The River Within

by Karen Powell

  ‘Norfolk,’ Danny said. ‘Day after tomorrow.’

  For no very good reason, Danny had put his name down to train as a mechanic. He had no thoughts about Norfolk either, except to think that it sounded a decent enough posting. McLean’s older brother had been at the same barracks, said it was pretty lax. Some glitch in administration meant they’d not been expecting him, so the elder McLean had spent his first two weeks sunbathing on a nearby beach and flirting with the local girls. The idea of anyone related to McLean flirting was a terrifying concept, but the story had the ring of truth about it. Danny had already said goodbye to his mam. She was staying in Malton for a few days because Danny’s cousin Valerie was already overdue. When she’d gone, he found his rucksack by his bed with everything laundered for him and a tin of toffee in one of the side-pockets. Weeks of training must have taught him something, because he moved it, for the sake of tidiness, into the wardrobe.

  Lennie was standing on her own, drinking punch. She had a wary look about her, like an animal when it senses danger at hand but can’t pinpoint its source. Some of the other girls were talking about her, Bridie and her lot huddled together by the stage. He’d spent too many years in their company not to know what they were about. How lovely Lennie was with her hair falling over her shoulders, the pale oval of her face like the Virgin Mary in the illustrated bible they’d read when they were children, back in school. He stared at her, he couldn’t help himself, her body slender and upright as a young birch. All the girls he’d once thought pretty seemed commonplace and clumsy next to her. Why had she come tonight? She had no friends here, not really. Even Joan Nicholson had moved right away. His mam said she had some mad idea of going to university. When Joan’s dad said no, get a proper job, she went off to join the WRAF, just to show him. Besides, if everything Hattie said was true, Lennie should surely have been at home right now, waiting for him to come back.

  The band seemed to wake up once darkness fell outside. The music was modern now and rawer, getting into your bones. Danny talked to people without knowing what he said, signalled yes to more beer. Miss Price left, waving goodbye to people, and the beer and punch must have been doing their work because more people were dancing. Jackie and Mary were locked into one another at the edge of the dance floor. They’d be disappearing soon, off somewhere secret before Mary had to be home.

  The lights went up. It was time for the band to take a break, for the food that had been set out earlier on trestle tables to be uncovered. Lennie was going now, he could see her outline in the doorway. Hattie was making her way across the hall towards him, a determined look in her eyes. He needed to move.

  ‘Lennie!’ He was outside the hall, the darkness gathering him in.

  She waited for him to catch up.

  ‘I’ll walk you home,’ he said.

  As easily as that, they were walking together. He’d pictured it in his head many times but now that it was actually happening it felt less real that it had in his imagination. Behind them, he heard little balloons of noise as people came and went from the party.

  ‘The band weren’t so bad,’ said Danny, trying for any kind of conversation. The book of poetry was in the inside pocket of his jacket, one corner of it digging into his heart. He carried it like a talisman but wished he hadn’t brought it with him tonight; he didn’t need it now that Lennie was here, right next to him. They passed his home, came to the stile that led to the river path. Lennie was agile, needed no help to climb the stile, but she took his hand when he offered it.

  ‘You were watching me,’ Lennie said, holding onto him for a moment longer. ‘I’ve noticed before.’ There was no way of telling if she was angry or happy about it.

  ‘I’m not the only one,’ he said, then wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

  They were approaching the roar of the Stride.

  ‘You like me, don’t you, Danny.’

  At first he thought she was teasing him.

  ‘I do,’ he found himself saying. He stared at her, knowing that all his desperation was there to see. It was too late to stop now. ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘People act a certain way sometimes . . . It’s hard to know what to believe.’

  She had drunk too much of the punch, her words were sticky with it. Him too. His head felt heavy, as if the beer had thickened his senses.

  ‘I would never . . . Why did you come tonight, Lennie?’

  He had to know.

  ‘I saw Miss Price and she said it would be good for me.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know why. Even my father said I should go. Usually he likes me to be at home.’

  ‘Don’t you get lonely? With school over and you up there all on your own?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. I mean, I never used to. I hadn’t spoken to anyone all day though. I knew I wouldn’t enjoy the party but I suppose I grew tired of waiting around.’

  ‘Like the Lady of Shalott,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Lennie laughed. ‘Oh yes, I suppose so.’

  Dusk clung to the bracken, damp-fronded and green on either side of the pathway. Lennie came towards him and the night closed in upon him. They kissed and she tasted of oranges and cheap rum. He felt her hands on his chest, pushing him away.

  ‘Danny?’ she asked, as if, in the darkness, she was uncertain of him.

  He could feel the blood crashing in his eardrums, in his chest. He could barely speak and yet it didn’t matter: Lennie had taken his hand in hers and was leading him off the pathway into the trees, stopping only when they reached a clearing.

  ‘Here,’ she said, as if the clearing was a gift that had been waiting for them. Her eyes were shining in the black light. ‘I watched you once,’ she said ’When you were swimming in that pool downstream.’

  ‘I knew.’ Looking back it felt like a certainty. Though it was dark, he flushed at the memory of his nakedness.

  ‘You were lovely.’ Lennie reached out the fingers of one hand, placed them on his chest, and Danny’s stomach lurched in agony. Hardly aware of what she was doing, she seemed, her hair glowing in the gloom of the clearing. Ghost hair. A ghost girl, all pale like the moon. ‘I wanted to keep on looking.’

  Lennie put her arms round his waist, pulling him towards her. They kissed and he was lost after that: awkwardness of clothes; unpractised mouths; yielding undergrowth and the smell of some acrid wild herb rising up. She was wilder than he could ever have imagined, not the saintly creature of his dreams, but a girl who sunk her teeth into the flesh of his shoulder, drawing blood, who lifted her throat to the blade of the moon.

  Danny dressed in a hurry. He helped Lennie search for her clothes. They were soon back on the footpath, man-made and civilised, the woods to one side of them and the great churn of the Stride on the other. The air was damp and in motion. A sweet, dark smell came to them on the breeze. Danny stepped off the pathway towards the river bank, dropping to a crouch by the patch of dark roses, her favourites. He wrenched a trio of blooms from a thorny branch, held them out to Lennie. Now she would have to say something to make this new, awful silence come to an end. In his heart he knew it to be a cheap gesture. Roses had nothing to do with what had just happened, out there in the woods.

  ‘I love you, Lennie,’ he said.

  Worse even than flowers. The words came out before he could stop them. He let go of the roses. The thorns had hooked into his flesh like sharp little teeth. Danny cupped his palm, watched the blood pool, dark and shining, like an offering. Lennie took a step backwards, turned in what looked like panic. ‘I’ll walk you home,’ he said, trying to take her arm in his, as if they were courting, as if what had happened had not happened. She shied away from him, pushed him with such force that he staggered, fell to his knees. He could see the river bank falling away beside him.

  CHAPTER 37

  Venetia, September 1955

  The room where Angus had died, this bedroom had belonged t
o both of them until it had seemed obscene to continue to lie beside him at night, as though she was easing herself into her husband’s coffin. Here, on one side of the oak bed—made up since by one of the girls, with cream sheets and the jacquard bedspread—was the armchair where she had kept vigil. No-one would ever sleep in this room again. How ordered and civilised it now looked, this place where a life unravelled. Whoever had cleaned it had forgotten to plump the chair cushion, the only detail out of place. The chair had creaked whenever she had moved in it. Perhaps the noise had been one of the last things that Angus had properly registered, an everyday irritation on the edge of nothingness.

  She crossed to the window, her eyes following the line of the sycamores along the driveway. How often had she left the house during those days, taking the path that led towards the stables? She must feed the chickens, see to the horses, she would tell James or the nurse, though the chickens were thriving and the horses managed perfectly well without her, fed, watered and exercised by the stable lads. What she had really wanted was to breathe normal air again, to remind herself that life, in all its joyous mundanity, still continued.

  Venetia turned abruptly from the window. She no longer wanted to be in this room where the minutes still passed at a slower rate. There was too much time to think here. The bedroom door had been closed for months. She did not know why, today, she had chosen to enter the room again. In her hurry to leave, she caught her foot on the corner of a chest of drawers, one of a pair which flanked the bed. The chest echoed against her shoe, but wasn’t quite empty. Something rolled around inside the top drawer, back and forth, before coming to a halt. She did not need to look. She could picture what was inside the drawer precisely: it was an infant’s cup of innocent blue, with a spouted lid and a transfer of a teddy bear on the side, the bear’s red and yellow jumper half worn away. The cup had belonged to Alexander when he was a child. Later, she had retrieved it from the back of a cupboard in the kitchens, brought it here in case it was needed. Someone—not her—must take it away again.

  CHAPTER 38

  Lennie, September 1955

  In the cool, blue light of a new morning she was determined that she would no longer think about the past. Lennie dressed quickly and went down to the kitchen. The tap screeched as she filled the kettle, she must get someone in to look at it. She began making her father’s porridge, tipping oats into the saucepan, salt, water, and then lighting the stove. The gas popped into flame, chemical-blue and orange, vaguely sulphurous. She turned it to its lowest setting, moved around the kitchen in her usual way, putting out plates and cups, fetching spoons and knives, the butter dish, returning to the stove from time to time to stir the porridge or add a little more water.

  Something made her stop what she was doing. She would not have been able to explain it. Lennie went to the breakfast table with a knife, she made a small, clean cut through a corner of the new pat of butter, then dabbed the blade onto her finger. She lifted the chip of butter, already melting to yellow oil from her body heat, onto the tip of her tongue.

  The knife fell to the table.

  Lennie ran to the lavatory, it was almost too late, the sickness catching her just as she’d elbowed open the door and then coming in great, voluptuous waves. She made it by throwing herself forwards, sinking to her knees and there she stayed until the spasms of sickness were done, tears were streaming down her face, mixing with the mucus from her nose. Crumpled on the cold lavatory tiles, Lennie closed her eyes, listened to her own breath heaving in and out of her chest. From the kitchen came the unmistakable smell of burnt porridge.

  CHAPTER 39

  Venetia, 1954–55

  Angus was crestfallen, as if dying was a character flaw, a failure of good manners.

  ‘Nothing they can do, apparently. At most, they can buy me a bit of time with treatment.’

  They talked mostly of practical matters. How long? Nobody could be sure. Months not years. The estate finances were still messy. If only he had another year or two, he said. But there was much that could be done in the time he had left. James must help at first, until Alexander finished his studies and his National Service. They would have to tell James right away, give him fair warning. Venetia agreed that there was no way round that. What to do about Alexander?

  ‘Wait till after Christmas,’ Angus said, and Venetia did not argue.

  By December Angus had come through his first two sessions of treatment without side effects and with no clear worsening of his health. At the Christmas party, he was in festive mood. Venetia watched him joking with Nathan Lacey, the head gardener, as he served him beer. Later, after his speech, he made his usual round of the salon to wish every member of staff and their wives or husbands a happy Christmas. Perhaps the initial prognosis had been too pessimistic, thought Venetia, as the salon emptied and she and Lennie began collecting plates and stray mince pies, stacking the plates in neat piles on the trestle table. Lennie was wearing a forest-green dress and she had clipped a sprig of holly in her hair. Alexander stood by the fireplace and watched intently as she moved about the room, as if he had only just noticed her.

  Venetia told Angus when they were getting ready for bed. ‘We should wait a little longer,’ she said. It seemed cruel to destroy one form of Alexander’s future when another version might be taking shape. And what if the doctors were wrong about Angus?

  The early weeks of 1955 were crisp, bright distillations of themselves, more poignant, more lovely, than they deserved to be, given the presence of death on the horizon. February was rain-sodden, windy, unusually mild, but in early March everything changed. There was a morning when the sky was flat and heavy, with an ominous brassy quality which foretold snow. As Venetia returned from the stables, the earth was unyielding beneath her boots. Silence all around, as if the world were waiting for some momentous event. Across the hedge she saw a tractor making its way up and down the far side of the field, James ploughing in the winter manure. The farmer’s daughter in her took satisfaction in the sight of good work almost completed so early in the day. Soon the earth would be unworkable, a hard mass of frozen roots. But there was something desolate in the scene too, the small vehicle doggedly scraping away at the surface of the landscape. James appeared a lonely figure there, a reminder of the life he had chosen for himself, living alone all these years. She thought of his farmhouse, all heavy male lines except for a ridiculous china shepherdess simpering on the mantelpiece. The shepherdess had been left behind by the young woman James had met and swiftly married on his return from the war.

  ‘This is Cynthia,’ he’d said, bumping into Angus and Venetia outside the Post Office one afternoon. Venetia had the feeling he would have avoided them if it had been possible. James gestured to the girl who stood beside him.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ said Cynthia in a soft whisper of a voice which smoothed the edges of her London accent. She was dressed in a Land Girl’s uniform, belted tightly around her waist. She had a pretty, heart-shaped face, was built like a child.

  ‘Cynthia’s working up at Stockton’s,’ said James. He took her hand, pulled her closer. ‘Not for much longer now.’

  Venetia and Angus asked appropriate questions though there was little they didn’t know already. Starome was too small a village for the movements of a newcomer to go unnoticed, especially one as pretty as Cynthia.

  She had thoroughly disliked working as a Land Girl, she told Venetia on her first visit after the wedding, which took place just weeks after the post office meeting.

  ‘Hated every moment of it,’ she said, shaking her Veronica Lake curls so violently that her teacup rattled. A poster on the Underground had given her the idea: ‘Come and Help with the Victory Harvest,’ it had said. Beneath the writing was a picture of a young woman with a heroic look about her and rippling wheat-coloured hair. She held an abundant armful of cartoon-bright hay and the sky topping the rural scene behind her was a perfect Californian blue. The poster had born
e little resemblance to the mud and stinking silage Cynthia found at Alfred Stockton’s farm that winter. Farmer Stockton had set her to rat-catching on her very first day— ‘Oh those rats!’, she said to Venetia, shuddering and wrinkling her doll’s nose. Even more terrifying than rats were the pigs she must feed each morning, with their devil’s trotters and great pink bulk. The creatures gazed at her through pale lashes as she approached and Cynthia felt sure they knew exactly what she’d been about in her previous life, slicing bacon behind the counter of Swain The Butcher—Quality Meat, Affordable Prices—in Whitechapel.

  Venetia came to feel sorry for Cynthia, who would never be at home in the countryside and clearly thought the whole place could be improved by paving it over. Cynthia truly believed that her handsome new husband needed nothing more than bringing out of himself. She adorned their farmhouse with frills and frippery, tried to jolly him along with parties, but the war seemed to have hardened something in James and it had been no surprise to anyone when, just a year after the marriage, Cynthia returned to London, leaving only the china shepherdess as a reminder of her existence.

  As Venetia turned the dog-leg in the lane the wind caught her; it began to snow, as she’d known it would. Snow flew over the bare brown hedges in stinging handfuls, forcing her to wrap her shawl across the lower half of her face and bow her head as she hurried back to the Hall.