young girl standing by a wall, her shadow behind her. She was wearing a thin blue dress, and although you couldn’t see the outline of her body beneath it, you could
sense the structure of it, by the way the light fell on it. Yet it seemed to have been painted quickly, without lingering on the detail. I used to lie there in my warm bed, not wanting to get up,
looking at the painting and wondering how she’d done it. It was very subtle, like all her work.’

Elinor shifted her head again. As she did, her shoulders seemed to relax.

‘I suppose, looking back, it was a huge influence on me. Even as a child, I think I must have been trying to paint like that.’ She paused. ‘I’ve been trying ever
since.’

There was a silence, but Jess didn’t try to fill it.

‘When I left home and went to art college,’ Elinor went on, ‘the painting stayed in the bedroom. I’d come back for the holidays and wake up to it in the morning. It
remained very much part of my life. My father noticed how much I loved it, so when I got my own studio, he insisted on giving it to me.’ Her voice softened. ‘He was a very sweet man.
Thoughtful. Sensitive. He noticed what was going on with us kids. Every detail. Not like . . .’ She hesitated for a moment.

The mother, thought Jess. Not thoughtful. Not sensitive. Intrusive, perhaps? Cloying?

‘Well, anyway,’ Elinor continued. ‘To be honest, by that time I didn’t want it. But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I took it.’

There was a pause.

‘You say you loved the painting.’ Jess repeated Elinor’s words. ‘Yet you didn’t want to own it.’

This was another psychotherapeutic technique. Not simply reflecting back, but pinpointing contradictions in the patient’s account.

Elinor nodded. ‘It felt like too much of a responsibility. It’s worth quite a lot of money. And it wasn’t just the practical side of looking after it that bothered me,’
she went on. ‘It felt like a responsibility in artistic terms, too. It seemed to limit me as a painter. To set a goal that I could never turn away from.’ A look of sadness came over her
face. ‘In fact, I sometimes wonder if it ruined my career. I went to Goldsmith’s, you see, and during the time I was there, that kind of meticulous style was completely unfashionable.
It was all installations, warehouses, cows sawed in half, conceptual stuff.’ Her expression became more composed. ‘I did well on paper, of course; I got a first, because there was no
denying my work was good, but no one important came to my graduate show. No one was interested in collecting me.’ She paused. ‘I haven’t done too badly, I suppose. I’ve made
a career as a painter, which is more than most of my contemporaries did. But I’m not a hot artist, never will be.’

She pronounced the word ‘hot’ with distaste.

‘And then, of course,’ she went on, ‘there was the family connection. I often wondered if I’d just joined the family firm, and had no original ideas of my own.’

She was beginning to unburden herself now. Jess had the impression that she had been mulling over these problems for a long time, never discussing them with anyone.

‘You see, Gwen John is said to be a relative of mine. My great aunt, supposedly.’

‘Supposedly?’

‘Yes. Through my mother, Ursula. She claimed she was the illegitimate daughter of Augustus John, Gwen’s brother. But it was never verified. He had rather a lot of illegitimate
children, as it happened.’

‘What was your father’s view?’ From time to time, despite her training, Jess let her curiosity get the better of her.

‘My father died ten years ago. Cancer.’ Elinor’s tone was matter-of-fact, but Jess thought she detected a note of bravado in it, as if, after a whole decade, she had to marshal
her best defences against her grief. ‘He actually thought the story was a load of nonsense. My grandmother Ariadne was a very flighty woman. She’d had a brief affair with John, like so
many others. My father believed that she’d exaggerated the importance of it.’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘Because John was so famous. And to annoy her husband, of course.’ Elinor gave a wry smile. ‘That was the kind of relationship my grandparents had. One that my mother repeated
with my father, I might add.’

There was a pause. Parental conflict, thought Jess. The claustrophobia of an enduring but unhappy marriage, from which the child can never escape, carrying it internally into adulthood.

‘But one way and another, the story became part of family history,’ Elinor continued. ‘And something of a curse, maybe, for us all. This tenuous connection to a painter whose
work has influenced mine – for the worse, at least in commercial terms – and whose existence, in the end, seems to have caused the death of my mother.’

Silence fell. Jess had wondered when Elinor would begin to speak of her mother. The story of the painting was obviously important to her, but to some extent it was simply a preamble to
discussing the traumatic event that had pitched her into claustrophobia. And, as so often happened in therapy sessions, she’d waited until the last minute to start talking about it.

Jess glanced at the clock. They were already over time.

‘Elinor, I’m afraid we’ll have to finish there for today.’ Her voice was gentle. ‘Perhaps we can talk some more about that in our next session.’

After Elinor left, Jess had another two patients to attend to, and then it was time for lunch. She and Bob had arranged to meet at the Welsh Assembly offices, where he worked,
and to find somewhere to eat in the Bay. She was a little nervous about the encounter; she often spoke to him on the phone, or chatted briefly when he picked up Rose for the weekend, but
they’d never actually gone out for a meal together since the split. She feared that perhaps this was an attempt on his part to woo her back; it was he who’d offered to take her out.
He’d suggested a stylish brasserie in the vicinity; she’d countered by saying that she wouldn’t have much time, and that perhaps they should grab a sandwich somewhere. He’d
sounded disappointed, and in the end they’d agreed to take a stroll around the Bay and find somewhere on the day. On a Tuesday lunchtime, the restaurants and cafes on the waterside would
hardly be packed to the gunwales.

Before she left her consulting rooms, she went to the loo, washed her hands, and combed her hair, checking her face in the mirror as she did so. She looked tired, she thought; there were bluish
shadows under her eyes. To draw attention away from them, she took out a brightly coloured lipstick and applied it, rubbing the excess onto her cheeks. Immediately, she looked better; the slash of
pinkish red suited her pale complexion and dark hair; it made her look sexy, but in a cheerful, rather than sultry, way. She stepped back from the mirror a little and adjusted her coat; it was a
moss-green Harris tweed, with a nipped-in waist, a swing to the skirt, and a dark brown faux-fur collar. She always felt good in it; it was comfortable and snug, but with a touch of glamour,
accentuating the curve of her waist. She wriggled her shoulders and hips, feeling the soft satin lining against them. Before Bob left, the coat had been getting a little tight for her. Now, with
all this extra work and worry, she’d been eating less, and it was snug again, fitting just right.

She went downstairs, pausing to let the receptionist, Branwen, know her plans for the afternoon, then walked quickly to her car, parked a little way up the street. She got in, started the
engine, and swung out into the traffic. The jams had disappeared now, and she had a fairly clear run down through the city centre to the Bay. Once she was there, she found a space at the back of
the Assembly, parked the car, walked round to the front of the building, and went in.

Bob was waiting for her in the foyer, sitting reading the paper. That was a first. In the past, he’d always been in his office when she arrived, and she’d had to ask the receptionist
to contact him, sometimes repeatedly, until he came down to meet her. Now the boot was on the other foot.

For a moment, before he noticed her, she watched him – dispassionately almost, as if she were meeting him on a first date. It was odd, she thought, how someone so familiar to her could,
all of a sudden, seem like a stranger. Now in his fifties, he was still a good-looking man, she could see that; the type women found attractive. He had a full head of hair, greying now, but still
wild and curly, as it had been when she’d first met him. His reading glasses, perched on his nose, seemed somehow to be foreign to him, as if he’d borrowed them for a moment, rather
than depending on them daily to cope with his failing sight as he grew older. His shoulders were broad, and even though he was sitting down, you could see that he was a big, thickset man. In days
gone by, whenever she’d seen him after a short parting, even after years of marriage, her heart had given a little jump of excitement. Today there was nothing; nothing but a kind of
affectionate sadness for the memory of that feeling. She wondered if he felt the same.

‘Jess.’ He jumped up when he saw her, walked over to her, and enveloped her in a hug.

‘Sorry I’m late.’ She extricated herself as tactfully as she could.

‘You’re not. It’s good to see you.’

The formal politeness of their greetings these days hurt her a little, but she tried not to show it.

They set out from the front of the Assembly, walking down the steps to the sea, and then on towards the far end of the Bay. It was a cold, grey day, and there weren’t many people
about.