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with a pregnant woman in love with someone else?
    This was a woman who thought of him, if she did so at all, as a kind of devoted page, less man than spaniel.
    Thinking more clearly now than he had for weeks, he made himself sit up, listening to the creaks of the waking house and laying realistic plans. He had done the right thing in bringing her here. It was a healthier place, far away from bad associations and bad love, where she could paint again and meet other painters, like-minded souls rather than corrupt academics. He would find some useful woman, one of the Friends, to look in occasionally and perhaps cook meals. Rachel would mend. She would become the person she was meant to be, unwarped by influences and needs. For himself, however, he saw he had no further role in the happy scenario and that to linger longer than was necessary to settle her would be only to complicate matters and risk hurting both of them. He would stay on with her a week, maybe ten days, no more. He would write to his supervisor, who was far more worldlywise than he, and plead over-hastiness. His romantic folly would go understood.
    Then he remembered the nurse’s words about the baby and the doctor’s and landlady’s easy assumption that it was his. The Friends were famously non-judgemental in matters of unmarried couples and welcomed those other congregations branded, but that was only one morning out of seven. For the rest of the week she would be just another unmarried mother with all the trials and expense and disapproval to deal with the although he knew his grandfather would gladly take her in and, in time, her child, he doubted she had the strength to bear the burden of compassion.
    He shaved and pissed at his bedroom sink and dressed hurriedly. She was not in her room and his grandfather was not in his. He heard his grandfather’s scratchy laugh from overhead but was distracted by the smell of burning and raced down to the kitchen in time to tweak a tray of flaming toast from under the grill and tip it into the sink under a running tap. He opened windows to clear the billowing smoke then climbed the stairs, following voices.
    Like several houses in the neighbourhood of Morrab Gardens, it had an extra room, a kind of lookout built out of the attic. Long since retired from tailoring, half-gratefully defeated by the arrival of John Collier’s and racks of off-the-peg suits in Simpson’s, his grandfather had retreated to his first love: seafaring. He spent hours in his eyrie, telescope or binoculars trained on the water, or down at the harbourmaster’s office gossiping, and received a regular fee for a weekly half-column in The Cornishman called ‘About The Bay’ in which he gave details or stories of any vessels of note currently at anchor or being repaired in the dry dock.
    They were laughing again as he climbed the narrow wooden steps and he thought how long it must be since the dapper and lightly flirtatious old man had entertained an attractive woman in the house.
    They had all the windows flung up and his grandfather was showing her how to use the binoculars. They turned as he came up.
    ‘Well here’s the man!’ his grandfather exclaimed and she hurried over, laughing and enthusing about how beautiful it all was and how the light was so strong even inwinter and how she wanted to live there for ever and ever.
    And before he had even climbed up off the steps into the tiny, dazzling room, Rachel had stooped and was kissing him on the lips with an eagerness that made his grandfather laugh again and clap his hands.

CHYENHAL TREES ( 2002 ). Red chalk on paper.
    This late work shows a spinney of Cornish elms seen from the lane where Kelly’s son, Petroc, was killed in 1986. It is characteristic of the penultimate stage in her career, when she baffled and, indeed, lost the sympathy of many critics, by seeming to reject the abstraction that made her reputation in favour of meticulous, some said populist, studies from nature. Her