Free Band of Angel by Julia Gregson

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