Letting You Go

by Anouska Knight

  His voice was thick with panic. Ted jumped down clumsily into the water. He hadn’t even taken his boots off.

  He can’t swim in those boots! And his overalls! Alex had felt the weight in those overalls when she’d tried pegging them out on the line! No, no, no! You’ll be anchored to the riverbed, Dad!

  ‘Dad, it’s OK!’ she called.

  ‘Alexandra? Where are you, baby? I’m coming!’

  ‘Dad! Wait! Don’t come in any further—’ But talking and swimming was a stretch too far. Alex shut her mouth, fear finding its way back to her where a short while ago it hadn’t even dared to try. She was vulnerable again. Someone she loved was in the water too. Again.

  ‘Alex? I can’t see you!’ Alex heard the desperation in his voice, high rasps of panic escaping from a man too drunk and too distraught to save anyone. A heavy splash and she knew he’d stumbled.

  ‘Dad!’ Alex took a mouthful of water. ‘Dad!’ she spluttered. That one mouthful had filled her up, choking the bravery right out of her.

  She could hear thrashing, was he under? Please, don’t let him be under! Alex dug deep, ignoring the cold in her arms and legs. She wouldn’t run this time, she would swim. She would be efficient. She would be not be useless.

  Alex half thrashed, half staggered across the last stretch of water where it petered away against the riverbed. ‘Dad?’ she gasped. She grabbed at his head, pulling it free of the water where he’d stumbled under the weight of his sodden clothes.

  ‘Dad, are you all right? Dad, talk to me! Please!’

  Ted ruptured into heavy sobs. ‘Alex, my girl. My baby girl. I thought …’ He pulled Alex into him, clamping huge able arms around her small frame. He held her firm and close to him, like she was a little girl again. His little girl again. ‘I thought I’d lost you, girl. I thought I’d chased you away.’ He pressed a kiss firmly against Alex’s head and held it there, gripping her for dear life.

  Alex started shaking. Violent spasms of relief, or maybe it was just the cold. ‘No, Dad. You didn’t lose me.’

  She could feel his fingers, clamping her firmly in his embrace and felt something ease, a tightly wound coil that had kept her too tight to function properly all this time. ‘I’m so sorry, Alex. I’m so sorry. Please, can you forgive me?’

  CHAPTER 54

  Alex stirred. She lifted her head from the gentle rise and fall of a body asleep beside her and surveyed her surroundings. Norma’s ear twitched, she opened her eyes briefly then went back to sleep on the rug. Alex squinted at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was nearly five in the morning. She stood and wrapped the blankets around her shoulders. Norma watched her lean forwards to stoke the fire she’d made in the front room. Afire, in August? her mother would have said. But then a fire had been a far easier option than getting a grown man out of wet overalls. Besides, they’d both been exhausted from the walk back. It had done wonders for purging the alcohol from her dad’s system, a good thing because they’d still had a lot to talk about on reaching the farmhouse.

  Alex leant over her dad. He was sleeping against one arm of the small sofa they’d pulled up to the hearth. She pulled his blankets higher up his chest again. He was like an old grey sleeping bear.

  No-one else would know about what had happened between them tonight. How they’d both finally managed to put enough of the noise aside to just talk.

  Alex had finally told him. How Rodolfo had barked. How the water had been too quick for her. How hard Finn had tried. She told him how Rodolfo had tripped her into the nettle patch, and how Finn’s shirt was only on inside out because he’d been painting that morning and had called for Alex to go and look at his work. How they’d taken Dill out because he’d been teasing Jem about her attempts to look more like her girlfriends. Alex hadn’t felt on trial, or in danger of tripping over something that might reignite the fires again. She’d just felt that she was setting down a heavy load while her father quietly let her. The only thing she hadn’t told him, was that she’d been struck by lightning once, and had loved Finn every day since.

  Alex opened out her blanket and stood in front of the embers, warming herself like a moth at a lantern. Her hair had matted into damp clumps over the ruined vest Jem was going to kill her for. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Jem had bigger monsters coming her way.

  Alex stared into the glow.

  ‘Susannah Finn give you any pearls of wisdom while you were staying over at the Longhouse?’ Ted had asked her. ‘You and her boy … Are you as close as he wants? The way he says he feels?’

  Alex knew what Ted was really getting at. Did she know. Had Susannah or Finn ever told Alex that her dad been caught huddled up in the corner of Frobisher’s with the Mayor’s wife all over him. Did Alex realise that Dillon and Malcolm shared too much of a likeness not to share at least some of the same blood. Had Alex pieced it all together.

  ‘No, Dad.’ Alex had answered him. It wasn’t the truthful answer but it was the answer he most needed to hear.

  ‘Don’t you think you should tell him then? Put him out of his misery? He seemed … genuine.’ There had been something regretful in her dad’s voice, the first possibility that he might have done wrong by Finn? Maybe that was a wish too far. It was too late now anyway.

  ‘I’ve done some things, Alexandra, that I wish I hadn’t,’ her father had said. ‘Not told you enough how much I love you, for one. Not been quick enough to bring you back home to us where you belong, for another. What you said in The Cavern the other night, it was right. I wasn’t the only one who lost your brother, but I couldn’t see past that for a long, long time. There were other things happening back then, before Dillon’s accident. Things that clouded my mind.’ Alex had watched the firelight play over her dad’s worn features. ‘I was so angry, at the world,’ he’d gone on, ‘I thought you were best out of it all, away from anything that might make your life any harder than it already was up here after your brother died. And then before I knew it, you were out of sight, in every way, and I didn’t know how to bring you back.’

  Alex watched the dying firelight clinging on to the coals. It’s not about who’s done what any more, it was about saving their family, giving her mother the husband and daughters she needed to come home to. The only way Alex could do that now, to head off any more skeletons from rattling out of any closets, was to put some real time and distance between the people they now were, and the people they had all once been. And maybe one day, when he found someone with less baggage to spend his love on, Finn might even forgive her for it.

  Alex wrapped herself again and sat back against her dad’s solid body on the settee. Something had changed between them. There had been truths left unspoken, but for the things they had shared, hopefully forgiveness. Or at least understanding.

  Still there were other things bothering Alex when she finally drifted off to sleep again against the rise and fall of her father’s chest. The look in Finn’s eyes when she’d sent him away again rejected. The truth that was about to come crashing down on her sister.

  Jem.

  A tension spiked in Alex’s chest. Jem still didn’t know. And Alex had sent her away with Finn, without first telling her that Malcolm Sinclair was almost certainly their half-brother.

  What if Jem hadn’t stayed at the Longhouse like Alex had asked her to? What if she’d just seen to Finn’s split lip and then disappeared somewhere? She hadn’t come back here yet.

  Alex gave the clock on the mantel another tentative look and listened to the sound of her father’s heart beating its steady rhythm while he slept. She closed her eyes tightly and sent a small prayer up to the powers that be.

  Wherever my sister ended up last night, please, let it not have been with Malcolm.

  CHAPTER 55

  Jem looked like a fifteen-year-old as she walked up the track to the house. Alex had watched her head bobbing steadily over the hedgerow. Norma pulled again at the corner of Alex’s blanket where it touched the dusty floor of the front porch.

  Even
their dad’s gentle metronomic snores hadn’t lulled Alex back off to sleep for long. A fresh pot of coffee and an hour on the front porch watching the climb of the sun and Ted still hadn’t moved from his spot through the lounge window.

  Jem rounded the gatepost in the same skinny jeans and baggy white tee she’d been wearing last night. Her hair falling messily over her shoulder in a loose chunky braid, her fringe poking into tired eyes.

  ‘You look like Mum,’ Jem said softly as she crossed the lawn towards Alex.

  Alex squinted into the morning sun, her thumb busy over a little sharpness on her mug. ‘So do you.’

  Jem slowed as she approached the porch steps. ‘How is he?’ she asked, holding back where their mother’s flowerbeds ran up to the timber deck. Blythe’s poppies were in full bloom. A bright red warning against a backdrop of mint and sage.

  ‘Sleeping it off. How are you?’ Alex asked tentatively. Jem had a deep reddish brown on her sleeve. Alex might’ve thought it was paint if she didn’t know better.

  ‘I’m not the one who’s had to babysit a grown man all night.’ Jem looked over the house as if it had just landed from Kansas. ‘I didn’t mean to leave you with him all night, Alex. I was coming back, but …’

  ‘Jem? Can we talk?’ Alex blurted. Jem scratched her top lip. Her skin was as raw as ever. ‘We need to talk.’

  Alex lifted the cooling coffee pot from her dad’s smoking table and poured the cup she’d had ready for when he woke. Jem stepped lethargically up onto the porch and slumped tired limbs into the other chair.

  Alex passed her a cup of lukewarm black coffee and poured one for herself.

  ‘Where did you stay last night?’

  Jem sipped from her mug and grimaced. ‘I stayed at the B&B.’

  ‘The Longhouse?’ Alex asked. A cynical voice was already trying to whisper to her, Not with anyone called George she didn’t!, but Alex stamped it down and kicked it from her head before it had a chance.

  ‘I don’t know any other B&Bs in the Falls.’ Jem was being defensive.

  ‘You don’t look as though you’ve slept much.’

  ‘Neither do you.’

  No, Jem, I haven’t. And after what I’ve got to tell you, you probably won’t sleep easy ever again.

  ‘I need to tell you something, Jem. Something you’re not going to want to hear. But you need to know,’ Alex said flatly.

  Jem stopped sipping her coffee. Alex started with a deep breath.

  ‘It’s about Mal …’ Alex ventured, ‘and Dill. And what Mum said when she saw Alfie at the hospital.’ Alex’s heart was already in her throat.

  Jem sat back into her chair and looked out across the lawns. ‘It’s all right, Alex. I already know.’

  Alex felt herself rigidify. ‘You do?’ she was incredulous, relief and surprise all in one hit. ‘But …’

  Alex couldn’t find her words. Hang on, they’d been holding hands … Ah, but wait! They were at Dill’s grave when Ted had passed them on the way to the Tea Rooms, they were comforting each other, like Jem said! Maybe because they’d realised that Dill belonged to them both!

  Alex let out the breath she’d been holding. Thank you, Universe. ‘But … why didn’t you tell me, Jem?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Jem said wide-eyed. ‘Because it hurts, Al. Just like you said. I’ve been thinking about it constantly for the last ten days. I can’t get my head around it.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Alex agreed glumly.

  ‘I mean, Mum … having it off behind Dad’s back with the mayor. How could she do that to Dad?’

  Alex felt the coffee catch in the back of her oesophagus. For a split second she thought it would be all right with a steady swallow, but then it scratched and she spluttered it all over her mother’s poppies.

  She’d survived the Old Girl, twice, only to drown in coffee on her parents’ front porch.

  ‘What did you just say?’ she wheezed, her chest trying to suck in air while her lungs were trying to expel everything moist inside them.

  Jem’s had gone quite still. ‘You said you knew!’

  Alex carried on spluttering. Jem had got it wrong. So wrong. ‘But how … why do you …’

  Jem ran her fingers through her hair and held on to a clump at the top of her head. Alex held the last few coughing spasms down in her torso. ‘Mal’s dad … he left Mal a letter. For when he died,’ Jem said, startled.

  ‘Saying what?’ Her mum? Her mum had the affair? Alex saw Jem’s chest rise with an extra big breath as if she was about to go free-diving. ‘Jem? Saying what?’

  Jem gave herself a few seconds and then focused on something inside her cup. ‘The mayor didn’t want Mal to hear it from Louisa. He didn’t want Mal to hear it from himself either, the spineless git, so he left Mal a letter in with his will. So the good old Mayor Sinclair wouldn’t have to answer any difficult questions,’ Jem said quietly.

  ‘Go on,’ Alex said. She was listening carefully now. This had legs, this tale Jem was surely mistaken about, it had supporting evidence … Paperwork!

  ‘Do you remember when Mum and Dad were still friendly with the Sinclairs? Before Dill was born?’ Alex felt the hairs stand on her neck.

  ‘Vaguely. I remember Dad moaning that Louisa had been a stuck up wretch at one of the parties Mum had made them go to.’

  ‘Do you remember Mum cleaning for them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The mayor wrote in his letter that he missed speaking to Mum when she got more hours working in the family records office and stopped cleaning for them. So he took up an interest in tracing his ancestors. Mum had given Louisa one of those family tree sets or something. So Alfred took it to the Town Hall, for Mum to help him with.’ Jem shrugged and shook her head to herself. ‘That’s where it started.’

  ‘What started, exactly?’ Alex said soberly. She’d was just getting to grips with her dad’s infidelity, now she had to start the process all over again.

  ‘It was just the one time, or so it says in Malcolm’s letter,’ Jem said carefully. ‘But once is all it takes.’

  Alex felt a jumping in the side of her neck. ‘All what takes, Jem?’

  Jem didn’t need to say it. Alex had already seen it in all the similarities that still rung true between Malcolm and Dill. Alex had just got her facts in the wrong places. Malcolm wasn’t the child born from an affair. Dillon was. Dillon was Blythe and Mayor Sinclair’s son. A catastrophic error on Alex’s part, resulting in the same consequence all the same. Alex looked out across the lawns where they’d all played together, growing up. ‘Dill and Mal are half-brothers, aren’t they?’

  Jem clenched her teeth. Her eyes were becoming more bloodshot. ‘The mayor seemed to think so.’ Enough to give Dill a very shiny bow and arrow set a couple of weeks before his ninth birthday anyway. Alex’s heart plummeted like a pebble through water. She hadn’t imagined there being anything much worse than her dad fathering another child beyond their family, of gaining a son. But she’d been wrong. Ted had never gained a son, he’d lost one. He’d lost Dill. In every way possible.

  Alex felt a tremor inside her. For the man snoring on a settee in the lounge, oblivious to the hurtful secrets steadily being unpicked out here on the porch on a glorious bank holiday Monday morning.

  ‘He loved her, Alex. The mayor was in love with Mum. He told Mal that he’d asked her to leave Dad, but she wouldn’t. She didn’t feel the same way, it had been a terrible mistake. Can you believe he would say that in a letter? No wonder he didn’t want Mal hearing it from Louisa. It was hardly going to be a better version from her, was it?’

  ‘Louisa knows?’ Alex managed. ‘How?’

  Jem laughed, a harsh, pitiless sound. ‘Louisa had been snooping through the mayor’s papers once, probably checking how much she was in line for. Bet she wasn’t expecting to find Dill named in the mayor’s will.’ Alex shot a look at her sister. Jem shrugged softly. ‘The mayor wanted Dill and Mal to share everything he left them, straight down the mi
ddle.’

  Alex was trying to absorb it all. ‘But when? When did Louisa find out? Why didn’t she confront Mum?’

  ‘And let the world know that she’d been elbowed over for her old cleaner, Alex? Can you imagine Louisa Sinclair shrugging that one off?’

  ‘But when? When did Louisa read the mayor’s will? How long has everyone know about this?’

  ‘Everyone doesn’t know about this, Al. Mal found out about six months ago, when his dad passed away, I’ve known since Mal and I went out for that drink last week.’

  ‘And Louisa?’

  ‘Mal isn’t sure. He thinks it must have been the year Louisa sent him to his grandparents’ and he had to miss the boat race. The same summer Dill died. Mal remembers his mum and dad arguing before he was sent away for the week, and when he came back he was just told … about what had happened at the river … and that his mother didn’t want to talk about it again. I guess the mayor changed his will after that anyway so Louisa didn’t have to worry about her or Mal losing out any more.’

  It was starting to seep in. The times they’d all played together, the birthday parties. Blythe keeping busy in the kitchen while their dad got stuck in horsing around with the kids. Her head was throbbing. ‘Does Dad know, Jem?’

  ‘If he does, he’s gone a very long time pretending not to. I want to say that I don’t think he knows, but I’m not sure I believe that, Al. Helen Fairbanks had a quiet word with me last week. The groundsman at St Cuthbert’s thought he saw Dad the morning after Mum went into hospital, tearing flowers apart at Dill’s grave. Helen asked me if he was coping alright.’

  Alex thought back to the yellow petals fluttering over the ground when she’d gone to visit Dill. Jem looked at the house, checking for signs of life before she continued.

  ‘The mayor sent flowers for Dill every birthday. I think those were the flowers the groundsman saw Dad destroying.’

  ‘But … the mayor died … months ago?’ Alex was trying to squeeze pieces together that wouldn’t fit.