The Girl by the River (21 page)

‘Thank goodness your father’s not here,’ Kate said. She was trembling with fury, and with the shock of slapping her treasured daughter. ‘I could SMELL you coming up the
path,’ she ranted. ‘How dare you get drunk, Lucy! Where did you get it from? I hope you haven’t spent the money Daddy gave you on . . . on booze.’

‘I wasn’t doing any harm, Mum. They were friends from school. They only gave me a bit of cider. Everyone was drinking it – and Jill’s mum’s potato wine.’
Lucy’s eyes blazed at Kate. ‘We were only having fun. You didn’t have to slap me like that. It’s not fair.’

‘You should have known better, Lucy. You don’t just do something because someone else is doing it.’

‘Why not? I was joining in and I enjoyed it,’ said Lucy defiantly. Her eyes rolled and she swung round and was sick into the grass.

‘Oh for goodness’ sake, Lucy!’ Kate pushed her into the green canvas toilet tent. ‘Go in there.’

She got a bucket of water from the tank and sloshed it over the grass, feeling sick herself now. She glanced up at Freddie’s silhouette and he was winding the kite in. Soon he would come
padding down to the caravan, his face red from the sea air, his eyes peaceful.

‘Don’t tell Daddy. Please, Mum.’ Lucy staggered out of the tent, her eyes desperate, her hair straggled over her face. ‘You’ve ruined our holiday,’ Kate said,
‘and Daddy will be terribly upset. You’d better tell me who that boy was, Lucy. You won’t be seeing HIM again, my girl.’

‘That’s not fair. He’s a nice boy, Mum. You haven’t even met him.’ Lucy began to cry with rage. ‘He’s Jill’s brother, and he gave me a lift back
on his Vespa.’

‘You’ve no business getting on the back of one of those scooters,’ Kate ranted. ‘You saw them all riding along the sea front, causing trouble everywhere. Fighting.
They’re no good – the scum of the earth – and your father hates them.’

‘But you don’t KNOW them, Mum. That’s not fair. Why can’t I have some fun? I’m seventeen, not ten.’ Lucy pushed her hair back from her face, and her eyes
seethed with resentment. ‘And they invited me to go midnight swimming with them – and I’m going. You can’t stop me.’

‘Lucy!’ Kate was hurt and appalled. She’d only just recovered from the upset with Tessa. Now her precious Lucy had turned on her. She couldn’t understand it. Lucy had
been a model daughter all her life. What had gone wrong? ‘I would never have spoken to my mother like that,’ she said, and her voice seemed disempowered, like something vanishing down a
hole in the ground. ‘You get undressed and get into bed,’ she said through tightening lips. ‘I’ve nothing more to say to you.’

She guided Lucy into the caravan and watched her lie down on the narrow bunk, fully dressed, and bury her head in the pillow. Kate covered her with a blanket, and shut the door on her. Dazed and
upset, she sat on the caravan steps and waited for Freddie to come down from the cliff.

In her final three years at primary school, Tessa had been steel hard and silent. ‘Communicates very little,’ her reports said. Miss O’Grady had marked her
work and tolerated her, but the hatred was mutual. Her threat had lodged in Tessa’s mind. ‘You’ll be sent away to a home for bad children.’ Tessa had spent time imagining
such a place. It would be grey, inside and outside, like Miss O’Grady. Grey bars at the windows, grey porridge for breakfast, a garden of sticks and stones. It would be far away under a grey
raincloud. The stress of trying to behave like Lucy made Tessa nervous and withdrawn. Her only happy times were when she was ill. Kate nursed her through measles, mumps and whooping cough,
chickenpox and endless chesty colds. The last long summer term when she was well enough for full attendance was unbearable for Tessa. Yet she’d pushed herself through the eleven plus, passed
it and gone to the grammar school where she was once again in the shadow of Lucy’s perfection.

She’d remained a loner and a misfit, longing for a friend, forever feeling she wanted school to end and life to begin. When the Arab mare, Selwyn, had walked up to her and offered her
silent love, Tessa had been overwhelmed. It was a key moment of change in her life. Minutes later, she had met Lexi.

Selwyn had walked away, cropping grass, and Lexi sat down on the turf beside Tessa. For the first time ever, they had eye contact, and Tessa discovered that Lexi didn’t look so much like
an ostrich when she was sitting close and being quiet. Lexi’s eyes were honey bright and warm. Tessa looked right into them and saw something surprising. Loneliness.
Lexi thinks no one
loves her
, she thought, and looked carefully at her aura, seeing emerald greens and orange around most of her lean body. But over the heart was a shadow. Tessa wanted to tell her that, but she
kept quiet. Reading auras was a skill she was developing in secret. Increasingly, she felt like two people; the outside Tessa and the inside Tessa. And she believed Lexi’s shrewd eyes were
seeing the inside Tessa.

Lexi hadn’t asked the usual questions like, ‘How are you getting on at school?’ and ‘How’s your mother?’ She’d told Tessa about Selwyn.
‘She’s three-quarters Arab, if you can work that out – and she’s eight years old. I’ve had her since she was a youngster, and she used to be a show-jumper. Jumped like
a stag. I won lots of cups with her – she even beat some of the top horses, even though she’s smaller than most of them. But then, one day, she just turned.’ Lexi looked sad. She
twiddled a piece of grass in her weathered hands.

‘Turned? What do you mean?’ Tessa asked.

‘She wouldn’t jump any more. Just refused. And she went so bad-tempered – she wouldn’t even let anyone groom her. We tried to give her a rest and train her up again, but
she wasn’t having it. I’m fond of her, but I don’t know why I keep her really – I suppose I’m protecting her. No one else would put up with her. She seems to hate
everyone now.’

They both looked at Selwyn, who had turned her back on Lexi and wandered away, eating, her silver coat shining in the sun.

‘She’s beautiful,’ said Tessa. ‘I love her.’

She didn’t tell Lexi that those words, ‘She seems to hate everyone now,’ had resonated deep in her heart. Yet she felt Lexi understood. They stared at one another in silent
empathy.

The upset at home had sent Tessa spinning into another emotional turmoil. She felt trapped by the family she loved. Her mother’s headache had been frightening.
Is it my fault
? Tessa
had thought.
Is she going to die
? Then it loomed again, the thought that sprang up like a billboard in front of her:
Everyone hates me
. She always added, except
Daddy
, and now
she added,
except Art, and except Selwyn. And Lexi hasn’t had time to hate me yet
.

So there is hope
, she thought, as she clung to Jonti in the front of Lexi’s Land Rover.
I’m getting a new life. For a week
.

Lexi carried Tessa’s box of books towards the stairs, through a hall with a dusty parquet floor and walls covered in coloured rosettes and photographs of horses. ‘You won’t
mind sleeping in the attic room, I hope.’

Tessa followed her up a second staircase which had bare boards and flaking cream paint on the walls. At the top was a bedroom with an iron bedstead, a basket chair, and a big table. Tessa was
only interested in the view from the tall sash window. Fields and elm trees, and great silver skies.

‘Can I open it?’ she asked.

‘Like this.’ Lexi slid it upwards with her wiry arms. ‘But at night, you’ll get all sorts of moths coming in. And you can hear the nightingales.’

‘And I can see Selwyn out in the field,’ Tessa said. ‘I shall watch her in the moonlight, and send her secret messages.’

‘It’s eleven o’clock. Lucy should be up by now,’ Freddie said. ‘If we’re going to Abbotsbury, we should go soon.’

‘I’ll see if she’s awake,’ Kate said. She got up from the rug where they’d had breakfast overlooking the sparkling bay. Freddie lit a fag and tried to think calmly
about what he was going to say to Lucy. Kate had told him, but he guessed she’d been playing it down, looking on the bright side as usual, protecting, always protecting her daughter.

The next minute, Kate was beside him, her eyes flickering with panic. ‘Lucy’s gone. Her bunk is empty. She’s gone, Freddie! Where is she?’

‘Check the toilet tent.’ Freddie stood up. ‘And look all round the caravan, and the bushes. She might have gone for a walk.’

‘She was drunk!’ Kate said. ‘I thought she was out for the count.’

They searched the area around the caravan. It was the highest one in a line of five on the cliff overlooking Bowlys Cove, and no one else seemed to be around. There was no sign of Lucy at all.
Freddie went to the edge of the cliff and looked down through clumps of sea pink and yellow kidney vetch. Nothing. But the thought of Lucy falling over that cliff filled him with a roaring, pulsing
terror.

‘I’ll go down and take a look – she could have gone to the shop,’ he said shortly, not wanting to alarm Kate. ‘You stay here.’

He bounded down the cliff path towards the shop on the beach. He passed the seesaw where Tessa and Lucy had loved to play, and remembered them screaming with joy, one each end of the wooden
seesaw. It had iron springs under each end which gave them a fierce bounce. He saw them licking pink ice-cream cones, sitting on the sea wall swinging their brown legs. His children were gone. It
dawned like a dark sun in his heart, just as it had when he’d been flying the box kite on his own. Freddie hadn’t had a carefree childhood. His childhood had arrived with Lucy and
Tessa. He never wanted them to grow up.

The cliff towered over a stretch of black, slimy rocks festooned with seaweed. Further out towards the point were the barnacled hulks of two wrecked fishing boats. It was low tide and the
blue-black clusters of mussel shells glistened on them in the sun. What if Lucy had fallen on to those treacherous rocks? No one would have seen her there. And the tide, in the night . . . Freddie
felt sick with panic. Lucy. His little Lucy, with her blonde swirl of hair and dazzling smile. Right now, he’d forgive her anything – anything just to have her back.

White-faced, he went into the shop, past the colourful buckets and spades and kites hanging from the doorway.

‘Have you seen my daughter – Lucy – she’s got blonde hair – you know her, don’t you?’

‘Oh I know Lucy, ’course I do,’ the man said. ‘No, she hasn’t been in here this morning. You don’t look too good, sir. Do you want to sit down?’

‘No thanks,’ Freddie said. ‘I’ve gotta find her.’

‘She’s a big girl now – a young lady, isn’t she? Could she have gone off with her friends?’

‘What friends d’you mean?’

‘Those lads, on Vespa scooters, were here early this morning. Made such a noise – and left such a mess – crisp packets and broken bottles. I was glad when they’d
gone.’

‘Which way did they go?’

‘They were going off to Burton Bradstock, they said. And they’d mostly got girls on the back, all dolled up with eye make-up – eyes like piss holes in the snow, some of
’em had. And skirts! I never saw skirts so short in my life.’

Freddie went back to the caravan and found Kate sitting on the steps, a piece of paper in her hand.

‘Lucy left a note,’ she said, and looked up at him with tormented eyes. ‘And – oh, it’s so cruel.’

Freddie took the pale blue sheet of Basildon Bond writing paper, his mouth twitching as he read the words Lucy had scribbled there in a leaking ballpoint pen.

Stunned and hurt, Freddie and Kate went into the caravan and sat together on the seat, sharing a bitter silence.

‘Please, Freddie – let’s get in the car and go and fetch her,’ Kate said eventually.

‘No,’ Freddie insisted. ‘I’m not going running after her. If she wants to throw her life away like that – let her – she’ll learn a hard
lesson.’

Kate look shocked. ‘That’s not like you, Freddie.’

‘I can harden my heart,’ Freddie said bitterly. ‘That’s what she’s done. Hardened her heart against us.’

‘She’s young,’ Kate pleaded. ‘She’s had years of studying, and she just wants to be like her friends. We must stand by her, Freddie.’

Freddie shook his head and retreated into the forests of his mind. He pictured the Somerset Levels on a windy day when you could stand on the ridgeway and see the shadows of clouds racing over
sunlit pastures. Each bright meadow was a thought, chased by a shadow, and each hopeful green stalk was bent by the wind, its intentions shredded and scattered across the earth. The conflict in his
mind tore itself apart like the wind ripping the grass. He could forgive Lucy anything if she had fallen from the cliff, but if she’d run away with some layabout on a scooter, he could never
forgive her!

Tessa and Lexi sat on a tartan rug at the edge of the woods, an hour before sunset. A nightingale picnic, was what Lexi called it, but it was different from the picnics Tessa
was used to. There were no cucumber sandwiches and boiled eggs dipped in salt, and no threats about eating nicely and eating crusts. Lexi had thrown the picnic together in a saggy canvas holdall. A
sharp knife, a box of matches, a frying pan, tin mugs and plates, bread rolls, a lump of butter rolled in grease-proof paper, two onions, four chipolatas and two Penguin biscuits. ‘You carry
the whistling kettle,’ she’d said, ‘and keep it level – it’s full of water.’

Lexi showed her how to cut a square of turf and light a fire. ‘You can do it next time,’ she said, building a ring of flat stones around the fire pit as Tessa chopped the onions,
awkwardly, on one of the tin plates. ‘We’re having hot-dogs, like they have at the carnival, only nicer!’