The Summer of the Bear

by Bella Pollen

  ‘Take these for your little brother then.’ Aliz produced a pack of Fruit Pastilles.

  ‘No, no, please.’ She waved them away. ‘I don’t have any more money’

  ‘Good.’ Aliz took her hand and closed it round the sweets. ‘That means you have to bring it tomorrow.’

  47

  Letty picked her way over the rubbery ferns and grasses of the dunes. The sea was as flat as polished glass. She slipped out of her clothes, folding them piece by piece and laying them on a dry patch of rock. The episode with Alba had shaken her badly. It wasn’t the stealing. She understood that. It was the impossibility of communication that floored her. Alba had stopped talking to her, and now they moved around the house like two magnets repelling each other. Why was it so hard to reach out to the very people closest to you? If it were only possible to return to those moments when relationships went quiet and bang a noisy warning gong. It had been the same with Nicky. They had stopped talking and everything had changed.

  Rome had been the posting Nicky had been after for some time. So after Gillian’s little pep talk, and much as it went against her nature, Letty had made a conscious effort not to distract him with the mundane details of life.

  At first, the difference in their relationship was so subtle, she barely noticed it. It was as though each sentence had one word less and each conversation was short of one sentence. Slowly but surely though, whole paragraphs began to disappear from their lives until information was being exchanged on a need-to-know basis only.

  It was bewildering how lonely it made her feel. She was used to telling Nicky everything. From the day they’d met, they’d communicated like butterflies, flitting from one topic to the next, a whole garden of trivia to feed on. However dull Nicky’s day, he always managed to find some funny detail or quirky observation, while Letty in turn amused him with the operatic power struggles of the wives, and the moods and whims of the children.

  Communication operates according to the law of diminishing returns. The less there is, the less is generated. Lack of communication leads to misunderstanding, misunderstanding leads to resentment and the finger-pointing that inevitably follows leads to war. Nicky, busy negotiating with the rest of Europe, could not see that relations in his own tiny kingdom were in danger of imminent breakdown.

  Letty waded into the sea. Happiness. Life. Family. Love. You only got one shot at it. Everything else was a re-try, a diminished version of. She gasped involuntarily as the water closed around her but it was too cold to remain still and she struck out purposefully, forcing her arms and legs into long powerful strokes. For a while she was hypnotized by the monotonous view of the horizon. A tiny part of her thought how simple it would be to keep swimming, but already she was aware of an ache in her chest. Her mind was filled with an image of Jamie’s face and she quickly turned around.

  She stood naked by the rocks and waited for the wind to blow her dry. Afterwards, when she was dressed, she crawled into the shelter of the sand dunes and curled up, trying to find warmth in her body. Why hadn’t Nicky told her they weren’t to be given Rome? She knew he would have hated disappointing her, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Buenos Aires, Chile, back to Africa even. She could have been happy wherever they’d been posted. As long as it was away from Bonn; away from the Ambassadress. She should have reassured Nicky. She knew he felt the pressure of a new posting more keenly because of her, but after his and Georgie’s trip to East Berlin, he’d been withdrawn. Overwhelmed with work, she’d diagnosed. And the more overwhelmed he’d seemed, the louder Gillian’s warning came back to her. She must not be too needy or distracting. Nicky must be allowed to get on with his job. Besides, they were so nearly there. Seven years spent breaking rock in Bonn – they’d well and truly served their time in Germany. A new posting was imminent. Spring was on the way. Soon, the family would be together on the island, and everything always came right on the island.

  Below her, a group of ringed plovers pecked at their reflection on the mirrored sand. The spring tide had deposited a tangled mass of kelp on the shore and suddenly the memories crowded in on her like an angry mob. Nicky whirling a ribbon of seaweed over his head. Nicky, doubled into a question mark, sifting through the lanes of broken shells for the prize of a single cowrie. Nicky pulling her down into a sand dune, kissing the brown mole on the mound of her stomach and then raking up her jumper and finding another, smaller mole on her ribcage. The first time they had made love had been in these sand dunes and she had been a virgin. She remembered the feel of his body close to hers, the taste of salt on his skin. She remembered how she unfurled under his hungry look. ‘What if someone sees us?’ she whispered, but nobody had been watching, only the nesting terns wheeling and screeching overhead.

  The summer after they’d been married had been freakishly warm. They might have been holidaying in the West Indies for the cloudless skies and emerald waters swaying in and out of the bays. Nicky, walking a few steps ahead, bent down to pick something off the sand. The stone had been pure white, perfectly round, and he had turned it this way and that, examining it for flaws. When he was satisfied there were none, he hurried back and dropped it casually at her feet. ‘Oh look!’ he cried, pretending to spot it for the first time. ‘A perfect stone! Fancy that.’ He plucked it off the ground again and pressed it into her hand. ‘We must keep it and treasure it forever.’ He grinned at her and she’d looked quizzically at him.

  ‘At least that’s what penguins do, apparently’

  ‘You are silly. What do penguins do?’

  ‘They drop pebbles at each other’s feet. It’s more or less what they say when they want to have a nice egg together.’ He drew her to him and laid his hand gently on her stomach. ‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’

  She’d been shocked at his perception. She hadn’t yet worked out why she hadn’t told him.

  He laughed. ‘Don’t you understand? Everything you do, everything you are, everything that makes you happy or sad, it’s all there for anyone to read in your face.’

  ‘For you to read,’ she said, mortified by the idea. ‘Only you, not everyone else.’

  ‘But I’m right, aren’t I?

  ‘Oh Nicky, I wanted to be sure.’

  ‘Well, you’re lousy at secrets, you know that, don’t you?’

  Who knew, she thought bitterly, who knew that he would turn out to be so much better.

  Something I’ve been keeping from you, the letter had said. Something that’s been preying terribly on my mind . . . Once again she heard the sound of the envelope shifting in the canvas. ‘Oh Nicky,’ she said helplessly, ‘what did you do? Tell me what you did, goddamnit! NICKY!’ She shouted but the wind tore his name from her mouth and flung it with such force towards the sea she thought the line of the horizon might quiver back at her like sound waves from a radio. She closed her eyes, clenched her fists and roared until her throat burned. She didn’t care what he’d done. Right then, she would have given everything she owned, she would have sold her soul to have his arms around her. To feel him move inside her. To know that he loved her.

  A movement caught her eye. She scanned the top of the dunes. Had someone seen her? Heard her?

  Nicky?’ she whispered.

  She pushed shakily to her feet and stared out over the deserted sands. She pressed the pads of her fingers to her sore eyes then stared at the dunes again. ‘Nicky,’ she breathed, half in fear, half in hope. ‘Oh God. Nicky, are you here?’

  48

  Why was he shadowing them? Sometimes the girls, sometimes the mother, but most often it was the boy he was drawn back to, the boy with his binoculars and little Bakelite lunchbox. Was he supposed to be keeping an eye on the family? He didn’t know, but at least somebody should. Every day the tenuous threads that connected their lives frayed thinner. Did the children know, for instance, that their mother cried in the dunes most afternoons? Long, noisy bouts of crying, like a penance, like a prisoner breaking rock? Did she, in turn, have any idea that her eldest d
aughter was dreaming of a boy in a yellow school bus or that her son was riding on the trailer of an islander whose intake of alcohol doubled with every passing week, an islander who only the previous day swerved his tractor along the top of the cliffs with such abandon that two of its four wheels hung over the edge? And what about the time not so many days ago when he ferried all three children over the treacherous flats of Islay Sound but left the return journey so late that the channels of the incoming tide were almost too deep to pass? The children would not have been the first to drown in this way.

  And so he continued to shadow them, guarding the house at night, watching the boy from his cave at the bottom of the Kettle, waiting for the girls to appear on the beach, and every day anxiety burned around the edges of his heart.

  49

  Jamie dangled his legs over the edge of the Kettle, and stared at the Penguin biscuit Alba had included in his lunchbox. He had noticed the change in her straightaway. It wasn’t so much that the daily pummelling she liked to visit on him had abated. After all, he’d become so immune to her pinches, arm twistings and Chinese burns that his flesh scarcely bothered to bruise up for them any more. No, it was his pride that had taken fewer blows. Normally when Jamie opened his mouth in the presence of his sister, he did so in the full expectation of being sneered at one way or another. Sometimes her jibes were so crushing and numerous it felt as if she had taken his heart in her hand and squeezed it down to the size of an apple pip.

  Jamie was used to being bullied. He had been mildly bullied at his Bonn school and more rigorously so at St Matthews, on the family’s return to London. The trouble with Jamie was that he was eligible for bullying on so many levels; for being weedy, for being a dreamer, for his mal-coordination and laughable attempts to read out loud. In London, the chief perpetrator of his harassment was a boy called Fletcher who sat behind him in the classroom. Every time Jamie was called upon to stand up and open his book, Fletcher would issue a soft hissing noise through his teeth. The school’s fondness for alphabetic order meant that Fletcher and Fleming were destined to be thrown together at every opportunity but nowhere was this more problematic than in the changing room. Jamie had no aptitude for sports whereas Fletcher was captain of both the cricket and rugby teams. If Fletcher handled a bat like Geoff Boycott, Jamie threw a ball as though he were a mechanical toy with a faulty repeat action. After each disastrous session on the field, Fletcher would corner Jamie and exact his revenge. Sometimes it was just your run-of-the-mill abuse, but other times he would lob the cricket ball at Jamie, taking him unawares in the chest, the stomach and once, painfully, on the edge of his kneecap. ‘Oops,’ he’d snicker, ‘LBW. Fleming’s out again!’

  One day, fate intervened. Fletcher threw the ball at the precise moment Jamie opened his locker door. The ball ricocheted off the grated metal and back into Fletcher’s face. There was a gasp, some fractured giggles from the other boys, then Fletcher sat down abruptly on the bench and plugged his fingers up his nostrils.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jamie stammered. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘Save it, Fleming,’ Fletcher snarled. He waited till the bleeding had stopped, then he picked up his bat and trailed it softly across Jamie’s shins. ‘I’ll be waiting for you outside.’

  It was Jamie’s turn to sit heavily on the bench. Fletcher was twice his size with purple-rimmed eyes and a thrusting overbite that was crying out for a pre-teen brace. Jamie, conversely, was small for his age. ‘We’re a family of late developers,’ his father had informed him as year after year he inscribed his son’s lack of inches into the doorframe of his bedroom. ‘You’ll grow sooner or later, and it will happen quite suddenly, you’ll see.’ Jamie had believed him. Sometimes in his dreams, an abrupt tingling of his body heralded a wondrous lengthening of his arms until they burst through the ends of his clothes like spring shoots through winter soil. But it hadn’t happened yet and he could not escape the fear that well into adulthood he would still find himself trapped in the same pygmy frame he was currently obliged to put up with. So after Fletcher left, after the other boys vacated, giving him the sort of looks familiar in the saloons of spaghetti Westerns after accusations of card-cheating, he rubbed the goosebumps on his legs and tried to work out what to do. Finally, taking a deep breath, he picked up his cricket bat, stepped out into the failing light of the afternoon and by some lucky chance found Fletcher, back to the door, momentarily distracted by a passing teacher. Without further ado, Jamie laid about his tormentor, breaking Fletcher’s arm in two places. To Letty, summoned within the hour to discuss the incident, this had seemed like entirely justifiable behaviour, but Fletcher’s parents, cold and hostile on the other side of the headmaster’s study, took a dimmer view.

  ‘Mrs Fleming,’ the headmaster said crisply, ‘bullying and violence cannot be tolerated under any circumstances. It is only in light of Jamie’s recent loss that the Fletchers have generously agreed not to press charges.’

  Letty knew she should have argued. Nicky, a champion against injustice and the tyranny of false blame, would never have accepted his son being sent home in disgrace, but as soon as she heard the word ‘loss’ she felt the habitual paralysis and she knew it was better to stand up and walk out of the room while she still had the use of her limbs.

  However, for Jamie, the upside of the whole incident had been the unexpected approval it brought him from Alba. For the first time in a long while, she did not call him Spore of Satan, or remove his arms when he hugged her.

  ‘Good for you,’ she’d said. ‘You mustn’t let yourself be bullied. In fact, one of the main reasons I bully you myself is to toughen you up against this sort of thing.’ Then, as if these accolades weren’t startling enough, she had added, ‘I’m actually quite proud of you.’

  The glimmer of respect Jamie recognized in her eyes was a match flaring in the dark tunnel of his life and it illuminated a future in which he forged a magnificent relationship with his sister. Unfortunately, in his gratitude and joy, he pushed too hard. Nothing repelled Alba more than neediness and he’d woken the following morning to find the door to sibling love once again slammed in his face.

  So as he carefully eased his finger under the metallic wrapper of the Penguin, his excitement was tempered by wariness.

  Since the cricket bat incident he could not remember an act of kindness from Alba. As a general rule, ‘nice’ or ‘helpful’ were foreign concepts for her. Her cruelties were only occasionally curtailed by flu or extreme exhaustion. To trust his sister was to place his head inside the mouth of a sleeping lion, but the chocolate biscuit was no one-off. When he’d knocked on the door of her room a couple of days earlier, instead of randomly selecting a reply from her usual store of ‘Choke on vomit, subhuman,’ or ‘I wish you’d died at birth,’ she’d cried, ‘Enter my domain!’ in an almost genial manner. Added to that had been the two pats on the back, issued at separate times – the use of his name rather than ‘spazz’ or ‘moron’. And, most thrilling of all, the introduction of special food allowances at mealtimes. The previous night, wandering into the kitchen to find her mashing potatoes, he’d enquired what was for supper.

  ‘Mum and Georgie are having winkles but I’ve made you a sandwich.’ Then, adding a dob of butter and a sprinkling of salt, she’d scooped the potato from the bowl, spread it between two pieces of white bread and slid it onto a plate in front of him.

  ‘I love you, Alba,’ Jamie declared before he could stop himself, but instead of snubbing him or hitting him, she had merely responded with a triumphant little smile directed at Georgie. Jamie was the opposite of a futilitar-ian but even he tried not to put too much store by it. Still, the rekindling of hope was so seductive. The thing was, if Alba could love him, then the impossible became possible. The bear would be found. His lost father would come home, the hole in his heart would mend. Greedily, Jamie took a nibble of his biscuit and then a bite. He almost moaned with pleasure as the rich sweetness filled his mouth.

  50

 
Alba was cooking mussels. She wrenched the lid off the big saucepan and sniffed. Beneath the steam, the water glowed a synthetic blue. She had never made mussel soup before and it didn’t look precisely how she’d imagined, but Deuteronomy – it wasn’t as if she was expecting any complaints.

  Having exchanged her moral duties for Georgie’s culinary ones, Alba had quickly realized that she’d as good as taken control of the kitchen in a bloodless coup. Her family would now eat what she wanted, when she wanted and while her flaws as chef might be legion, her skills as despot grew daily. Still, as with the administration of most dictatorships, there were logistical matters to consider and Alba’s initial problem had been one of supply.

  For obvious reasons she could no longer patronize the shop and because she was punishing her mother by not speaking to her, there was little question of demanding that the necessary provisions be bought for her. Given the dwindling cupboard supplies, it was only a matter of time before she hit on the idea of living off the land and, once she had, the beauty of it grew on her. She became evangelical about the procurement of food for little or no money and in this respect the island did not disappoint. Field mushrooms hovered like UFOs on cliff tops. Seafood, disgusting though she found it, could be had virtually gratis. Alick had long ago taught them how to whisk lobsters from underneath rocks with a broom handle and how to kill flounders by straddling the narrow channels on the incoming tide and stabbing them through with a pitchfork. Further away, under the causeway, buckets of winkles and mussels could be harvested and sometimes when the fishing had been especially good Alisdair would bring a sack of crab claws to the house. Added to these was the cow’s yield with all its rewarding by-products. The bovine Ambassadress produced a bucket of warm rich milk a day, which, after a spell in a bowl on the top of the fridge, formed a thick layer of cream. Daily, Alba spooned off the drowned flies and attempted to make yoghurt from the curdling milk. Soon, with a little more practice, even crowdie would be within her repertoire. If all else failed, they could live on potatoes. With its whiff of famine, what could be more heroic than feeding her family straight from the soil? Island potatoes were the best in the world, so soft and floury they fell apart underneath the fork, and she had always suspected that the Irish had made a fuss about nothing. Anyway, the point was she would manage without the shop and she could manage without her mother.