The Girl by the River

by Sheila Jeffries

  Annie had come into their kitchen and was standing at the table, thoughtfully arranging a bunch of daffodils and willow catkins in a blue glass vase. ‘I brought some flowers to cheer you up, Kate,’ she said. ‘I heard all the screaming – where is she now? In her cot?’

  ‘Yes – and still crying,’ Kate said, ‘and she’s trying to kick the cot to bits. She seems such an angry baby.’

  ‘Wearing you out, isn’t she?’ Annie said. ‘You stick to your guns. Leave her there. She’ll cry herself out.’

  ‘That’ll be the day.’ Kate sniffed at the white narcissus flower in Annie’s hand. ‘Isn’t that beautiful? It’s kind of you to bring them in.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know how else to help you. I can see you’re having a hard time, Kate, and I expect you miss your mum, don’t you? Pity she lives so far away.’

  ‘I do miss her,’ Kate said. ‘But she’s with family, and she wants to stay close to where Ethie died. She’s never got over it. When the children are old enough we’ll take them up to see her.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go all the way up there,’ Annie said. ‘Gloucestershire! I’ve never been beyond Yeovil in my life. Never seen the sea. I could have gone on a day trip, on a charabanc, but I couldn’t do that. Terrified, I’d be. I just like to stay home.’

  ‘Good for you, Annie,’ Kate said, and listened as a fresh volley of screams came from upstairs. ‘I’d better get back to her.’

  ‘No – you leave her – little madam!’ Annie said, and frowned, ‘or she’s gonna be trouble when she’s older.’

  ‘I’m not trouble am I, Granny?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘No, you’re a good girl.’ Annie patted Lucy’s shining head. ‘But that Tessa – she’s wearing your mother out.’

  ‘It would help me if you had Tessa for an hour,’ Kate said, ‘then I could take Lucy for a walk.’

  Annie shook her head. ‘No, I’m too old to cope with Tessa. No one helped me with my children – mind you, they were all well behaved. None of them ever screamed like she’s doing. They wouldn’t have dared! Children should be seen and not heard, as they say.’

  The only person who could silence Tessa was Freddie. When he walked in that evening, tired and grubby, he found Kate exhausted and frustrated, nothing like the radiant girl he had married. She blamed Tessa. ‘Lucy was never like this,’ she ranted, and Freddie held out his arms and took the hot-faced bundle of screaming baby. And Tessa was quiet, her eyes gazing raptly into his soul. Freddie carried her outside and let her feel the breeze on her cheeks. It was April, and the sky was piled high with extravagant palaces of cloud. A raindrop sparkling on a leaf held Tessa’s attention and Freddie let her study it, sensing she was seeing something invisible to him. He let her reach out and touch it; the wetness on her finger made her squeal with surprise. He stooped and picked a dandelion clock, held its perfect sphere against the sky and blew it for her. ‘One o’clock, two o’clock . . .’ By the time he got to six, Tessa was chuckling with delight.

  There’s nothing wrong with you, Freddie thought. You’re like me – happier outside in the sunshine. So why did people keep saying there was something wrong with Tessa? He wanted to understand.

  Freddie sat down on one of the wooden garden chairs he’d made for Kate, and rocked Tessa in a slow, soothing rhythm. He talked to her with his thoughts, and was rewarded with a quizzical stare and an appealing little cry that told him she didn’t want to be rocked. She wanted stillness. So he sat motionless with her, almost holding his breath as he sent her his silent thoughts. He told her how she was beautiful. He told her he loved her. And something magical happened to the baby in his arms; a light shone from within her, her skin luminous, her eyes ablaze with the spirit of who she was. In that moment, Freddie visualised her as a young woman, a goddess with tendrils of chestnut hair winding around the drapes of satin enfolding her young body. A gift, he thought. A gift to this world.

  For the first time, Freddie felt Tessa was actually there, fully present as the beautiful person she was. In the perfect silence, he asked her ‘Why do you cry so much?’ His question was greeted with a tiny frown and an intense gaze. The reply came to him by telepathy, like the sound from inside a seashell.

  ‘I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be in this baby’s body.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ he asked kindly.

  ‘It’s not who I am,’ she replied, ‘and I don’t think I can stay in it.’

  The conversation was telepathic, but Freddie took it seriously. He and Kate had brought Tessa into the world in a sacred act of love. They wanted her. But Tessa Barcussy, or whoever she really was, didn’t want to be here. A sobering thought. A suicidal adult was bad enough, but a baby! A tiny baby who didn’t want to live? And she’d only been with them for a few months. What had gone wrong?

  Tessa was looking at him expectantly, wanting a reaction. Freddie prayed for some words, but none came. She must have trusted him a lot, he figured, to send him that thought. Had it been spoken, Kate would have fired it straight back with a ‘Don’t be so silly’ approach. Acceptance, Freddie thought, acceptance is all I can offer Tessa. And hope – maybe.

  ‘LISTEN!’ he hissed, and froze, his eyes watching the garden. In the electric atmosphere he seemed to have created, a blackbird started to warble in the cherry tree, hidden in the coppery leaves which were unfolding around the dangling blossom. He and baby Tessa listened together in a shared moment of enchantment.

  The words he needed tumbled from the blackbird’s song.

  ‘It’s spring,’ he said, aloud, ‘and everything’s growing, Tessa. You’re growing, every day. It will get easier, and when you’re bigger you can run around with Lucy. You stay put. For Daddy.’

  He bounced her on his lap, and let her feel how her legs wanted to stand up. And suddenly Tessa smiled, a gummy grin of pure joy, and squealed as Freddie smiled back.

  ‘She’s pretty when she smiles,’ said Kate who had felt drawn out into the ambience of the garden. ‘Now why don’t I bring our tea outside on a tray?’

  ‘Tessa’s happier outside,’ said Freddie, and he debated whether to tell Kate about the telepathic conversation. He looked at Tessa’s eyes and sensed anxiety. It was a secret between them. Not to be shared. Like the secret he’d kept with his mother, Annie, when he was seven years old. Annie suffered from agoraphobia and Freddie had felt responsible for her. He’d been her lifeline, not only because he ran errands for her, but in the way he’d calmed her down and coaxed her home if she’d ventured out and panicked. He understood her fear of confiding her problem to a doctor. She feared being labelled ‘mad’ and sent to an asylum.

  Annie lived quietly now, next door in the old bakery, tending her garden and selling posies of flowers and herbs at the gate. She adored three-year-old Lucy, but so far she’d avoided helping out with Tessa. ‘Something’s wrong with that child,’ she’d declared. ‘I hope she don’t turn out like me!’

  Freddie’s silent work with Tessa led him ever deeper into the child’s mysterious eyes. At first, he’d felt malevolence from her, but now he sensed anxiety beyond that steady pale blue gaze. Little flecks of gold clustered around the dark pupils but they seemed masklike and superfluous, glistening like reeds around a deep pool. Freddie felt he’d been given a new task in his life – the task of caring for the rare spirit that was Tessa.

  ‘You’re so good with her, Freddie,’ said Kate, putting the wooden tray on the garden table. It was laden with fresh ham sandwiches, tomatoes, and an enormous curly lettuce. There was a jar of homemade apple chutney, one of Sally’s homemade cheeses, and a plate of jam tarts Kate had made with Lucy.

  ‘Ah,’ said Freddie, ‘I wish I had more time to spend with her.’ He looked at Kate’s tired face in concern. ‘I can see she’s wearing you out.’

  Kate’s bright brown eyes shone as she treated him to one of her reassuring smiles. As always, it made his heart turn over. Her radiance had made him fall in love with her, the light from some inextinguishable inner
flame. To him Kate was like a garden in the sun, always a new flower opening – for him! – a new ripe apple or a plum. One smile and he was aroused, awakened and energised. Sitting there with baby Tessa in his arms, he would have liked to roll in the lawn with Kate, and feel their love-making pulsing into the earth. But, with their busy lives, love-making was now slotted into the night, between the starched sheets and the tiredness. Better than nothing, he thought.

  ‘Don’t look so worried, Freddie,’ Kate said. ‘Here we are on a lovely evening with two beautiful little girls.’ She handed him a plate with a thick sandwich and a dollop of chutney. ‘Put Tessa down on the rug.’

  Freddie felt instant resistance from the baby in the crook of his arm. He looked at her eyes. ‘Do you want to stay with Daddy?’ She leaned her plump cheek against his tweed jacket, and clung to a handful of his shirt with her tiny fist. ‘She understands everything you say,’ he said, and hung on to Tessa, while he ate his tea with one hand and watched the butterflies flitting over the aubrietia flowers. There were orange-tips, yellow brimstones, and tortoiseshells fluttering like flakes of colour over the spring garden. Along the fence was a mass of white flowers on tall stems with lush green leaves. Freddie watched Lucy pick one and bring it over to him.

  ‘What’s this, Daddy?’

  ‘Ah – that’s Jack by the Hedge,’ he said, ‘garlic mustard. The butterflies love that.’

  ‘Why?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘You watch,’ Freddie said as an orange-tip butterfly came to the flower Lucy was holding.

  The child’s eyes glistened with curiosity. ‘It’s putting a black stick inside the middle of the flower,’ she reported.

  ‘That’s not a stick,’ said Freddie, ‘that’s like a drinking straw, a thin one.’

  ‘Is it drinking milk out of the flower?’

  ‘No. Nectar!’ Freddie’s eyes lit with the reflection of Lucy’s joy. ‘It’s like honey.’

  ‘Oooh – honey!’ Lucy’s smile was heart-stopping. Like Kate. It swept the darkness from his soul.

  The darkness wasn’t something he wanted. Freddie had thought about it a lot, but never taken the risk of telling anyone. He hadn’t been born with it, he knew that. Freddie had been a child of light, like Lucy. He felt the darkness had been imposed on him; not just imposed but planted deeply in his subconscious where it had grown tenacious roots reaching into his mind. He knew what the ingredients were. Fear was number one, and it wasn’t a rational fear. His childhood of grinding poverty, his mother’s terror of going out, his father’s violent temper, the barking voice of Harry Price who had been his one and only teacher from the age of five to when he was twelve. The negativity, the criticism, the siren-like ringing of endless warnings about what would happen if he didn’t conform to the norm. Deeper still, and more cosmic, were the accusations and the condemnation of the most precious essence of his soul, his gift of prophecy.

  That evening, Freddie decided to risk telling Kate. It would help him so much to share his feelings. Surely the woman he trusted and adored would understand. Telling her would open a door inside his mind and let the light flood in.

  He chose a rare moment of peace when Tessa was asleep and Lucy tucked up in bed. Kate was at the kitchen table, making butter, beating and beating the creamy milk in an earthenware basin. He wanted her to sit out in the garden with him and listen to the thrushes and the baby lambs, and watch the sunset paint the sky over Monterose.

  ‘I can’t leave this,’ Kate said. ‘If I do, it will be wasted. You sit at the table and talk to me.’ She went on beating, not looking at him. Freddie wished she would keep still for a minute, but she never wanted to. He sat down at the scrubbed wooden table, his fingers smoothing the wood, touching the knots that had been branches, wondering whether the wood was still alive, still holding a memory of the tree it had once been. Did it feel resentment at being a kitchen table? Did it long for leaves and sap and the tingle of a chaffinch nesting in its branches?

  ‘You look thoughtful,’ Kate said. ‘Penny for them?’

  ‘I sometimes think you’re full of light,’ Freddie said. ‘And me – I’m full of darkness.’

  He was deadly serious, but Kate laughed. ‘Oh don’t be so MORBID,’ she scolded. She scooped the crumbly lump of freshly made butter onto one of the wooden pats and began to tease it to and fro between them, each time squeezing out pearls of moisture. ‘You wait ’til you taste this. It’ll fill you up with good country sunshine.’

  Freddie couldn’t help smiling. Kate had a way of deftly changing the subject, as if she’d turned him around and pushed him into the light, even if he didn’t want to go. He took the breadknife and sawed the crust from a loaf of bread, sniffed it, and handed it to Kate. ‘Nothing nicer than the smell of fresh bread.’

  Kate spread some of the crumbly butter thickly over the crust, broke off a corner for herself and gave the rest to Freddie. They sat at the table munching the satisfying snack, and an extra sparkle came into Kate’s eyes. ‘AND . . .’ she announced, ‘I’ve got something exciting to tell you.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Freddie asked.

  ‘Well – Susan Jarvis popped in to see me, and she’s getting married in June.’

  ‘About time too,’ Freddie said. Susan Jarvis had been to school with Kate, and worked with her as a nurse through the wartime.

  ‘Well, at least it’ll stop her making eyes at you,’ teased Kate. ‘I’m glad I got to you first!’

  ‘She’s never forgotten me helping her over the station bridge when she was little,’ said Freddie, remembering the blonde plaits, and the look of terror in Susan’s eyes. ‘She was scared stiff of walking over the cracks between the planks. So who’s taking her on then?’

  Kate still seemed to be hanging on to a secret, her eyes bright like a magician pulling surprises out of a box. ‘Well – who do you think?’ she announced. ‘She met him at Cheltenham Races. They’ve been courting for a year now, and he’s buying a place down here, that farm with all the stables out on the Taunton Road – and he’ll be bringing his racehorses down.’

  ‘Who? Who is he?’ Freddie didn’t like the sound of that. He didn’t want Kate getting mixed up with Susan and her racehorses. Suddenly he felt pressure rising in his head.

  ‘Well, you’ll remember him,’ Kate said. ‘Ian Tillerman.’

  ‘Ian Tillerman!’ Freddie felt the colour rush to his cheeks, his temples throbbing. A shadow crept over his life like a storm cloud across the sun. Words gathered in his mind, words of anger and fear, words that flew up like a flock of black starlings. He felt himself go into lockdown mode. Silence was his retreat place. It held the key to his happy life, his peaceful marriage. Kate did the talking, and he did the silence. Most of the time.

  Kate chattered on about racehorses and weddings and he hardly heard her. He felt a gulf opening between them, as if the sound of Ian Tillerman’s name had cut a chasm through everything he treasured, everything he’d worked for.

  She delivered the final blow with a radiant smile. ‘The wedding is going to be here, at Monterose Church. It will be a big society wedding, and, oh I’m so thrilled, Freddie. We are invited! I told Susan we’d come, and she wants Lucy to be a bridesmaid.’

  ‘I’m not going,’ said Freddie in a loud voice he hardly recognised as his own.

  Kate looked startled. Her eyes searched his face, but Freddie couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t bear to see the disappointment on her face. Hurting Kate was hurting himself. But this!

  ‘I told you. I’m not going.’ He stood up. ‘I need some fresh air.’

  ‘You haven’t finished your supper,’ Kate said caringly, but Freddie took his cap from its peg and walked out into the April evening.

  There was only one person Freddie hated and it was Ian Tillerman. Ian had once tried to take Kate away from him, and the shock had caused him to lose his cool. In a rare moment of furious anger, Freddie had crashed his motorbike into the canal. Far from home on a bitterly cold winter day, he had lain on t
he bank in a coma until he was hospitalised for weeks, disastrous weeks of being unable to work and earn, a time of deep depression. He believed he’d lost Kate for ever to this ruthless toff who had everything Kate wanted. Horses, money, a big home in the country. All the things Freddie couldn’t offer her. It had made the diamond ring he’d had in his pocket seem totally inadequate.

  Yet Kate had come back to him, and when he asked her about Ian Tillerman she’d said flippantly, ‘Oh him. I told him to go to Putney on a pig.’ Freddie felt confident that Kate loved, adored and needed him, especially after the happy years of marriage. Their love had burned steadily through the dark years of the war, through the hard times of living next door to Annie, and the arrival of Lucy and Tessa. It was strong. It had already stood the test. So why did the mere mention of Ian Tillerman’s name set alarm bells clanging in his mind?

  Ian had been safely out of the way in Gloucestershire. But now, he’d got the brass neck to come down here and invade his patch. Worse, he was marrying one of Kate’s friends. It wasn’t going to be possible for Freddie to avoid seeing him. Susan’s mother, Joan Jarvis, had been a friend and mentor to him and to Annie. Things were going to get complicated.

  Freddie walked in long strides, for once not hearing the song thrushes or seeing the elm trees along the street. His feet took him down to the stonemason’s yard.

  ‘What’s up wi’ you?’ Herbie was inside his office, which was made of black corrugated tin. Inside, it was festooned with cobwebs covered in stone dust and piles of flimsy receipts stacked onto metal spikes. Old tobacco-yellowed calendars swung from the walls along with a patchwork of dog-eared postcards, each one pinned up with a single brass drawing pin. Herbie was sitting on a battered dining chair which was tied together with baler twine.

  ‘Have you got a fag?’ Freddie asked.

  ‘Sure. ’elp yerself.’

  Herbie studied him with a penetrating stare while he lit one of the Players Navy Cut cigarettes. ‘Don’t bottle it up, Freddie,’ he advised. ‘That’s what killed your father. Like a time bomb he was.’