by Ruth Ware
‘Hot for June, in’t it?’ Rick says conversationally as we round the corner, and the trees break into a flash of bright dappled sunlight, hot on my face. I blink, wondering if I packed my sunglasses.
‘Scorching,’ I say. ‘It wasn’t nearly so warm in London.’
‘So what brings you back then?’ Rick’s eyes meet mine in the mirror. ‘You was at school with Kate, that right?’
‘That’s right,’ I say. And then I stop. What did bring me back? A text? Three words? I meet Kate’s eyes and I know there’s nothing she can say now, not in front of Rick.
‘Isa’s come down for the reunion,’ Kate says unexpectedly. ‘At Salten House.’
I blink, and she gives my hand a warning clasp, but then we bump across the level crossing, the car shaking and bouncing over the rails, and I have to let go to hold Freya with both hands.
‘Very posh them Salten House dinners, so I hear,’ Rick says. ‘My youngest does a bit of waitressing up there for pocket money, and I hear all sorts. Canopies, champagne, the works.’
‘I’ve never been to one before,’ Kate says. ‘But it’s fifteen years since our class graduated, and I thought this year might be the one to go to.’
Fifteen? For a minute I think she’s got the maths wrong, but then I realise. It’s seventeen years since we left, after GCSEs, but if we’d stayed on for sixth form, she’d be right. For the rest of our class it will be their fifteen-year anniversary.
We swing round the corner of the lane and I hold Freya tighter, my heart in my mouth, wishing I’d brought the car seat. It was stupid of me not to think of it.
‘You come down here much?’ Rick says to me in the mirror.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I – I haven’t been back for a while. You know what it’s like.’ I shift awkwardly in the seat, knowing I am gripping Freya too tight, but unable to loosen my hold. ‘It’s hard to find the time.’
‘Beautiful bit of the world,’ Rick throws back. ‘I can’t imagine living anywhere else meself, but I suppose it’s different if you wasn’t born and bred here. Where are your parents from?’
‘They are – were –’ I stumble, and I feel Kate’s supportive presence at my side and take a breath. ‘My father lives in Scotland now, but I grew up in London.’
We rattle over a cattle grid, and then the trees open up and we are out on the marsh.
And suddenly it’s there. The Reach. Wide and grey and speckled with reeds, the wind-rippled waters reflecting the lazy streaks of sun-bleached cloud above, and the whole thing is so bright and clear and wide that I feel a lump in my throat.
Kate is watching my face, and I see her smile.
‘Had you forgotten?’ she asks softly. I shake my head.
‘Never.’ But it’s not true – I had forgotten. I had forgotten what it was like. There is nothing, nowhere like the Reach. I have seen many rivers, crossed other estuaries. But none as beautiful as this, where the land and the sky and the sea bleed into one another, soaking each other, mingling and mixing until it’s hard to know which is which, where the clouds end and the water starts.
The road is dwindling down to a single lane, and then to a pebbled track, with grass between the tyre marks.
And then I see it – the Tide Mill; a black silhouette against the cloud-streaked water, even shabbier and more drunken than I remember. It’s not a building so much as a collection of driftwood thrown together by the winds, and looking as if it might be torn apart by them at any point. My heart lurches in my chest and the memories come unbidden, beating at the inside of my head with feathered wings.
Thea, swimming naked in the Reach in the sunset, her skin turned gold in the evening light, the long black shadows of the stunted trees cutting across the flame-coloured water and turning the Reach to tiger-striped glory.
Kate, hanging out of the Mill window on a winter’s morning, when the frost was thick on the inside of the glass and furring the reeds and bulrushes, throwing open her arms and roaring her white breath to the sky.
Fatima, lying out on the wooden jetty in her tiny bathing suit, her skin turned mahogany with the summer sun and a pair of giant sunglasses reflecting the flickering light off the waves as she basked in the heat.
And Luc – Luc – but here my heart contracts and I can’t go on.
We have come to a barred gate across the track.
‘Better stop here,’ Kate says to Rick. ‘We had a high tide last night and the ground up ahead is still soft.’
‘You sure?’ He turns to look over his shoulder. ‘I don’t mind giving it a whirl.’
‘No, we’ll walk.’ She reaches for the door handle, and holds out a tenner, but he waves it away.
‘Your money’s no good here, duck.’
‘But, Rick –’
‘But, Rick, nothing. Your dad was a good man, no matter what others in this place say, and you done well to stick it out here with the gossips. Pay me another day.’
Kate swallows, and I can see she is trying to speak, but can’t, and so I speak for her.
‘Thank you, Rick,’ I say. ‘But I want to pay. Please.’
And I hold out ten pounds of my own.
Rick hesitates, and I put it in the ashtray and get out of the car, holding Freya in my arms while Kate retrieves my bag and the buggy from the boot. At last, when Freya is safely strapped in, he nods.
‘All right. But listen, you ladies need a lift anywhere, you call me, understand? Day or night. I don’t like to think of you out here with no transport. That place,’ he jerks his head at the Mill, ‘is going to fall down one of these days, and if you need a ride somewhere, you don’t hesitate to call me, tenner or no tenner. Got it?’
‘Got it,’ I say, and I nod.
There is something comforting in the thought.
AFTER RICK DRIVES away, we look at each other, each unaccountably tongue-tied, feeling the hot sun beating down on the top of our heads. I want to ask Kate about the message, but something is stopping me.
Before I have made up my mind to speak, Kate turns and opens the gate, closing it behind us, as I make my way down towards the short wooden walkway that joins the Tide Mill to the shore.
The Mill itself sits on a little spit of sand, barely bigger than the building itself, which I suppose was once joined to the bank. At some point, when the Mill was being constructed, a narrow channel was dug away, severing the Mill from the land and funnelling the rising and falling tide past the water wheel that used to sit in the channel. The wheel is long gone, only a stump of blackened wood sticking out at right angles from the wall shows where it once stood, and in its place is the wooden walkway, bridging the ten feet of water that separates the Mill from the shore. Seventeen years ago I remember running across it, all four of us at once sometimes, but now I can’t quite believe we trusted our weight to it.
It is narrower than I remember, the slats salt-bleached and rotten in places, and no handrail has been installed in the years since I last saw it, but Kate starts across it fearlessly, carrying my bag. I take a deep breath, trying to ignore the images in my head (slats giving way, the pram falling into the salt water), and I follow, my heart in my throat as I bounce the wheels across the treacherous gaps, only exhaling when we reach the comparative safety of the other side.
The door is unlocked, as it always is, always was. Kate turns the handle and stands back, letting me pass – and I wheel Freya up the wooden step and inside.
It’s seven years since I last saw Kate, but I have not been back to Salten for more than twice that. For a moment it is like I have stepped back in time, and I am fifteen, the ramshackle beauty of the place washing over me for the first time. I see again the long, asymmetrical windows with their cracked panes, overlooking the estuary, the vaulted roof that goes up and up to the blackened beams above, the staircase drunkenly twisting around the space, hopping from landing to rickety landing, past the bedrooms, until it reaches the attic lodged high in the rafters. I see the smoke-blacked stove with its snaking pipe, and th
e low sofa with its broken springs, and most of all the paintings, paintings everywhere. Some I don’t recognise, they must be Kate’s, but intermingled are a hundred that are like old friends or half-remembered names.
There, above the rust-stained sink in a gilt frame is Kate as a baby, her face round with chub, her concentration fierce as she reaches for something just out of view.
There, hanging between the two long windows is the unfinished canvas of the Reach on a winter’s morning, crackling with frost, and a single heron swooping low above the water.
Beside the door that leads to the outside toilet is a watercolour of Thea, her features dissolving at the edges of the rough paper.
And over the desk I catch sight of a pencil sketch of me and Fatima, arms entwined in a makeshift hammock, laughing, laughing, like there is nothing to fear in all the world.
It’s like a thousand memories assault me all at once, each of them with clutching fingers pulling me back into the past – and then I hear a loud bark, and I look down to see Shadow, bounding up to me, a flurry of white and grey. I fend him off, patting his head as he butts it against my leg, but he is not part of the past, and the spell is broken.
‘It hasn’t changed!’ I say, knowing I sound foolish. Kate shrugs, and begins to unbuckle Freya from her pram.
‘It has a bit. I had to replace the fridge.’ She nods at one in the corner, which looks if anything older and more disreputable than its predecessor. ‘And I had to sell a lot of Dad’s best paintings of course. I filled the gaps with mine, but they’re not the same. I had to sell some of my favourites – the plover’s skeleton, and the one of the greyhound on the sands … but the rest, I couldn’t bear to let these go.’
She looks over the top of Freya’s head at the pictures that remain, and her gaze caresses each one.
I take Freya from her arms, and bounce her over my shoulder, not saying what I am thinking, which is that the place feels like a museum, like those rooms in the houses of famous men, frozen at the moment they left it. Marcel Proust’s bedroom, faithfully reconstructed in the Musée Carnavalet. Kipling’s study preserved in aspic at Bateman’s.
Only here there are no ropes to hold the viewer back, only Kate, living on, in this memorial to her father.
To hide my thoughts I walk to the window, patting Freya’s warm, firm back, more to soothe myself than her, and I stare out over the Reach. The tide is low, but the wooden jetty overlooking the bay is only a few feet above the lapping waves, and I turn back to Kate, surprised.
‘Has the jetty sunk?’
‘Not just the jetty,’ Kate says ruefully. ‘That’s the problem. The whole place is sinking. I had a surveyor come and look at it, he said there’s no proper foundations, and that if I were applying for a mortgage today I’d never get one.’
‘But – wait, hang on, what do you mean? Sinking? Can’t you repin it? – underpin, that’s what I mean. Can’t you do that?’
‘Not really. The problem is it’s just sand underneath us. There’s nothing for the underpinning to rest on. You could postpone the inevitable, but eventually it’s just going to wash away.’
‘Isn’t that dangerous?’
‘Not really. I mean, yes, it’s causing some movement in the upper storeys, which is making the floor a bit uneven, but it’s not going to disappear tonight if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s more stuff like the electrics.’
‘What?’ I stare at the light switch on the wall, as if expecting sparks to start flying at any moment. Kate laughs.
‘Don’t worry, I had a massive fuck-off circuit-breaker installed when things started getting dicey. If anything starts to fizz it just trips. But it does mean that the lights have a tendency to go off at high tide.’
‘This place can’t possibly be insured.’
‘Insured?’ She looks at me like I’ve said something quaint and eccentric. ‘What the hell would I do with insurance?’
I shake my head, wondering.
‘What are you doing here? Kate, this is mad. You can’t live like this.’
‘Isa,’ she says patiently, ‘I can’t leave. How could I? It’s completely unsaleable.’
‘So don’t sell it – walk away. Give the keys to the bank. Declare yourself bankrupt if that’s what it takes.’
‘I can’t leave,’ she says stubbornly, and goes across to the stove to turn the handle on the gas bottle and light the little burner. The kettle on top starts to hiss quietly as she gets out two mugs, and a battered canister of tea. ‘You know why.’
And I can’t answer that because I do. I know exactly why. And it’s the very reason I’ve come back here myself.
‘Kate,’ I say, feeling my insides tighten queasily. ‘Kate – that message …’
‘Not now,’ she says. Her back is towards me, and I can’t see her face. ‘I’m sorry, Isa, I just – it wouldn’t be fair. We need to wait, until the others are here.’
‘OK,’ I say quietly. But suddenly, I’m not. Not really.
FATIMA IS THE next to arrive.
It is almost dusk; a warm sluggish breeze filters through the open windows as I turn the pages of a novel, trying to distract myself from my imaginings. Part of me wants to shake Kate, force the truth out of her. But another part of me – and it’s equally big – is afraid to face what’s coming.
For the moment, this moment, everything is peaceful, me with my book, Freya snoozing in her buggy, Kate at the stove, salt-savoury smells rising up from the frying pan balanced on top of the burner. There’s a part of me that wants to hold on to that for as long as possible. Perhaps, if we don’t talk about it, we can pretend that this is just what I told Owen – old friends meeting up.
There is a hiss from the pan, making me jump, and at the same time Shadow gives a staccato series of barks. Turning my head, I hear the sound of tyres turning off the main road onto the track that leads down by the Reach.
I get up from my window seat and open the door to the landward side of the Mill, and there, lights streaming out across the marsh, is a big black 4x4 bumping down the track, music blaring, sending marsh birds flapping and wheeling in alarm. It gets closer, and closer, and then comes to a halt with a crunch of stones and a creak of the handbrake. The engine turns off, and the silence abruptly returns.
‘Fatima?’ I call, and the driver’s door opens, and then I am running across the jetty to meet her. On the shore, she throws her arms around me in a hug so hard I almost forget to breathe.
‘Isa!’ Her bright eyes are as black as a robin’s. ‘How long has it been?’
‘I can’t remember!’ I kiss her cheek, half hidden with a silky headscarf, and cool from the car’s air conditioning, and then pull back to look at her properly. ‘I think it was after you had Nadia, I came round to see you so that must be … blimey, six years?’
She nods, and puts her hands up to the pins that hold the headscarf in place, and for a moment I’m expecting her to take it off, assuming it’s an Audrey Hepburn-type thing. But she doesn’t, she only pins it more securely, and suddenly I realise. It’s not just a scarf – it’s a hijab. This is new. New since I last saw her new, not just new since school.
Fatima sees me looking, joining up the dots, and she smiles as she pushes the last pin back into place.
‘I know, bit of a change, right? I was thinking about it for ages, and then when Sam was born, I don’t know. It just felt right.’
‘Is it – did Ali –’ I start, and then instantly want to kick myself when Fatima gives me the side-eye.
‘Isa, honey, when have you ever known me to listen to a bloke when it wasn’t something I wanted to do myself?’ Then she sighs. I think it’s a sigh at me, although perhaps it’s about all the times she’s been asked this question. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Maybe having the kids made me reassess stuff. Or maybe it’s something I’ve been working my way back to all my life. I don’t know. All I know is I’m happier now than I ever was.’
‘Well, I’m …’ I pause, trying
to work out how I feel. I am looking at her high-buttoned top, and the sleekly folded scarf, and I can’t help remembering her beautiful hair, the way it fell like a river over her shoulders, draping her bikini top until it looked like she was swathed in nothing else. Lady Godiva, Ambrose had called her once, though I didn’t understand the reference until later. And now … now it’s gone. Hidden. But I understand why she might want to leave that part of her past behind. ‘I’m impressed, I guess. And Ali? Is he – I mean, does he do the whole nine yards too? Ramadan and stuff?’
‘Yup. I guess it’s something we’ve kind of come to together.’
‘Your parents must be pleased.’
‘I don’t know. It’s a bit hard to tell – I mean, yeah.’ She shoulders her bag and we start to walk across the jetty, picking our way carefully in the last shafts of sunset. ‘I think they are; although Mum was always very clear that she was OK with me not wearing a scarf, I think she’s secretly quite chuffed I’ve come round. Ali’s parents … funnily enough, not so much. His mother is hilarious, she’s always like but, Fatima, people don’t like hijabis in this country, you’ll hurt your chances at work, the other mothers at school will think you’re a radical. I’ve tried to tell her my surgery is pathetically grateful to get a female GP who can speak Urdu and is prepared to work full-time, and that half of the kids’ friends are from Muslim homes anyway, but she just doesn’t believe it.’
‘And how’s Ali?’
‘He’s great! He just got made a consultant. I mean, he’s working too hard – but aren’t we all.’
‘Not me.’ I give a slightly guilty laugh. ‘I’m swanning around on maternity leave.’
‘Yeah, right.’ She grins sideways at me. ‘I remember that kind of swanning. It involves sleep deprivation and cracked nipples. I’ll take the podiatry clinic at work, thanks.’ Then she looks around. ‘Where’s Freya? I want to meet her.’
‘She’s asleep – completely knackered by all the travel, I think. But she’ll wake up soon.’