by Emlyn Rees
Because she was proud, she admitted to herself, practising the speech she was going to deliver. She was proud of her children. She wanted Bill to meet them all. She wanted him to see how stable and secure they all were. She wanted to prove to him that she wasn’t controlling and judgemental as their mother had been, but that she had a special bond with each and every member of her family and that they embraced her being part of their lives.
And most of all, she wanted Bill to know that he could . . . would be part of her happy, loving, open family, if he’d only say the word. Just as Rachel had grown to love Laurie, then perhaps Bill would learn to love and respect her family, too. She and her brother were both getting older, after all. Surely, in their twilight years, it would be nice to think of them sharing the bond of family, of having found each other again.
It seemed to Rachel that the void Tony had left in her life had never felt bigger than it had in recent weeks. She’d been through so much anguish, so much pain, so much grieving. Would spending time with Bill make her feel better? she wondered. Even a tiny bit? Because even a tiny bit would help.
Rachel placed the photograph on the bedside table and listened, as she heard a car in the distance. But it passed the gateway and, as it did, she realised she’d been holding her breath. This was no good, she decided. This waiting around was disastrous for her blood pressure. It was pointless hovering by the window, waiting for him to come. It felt too weird. As if she were waiting for a long-lost love.
Rachel knew from her previous visit that Laurie had taken over the top attic room, so when she pushed open the door, on a last-minute inspection of the house, she was expecting to see Laurie’s clothes and belongings everywhere. Instead, she stopped in the doorway, as she saw Laurie’s suitcase and bags stacked by the door, her canvases leaning neatly against the wardrobe.
What was going on? She’d only seen her niece briefly this morning, but even so, Laurie hadn’t mentioned that she’d packed up. Was there something wrong?
No, there must be a perfectly logical explanation, she thought, as she went back to her own room. Maybe Laurie was just being her usual considerate self. Maybe she felt it was better for Rachel and Bill to have some time alone. And anyway, Laurie had her own life to lead. She was probably anxious to get home to James. That was it, Rachel thought, feeling relieved. She wanted to be with James. But, even so, it would be ridiculous for Laurie to leave now, especially when Rachel had a surprise for her. She’d asked Anton, her and Tony’s art dealer, to come out later on in the week to see Laurie’s paintings. It was the least Rachel had been able to do for Laurie, considering all her niece had done for her.
Just at that moment, she heard a car turning into the driveway. She raced to the window. She watched as Laurie stepped out on to the drive from what she assumed must be Bill’s hire car.
Then the passenger door opened and Rachel saw an elderly man supporting himself on the edge of the car door, as he got out. When he removed his hat and looked up at the house, she gasped, putting her hand to her mouth to stop herself from calling out Bill’s name.
It was such a shock seeing him after all these years. In her mind’s eye, when she’d been addressing him, rehearsing what she was going to say, she’d imagined his twenty-six-year-old face. But he was old, she realised, watching as he fanned his face with his straw hat. She looked down on him, recognising his features, yet feeling the weight of time so acutely she couldn’t stop the tears in her eyes from spilling out on to her cheeks.
She flattened herself against the cool brick of the bedroom wall, out of sight of the window, not knowing what to do. Why was she being so childish? It was as if Bill were in charge of her home again.
But this was the way Laurie wanted it to be. Laurie had insisted that she wanted to talk to her father and settle him in first, before she announced that Rachel was in the house.
But discovering Laurie’s bags all packed up had shaken Rachel’s confidence. Now that he was here, what if it was harder than she thought to convince Bill that they should heal their past? What if he was happy to remain stubborn and not speak to her for the rest of her life, as he’d once declared was his intention?
She glanced across to the dressing table by the door. On it were all the returned letters she’d written to Bill over the years, which she’d brought from Dreycott Manor. She tiptoed over to it and picked up the letters and newspaper cuttings.
She looked at herself in the full-length mirror, smoothing her hair for the fiftieth time and touching up her make-up. She wondered, now that she’d seen Bill, how he would see her. She’d spent so many years trying to retain her youth, but she knew she hadn’t really escaped time. She could see it on her face. She thought of all the tragedies she’d assimilated into her life: her father, the flood, her mother, Anna and now Tony. Heartbreak after heartbreak. It was amazing she’d survived at all. And now she hoped to cover it all up with make-up. It seemed laughable.
And pointless. A lifetime’s worth of highs and lows had become part of who she was. And she’d lived through them all, because she’d always had hope. She’d always managed to tell herself that however bad things got, the future would somehow be brighter.
Now, as she took a deep breath, she forced herself to reach her last reserve of hope. Bill was here. And that meant that she would find peace at last and lay the ghosts of the past to rest.
She glanced at the newspaper articles in her hand. She thought of the first time she’d seen the facts of the flood in print, the first time she’d seen the list of the dead in these very cuttings. It had been so raw, but now, over time, she could barely remember half of the people the newspaper mentioned.
In the meantime, generations had come and gone. These newspapers she’d kept and cherished would have been through someone else’s compost heap several times over, would have served to mop up the floor of a hundred rabbit cages, no doubt.
But it hadn’t stopped mattering to her. It hadn’t stopped being real. Of course she hadn’t thought about it every day, but it had always been there: the tragedy she’d walked away from.
That was it, she thought, straightening up. That was how she would set the tone of her reconciliation with Bill. She would start by thanking him. She would be gracious and magnanimous. She would start by acknowledging that he’d helped save her life once. Was it too late to thank him? Was fifty years too long? she wondered.
Fifty years. Could it really be that long ago? She closed her eyes for a second, listening to the whirring of the ceiling fan, the noise blurring with a vivid memory of being in Bill’s car, up on the moor, on that terrible night.
Chapter XXII
Stepmouth, 7.30 p.m., 15 August 1953
It was ink black, black as Guinness, black as the night-time sea.
The rain beat down like a thousand tiny drumsticks against the walls and windows and roof, muffling the slow tick-tock of the clock. Crouching over the stove, Bill felt for the match head with his fingertip, then scraped it across the big box of cook’s matches. A phosphorescent flame flared up. Yellow light flickered nervously across the kitchen. Shadows danced.
‘Have you found them?’ Mrs Vale called from upstairs.
Bill could smell the lamb stew left over in the pan from supper. ‘Yes,’ he shouted back.
He dug out a fistful of candles from the table drawer, along with an army surplus battery-powered torch, which he briefly tested, before pocketing. He set about lighting candles, melting their bases and sticking them to saucers. The shadows shrank back into the corners. The whiff of wick and wax filled the air.
Out in the corridor, Bill examined the fuse box beneath the stairs, but could see nothing wrong. The town received its electricity from the power station further up the valley at Watersbind. All this water and debris, Bill thought, careering through the turbines, maybe that was what was to blame.
Mrs Vale was waiting for him upstairs in her bedroom, sitting in front of her dressing table, with her nightgown on and a black crocheted shawl a
round her shoulders. She’d been just about to have a bath when the electricity had cut out.
‘Put it on the window sill, will you?’ she asked, twisting her wheelchair round to face that way. She smiled at Bill, comforted by the warm glow of the candle he’d brought with him. ‘I hate the dark.’
Bill did as he was told and Mrs Vale wheeled herself over and peered outside. The high street was wrapped in shadow as thick as wool. You could see candles and oil lamps glowing like fire embers in the windows of the buildings opposite. The power was down across the whole town, then.
‘What a filthy night,’ his mother complained.
‘Worst August on record,’ he told her. He’d heard it on the radio that afternoon. There’d been six and a half inches of rain in the last two weeks alone. Half the crops in the county had been decimated, the news presenter had reported. A river bank had burst over in Moxborough Valley, drowning six rare piebald ponies which had been put out to pasture on the flats.
‘I think it might be a good idea to go and bring Rachel back from Pearl’s,’ his mother said. ‘I don’t like the look of it out there. It’s going to turn worse before it gets better.’
‘I’ll go now,’ he answered, taking out the torch and switching it on.
He was already dressed to go out: boots on, raincoat tied. He’d been planning to call in on Emily to see that she was all right. He’d tried telephoning her already, but the line was dead, the telephone exchange down.
Throughout the day, he’d been monitoring the condition of the River Step where it ran between their two streets. It had grown turbulent and swollen. All afternoon, it had risen steadily. There was nothing to worry about yet, he didn’t think, though the waters were blackening, heavy with peat. But if the rain carried on this way for many more hours, then there’d be a real danger of the river breaking its banks and seeping out across both his and Emily’s backyards.
Bill had a stack of sandbags left over from the air-raid shelter he and his father had built in the war. He’d already dragged two across the yard door just in case. He’d wheelbarrow more round to Emily if she hadn’t already taken precautions of her own.
As he hung an oil lamp from the ladder leading to Rachel’s room, Bill shivered, remembering the water damage he’d seen over at the nearby village of Castleton as a child, after the 1933 storm. He’d driven out there on the old cart with his dad to deliver blankets after the swollen River Lox had forced people from their homes and left their possessions rotting and sodden. He hated the thought of all the work Emily had put into the Sea Catch Café going to waste for want of a little preparation.
Downstairs, he pulled out his set of keys to unlock the alley door, but the door started to shake, being pounded by something from outside. Bill froze. Then the noise stopped, then started again.
Quickly, Bill unlocked and opened the door. He shone the torch outside. What he saw made his heart lurch. A man – he didn’t recognise who it was at first – was slumped against the door frame, clinging on to it like he was about to collapse. The man’s head hung low. His fingernails were filthy and his black hair soaked. As the man looked up, Bill saw that his lip was split wide open and a great scab of freshly congealed blood clung like an obscene parasite to his jaw. He was out of breath. He looked like he’d been in a fight.
‘If it’s help you’re after, you can forget it,’ Bill told him the moment he recognised him.
The man showed no surprise at Bill’s welcome. But he didn’t move either. He opened his mouth to speak but he was panting too heavily and whatever it was he said came out in a wheeze.
‘Scat,’ Bill told him, starting to shut the door.
‘No,’ the man gasped, lurching forward and unsteadily planting his foot in the doorway, ‘you’ve got to come with me.’
‘Like hell I –’ But then Bill saw that it wasn’t only rain running down the man’s face, but tears as well.
‘It’s Rachel,’ the man said. ‘There’s been an accident.’
Bill Vale stared with disbelief into Tony Glover’s eyes.
‘Who’s there?’ Mrs Vale called from upstairs. ‘What is it, Bill? What’s going on?’
Bill grabbed Glover, spinning him round and slamming him up against the soaking outside wall. His voice turned sharp and cold. ‘Tell me what you’ve done.’
Glover’s eyelids drooped like he was about to pass out. He stank of fuel. All around them, drainpipes cascaded like waterfalls. ‘We were eloping,’ Glover croaked, ‘we were in the car . . .’
Eloping. Bill’s expression crumpled. Glover . . . eloping with Rachel? But how was that –
‘A baby . . . we’re having a baby . . .’
Bill jammed the torch up under Glover’s throat. ‘Where is she?’
The savageness of the question seemed to straighten Glover out. ‘Up on the moor,’ he said. ‘I left her there and came to get help. You were the nearest . . .’ As Glover looked Bill in the eyes, strength seemed to gather in him. He struggled from Bill’s grip. ‘Don’t you get it?’ he snarled, throwing his arms up as he stumbled back. ‘We crashed. I crashed the car. She’s unconscious. She needs a doctor. Now.’
This last word came out as a roar.
Now.
Glover was right. They needed to act immediately. Think of Rachel, Bill told himself. Only her. Forget everything else you’ve just heard.
Rachel . . . unconscious . . . up on the moor . . . he started running through the options. They could pick up Pearl’s dad, Dr Glaister, on the way. But the doctor was away at a conference . . . Pearl had said so that afternoon when she’d popped in to see Rachel . . . That left Dr Barnard, who lived in a hamlet two miles out on the east side of town. But with the telephone lines down, there was no way of knowing if he was at home . . . he might be out on a call . . . And they were wasting precious time already. And what if Rachel needed more than a small-town doctor? Then he’d need to get her to Barnstaple General Hospital as quickly as possible . . .
Go to Rachel now, that was the decision Bill made. Get to her as fast as he could. Then he could make his choice, once he saw what sort of state she was in: either to bring her back here into town and search for the doctor, or to rush her to Barnstaple and the surgeons there . . .
‘You’d better pray she’s all right,’ he told Glover.
Glover nodded dumbly back.
‘My car’s over on Lydgate Lane,’ Bill said, turning to run upstairs and get the keys.
Glover shook his head. ‘No. We took it. It was your car we crashed.’
Bill said nothing. He didn’t care about the car. The thought of Rachel wiped it from his mind.
‘Answer me, Bill!’ Mrs Vale called again. ‘What is it?’
She sounded closer, like she’d moved to the top of the stairs. Bill didn’t turn round to look. She’d worry herself sick if he repeated what Glover had just said. Better to lie to her until he knew how bad Rachel was. He stared down the alley and that was when he saw a way to make everything work.
‘It’s Giles,’ he called up through the doorway to his mother, ‘he’s going over to Lewis Cook’s house to see their new television. He’s going to give me a lift over to Pearl’s house, so I can pick up Rachel.’
Without waiting for a reply, Bill ran through to the shop and grabbed the first-aid kit from underneath the counter.
‘Move it,’ he told Glover, back outside, pulling the door shut behind him.
‘But without a car . . . how –’
The Norton motorbike was too unstable to use to get Rachel, but parked in front of it was a white Citroën delivery van, belonging to Giles Weatherly. The ironmonger, who Bill really had watched set out on foot for Lewis Cook’s house over an hour ago, let Bill use the van from time to time for big deliveries, and now Bill reached beneath its front right wheel arch and unhooked the spare keys which he knew Giles kept there.
Bill thought of Emily. The Sea Catch Café was sited next door to Lewis Cook’s. All of a sudden, he wanted her close.
> ‘Get in,’ Bill ordered Glover, unlocking the door and climbing in.
The electricity flickered back on in the town as Bill pulled out of the alley and on to the high street. The street lamps blazed, restoring a sudden reality to the insanity of the last few minutes. Bill hoped his mother wasn’t looking down, or if she was, he hoped the old oak tree obscured the fact that it was Tony Glover sitting next to him. It was only then that he realised that, for the first time since his father’s murder, he’d left home without locking the alley door behind him. He gripped the steering wheel tighter. Glover’s blood from when he’d grabbed him was on his hands.
‘Patch your face,’ Bill told Glover, taking the first-aid kit from his lap and holding it out to him. But Glover didn’t move. Bill shoved the first-aid kit at him.
‘I don’t matter,’ Glover responded. ‘Just get to Rachel.’
As he accelerated over the crossroads, Bill glanced left towards South Bridge. For an instant, he imagined it looked awash, as shiny as treacle beneath the street lamps, like the river had already crept up over it and any second now would start spilling out on to the streets. But that couldn’t be true, could it? It must have been a trick of the light. The river couldn’t possibly have risen up so high so soon.
Forcing the van up Summerglade Hill and into the wall of wind and rain, Bill thought of his mother, alone at home, then of Emily, alone at the Sea Catch Café. He wished he’d called round earlier to see that she was OK. But the sandbags could wait. Rachel was the priority now.
As the engine screamed in protest and the town dropped away below them, Bill’s mind reeled. A baby. A baby. A baby. His baby. Glover’s baby. The thought kept slipping from his mind. He couldn’t face it. Glover and his sister. A baby. Their baby. Rachel had been eloping with Glover? Glover was the boy she’d been seeing all this time? Had Emily known? Was that why she’d refused to tell him who it was? Had she known they were planning to elope, too?