The Ice Twins

by S. K. Tremayne

Again I note how our conversation is reduced to this: Where you are going, Why am I going, Who gets the boat, Who will buy food tonight. Maybe it is because we are scared of talking about the bigger things: what is happening to Lydia. Maybe we just hope that if we don’t talk about it, the problem will melt away, like early drifts of snow on the lower slopes of Ladhar Bheinn.

  He opens the door to the freshening air and trudges down to the lighthouse beach. As the door opens I pretend to myself I am not looking for Lydia and Emily, but I am. I want to be a non-interfering mother who can let her happy daughter run free, safe on her island, with her friend, but I am also the anxious mother of a friendless daughter and I am shredded with worries.

  I can hear the dwindling buzz of the outboard motor, as Angus disappears around Salmadair. For a moment I stand at the kitchen window and watch a curlew, sitting on a rock, near the washing line. It is pecking at a winkle, tossing seaweed over its shoulder; then it hops on one leg to a slippy boulder, flaps irritably at the dampness, and makes its lonely cry.

  Lydia.

  She is there on the beach by the tidal causeway. My daughter is staring into the still pools of water. She is alone. Where is Emily?

  I have to intervene.

  Zipping up my windcheater, I stroll, casually, down the grass path, to the sands and shingles.

  ‘Lydia, where’s your new friend?’

  My voice is absurdly calm.

  Lydia is now digging something out of the sand with a stick. Her boots are smeared with grey mud and green seaweed and her soft blonde hair looks wild, near-feral. Her hood is down. An island child.

  ‘Lydia?’

  She looks up, with an expression halfway between guilt and sadness.

  ‘Emily didn’t want to play what I wanted to play, Mummy. She wanted to go look at the lighthouse, that is boring isn’t it? So I came here.’

  I can sense the panic of isolation in this statement. It’s been so long, Lydia has forgotten how to socialize, to share, how to be a friend.

  ‘Lydia you can’t always do what you want to do. Sometimes you have to do what your friends want to do. Where is she?’

  Silence.

  ‘Where is she?’

  The first strain of anxiety tightens in my throat.

  ‘Sweetie, where is Emily?’

  ‘Told you! By the lighthouse.’ She stamps her foot. Pretend-angry. But I can see the hope, and the hurt, in her eyes.

  ‘OK then, let’s go and find her, I’m sure we can find something you both want to do.’

  I take my dismayed daughter by the hand and haul her up onto the path – and together we march, lockstep, to the lighthouse, and there is Emily Durrant looking utterly fed up, and bored, and cold, her hands in her anorak pockets, standing by the lighthouse railings.

  ‘Mrs Moorcroft, can I go home now?’ she says. Flatly. ‘I want to see my friends in the village this afternoon.’

  I glance, immediately, at my daughter.

  Lydia looks openly anguished, and hurt, by this inadvertently cruel remark. Tears are not far from her blue eyes.

  Yet Emily is, of course, simply being truthful: Lydia is not one of Emily’s friends and probably never will be.

  Somehow I suppress my maternal anger. The urge to protect Lydia. Because I am determined to give this another shot. ‘Hey, girls, why don’t we play rock-skipping?’

  Emily pouts. ‘But I want to go home.’

  ‘Not yet, Emily, not quite yet – very soon. But we can have some fun first, we can skim rocks behind the lighthouse!’

  This is one of Lydia’s favoured games: skimming rocks over the flat stretch of water around the corner, where the waves are harboured by the basalt and granite blocks, set beneath Stevenson’s noble lighthouse. She likes to play this game with Daddy.

  Emily sighs heavily, and Lydia says, ‘Please come, Emily. We can play this, I can show you. Please let me show you?’

  ‘Oh, all right then.’

  Together we painstakingly make our way down to the basalt blocks, and the flat stretch of water. We have to clamber, and trip over kelp, and step onto crusts of decaying seaweed. Emily wrinkles her nose.

  When we reach the tiny beach, Lydia picks up a round stone and she shows it to Emily.

  ‘See, you have to get a round one and then throw it kind of like a sideways thing?’

  Emily nods. Clearly uninterested. Lydia leans back and skims a stone and it does three little cheery bounces and then she says: ‘Your go. Your go! Emily!’

  Emily does not move. Lydia tries again. ‘Let me find you a stone, Emily. Can I find you a stone to throw?’

  I watch on, helpless. Diligently Lydia searches the shingled little beach for a nice flat round stone, and she hands it to Emily, who takes it, and looks at me, and at the sea – and then she listlessly throws the stone; it does a half-hearted plop straight into the water. Then Emily shoves her hands in her pockets.

  Lydia gazes at Emily in despair. I don’t know whether to intervene, or how to intervene. At last my daughter says: ‘Imagine if everyone in the world wanted to queue up to see a caterpillar?’

  Emily says nothing. My daughter goes on, ‘Imagine that, imagine if they did, you’d have to have a big café, but there’d be no one to give them food coz they’d all be queuing!’

  It’s one of Lydia’s flights of fancy, her nonsense concepts: the ones she used to exchange with Kirstie, when they’d whoop with laughter, spiralling into ever dizzier realms of absurdity.

  Emily shakes her head and shrugs at Lydia’s idea and then she looks at me and says: ‘Can I go home now?’

  It’s not Emily Durrant’s fault, but I seriously want to slap her.

  I am about to give up, to call Angus and say come and collect, or maybe I will just drag Emily on foot over the causeway and mudflats at low tide; which happens in less than an hour: one p.m. But then Lydia says, ‘Emily, do you want to play Angry Granny on the big phone?’

  And this changes things. Emily Durrant actually looks curious. The big phone is the iPad. Which we bought when we had money.

  ‘It’s an iPad,’ I say to Emily. ‘Got lots of games!’

  Emily Durrant frowns. But it is a different frown, a good frown, a frown of confusion – and interest.

  ‘Daddy won’t let us uh play any computer games or stuff like that,’ she says. ‘He says they are bad for us. But can I play them here?’

  ‘YES!’ I say. ‘Of course you can, sweetheart.’ I am beyond worrying as to whether this will annoy the Durrants. I just need to rescue the day. ‘Come on, you girls, let’s go inside and you can play on the iPad and I’ll make some lunch! How about that?’

  This works. Emily Durrant looks properly enthused – even keen. Consequently the three of us climb back up the rocks and we skip into the cottage and I settle them both in the living room, where the woodfire is roaring, and the iPad is glowing. Emily actually giggles as she boots up one of the games. Lydia shows her how to do the first level of her favourite game: how to stop Angry Granny from running into a sheet of glass.

  The girls look at each other – and they smile – and they giggle together, like friends, like sisters, like Lydia and Kirstie used to do, and I make another little prayer of thanks and gently, tentatively, hopefully I step outside the living room and go into the kitchen. I want to make pasta and meat sauce. All kids like pasta and meat sauce.

  I can still hear them laughing and chattering in the living room. The relief is intense. This is not what I’d intended, what I had idealized. It’s not two girls scampering around our lovely island, hunting for ark shells and cowries, pointing at harbour seals swimming upstream from Kinloch: it’s two kids hunched over an iPad, indoors. It could be in London. It could be anywhere. But it will very definitely do. Because it could be the beginning of something better.

  The minutes pass in relief and reverie. I sieve the penne, carefully make the sauce, and stare at little Ornsay Bay, and the hills over Camuscross, through the kitchen windows. The beauty of Torran an
d Ornsay is subdued today, but still impressive. It is always impressive. The fine pale greys of sea and sky. The rich dark russet of the dead winter bracken. The trumpeting of the whooper swans.

  The sound of a girl screaming.

  What?

  It’s Emily. And she is shrieking.

  Desperately.

  I stand, still, quite stuck. Rigid with fearfulness. Paralysed by a desire not to know what is happening. Not again. Not here. Please no.

  Reflex takes over and I run into the living room and it is empty but then I hear the scream again – and it is coming from our bedroom, Angus’s and mine, with the Admiral’s Bed, so I step into this room: and Emily is standing in a corner sobbing, frantically. And pointing at Lydia.

  ‘Her! Her! Her!’

  Lydia is sitting on the bed and she is also crying, but in a different way. Helpless. Silent. Those silent tears that freak me out.

  ‘Girls. What is it?! What’s happened?!’

  Emily screams like an animal, she runs from the room, right past me, I try to grab her but she is too fast. What do I do? I cannot let her run onto the beach, onto the rocks, not in this hysterical state, she might fall – anything might happen. So I pursue Emily into the kitchen where I corner her and she stands by the fridge, shivering, trembling, sobbing, and then screaming again.

  ‘Her! It was her! Her talking! Her! In the mirror! In the mirror!’

  ‘Emily, please, calm down, it’s just—’ I don’t know what to say.

  Emily screams in my face, ‘Take me home. Take me home! I want my mummy! Take me home!’

  ‘Mummy …’

  I turn.

  Lydia is in the kitchen door, her face streaked with misery. Standing in her pink socks and her little jeans.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mummy,’ she says. ‘I just … I just said that Kirstie wanted to play too. That’s all.’

  This provokes even louder shrieks from Emily: she looks terrified of my daughter, she is hunched, backing away.

  ‘Take me home! Pleeeeese, please get it away, get it away from me, get it away! Get them away from me!’

  17

  Angus comes quickly. Thirty minutes after I phone him – he was in Ord, which has a randomly good mobile phone signal – he appears in the dinghy, around the rocks of Salmadair.

  I have calmed down Emily Durrant, in the meantime. She is still trembling, but the tears have stopped. I’ve given her cocoa and biscuits and I have kept her away from Lydia.

  I have to keep other children away from my daughter.

  Lydia is hunched on the sofa in the living room, pretending to read a book; she looks terminally lonely – and guilty, too: as if she has failed at something very important.

  And the worst of it is: she has.

  I cannot see now how she will ever make friends with anyone at Kylerdale. Whatever she did to freak out Emily – Talk her twin language? Pretend to interact with Kirstie? Talk about a ghost sister? – Emily will tell everyone at the school and all the children will listen to her and Lydia will become, even more, the strange kid from Torran. The spooky, lonely girl. With the voices in her head.

  And the Durrants will loathe me in so many ways: for making their daughter play computer games, for making their daughter miserable and terrified.

  We are doomed. Maybe it was a tragic error, moving here.

  ‘Where is she?’ says Angus, as he pushes into the kitchen and looks at Emily, standing at the furthest corner of the kitchen. ‘Where is Lydia?’

  I whisper back. ‘She’s in the living room, she’s OK, considering.’

  ‘Hm.’ He is glaring at me. The play date has failed, catastrophically, and this is my fault. I arranged this, and it has gone horribly wrong.

  ‘Please, Angus, just take Emily home.’

  ‘I will.’

  He goes over to Emily and, quite bluntly, he seizes her by the hand and leads her out into the dying light of the afternoon. I give him Emily’s bag with her toy inside. The two of them traipse down to the boat and the motor starts; I turn in despair, and go back into the house.

  It’s just me and Lydia. Alone. Here.

  I peer my head around the door of the living room – she is still reading but not really reading.

  ‘Sweetie.’

  She doesn’t even look at me. Her white face is streaked by tears. The house is so quiet. Just the hymning of the wind and waves and the crackle of the hungry woodfire. I wish for a TV. I wish we had a hundred televisions. I wish we were back in London. I can’t believe I want this, but I think I do.

  Yet we can’t go back. We are trapped here. On an island.

  We have very little money. I have no money. We are putting everything into Torran, we have just enough for a basic renovation; but if we sell it now, barely developed, just half a shell, we will make nothing. We might even make a loss, and go bankrupt.

  The night passes in frightened quietness, Sunday is listless and subdued; our daughter loiters in her room. I sense that if I try to console her, I might make things worse. But what else should I do? Angus is no help: by Monday morning he is barely speaking to me: there is rage in his movements, he cannot hide it. He clenches his fist at the breakfast table. It seems as if he is inches from punching me.

  And I am beginning to feel genuine fear of this anger: the repressed violence it implies. Angus, after all, hit his boss. And Angus’s drunken dad beat Angus’s mum half to death. Is Angus that different? He certainly drinks, and he is angry all the time. I don’t think he would ever touch Lydia, but I no longer feel entirely safe with him next to me. So close.

  He gets up, wordless, and ferries his breakfast dishes to the sink. And then I shrug, and I let him take Lydia to school. Because I cannot face the mums and dads at the gate; especially not Emily Durrant’s mum. Lydia is also silent. Everyone has been silenced.

  When I am properly alone, I take the phone off the hook. I want to be undisturbed, I want time to think.

  Then I go back to our bedroom and lie there, for five or six bleak, silent hours, staring at the ceiling and its stains of dampness. I consider my mother’s words. About Kirstie’s strange behaviour just before the accident. The way Angus was delayed that night, with Imogen.

  There is some pattern here. What is it? I feel as if I am staring at one of those 3D puzzle-pictures and I have to let my eyes relax, and the reality will come into view.

  Resting my face piously on my hands, my eyes slowly unfocus, and I gaze vacantly across the room. Then I realize I am staring at Angus’s cherished chest of drawers. One of those items of furniture that had to come here from London.

  It’s been his since before we were married. A present from his grandmother: an old Victorian Scottish ‘kist’. The drawers are lockable. And he keeps them locked.

  But I know where he stores the key. I’ve seen him casually reach for it, half a dozen times; after all, we’ve been married ten years. You see things in ten years. He probably doesn’t know that I know, but I know.

  Crossing the room I reach behind the kist: and here it is. Lodged in a slot, at the back of the chest.

  I pause. What am I doing?

  The key slots in the first lock, and turns with antique and well-oiled ease. I grasp the brass handles, and pull the top drawer out. The house is very cold. I can hear seagulls swooping on the Torran winds, calling in that annoying way – needy, yet critical.

  The drawer is full of documents. Career stuff. Architecture journals, some of them signed by stars of the trade. Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano, other people I don’t know. Then a folder of CVs. Photos of buildings. Plans and projects.

  The next drawer unlocks, and slides out. This looks more promising; though I’m not sure what the promise might be. There are letters and books. I lift one letter up to see, properly, in the ageing afternoon light.

  The letter is from his grandmother.

  My darling Angus, I’m writing from Torran to tell you we have a pair of otters breeding! You must come and see them, they play all day by the lig
hthouse beach, it’s lovely to—

  I feel the sense of wrongness, as I read this. What am I doing? Sleuthing my husband? Yet I don’t trust him, because he’s told too many shifting lies: about the toy, about the identity change. I am also increasingly scared of him. So I want to know. I want to understand the pattern. Dropping this letter, I reach for another.

  A noise stiffens the air. That was a definite creak in the floorboards. Is that Angus coming back? So early? It’s nearly three p.m., and low tide. He could have crossed the mudflats on foot. But why?

  The creak repeats. The terror is like a cold injection, intramuscular.

  Why was Kirstie frightened of Angus the day she died? Had she seen his violence? Did he slap her?

  The creaking stops. It must have been the back door of the kitchen, swinging on a hinge. I didn’t shut it properly.

  The relief surges and I plunge into the second drawer again. Letters spill onto the floor. One is from his granny, again, another one is from his mum, a third from his brother, written in a bad schoolboy hand. I also find two typed letters about his dad; plus his father’s death certificate. And then – my fingers tingle with unexplained anxiety – I see it.

  A copy of Anna Karenina.

  Anna Karenina?

  Angus is not a reader of novels. He devours newspapers and architectural journals, he can be easily diverted by a volume of military history, like most men.

  But novels? Never.

  Why would he have a copy of Anna Karenina? And why would it be hidden?

  I pluck it up, and flick the first few pages. And my fingertips go cold as they rest on the third page.

  There is a brief, handwritten inscription, under the title.

  For us, then … Love, Immy, xxx

  I know that handwriting from Christmas cards, and birthday cards, and witty sarcastic postcards from Umbria, and the Loire, every summer. I’ve known this handwriting for all my adult life.

  It’s from Imogen Evertsen.

  My best friend Immy.