Still Waters (13 page)

‘Whoa, whoa! What’s up, sonny Jim?’

A tall, heavily built man in a red shirt and grey flannels with a tanned face, broad shoulders, and a smile. A man whose strength and goodness seemed to shine out of him. Yet for a second or two Mal went on running, though the man held him captive easily enough. Then he said, ‘They’re in the sea! Help me!’ and the man glanced at the sea and said: ‘Where?’ and Mal pointed to the rocks.

The man wasted no time, no breath. He began to jog back along the cliff top the way Mal had come. He said, over his shoulder, ‘How many?’

‘Two,’ Mal said breathlessly, one hand clutching the stitch of pain in his side. ‘Dad and Petey. The wave . . . the wave took my little brother and my Dad jumped in . . . he was too near the rocks.’

The man went on jogging and when they came to the rocks he told Mal to wait on the sand and climbed up with the agility of a monkey. Mal didn’t wait. He followed, scrambling up with aching chest and sore knees, stiff legs, but he wasn’t far behind the man.

‘They’ll be in the long pool if we’re lucky,’ the man said when he saw Mal had followed him. ‘Stay out of trouble, sonny. I’m going to have enough on my hands as it is.’

‘I will,’ Mal promised. But he followed.

The man rounded a pile of rocks and instead of going on out to the end of the reef he doubled back, and there it was, a great, deep fissure in the rocks. It was full of water, rocking, surging. And not only water. Bill was there. Washed up, half in the water and half out of it. Not moving.

There was no Petey. No Petey.

The nightmares didn’t start for ten days and that was because for ten days after the accident Mal couldn’t sleep. He lay in the darkness, wide-eyed, dry-mouthed, and he waited. Out there, somewhere, was whatever had come for Petey and any moment now it would come for him.

Was it death that he feared? Drowning? The terrible violence of the ocean? He could not have said, he would simply have said that he feared. Out in the darkness roamed a terrible, faceless something which had snatched his little brother away and almost taken his father, too. Why should it not take him? Why should not Malcolm Chandler be snatched up, taken away? He was not nearly such a nice person as Petey, nor anywhere near as brave as Bill Chandler. Mal hadn’t dived into that boiling, terrible sea as Bill had, he had just run and run and fetched help – too late for Petey, though the big man in the red shirt had managed to get Bill’s unconscious body out of the water and had resuscitated him after great labour.

Mal had done as he was told, that was all. The red-shirted one had yelled at him to go to the nearest house, fetch blankets, another grown man, get someone to find a doctor. Mal had obeyed. Breath sobbing in his throat, chest aching with effort, he had run back along the beach, up the cliff path, on to the sandy, meandering lane . . . and found a wooden bungalow, with a woman who provided blankets and two grown men who came back with him, to that terrible shore.

They had brought Bill back and had, with great difficulty, fished Petey’s body out of the water. Tiny, blue-faced, Petey, yet not Petey. They had crossed his little blue hands on his chest and carried him up the beach and when they put him down outside the bungalow on the rough strip of grass his head had fallen to one side and water had rushed from his mouth and a terrible groaning sound had come from somewhere within his tiny, ghastly corpse.

Bill had sobbed, had wanted to take the body in his arms, but had been prevented by the kindly men, by the doctor, by the motherly woman who had lent the blankets. Mal hadn’t sobbed. He had been sick into a flower-bed and then he had gone into a sort of daze, in which he vaguely remembered drinking a cup of hot, sweet tea and submitting to being wrapped in someone’s huge, hairy overcoat.

At home, he had been given a horrible, sickly drink in a beaker and had been packed off to bed at once, and that first night, had slept in a jerky, dreadful sort of way.

But since then, there had been only wakefulness. During the hours of daylight he went to school, came home, ate his meals like an automaton. His mother and father wept at the funeral, at odd moments during the day, at mealtimes. Mal didn’t weep; not outside, that was. Not where it could be seen. Only inside himself were painful tears shed, during the hours of darkness when he could no longer escape from his thoughts. Then he wrestled with his fears, longed for morning, and sobbed dry, secret sobs in his lonely mind.

Kath, he knew, found comfort in telling everyone that Bill was a hero; that he had nearly died trying to rescue his son. But that only made Mal feel worse, because what had he done? Screamed a warning about the wave, but not loud enough. Run fast to get help, but not fast enough. Bill had tried, had done his best, but Mal, who was a good swimmer for his age, had been too afraid of the violence of the waves, the wicked surge of the currents around the rocks, to do anything but run for help.

But he could not continue to blame himself for ever, any more than he could remain awake for the rest of his life. So one night sleep came at last, and with it, the nightmares. Most nights, at some time or other, Mal dreamed that he was sitting again on the rocks with half an eye on his line, rubbing his icy hands, hating the cold, the wet, his companions. And once again he saw the great wave, screamed his soundless warning, watched his little brother snatched from the rock, cradled for a moment in the curve of the wave, then crash down, down, down, into the spiralling depths.

And his father was odd, moody and strange. Mal never saw him take a drink now, but he couldn’t help suspecting that Bill was drinking secretly. And the affection between them had thinned and paled until it scarcely seemed to exist. Indeed, Mal sometimes caught his father giving him the self-same look which he had suffered from as a small child, when Bill first returned from the army.
I don’t trust you,
the look said,
One day you’ll do me harm
.

He didn’t seem to want to go out much, either. Oh, he went to work, came home, ate his food, went to bed, but if Kath suggested a walk down to the shops at the weekend or a bus trip, he always found an excuse not to accompany them. As the weeks since Petey’s death turned into months Mal realised that he and Kath could laugh again sometimes, tease each other, fool around. But not when Bill was present. When his father was there, both Mal and Kath watched what they said.

Then sudden, violent eruptions of temper, accompanied by a brutally swung fist, began to be normal behaviour from Bill when he was crossed in any way. He started to drink again openly, coming home later and later, sometimes not coming home at all. Once, Mal found his father at the bottom of the stairway, snoring, as he made his way to school. Once he found Kath crying in the cramped little kitchenette, with a black eye and a lower lip cut and swollen until it was the size of a half-orange.

‘Your father’s under a lot of strain,’ Kath said thickly, touching her lip with trembling fingers. ‘He’ll come round, learn to deal with it.’

He didn’t.

Four

August 1931

IT WAS A
breathlessly hot day. Tess had been looking after her little sister, rather grandly christened Avril Mignonette though known to all and sundry as Cherie, but then Marianne had come in from a shopping trip to Norwich, rather hot and cross, and had said that Tess could make herself scarce; she would keep an eye on Cherie until tea-time. Since Cherie was sleeping soundly, sprawled out on her neat little bed with its Easter Bunny counterpane, keeping an eye on her would not be an onerous task, but Tess was simply longing to get outside and did not intend to say anything which might be taken the wrong way. It was so easy, alas, to turn Marianne from lazy good temper to spiteful antagonism with a thoughtless word. Or at least it’s easy for me, Tess thought ruefully. Daddy and other people don’t seem to annoy her nearly so much.

‘I’ve had an exhausting day,’ Marianne said now, turning towards the stairs. ‘I shall have a rest until Cherie wakes. As for you, it’s about time you did something useful,’ she added, not bothering to keep the fretful peevishness from her tone since Peter was not around to hear. ‘Tidy your room and dust the spare room and the stairs and landing, the dressing-room. After that you can go out.’

Because it was easier for her, Marianne had moved Cherie into the small dressing-room which was between the master bedroom and Tess’s room as soon as the child was old enough to climb out of her bed in the mornings. She had also decreed that their bedroom door-handle be moved up so that it was out of Cherie’s reach, thus ensuring that it was Tess who was woken early rather than herself and Peter. What was more, because Tess’s room was large and the dressing-room small, Cherie’s clothing and books were all kept in her sister’s room. Tess didn’t mind; Cherie was company, she rather enjoyed reading her little sister stories and helping her to dress.

But of course one day, Tess told herself, Cherie would doubtless be given a proper bedroom rather than the tiny dressing-room and when that happened they wouldn’t have a spare room any longer. Not that they really needed it now; Marianne did not like entertaining. However, Tess hurried into the spare room where she flicked a duster around everything, checked that the sheets on the second bed were clean – they were – and then hung about just inside the pink-and-white boudoir which the room had become until she heard Marianne shut her bedroom door. It was terribly hot; she guessed that her stepmother and the baby would sleep the afternoon away in the comparative cool of the house, so she waited a few moments, then ran lightly down the stairs. Once in the lower hall she stood for a moment, listening. No point in courting disaster by going out before Marianne had settled. But there was no sound from upstairs. Satisfied, she slid out of the front door, stopping for a moment in surprise as the heat hit her, then hurrying down the garden path.

She opened the gate quietly, swung it shut behind her, and felt the smile start. Freedom! She set off at a canter along the lane, but turned off before she reached the staithe. Once, she would have gone straight to the Throwers’ cottage, but things were different now. Silently, she slipped into the woods, taking the paths she knew well, not straying into the boggy patches, nor into the tangle of rhododendrons which would give her away with the cracking of their dead and cast-off branches underfoot.

The woods were beautiful, and she paid them the compliment of noticing their beauty; the greens of foliage, the tall stands of iris, the flowers over now, which crowded the boggy patches, the reeds which framed the Broad. Wild roses, pink, white, blush-red, bushed out between the willows. Honeysuckle twined round trunks and cascaded over branches. Tall foxgloves nodded their purple heads, held out their freckled faces for her inspection and delight whilst meadowsweet scented the air with its delicate sweetness.

Glancing around her with love and contentment, Tess slowed to a wander, moving in and out of hot sun and cool shade and enjoying both. She saw butterflies in abundance – Meadow Browns, Red Admirals, Tortoiseshells, and a pair of exotic Swallowtails – as well as a huge, furry bumblebee forcing its way into a foxglove’s bell and, less welcome, a column of gnats dancing above a pool of tepid brown water. My place, Tess thought contentedly. My heritage. Of course one day it will be Cherie’s, too, but that won’t stop it being mine.
How
I love it!

But it behoved her to tread carefully now for the Broad was only just beyond the reed-bed and she didn’t want to sink up to her knees in the rich, black mud. She padded silently along in her sandshoes, sticking to the narrow path between the reeds, and there was her boat, tied to a stake, pulled up into the rushes and hidden from passers-by, as she had left it the previous day.

Tess had not known she was holding her breath but she released it in a long whistle of relief. Her boat and her bicycle were her dearest, most cherished possessions, the things which made her life perfect despite Marianne’s occasional bouts of ill-humoured antagonism, and she had got them, she knew, because of Marianne. Daddy had bought the dinghy whilst he and Marianne went off to France for a week, after their wedding almost four years ago.

‘It’ll give you and Janet something to do whilst we’re away,’ he had said. ‘Ned will show you how to use it safely – you aren’t to go out without him until we come back – savvy?’

She had agreed, of course, and she and Janet had spent most of that summer in the boat, christened
The Jolly Roger
by its enthusiastic owners, for Janet had had shares, then, or as good as.

The bicycle had come with boarding school. ‘Your dad won’t never send you away,’ Mrs Thrower had said comfortably when Tess, weeping, had run down the staithe to tell her that she had heard Peter and Marianne discussing boarding school. ‘I’ve heared him say time and again that that ain’t right to send gals away to school. Boys now, that might be diff’rent. But never gals.’

She had started boarding school a short while after that conversation, though at first she had only been what they called a weekly boarder. Every Friday afternoon when school had finished for the day Daddy had called for her and taken her home and for two days life returned to normal. She slept in her own bed, ate at her own table, played with her friend Janet. And on Monday morning she climbed into the car beside Daddy, with her school uniform on, her homework in her satchel and her little green purse full of her shilling pocket money in pennies, and lived in Norwich until Friday.

That went on for a year, but then Marianne announced that it was not a good thing, that in her opinion Tess was simply unsettled by all the toing and froing. And Tess saw the point, because her best friend at school, Sara, was a term-boarder and missed her at weekends. So when Peter suggested she might like to board termly, she agreed placidly enough.

But that didn’t mean she hadn’t recognised it for what it was; dismissal. Oh, Daddy wasn’t dismissing her, but Marianne was. Her stepmother was wrapped up in Peter and in Cherie, and Tess’s continual on-and-off presence was a distraction, a disturbance to an otherwise smooth routine. What was more, Tess hadn’t really minded. Her school was a first-rate one, she found her work interesting, her friends delightful, and she certainly did not miss all the little digs and unpleasantnesses which were her lot whenever Marianne was cross or out of sorts. And oddly, she never had the dream at school. She dreamed most nights of course, and sometimes the dreams were nightmares; Miss Pryce, the physics teacher, chased her through an endless laboratory with a hissing test-tube of deadly poison in her hand, the dormitory was invaded by crocodiles which squiggled beneath her bed and tried to worm their way through the mattress to get at her, the lavatory block was infested by giant octopuses which waved their tentacles out of the toilet bowls. But whilst she was at school, she never found herself on that stretch of lonely beach, shoes and socks in hand, walking beside the breakwater and seeing a horror there.