A Brighter Tomorrow - Maggie Ford (thriller novels to read .txt) 📗

out and straight home. I never saw anything of London, really.’ And, of course, when they had been children they had been too poor to go roaming London and seeing places of interest.

But it couldn’t go on for ever. Sooner or later she had to get down to some serious work. It was then she began to notice how bored Dora was becoming.

‘We never go out anywhere,’ she complained after only three weeks.

‘We go out to sell my paintings.’

‘What’s the point of that? Not many people buy them.’

‘Some do.’ Hearing the sharpness in her tone, Ellie hated herself.

It was difficult to concentrate on painting, with Dora looking over her shoulder or walking aimlessly around the room, staring out of the window and sighing as she gazed down at the street below, blocking the light until Ellie had to tell her to move aside. She knew, too, that Dora felt in the way on the few occasions Felix called in, making her feel foolishly guilty.

He didn’t call all that often, but when he did he was a welcome sight. He’d said he wanted them to remain friends and she went along with that, surprised how quickly her initial infatuation with him had faded. Now he was just a friend, but a very constant one.

He was even able to bring his partner with him now. A short, stocky ginger-haired young man named Jock – not the sort of person she’d have imagined Felix would have shared his life with: maybe someone slightly built and gentle-natured like himself; but she sometimes caught the looks that passed between them and saw what true love and affection lay in those glances.

Dora had no idea and Ellie didn’t enlighten her. Her hard start in life hadn’t included this side of it and she had been living a sheltered life with Doctor and Mrs Lowe. Ellie supposed her own had only opened up since she’d come to live here.

Sometimes she and Dora would go with Felix and Jock to the cafés or whatever small party was going on. One needed to escape the enclosure of four walls and let a little light into the mind.

She felt that, since having painted Felix’s portrait, her zest for this sort of painting was waning, her ideas becoming arid.

With two months gone by she’d heard nothing more from Robert C. Hunnard either, and took it that he had not sold her paintings. Money was running low even though she knew how to be careful with it, and there was little coming in from any other pictures she sold, none of them being what she would have preferred to paint. She worked solely in oils now, good paper for watercolours being expensive. Her worst worry was how to support Dora if things began to get really bad. With that in mind she painted as if her life depended on it, but her soul seemed to have forsaken her. She needed a goal, a certain feeling of anger; but it wasn’t there any more.

Oddly, her fierce resolve to find her father was fading. Funny how time mellowed things, shaved off the harsh corners. If it hadn’t been for her quest to avenge what her father had done to her, she might never have become a painter, might have remained with Bertram Lowe for years – and what then? Even if she had stayed, Michael Deel’s father would never have let them marry. What would have happened to her? Would she have become a painter, hanging out with the sort of people she’d come to know? It was odd how time mapped things out for a person.

Now, what her future was she had no idea except that every so often that old hatred would climb on to her shoulders and poke a hole in her skull to nibble at her mind. Then she would look for the sort of painting she needed to do to evict the ogre from her brain again.

One portrait she’d started working on, which was helping to sustain this odd sensation, was of Dora, showing her as a lost child, fear of the unknown emanating from the oddly positioned eyes, though the mouth – a thin line of a mouth – smiled tremulously but bravely at the world, while, in the dark background, misty faces looked out at her – faces with menace in their dimly distinguished expressions.

‘It’s absolutely horrible!’ Dora burst out when at last she was allowed to see it. ‘That’s not me at all.’

‘It depicts your inner self,’ Ellie tried to explain, but Dora turned away in a huff.

‘All that sitting like a blooming statue and that’s the result. Is that how you see me? The way you’ve painted me makes me feel you don’t even like me.’

‘Of course I like you. I love you. You’re my sister and I love you.’

‘Then why make me look so ugly?’

‘You’re not ugly. You’re pretty. It’s how I see you deep inside: worried about being your own mistress after having been at your employer’s beck and call.’

‘Well, I think it’s horrible. You make me feel that I’m just a blooming nuisance to you, that I’m only in the way.’

‘You’re not in the way, Dora. I enjoy you being here.’

‘And those faces behind me – it’s enough to give anyone nightmares. Who’d want to buy something like that? No wonder you don’t sell much!’

It was hopeless trying to explain to her. She was her father’s child, with no depth of imagination.

‘If I am in the way here, perhaps I’d be better going back to work at Doctor Lowe’s,’ she pouted.

‘You are not in the way,’ Ellie told her, the words uttered slowly.

Dora shrugged and let it go at that while steadfastly refusing to even look at the painting, and not at all happy about Ellie taking it to display alongside her pleasanter ones. Ellie let it go at that. It was up to her what she did or did not display. And one day it might hang in Hunnard’s galleries. But