To Elinor’s amusement she found Leo had devised a novel way to communicate with their unexpected guests. He was using silent and overtly theatrical gestures, improvising as he went along.
Leo pulled out a dining chair and signalled with wild gestures that they should sit. The men smiled to themselves but obediently sat down on the chairs surrounding the dining table.
Leo then pulled a chair up to the table and passed around the mugs of coffee and biscuits. Elinor, playing the familiar role of a passive observer, stayed quietly sitting on her armchair at the corner of the room.
She watched the men attentively, noting they all looked to be in their early twenties. Younger than she was, in fact. She’d turned twenty-eight that July.
They were swarthy, clean-shaven men with black cropped hair and they had strong, clearly defined features. Their facial expressions were open and surprisingly calm, given the manner in which they’d appeared.
Elinor looked curiously at them, making those rapid judgements all people make when they meet someone for the first time. She generally found that her intuitive responses whenever she tried to get the measure of someone were strangely accurate.
She was pretty sure her habitual anxiety heightened her awareness of other people and this in turn made her more perceptive than she’d ever been before. Ironically, this was probably the only positive thing she could take from her debilitating nervousness.
However, these men flummoxed her. Considering the manner of their arrival, she felt no instinctive sense of caution or defensiveness towards the strangers sitting around the table. In fact, she felt strangely relaxed in their presence.
She wondered what language they were speaking in and where their country of origin was. She listened to the guttural sounds of their speech and thought that maybe the men were Middle Eastern, but it was a feeble guess at best.
Leo picked up the house phone, looked up a phone number in his battered copy of the Phone Book and dialled it.
‘Hello? Could I speak to the duty officer, please.’
Leo paused impatiently as he listened to the voice on the other end of the phone.
‘I need to speak to him now, thank you. I’ve six men in my house, who don’t speak a word of English by the way, and I’ve no idea where they came from. They arrived at my front door fifteen minutes ago. They were soaked through, with no shoes on, and they need help.’
Another pause.
‘We live in a bungalow called Trenouth, at the top of Warren Cove, near Treyarnon Bay.’
Silence.
‘OK... They’ll be here within the next hour? Right. Thanks.’
Leo hung up and looked across to Elinor.
‘They’re going to get in touch with the local immigration enforcement officials and get them to come along. I got the impression this isn’t the first time they’ve had to deal with a situation like this.’ Leo shrugged his broad shoulders, looking extremely puzzled. ‘I’ve never heard of any problems with illegal immigration here. Never read anything about it either.’
The men, meanwhile, were talking quietly amongst themselves, looking slightly ridiculous in their oversized clothing. There weren’t many men around of Leo’s shape and build.
‘Maybe I should heat up some soup for them? They’re clearly hungry,’ said Elinor, indicating the empty packet of ginger biscuits.
Leo watched them with pity on his lined face.
‘Poor sods. Goodness knows what kind of a life they were living before arriving on our doorstep. I’d guess some soup and bread would be appreciated, Elinor.’
Elinor nodded and walked off into the kitchen.
She pulled out two frozen containers of her chicken soup from the freezer, leaving them to defrost in the microwave. She and Leo didn’t have huge appetites, so she tended to freeze portions of her cooked food. While the soup defrosted, she sliced up the remainder of a loaf of bread.
Leo’s cooking repertoire, apart from a few seafood dishes, was very limited and it hadn’t taken long for Elinor to preside over their meals. She superintended their weekly shopping trips for food at the Tesco in Padstow, and kept their kitchen cupboards amply stocked with supplies. Leo, meanwhile, had accepted her dominance over the kitchen with his usual laid-back sangfroid.
Before long, Elinor was pouring the steaming hot soup into the bowls and putting them up on the serving hatch.
As she looked through the hatch, she saw with hilarity that Leo was still seated at the head of the dining room table, seemingly entirely at ease, even though he couldn’t follow a word the men were saying to each other.
The men seemed to be taking this fantastical situation in their stride, unwittingly revealing they’d had plenty of experience coping with the unexpected. They chatted earnestly amongst themselves, cradling their mugs of coffee in their hands.
It was forty minutes before the knocker banged at the front door, announcing the arrival of the immigration enforcement officials.