Come Away With Me

by Sara MacDonald

  ‘Gooseberry, not strawberry, Elle. Don’t be silly. Where are all our takeaway menus…?’

  ‘Aha. Girls after my own heart.’

  We fish them out and I fly upstairs to have a quick shower. Tom and Danielle get on famously.

  Tom had to do a bookkeeping course for the army and he glances over our books for us. ‘Why don’t they teach students the business side of things at art school?’

  ‘I think some art schools do, but not at Central St Martin’s,’ Danielle says.

  ‘You really need someone to do this professionally for you.’

  ‘We’ve got an accountant, but we still have to get the books in order for him and it’s so time-consuming,’ I tell him. ‘But you’re right, we do need someone.’

  Danielle and I smile at each other. ‘Actually, we both know the ideal person. We need someone administrative who can also oversee the girls in the workroom, leaving us both free to design. Someone who knows the fashion business inside out.’

  ‘So, have you asked her?’

  ‘It’s tricky. She works for a designer we know very well. We’d have to approach her carefully.’

  ‘Headhunt, entice, persuade, inveigle, you mean?’

  ‘That is it.’ Danielle laughs. ‘Jenny is nicer than me. She worries. I think we should take Florence out to lunch, Jenny, and just ask her. I do not think she is happy with Sam Jackson.’

  ‘He certainly takes her for granted. She’s an absolute treasure.’

  ‘We would appreciate her.’

  ‘Of course we would. I’ve heard he is appallingly mean with his staff, too.’

  Tom pours more wine. ‘That’s the way. Talk yourselves into it. Concentrate on “Operation Headhunt”.’

  When Danielle has gone up to bed Tom says, ‘I’m going to go and let you get some sleep.’ But he doesn’t leave for another half-hour. We kiss until my mouth is sore.

  The following night we make love on the hard polished floor of his flat because we never make it to the bedroom. I see Tom every day of his ten-day leave and when he goes again I cannot even remember what I had done or where I had gone before I met him.

  FIFTEEN

  The creek lay still and deserted in early evening. The tide was in and the last streak of gold-grey sun slanted through a crack in the darkening sky and lit up the water. The boats were turning in a brisk breeze. The world looked like an old black-and-white film.

  Terns swooped like dancers in a ballet or an expert aerobatic team and waders cried out over the water. I sat in the hired Volkswagen camper watching the light go. I loved creeks and inlets. The mudflats were not ugly when the tide was out, but beautiful, full of the patterns of birds’ feet and the differing cries of waders. The sound of their cries echoed something primitive inside me.

  I pulled the hood of my thick Barbour round me, making sure it hid my face and hair, and stepped down on to soft wet ground. My walking boots sank and I lifted the long coat so that it didn’t trail in the mud. I started to walk along the path.

  The creek was deserted. People in the cottages had already drawn their curtains and were busy eating or cooking supper. I knew I must not walk too far because the dark would come quickly and engulf me.

  I walked fast past godmother Sarah’s house where Adam and Ruth were staying. The curtains were not drawn and music came from a lighted window. My heart gave a lurch at the thought of them together inside the house. I was on the outside.

  I knew that I could walk up the path to the front door and knock. I knew I could be on the inside of that house if I wanted to be, but I couldn’t do it. How could I say anything to Adam with Ruth there? I would have no chance to explain the truth to him: that he was Tom’s son and mine too.

  The path was muddy and the hedges high and bare still. Small birds scuttled and swooped past my head, gathering and screeching territorially as dusk descended. I reached the lake on the left of the creek where the birds overwintered. It was ruffled and pitted by wind and current, as if a giant had blown on the surface of the water.

  I watched a heron fly over my head and land in the shallow water beyond. It gathered its wings fussily round it and became as still as a stone, long neck and head craned away from me as if praying to some unseen god.

  Two swans sailed majestically towards me on the tide, like an omen; feet operating like miniature paddle boats as they hoped for bread. I had so many memories of walking here with Dad on shopping trips to Truro or coming here with Ruth at weekends to her godmother. This place had always been eerily magical.

  On my right the hedges disappeared and I walked within sight of the creek again. A lone canoeist appeared out of nowhere, negotiating the narrow channel of water left by the tide with speed and skill. The light was almost gone and it was time to go back. The tide was on the turn and the waders strutted in the shallows making complicated footprints I could not see but only hear in little plops on the chocolate mud.

  I had a bizarre feeling that I was watching myself noticing these things. As if I had to note them in order to be here, in order for them to be real. Why am I here? I felt fear prickle my skin. I turned and walked quickly back the way I had come.

  The only lights now from the cluster of houses were the cracks from behind curtains and I felt an overpowering sense of loneliness engulf me. I looked at the cottage and the closed front door, and wanted to run up the path and hammer on it for Adam and Ruth to let me in.

  I got back into the Volkswagen. I was too tired to drive away. I would risk parking here for tonight. My hands trembled as I lit the gas burner to make tea. I climbed into my sleeping bag, pulled back the window curtain and watched the stars.

  I could hear the waters of the creek moving gently around me and splashing against the sides of small boats. Curlews wailed their lament, then were silenced by the night. I sat up and stared across at the thatched cottage where Adam and Ruth moved about together inside.

  One by one the downstairs lights went off and two lights came on upstairs. I thought I could dimly hear the sound of a clarinet. I imagined Adam sitting up in bed in his pyjamas, playing. Then every light went off in all the cottages. There was only a heavy blackness, as if every light in the world had been extinguished.

  I felt as if a thick blanket were enveloping and pressing down on me. I opened my mouth to cry out but no sound would come. I stretched out my hand into the cold dark air to feel the warmth of their hands. Rosie’s little hot, sticky one and the large, safe hand of my love. My fingers grasped only air. There was nothing there, nothing to hold on to and my open mouth could not even form a scream.

  SIXTEEN

  I woke with the dawn and sat crouched and cold in my sleeping bag to watch the sun flare up over the dark forest on the far side of the creek, then rise to touch the water. My spirits rose and swooped and soared in a moment of wonder at the sheer mystical beauty of yellow winter sun rising through mist that lay over the water like a ghostly blanket.

  As the sun came up I saw a light go on in an upstairs room of the cottage and I got out of my sleeping bag and pulled on jeans and a sweater. I tied on my walking boots and reached for my Barbour. Then I sat and waited.

  The light in the bedroom went off and one came on in a downstairs room. After a minute the front door opened and Adam emerged. He was muffled in green waterproofs, hat and scarf. Outside his coat he carried binoculars against his chest.

  He walked quickly down the garden path and turned left up the creek path. He was making for the lake. I waited for a few moments, then pulled up my hood and slowly followed him.

  I smiled as I thought of Ruth asleep in her bed while I was with Adam on the outside of that womblike cottage. I was watching over Adam as a new day began.

  The birds were singing as if their hearts would burst and the waders screeched out across the water. Ahead, I could just hear the boy’s footsteps. I could not see him because of the mist that lay over everything. He stopped every now and then, and I stopped too. I knew he must be looking through his
binoculars but there would be little to see on a morning like this.

  When he came to the lake the skies began to lift and lighten a little and I could see his outline clearly. He paused, left the path and moved over boggy ground to the left of the lake where there were large stones he could sit on to watch the waders. Then his outline disappeared. I stopped and leant on a gate leading into a field running parallel to the lake. I strained to hear his movements but there was only silence.

  I gathered my coat round me and, holding the hood to my face, moved carefully on down the path between lake and creek, past the point where I thought Adam must have left the path to the far side of the lake. I tucked myself into the undergrowth. The ground was soggy and the stone I sat on was damp.

  I waited, waited amid the rustling and swooping and singing of birds. As the sun filtered through, the mist began to evaporate and rise up over the water a few metres like a theatre curtain. The dim shape of Adam started to materialise on the other side of the lake in early morning light. He was crouched on a rock, watching something through his binoculars.

  I was at an angle from him so he could not see me as I sat hard against the hedge, but for a minute it seemed as if he stared straight across at me. Then he raised his glasses again and trained them skywards at an egret flying over my head towards him.

  He birdwatched for perhaps twenty minutes, then he got up from his boulder, stretched, shook his legs and moved back to the creek path.

  I got up too and kept my distance. The sun was beginning to burn off the sea mist. Adam walked slowly but seemed ill at ease. He looked left and right; then he stopped, turned and looked behind him. I stood very still, close to the hedgerow, and hardly breathed. He could not see me, but he must feel me here.

  He shivered suddenly, then turned and walked quickly on back to the cottage. He almost ran up the path and the front door slammed behind him.

  Most of the houses were still in darkness. I got back into the Volkswagen. I needed to drive away before anyone was up. The car engine was noisy and as I turned in the halflight I saw the boy standing in his unlit bedroom watching me.

  The car lights flickered across the wall of the cottage before I turned and drove away up the hill. Next time I would park at the other end of the creek where the woods made it easier not to be noticed.

  SEVENTEEN

  Ruth had been determined not to put a telephone in the cottage. She liked the illusion that she wasn’t easy to get hold of in Cornwall. She kept in contact with work by e-mail. Peter complained bitterly because the cottage was in a dip and reception for mobile phones was terrible. Ruth suspected, deep down, that it was really Peter she was avoiding.

  Sometimes she dreaded hearing his good-natured, solicitous voice because she imagined it held a veiled disappointment in her. She knew she was being unfair and it was her stubborn unwillingness even to talk about having his child that was unreasonable.

  It was becoming a hurdle between them and Ruth did not want to discuss it because she would have to face the moral implications of marrying a man without making it clear she did not want his children. The honourable thing would be separation or divorce. Peter could then marry a good Jewish girl who would bear him the children he and his family in Israel desperately craved.

  Peter loved her and Adam so generously. He had married a Gentile against fierce parental wishes and how had she repaid him? With as little of herself as possible. Ruth thought that for Peter any happiness from this marriage was due to Adam, not her.

  She went outside and walked a little way up the hill to ring him. Peter sounded so glad to hear her it gave her a guilty ache between her ribs, where my heart should lie. She described the alterations to the cottage they had arranged earlier in the year. She told him what she and Adam had been doing. She told him how beautiful the creek was at dusk as she stood talking to him, despite the gloomy weather.

  ‘I miss you, Ruth. I wish I were there with you both. I’m weary of this wretched merger and commuting back and forth.’

  ‘You must be. It seems to have gone on and on. You’ve got to take a break soon, Peter, or you’ll crack. Surely your family realise you are exhausted with the constant travelling?’

  He snorted wryly. ‘My mother worries about me, as only mothers do. My father and brothers are impervious to anything but getting the right terms drawn up. They certainly don’t understand the word compromise in business. Anyway, I’m OK. How’s Adam?’

  ‘He’s jogging up the hill to talk to you now. Take care of yourself, Peter.’

  ‘You too.’ She heard him hesitate, longing for her to say more, or anything that would enable him to say I love you, Ruth.

  Adam took the phone from her, and she went back into the house and took a bottle of wine from the fridge and poured herself a large glass. The glass misted like her eyes with her wretchedness at her inability to provide the small, normal, loving moments that would wipe Peter’s weariness clean away.

  My mother worries about me as only mothers do. Oh, Peter.

  She went to the door with her wine. Adam’s voice, as he chatted to Peter, reached her across the night. He seemed a little subdued, not so enthusiastic about his birds or about being here as he usually was. It occurred to Ruth that he might be starting to outgrow the cottage and his childlike delight in being here might be changing.

  He was reaching the age when everything was going to become dead boring and the most boring thing of all would be going anywhere with your mother. Or perhaps it was just the closed-in weather and missing having Peter to birdwatch with.

  Ruth started to open cupboards and get out the things she needed to make lasagne, Adam’s favourite supper. As she chopped the onions she realised he had come back inside the house and gone upstairs. Usually, when he had been talking to Peter he came and gave her the gist of the conversation.

  After a minute the mournful notes of his clarinet wafted downstairs: a James Galway number played tremulously. Anxiety for him welled up inside her. Why couldn’t I, for just once in my life, swallow my pride, say to hell with my principles and accept Peter’s offer to pay for a private school?

  She grated cheese over the top of the lasagne and bunged it in the oven. Soon the smell of it filled the cottage. She looked up the television programmes. Thank God there was an aged James Bond. She laid two trays and poured herself some more wine. She was pleasantly bored. She might do some work later on. Tomorrow she would put out bedding plants in the garden, ready for holidaymakers.

  Oh God! she thought suddenly, sometimes I feel forty not thirty-one. All at once she wished she had no responsibilities at all, that she could jump on a plane, work abroad and answer to no one. Do something exciting. Be free. She prayed the wretched sun would come out, that Adam was not going to throw a moody and that they would not be shrouded in mist for the entire half-term.

  After a while the music stopped and following a few thumps Adam came noisily back down the stairs.

  ‘What is it, lasagne?’ He sniffed hungrily.

  ‘Yep.’

  He grinned at her. ‘Wicked.’

  Ruth grinned back. ‘Could you get some garlic bread from the fridge? There are some green beans in there somewhere too.’

  He saw the trays and his face lit up. ‘Are we eating in front of the telly?’

  ‘Yes. There’s no one to see us slumming and there’s a James Bond to watch for the umpteenth time.’

  He grabbed a sip of her wine and she batted his hair. He went off, humming, to turn on the television. Ruth was frozen for a second in the fleeting moment of how easy it was to make someone else happy if you really wanted to.

  She went and opened the door of the cottage again and listened to the curlews. What a wavery, uncharted line there was between sorrow and happiness.

  EIGHTEEN

  Danielle rang Flo from Birmingham. ‘Is Jenny home?’

  ‘No, she isn’t,’ Flo said, her heart sinking.

  ‘There is no sign of her here. She still is not answering her m
obile phone. I have even been out to Ruth’s house. They have all gone away for a break. Her cleaner told me that Jenny was going to stay on one more night in the house after the family left and then she was returning to London. Neither of the buyers at Mason’s or Simpson’s has seen her.’

  ‘Why on earth hasn’t she rung us? Maybe she’s on her way home now.’

  ‘Maybe. But Flo, I don’t like it. Jenny always lets us know where she is.’

  Flo sat down heavily. ‘Oh dear. I wonder if she could have suddenly decided to go home to Cornwall, to Bea and James.’

  ‘She would have rung and let us know.’

  ‘Not if she isn’t thinking straight. Not if it’s all caught up with her. I must ring James and Bea. I don’t want to worry them unnecessarily, but it’s been forty-eight hours now since we heard anything. Danielle, come home, there is nothing more you can do in Birmingham.’

  ‘Ruth’s cleaner told me that Ruth has no phone in the Cornish cottage and there is no reception on her mobile there so we cannot contact her.’

  ‘You’ve done all you can, dear. Come back to London now. I’ll see you tonight.’

  Flo replaced the receiver. She wanted to believe that Jenny had suddenly made for home on a whim, as a child does, seeking comfort. She got up awkwardly, a pain shooting up her left leg, went to the landing window and picked up the vase of dead snowdrops that depressed her and threw them away. Nothing could account for this silence. Something was wrong. Flo dialled the Browns’ number.

  James took the call. He realised as he listened to Flo that he had been half expecting something like this to happen.

  ‘How odd that Jenny and Ruth should meet up after all this time on a train. If it’s the same cottage, Flo, I know it well. I’ll drive over to St Minyon now. It wouldn’t surprise me if Ruth and Jenny were together. They were extremely close as children. If she isn’t there and Ruth doesn’t know where she is, then I think we might have to do something about it.’