The Girl by the River

by Sheila Jeffries

  Tarquin gave Kate an affectionate push with his nose. She missed horses so much. She led him over to the stone water trough and let him drink. Watching the lane for a sign of Lucy and Tessa returning, she was surprised to see Miss O’Grady herself come into view, striding along with Lucy beside her. For once Lucy looked serious, her small back importantly straight as she walked beside her teacher. Where was Tessa? Something’s wrong, Kate thought. Not today, of all days – with Lexi and Sue here.

  At the same time, Annie was struggling down the garden path in her best navy blue dress, her eyes bright at the prospect of a tea party, a plate of scones in her hand. She walked awkwardly now, her wide hips seesawing, her ankles turned inward. She’d put on a lot of weight that year from sedentary living and unaccustomed plenty.

  There was no escape. They all met in the lane outside the garden gate. Annie, Lexi and Susan with her two obedient children, and Miss O’Grady and Lucy. Kate tied Tarquin up quickly and bustled over there, the beat of her heart quickening with anxiety.

  ‘Don’t CRY,’ snapped Miss O’Grady as Lucy’s face crumpled. ‘Your mother doesn’t need any MORE trouble. Hold your head up and don’t be silly.’

  Bewildered, Lucy glanced dubiously at Lexi and Susan. She went straight to her mother. Kate could feel the sobs shaking Lucy’s little body as she leaned against her. ‘Lucy!’ she crooned. ‘This isn’t like you.’ She gave Miss O’Grady a searching stare. ‘Don’t tell her not to cry. Something’s obviously wrong. What is it? Where’s Tessa?’

  ‘Tessa just upped sticks and ran out of the classroom. Little madam.’ Miss O’Grady pursed her thin lips and a forklike frown dissected her face. ‘In the middle of a poetry lesson, if you please.’

  ‘There – I told you, didn’t I?’ said Annie triumphantly. ‘I always said there was something wrong with that child.’

  ‘Nothing a good slap wouldn’t cure,’ said Lexi.

  Humiliated, Kate tried to shoo them away. ‘Why don’t you go in and start tea?’ she suggested. ‘I can sort this out. Go on Lucy – you take Lexi and Susan into the dining room and show them where to sit. I won’t be long.’

  It got worse. Lucy clung to her, the sobs still shaking her slim body. Miss O’Grady’s next remark was a shock. The words exploded from her thin lips like gunfire. ‘I have to tell you, Mrs Barcussy, that I’m sorry but I cannot have your daughter at our school any longer. She is sullen and disruptive. And – and unmanageable.’

  A hungry silence opened its jaws between them standing there in the lane with Miss O’Grady glaring at Kate.

  Kate’s cheeks went crimson. She tossed her glossy black hair, and glared back. ‘No, you can’t do that, Miss O’Grady. Tessa’s only seven. We can sort it out if we sit down and talk it over. I won’t have it. Don’t think you can expel my daughter, Miss O’Grady, because I won’t let you. Why did she run away? And where is she now? I’d like to know, please.’

  Annie was looking admiringly at Kate. She took Lucy. ‘Come on, you come inside with Gran, and you two. We’ll start tea. You carry that plate.’ She gave Lucy the plate of scones and marched her inside. After a curt thumb jerk from Lexi, Michael and Fiona scrambled down from the cart and floated after them like two ghost children.

  But Lexi stood there, her riding boots planted squarely in the grass, her lean face concerned as Kate and Miss O’Grady eyeballed one another. Clearly, Kate was going to win.

  ‘Where is Tessa?’ Kate asked again, and the answer made her go cold all over.

  ‘We don’t know. She’s not in the school building. I expected her to be here.’ Miss O’Grady went pale. ‘Isn’t she?’

  ‘No. So where is she? What time did she run away?’

  ‘About half past ten. I assumed she’d run home.’

  ‘Half past TEN? That’s hours ago. Surely someone could have looked for her? Couldn’t you have telephoned me?’

  A blend of panic and fury was driving Kate. She struggled to remain courteous. ‘We do have a telephone, you know. Don’t you know how to use one?’

  ‘Most families in Monterose don’t have such a luxury as a telephone. It’s not normal practice for our school to be spending time and money telephoning parents who can’t – who don’t . . .’ The words died on Miss O’Grady’s wiry lips as she caught the glint in Kate’s eyes. She took a deep breath and looked at her watch. ‘You realise my school day actually ended half an hour ago? I brought Lucy home, and that’s it. You must find Tessa yourself, Mrs Barcussy. I wash my hands of her.’

  Kate gasped in disbelief, and felt a restraining hand on her arm. ‘I suggest you go home then,’ Lexi said, acidly. ‘You’re beneath contempt. Go on. Buzz off.’

  Kate was shaking as they watched the thin figure stalking away from them. She leaned on the field gate opposite the house, trying to stay calm, her brown eyes scanning the miles of wild flower meadows and the thickly blossomed hedges. She stared down at the river valley. A rich haze of buttercups and red sorrel. A sliver of light on the water. The river! A crippling memory made her clasp her hands to her temples so tightly she wanted to crush her own skull.

  Ethie!

  When they lived in Gloucestershire, Ethie had gone to the river. Ethie, like Tessa, had been obsessed with water. And Ethie had never come back. Missing, presumed drowned. Until, one terrible day, a sheep farmer had found her body, miles upstream, a victim of the Severn Bore.

  Surely it couldn’t happen again? Could it?

  Despite the child’s difficult personality, Kate loved Tessa fiercely and unconditionally, the way she’d loved Ethie. The difference was that Kate needed Tessa. With both her children, the mother love had overwhelmed her. It was an unexpected, awesome power, a demanding power which hadn’t made her a better, wiser parent. It had made her vulnerable, and Kate had never felt vulnerable. She’d always been confident and in charge of her life. Until Lucy and Tessa had taken it over, taken her heart and most of her energy. Even her fine private education, her hard nursing training and the frugal, nerve-wracking wartime years had not prepared Kate for the maternal savagery that engulfed her life now. It was a different kind of love. A savage, protective love that didn’t gel with behaving like a nice girl from a nice family.

  ‘Kate!’ Susan was beside her, quietly supportive, her arm around Kate’s shoulders. ‘Don’t worry – she’s bound to be somewhere nearby. Lexi and I will help you find Tessa.’

  ‘But it’s FIVE HOURS she’s been missing! With no lunch and no coat,’ Kate said desperately. ‘Where did she go? Why – oh why didn’t she come home?’

  ‘One more load, Freddie. All right?’ Herbie shouted over the roar of the lorry’s engine.

  ‘Yeah, all right. She’s got just enough petrol,’ Freddie said. He looked at Herbie’s eyes shining blue in his dust-covered face. The whole man was covered in stone dust and might have been a stone carving of a gargoyle. ‘I’d do anything for you.’ Freddie’s eyes twinkled as he nodded at Herbie and drove away, enjoying the shudder of the engine and the way it responded to his touch. One more load of blue-lias stone, then he could go home to Kate and his two little girls. It was their anniversary, but Freddie was glad to be missing out on the tea party. It was women’s stuff. He felt awkward, especially around Lexi and Susan.

  Following the winding road over the Poldens through the green twilight of the woods, Freddie remembered the happy picnics he’d shared with Kate, and the games they’d played with the children. He longed to stop and rest on the ridge-way, to walk up there on springy turf and see the butterflies, especially the large blues which appeared in June. He wished Kate had arranged a picnic, just for the four of them, not a tea party dominated by disapproving aunties and his mother’s indefatigable negativity.

  Life was good at The Pines, and he’d never regretted buying it. But detaching from his mother hadn’t worked out and, after months of stress and arguments, she’d finally agreed to move in with them, into her own downstairs apartment and a square of garden. She had electricity and a bathroom
with hot water, luxuries Annie had never experienced.

  Earlier that day, Freddie had bought Kate a bouquet of a dozen fragrant red roses. It was sitting in a jar of water in Herbie’s office, and the two men had joked about not letting a single speck of stone dust spoil those precious roses. Freddie was looking forward to going home and seeing Kate’s radiant smile when he gave them to her.

  He allowed himself one brief stop on the best viewpoint high on the hills. He lit a fag and sat gazing across the Levels. Far below, a silver ribbon of water wound its way through the water meadows. And it was then that he heard a cry. The cry of a child.

  His skin began to prickle. His pulse quickened in the way it had done years ago in his youth, always just before he saw or heard something he wasn’t allowed to talk about. Forbidden fruit. Fruit of the spirit. Don’t talk about it, boy. You’re a liar. A liar.

  The air shimmered, and Freddie inhaled a lungful of smoke from the last of his fag. He stubbed it into the dashboard ashtray which was so crammed with dog ends that it wouldn’t close. He wound the window down and got out, suddenly needing the reassuring turfy fragrance of the hillside. He walked a few strides over the grass, stepping between the ant hills, looking down at the pink mats of wild thyme, scarlet pimpernel and blue scabious. Butterflies flitted over the flowers, bobbing like Lucy’s blonde curls did when she ran.

  Freddie knew he should be working, but something drew him up to the skyline, to a spot where he and Kate had often sat. He tried to ignore the insistent cry in his heart, the relentless shimmering of the air that announced the unseen presence of a spirit who wanted to talk to him.

  He sat down on the skyline, and lit a second fag, the nicotine dulling his senses. He listened intently to the skylarks and the linnets, and the clack-clack of a hay-baler far below in the fields, the sound of hammering from the village, the drone of a tiny aeroplane. He closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears. All the sounds in the world could not block this insistent voice. He felt the touch of a hand, like a tulip brushing his shoulder. He smelled her perfume, honeysuckle and lavender. And she was there, clear as a painting, Granny Barcussy with her radiant, two-toothed smile. In his difficult childhood she’d been his only friend. So why was he trying so hard to ignore her, while she was trying so hard to speak to him, to wrap him in the feel of a hug that swung around his tired shoulders like soft velvet?

  ‘I gotta work,’ he said aloud. ‘Have to fetch another load from the quarry.’

  He stood up, and allowed himself a final gaze at the blue-green landscape. Again that glint of water caught his eye. The cry came again. Tessa. It was Tessa. Those pale aqua eyes, appealing to him, needing him. He knew beyond doubt that Tessa was in trouble. But then, Tessa was always in trouble. So why was it different today?

  Freddie got back into the lorry, turned it round and headed down the winding hill, away from the quarry, and he drove more and more recklessly, the words of the gypsy haunting his thoughts, ‘I see a girl, a girl with pale blue eyes . . .’

  Chapter Seven

  DOGS WITH RED EYES

  ‘Don’t you DARE take those sandals off,’ Kate had said to Tessa in her ‘I must be obeyed’ voice. So when Tessa had reached the mill stream that morning and realised the only way to follow it was to paddle in it, she had kept her sandals on. For a long time she stood in the water, watching it crinkling in the light, making nets of gold flicker across the clay bed. The clay was different colours, ochre yellow in some places, grey in others, but mostly it was a pinky red, embedded with pebbles that made the water babble and gurgle. Mesmerised, Tessa watched it turning her white socks into grubby dishrags, striped with skeins of green weed. Her new sandals filled with water like two sauce boats, her small feet sloshing around in them. She had a blister on each heel from the hard new leather, and the ice cool water healed the fiery soreness. When she lifted her foot out of the water, a shoe-shaped cascade poured out, glistening like crystal. Stamping was even more fun, raising shoe-shaped splashes of lemon-white spray.

  Tessa had never been so ecstatically happy as she was now, by herself in the glittering mill stream. She felt the water was talking to her, and so were the creatures of the stream who stared at her with the brightest, friendly eyes: the gold-skinned frog who hopped ahead of her, and lingered in the grass, staring at her, waiting for her to catch up; the dragonflies, visions of turquoise, escorted her on wings like golden glass, flying ahead, pausing, watching her with complex eyes; the indigo scissor-like glint of the swallows who flew low over the water in front of her, snatching a drink. They were leading her. All the magic creatures. Leading her into their world as if she were a giant they had befriended.

  The way the creatures of the stream looked at her with undisguised curiosity and friendliness was nurturing to Tessa. It gave her a sense of belonging, a sense of unconditional acceptance. People didn’t look at Tessa like that. Their eyes were accusing, puzzled or angry. Only her beloved dad, Freddie, looked at her with peaceful eyes, loving her, no matter what kind of mood she was in.

  The stream was leaving the water meadows now, winding into a copse of willow and poplar, the banks sculpted into mounds and hollows with carpets of cowslips and starry white stitchwort. Tessa climbed out and picked a bunch of cowslips. She sat in a patch of sunshine, holding their fat pink stems and burying her face in the extravagant fragrance and velvet of the yellow and sage-green blooms. Friends, she thought, these flowers love me, they don’t tell me what to do.

  She felt inclined to stay there and go to sleep with her face covered in flowers. Once her mum had told her about an auntie, Auntie Ethie who had drowned in the Severn River – and how her family had gone out in a boat and thrown flowers on the water in her memory. The flowers were to say they loved her.

  Tessa stood up. She breathed in the perfume of the cowslips one last time, then threw them, one at a time, into the water and watched them twirling away like ballerinas. Little moments of stillness, then wild dancing on the polished water. ‘In memory of Auntie Ethie,’ she said, and tears poured down her cheeks. It didn’t matter, because there was no one there to tell her not to cry.

  When the stream reached the road, it plunged into a stone tunnel, too low for Tessa to walk through. She dropped to her knees in the water, wetting the edge of her dress and the ends of her plaits. In the cold of the tunnel she almost panicked when a pair of heavy Shire horses clopped overhead, pulling a hay cart that rumbled like thunder. She touched the stone ceiling and felt it vibrating under her fingers.

  It was a water vole with merry black eyes who led her through to the other side, his wiggling body trailing a wake of minute bubbles. She watched him swim out into the mysterious garden of the mill, his back glistening as he swam across the deep dark pool.

  Tessa hesitated. She wanted to find ‘the brimming river’ out there in the sunlight, leading to ‘forever’. Instead, confronting her was the polished black surface of the mill pool. She watched some willow leaves floating with a few rose petals and one of her cowslips. At first they twirled slowly on the black surface, then vanished at speed over the roar of the weir.

  Ivor Stape was a reclusive old man with a secret even darker than the mill pool. His wife, it was rumoured, had left him long ago, and he ran the water mill on his own, employing young boys who were too desperate for work to stand up to his bullying ways. No boy ever stayed longer than a month or so before leaving under a shadow of silence. He was fanatical about his garden and kept a pair of basset hounds to patrol the property. Their bark was a fearsome sonorous baying, guaranteed to spook the most intrepid intruders.

  Such a bark was intimidating but when magnified inside a tunnel it became heart-stoppingly loud, especially to a sensitive soul like Tessa. Now soaking wet, she had crawled to the exit where the stream poured with the silence of oil into the black pool, and the few sparkles on the surface reflected in an oscillating lattice on the roof of the tunnel. She crouched in the water, peering into a gloomy garden of heavy evergreens and s
loping lawns. In her mind, Tessa was trying to guess the depth of the pool. She couldn’t swim. But maybe she could wade around the edge and get onto the lawn. The garden was full of good hiding places. An eerie, birdless quiet hung there, punctuated only by the chug and whoosh of the great water wheel turning at the side wall of a house swathed in Virginia creeper.

  The howling bark of the dogs turned Tessa to stone. They charged along the bank of the pool to the tunnel and looked in at her. There was a moment when they both saw her there in the water and the barking turned into a frenzy, echoing down the tunnel, a terrifying sound to a seven-year-old child. Tessa stared in horror at their eyes and thought they were red. Dogs with red eyes! Like the dog with three heads in her fairy-tale book. Red eyes. Red jaws. Red like blood. A colour that terrified Tessa. It went right back to the moment she’d been born into a world of screaming women and blood-soaked sheets.

  She turned round and scrabbled to get back to the tranquillity of the water meadows. Her heartbeat shook her right to the core, so fast, so urgent she thought she was going to die. The bed of the stream was slippery in the tunnel and now she was going against the current. The water rushed and swirled towards her, filling her cotton dress, her knickers and socks. In her panic, she even swallowed some of it, gasping, breathing it in and coughing it out again. Shivering from the chill of the sunless tunnel, she paused to look back at the dogs, and saw they had gone. Where were they? She listened and heard the scuffle of their paws as they raced across the road above. They had anticipated her planned escape, and seconds later they were both at the other end of the tunnel, barking furiously and bouncing up and down.

  Tessa heard herself screaming at them. Her hands clawed at stones embedded in the stream bed, hurling them out at the dogs, the stones ricocheting off the walls. ‘Get off me,’ she howled. ‘Leave me alone.’