Skye heard a tearing sound and whipped around to see the rope beneath Nicholas’s feet cleave apart. He plunged down, one hand grasping the rope as he fell. Skye did the same as the entire floor of the bridge disintegrated.
Luckily the sides of the bridge remained intact, giving them something to cling onto. Their legs were in the water, their torsos and heads above it.
‘We’ll have to jump in,’ Skye said prosaically, as if her heart weren’t thudding faster than the Moth’s propeller at take-off. ‘We’ll just pretend it’s the sea, rather than slime.’ She cast her eyes over the thick layer of green muck that hid who knew what horrors beneath.
Nicholas’s face was pale, his knuckles whiter than bone. And then he said it. ‘I can’t swim.’
Her insides sank into the water. ‘Of course you can. I’ve seen you.’
Only then did she realise that no, she hadn’t ever seen Nicholas swim. Even though they spent so much time at the cove, he was always engrossed in the rock pools when she dived out into the waves. She’d seen him in the water up to his knees, but never any further than that.
‘I’m going to fall in,’ he said.
Skye heard fear in his voice for the first time ever. So she did the only thing possible. She let go, dropping into the water, keeping her mouth firmly closed.
‘You can go hand over hand along the side ropes until you can stand,’ she said firmly, as if she were certain it would work. ‘It’ll hurt and you’ll get blisters, but it’s the only way. I’ll swim beside you.’
She didn’t mention the unmistakable dangers.
Nicholas began to move as if he were swinging himself across the climbing frame in the school playground. He was good at that, so he’d be good at this too, Skye reasoned. She swam beside him just as she’d promised, her eyes fastened to his, brown locked with blue, wanting him to know that he could do it. His gaze assured her that he believed her.
They were still a way from the shore when he began to wince; the rope was tearing away the skin on his palms. Skye stretched down with one leg but couldn’t feel the bottom.
‘Not much further,’ she said, and he kept going, hand over hand, not stopping to catch his breath even though he must have been exhausted and in agony.
Of all the people Skye knew, Nicholas was the one who could do this. Liberty wouldn’t; and nobody from school had the stomach for it. Perhaps not even Skye herself. But Nicholas woke up each day in a house without love and, despite that, was the best friend Skye had ever had. If he could endure that kind of pain, he might just make it to shallow water before he reached his limits.
Soon Skye realised that the sandy bottom wasn’t far from her feet. ‘You can let go now,’ she said with relief. ‘Then bounce along like you’re on a pogo stick. It’ll keep your mouth above water.’
He dropped the instant she spoke. Being taller than her, he only had to bounce a few times before he could walk. Soon they were out of the lake, where they fell panting onto the bank.
‘I don’t know why I’m out of breath,’ Skye said at last, turning her head to look at Nicholas. ‘How are your hands?’ He held them up and she grimaced. ‘We’re going to be in so much trouble.’
But Nicholas just smiled. ‘At least now I can ask you the thing I’ve been wanting to ask since last summer. Can you teach me to swim?’
‘Lessons start tomorrow,’ Skye said decisively. ‘Whoever heard of a person who can dance but not swim?’
‘In New York one dances,’ he said, putting on a posh voice so she relaxed into a smile. ‘In Cornwall, we swim. I’m glad I’m in Cornwall.’
‘Me too,’ she said. Then, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
He inspected the chafing on his palms. ‘I thought you’d think I was an idiot.’
‘An idiot would have been so scared they’d have fallen in and drowned. I never thought you’d do that.’
His mouth turned up and Skye felt her heart glow in the sunshine of his rare and exceptional smile.
She stood up. ‘We’d better get my mum to dress your hands. We’ll swim tomorrow.’
Fortunately, Vanessa Penrose could be relied upon not to tell her daughter off as long as she was honest. All she said was, ‘You can’t teach Nicholas to swim, Skye. I’ll take him to the beach each morning for half an hour. You can stay at the house and mind your sister. I’ll also tell Nicholas’s aunt that he scraped his hands while chivalrously chopping logs for me, rather than by rescuing himself from a lake in a place where you probably shouldn’t have been. I know it’s futile asking you both not to go back there, but I will ask you not to return until I’m satisfied Nicholas can swim well enough to tackle the lake, should he chance to find himself in it again.’
They spent the rest of that afternoon inside, resting Nicholas’s hands, listening through the wall to Vanessa with her clients.
The last client of the day was Nicholas’s mother and, when she arrived with his aunt, Nicholas jumped up. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said.
‘Don’t you want to know your mother’s future?’ Skye asked.
He shook his head.
Skye frowned. If they stayed to listen, then all might be revealed about his mother’s recovery. Skye hoped, on the one hand, that she would never recover because then Nicholas wouldn’t go to New York. On the other hand, she hoped Mrs Crawford would recover this very day because his mother was the only thing Nicholas never talked about. Skye knew, in her own childish way, that behind that reticence lay a deep hurt.
So she went for a walk with him down to the cove until his aunt appeared at the top of the cliff, hands on her hips, glaring at him and his bandaged hands and saying, ‘I did not agree to being your nurse.’
Skye watched Nicholas leave with the two women, his mother walking alongside but saying nothing, not defending her son from his aunt’s tongue, just smiling beatifically as if she’d been blessed.
‘Will you tell me my future? And Nicholas his?’ Skye asked her mother when she returned to the house.
Vanessa shivered. ‘Not ever, Skye. So you needn’t ask me again.’
‘But why?’
‘I can’t tell you anything you don’t already have inside you. The future isn’t a promise yet to be kept. It’s an act waiting to begin. Perhaps it’s already begun.’
Skye shivered too. It had never before frightened her, this gift her mother supposedly had for looking into what hadn’t yet happened and placing it before those who asked, like a fingernail-sized cowrie shell, its pearly lips whispering its secrets.
Another year passed. Skye turned fourteen and began to bleed every month. Her legs lengthened, her chest and hips curved, and the only places she felt at home were in the sea, swimming, or in the sky, flying.
She swam with Nicholas all the time now. And she began to take the Moth up on her own. Soon Nicholas did too. More parties were held, and Skye’s mother continued to dance with the man who whispered in her ear.
Liberty’s kicks became more accurate and bruising until she began to spend less time with Skye and Nicholas, rarely asking Skye not to leave her alone any more. She only tagged along when they visited the lost garden. Even there, she mostly left them to themselves, preferring to sit and stare at the stone maid, entranced, wearing the same dreamy look in her eyes as when she watched Vanessa dance.
Once, Skye asked her what she was thinking. Liberty shrugged and said, ‘Life,’ as if it were obvious.
Rather than risk stirring Liberty’s temper by saying what she thought – life’s in the garden or in the cove, not in a statue – Skye shrugged too and joined Nicholas by the lake.
By now, Nicholas was fifteen and had been Skye’s friend for four years but she felt as if she’d known him forever. She couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been the most fundamental thing in her life; her ocean and sky.
‘Whenever I think of you, I think of the colour blue,’ he said to her in a peculiar voice as they walked back to her house after the last day of school, ready for another long
summer. ‘Water and air.’
She smiled, accepting it as a compliment of the best kind. Then she saw his face and she stopped still.
‘I’m going to New York tomorrow,’ he said miserably. ‘My aunt told me at breakfast. It’s only for six weeks though. I have to sit a test for school.’
Six weeks. It might as well be a year. All the things she’d imagined they’d do together over summer vanished, like gulls taking off for a long migration.
Skye kicked at the ground, scraping the black from her shoe. The sun vanished, making manifest the dark shadow already cast by tomorrow.
‘Come back,’ she said, suddenly afraid.
‘I promise,’ he told her.
Skye watched him go, like she had the day she’d met him, and, just like that day, he turned back to wave before he moved out of sight. Even though she was far too old for any such thing, Skye flipped into a cartwheel as if to say: this doesn’t change anything.
She tried to fly every day of the next month; she’d never been in a plane with Nicholas, so she didn’t feel his absence so acutely in the sky. But as her mother couldn’t take her to the airfield every day, she bought Skye a bicycle, and Skye cycled there instead. Even though she could fly almost as well as her mother, neither of them were sure what the other pilots would say if they found out that Vanessa had let her fly alone at age fourteen, although there were no rules to prevent her. So Skye, as tall as her mother now, wore Vanessa’s helmet and goggles and pretended to be her; and Vanessa, as always, trusted Skye to stay within her limits.
But it was a wet and foggy summer, as if the sky were crying for the temporarily severed friendship, and Skye couldn’t fly when visibility was poor. She spent many a day curled up on the window seat, scowling at the weather.
Liberty wanted Skye to sit with her on the floor, ear pressed to the wall, and eavesdrop on the futures of Vanessa’s clients. Skye refused. What right did anyone else have to a future when all Skye had was this rainy, hazy present? Liberty, predictably, tried to pinch her sister in retaliation but then changed tactics and gazed unblinking at Skye, which was much more irritating than physical violence.
‘Liberty, can you fill the wood basket,’ Vanessa said, after catching her in the act.
‘Why do I have to do it?’ Liberty complained. ‘Skye filled it yesterday.’
Liberty dispatched, Vanessa made Skye a cup of sweet, milky tea.
‘Nicholas’s father was a very wealthy man,’ she said as she measured tea leaves into the pot. ‘Nicholas will inherit his business when he is of age, and I think he’ll soon be groomed to take it over.’
‘What?’ Skye said, attention absolutely caught.
‘His mother’s condition has, at last, been declared untreatable and his aunt feels it’s time to focus on Nicholas. She wants him to be properly schooled, and to re-establish herself in New York. With Nicholas’s mother so ill, his aunt becomes, in effect, his mother. He must do as she says.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’
Her mother smiled. ‘I was trying to put off the future. But of course it’s the destiny Nicholas has always had in him. He’s fifteen now. An age when birthright and tradition matter.’
Skye felt her eyes tear up. At the same moment, Liberty returned with the wood. She gaped at Skye, dropped the basket on the floor and said, ‘I won’t stare at you again. I promise.’
Skye swiped her eyes. ‘I’m not crying because of you.’
Liberty scuttled over and sat beside her in the window seat, and Skye felt a wave of affection for her sister who, despite having tempests to rival those of a Cornish winter, could occasionally show such kindness too.
‘He said he’d come back,’ Skye told her mother.
‘I don’t know that he will, Skye.’
‘Nicholas never lies.’
Her mother sat at the table then, an unrecognisable expression altering the familiar features of her face.
Skye clutched Liberty’s hand. Liberty’s fingers closed over hers.
Their mother’s mouth twitched strangely when she saw their joined hands. ‘I thought to send you to France, to stay with your aunt for six months or so,’ she said suddenly. ‘You could go to school there. Learn all the things I’m not very good at teaching, but which she excels at.’ Vanessa leaned over and fingered Skye’s unkempt hair. ‘I’ve never cared about things like hairdos and wealthy families, but now, looking at your face, I think that perhaps I do.’
‘I don’t want to go to France,’ Skye said.
Liberty cuddled in closer.
They’d only met their ‘aunt’ twice before, when they’d been to France as children. But as Vanessa had never actually married Skye and Liberty’s father, this woman in France wasn’t really bound to them. Skye shook her head.
‘And,’ Vanessa continued, ‘I’m tired of seeing everyone’s future and doing nothing about my own – one of the few futures, like yours, I will never foretell. I’d like to do what Amy Johnson did and fly to Australia. Just take off and go. I want to see if I have anything more to me. Do you understand?’
‘I’ll go with you,’ Skye said.
‘I want you to look after Liberty for me. If you stay here in Cornwall without Nicholas, you’ll only miss him all the more.’
‘But why fly to Australia?’ Skye demanded.
‘I need to know that I can. I once knew Amy. I was a better flyer than her. But she’s just claimed a record to Moscow, and to Cape Town. What have I claimed?’
Skye felt it then: pain of a kind she’d never known as she understood that her mother’s life in Cornwall, with its occasional parties and two daughters, had its own shadow – a restlessness, a void, an unfilled space.
‘But …’ Skye couldn’t articulate what she wanted to say. ‘I thought it would be like this forever,’ she managed eventually.
‘You can’t look for cowrie shells forever, Skye.’
Six weeks after Nicholas had left, Skye was surprised one morning to see a man picking his way down the path to her cove. Only when the man reached the sand did Skye realise it was Nicholas.
How had six weeks wreaked such change? He was taller, broader, and his face had hardened, all traces of the boy vanished. She stood still, the water taunting her ankles, and folded her arms across her chest.
‘Let’s sit in the cave,’ she said when he was close enough to hear her.
He nodded and followed her to the cave, where she lay on her back in the darkness and he did the same beside her.
‘I start school in New York next week,’ he said, his voice deeper now, masculine. ‘My aunt was going to have someone pack up the house here, but I threw a Liberty-sized tantrum and convinced her to come back for our things.’
‘Well, if you copied Liberty, I’m not surprised you won,’ Skye said, keeping a smile on her face so it would show in her voice.
The sounds of their shared childhood filled the cave: the ceaseless roll of the ocean towards the sand, the violent unfurling of water, the crash as it spilled. The wind blew in a squall of protest: this couldn’t be happening. Salt water dripped silently over Skye’s cheeks, so many tears it was a wonder she didn’t drown in them.
For a time, neither spoke. They lay on their backs, side by side, hands so close she could feel the electricity of his body buzz from his fingers and into hers. She withdrew her hand from the sand and made a circle with her thumb and forefinger, closing one eye so she could focus through the makeshift ring.
‘When I did that cartwheel on the pier in front of you it was just one tiny moment. But now …’ She faltered, then flung her arms apart, as wide as they could go. ‘This moment is too big. It’s so big that I can’t see all of it and I don’t want to feel any of it. It’s too big,’ she repeated.
She heard a soft thud, as if a cartwheeling girl had toppled to the sand right beside them. Their heads moved in unison towards the sound, but there was nothing there except a memory.
‘I don’t want to go,’ Nicholas sai
d quietly.
Skye sat up, leaned over and gave Nicholas a hug that was ferocious and quite possibly painful. His arms closed around her too, and she felt that his cheeks were wet, like hers. Then she scrambled to her feet and ran away, feeling something rip against her chest, imagining that in her tear-blindness she must have scraped against one of the walls of the cave.
She ran fast, feet beating against the sand, up to the house and then over the moor beyond. Finally, at the top of the hill, she stopped and sank to the ground. From up here she could see everything, but she couldn’t see Nicholas and that was how it would be from now on.
She touched her chest but found no graze from the rocks, yet it still hurt more than anything ever had.
Aunt Sophie was as vivacious as Vanessa, but more effusive in her affections: hugs and kisses ended her sentences, rather than fullstops. She was the most elegant creature Skye had ever seen, always dressed in Schiaparelli or Poiret. Liberty watched her with delighted eyes and even Skye, sitting in her bedroom at the apartment in Passy – the sixteenth arrondissement near the Bois de Boulogne – couldn’t help but try to discipline her hair so it more closely approximated the lustrous upsweep of her aunt’s chestnut coiffure. But that was a minor transformation compared to everything else that happened in Paris.
Liberty was the first thing to change. She forgot to kick Skye. She smiled. She woke up in the morning eager to go to school. Rather than staying inside all weekend, Liberty went to visit her new friends and ate ice-cream with them while strolling through the Jardin du Ranelagh. She became a cool, elegant Parisienne, not unlike their Aunt Sophie.
Skye observed this metamorphosis with open-mouthed astonishment.
The second thing to change was Nicholas. Skye wrote to him almost every day. He never replied.
She’d been wrong when she’d thought, atop the cliff on the last day she’d seen him, that her chest couldn’t hurt more than it did in that moment. That pain had been a mere twinge. What she felt now, each day when she searched through the mail and found nothing, was a skewering – deep and raw.
The Paris Secret : A Novel (2020) Page 3