A Collection of Quests by Cecilia Peartree

Author:Cecilia Peartree
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: murder, 1950s, spies, britain, paintings

Chapter 14 Oliver – Summer emergency

Flora’s portrait wasn’t going quite the way I expected. I knew she would be horrified if I let her see it. The sketches I had been making over the weeks were quite true to life, capturing her range of expressions and hand gestures in a few pencil or charcoal lines. The painting itself had started to turn itself into a more abstract piece of work altogether, depicting her in a sort of whirl of activity. Even her hair had developed a life of its own, and all because of her remark about the range of different reds I would need for it. There was something still at the centre of the painting, but everything else moved: her hair flew out in cascading spirals, she looked as if she had about fifteen hands because I had tried to incorporate too many different positions in one picture. I did think there was something in it, though. I wished I could test this theory by asking someone who knew about art, but none of my friends, family or acquaintances really moved in quite that kind of sphere, except possibly Uncle Miles, who was presumably still recuperating from his injury. I couldn’t see myself lugging the picture down to St Ives, and Edwina probably wouldn’t want him bothered with it, so I contented myself for the moment with trying to complete it as best I could. The trouble was that I didn’t really want to finish work on it. If I seriously wanted to be an artist – even putting this thought into words in my own mind scared me – I would have to expose my work to other people at some stage, and yet I didn’t think I could bring myself to do it.

In this ridiculously immature and over-sensitive frame of mind I spent weeks in a kind of limbo, unable to move backwards or forwards. Flora was fully occupied by her new job, getting very tired and snappy in the evenings as she settled into the new routine, and I didn’t think it was fair to expect her to become an art critic in her meagre amount of spare time. And of course, I was afraid she would be horrified by the way I had portrayed her, and that she would break off our engagement again. Bad enough to view a traditional portrait of oneself but I still wasn’t sure about this rather non-representational style I had fallen into. Perhaps it was something I was trying out, a phase I had to go through to find my own niche. Perhaps I would grow out of it.

I hadn’t heard from Clemency since she sent me the snapshot of her man friend, and if I had thought about her at all I would have imagined she was still cross with me, but because she was one of the family, I knew she would come round sooner or later. So I was pleasantly surprised to get a letter from her at a time when she should have been immersed in her studies.

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