Come Away With Me

by Sara MacDonald

  Adam’s collar was caught inside his jacket, exposing that tiny bit of white neck. I want to hold him. I want to hold him. I am so tired. I will put my coat on the ground. I will rest for a moment, for a moment, until I stop shaking, then I will call out to him.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Ruth lifted the primroses out of the orange box and began to plant them under the window. She was shaking the earth out of the box when her eye caught a name in a headline in the old newspaper lining it.

  She flicked the dirt away and looked closer. There was a picture of an army officer called Tom Holland. He had been killed by a bomb. It had been placed under his car in London. He had been driving home from the zoo with his small daughter. Ruth looked at the date. It was 20 August 2005.

  His good-looking face smiled up at her. Ruth rocked on her heels in shock and sat on the hard ground. Oh, Jenny.

  Ruth stared down at the photograph and her world receded fast and dangerously in a rip tide. Memory culled, blotted out all these years as if it had never happened, flooded sickly back.

  She was once more among the coats, the dusty, sweaty, charity shop smell of them; lying, almost naked, with this man pictured here.

  Tom Holland…Just a boy when she met him. Here he was, this same man, dead; murdered. This was what happened to the man she so casually conceived a baby with in a cold room at a Christmas party. It was Adam’s face looking up at her. His face was an older, eerie version of Adam. The face she had taught herself to forget. This man had been Jenny’s husband.

  Ruth lifted out the paper and turned to the inside page. There were pictures of Jenny. There were pictures of a dark little girl with Jenny’s laughing eyes and wild curly hair. Ruth’s hands trembled. She wanted to cry out, Why didn’t you tell me the truth, Jenny? Why didn’t you tell me you lost both your husband and child in this terrible tragic way?

  She would have understood so much more, Jenny’s almost catatonic grief, her sudden illness. Ruth remembered the way Jenny had looked at her, her odd behaviour when she stayed at the house. Her preoccupation with Adam…

  Oh, my God! Ruth jumped to her feet. I’m so stupid. I’m so slow.

  She was out of the gate and on to the path running, running, the breath catching painfully in her chest. Through the beat of her heart and the noise of her feet, Ruth heard Adam screaming.

  James Brown parked the car by the upturned boats on the grass and strode towards the cottage. The front door of the house was wide open. He called out as he walked down the path. There was evidence of someone recently gardening. A fork and trowel lay discarded on the path. A page of an old newspaper was blowing around the garden and, irritated by it, James grabbed it as it blew around his feet.

  He stared down at the photographs of a wrecked car, obscenely mangled. Pictures of his daughter, granddaughter and son-in-law were blowing about in the wind. The world seemed suddenly silent as he stood looking at the images engraved indelibly on his mind. Out of this silence he suddenly heard a woman screaming.

  He moved quickly back to his car and grabbed his doctor’s bag, then made his way purposefully along the side of the creek towards the intermittent sounds. He was too old to run. It would serve no one if he had a heart attack. As he got nearer to the sounds, two white swans flew over him in perfect unison across the water into the mist. Underneath them the creek shimmered for a moment in late-afternoon sunlight.

  From the path he caught a glimpse of movement on the foreshore at the mouth of the creek. It was hard to make out what was going on. As he rounded the corner of the derelict barn and crunched over seaweed and pebbles, James saw a group of people at the water’s edge in the mud.

  They were bending over someone. A man in waders bent and lifted a small body and carried it up on to the shingle. A muddy, frightened boy was being clasped by a blonde woman.

  James broke into a run, his heart racing, towards the fisherman who was splashing out of the muddy water and laying Jenny carefully on to the ground. ‘I’m a doctor. I’m her father.’

  He turned Jenny on to her stomach but before he had time to pump her free of water she started to retch and vomit. Relieved, James turned her on her side and held her there, realising she couldn’t have been in the water long. He bent and felt her pulse, pushed her hair away from her muddy face, laid the back of his hand on the side of her neck. She was going to be all right but she was shivering with cold. He looked up at the fisherman. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ the man said. ‘It was the lad that went in the water after her. I was fishing by the lake, I heard him yelling. I just helped pull her out.’

  James took his mobile phone out of his pocket to ring for an ambulance, but abruptly changed his mind. He turned as the boy, covered in mud, walked towards him. He recognised Ruth despite the fact that she too was dishevelled and muddy.

  ‘Is Jenny going to be OK?’ the boy asked anxiously, his teeth chattering with cold and fright. His vivid blue eyes stared out at James from his dirty face.

  ‘James?’ Ruth said, surprised. ‘Oh, thank God you’re here.’

  ‘Yes, she’s going to be OK. Thanks to you,’ James said to the boy, then to Ruth, ‘You must get him home, he’s frozen.’

  The fisherman came back with an old rug. They wrapped Jenny in it and he offered to carry her back to the cottage. ‘She doesn’t weigh nothing, poor maid.’

  James looked down at the small muddy face of his daughter. ‘Jenny?’ he said softly. ‘Darling, it’s all right. It’s going to be all right.’

  Jenny’s eyes opened. She stared back with a blank hopelessness that seared him. He felt furious with himself. I should have seen this coming.

  They hobbled in a strange little procession back to the cottage. He and Ruth got Jenny out of her soaked clothes, put her in a hot bath, wrapped her up with hot-water bottles and placed her in Ruth’s bed. James gave her an injection and she stopped shaking as the sedative worked and fell asleep.

  Ruth got Adam into the bath and James rang Bea.

  When Ruth came downstairs she took one look at James’s face and offered him a drink.

  ‘I’d love a stiff whisky, but I’m driving. A cup of tea would be good. How’s the boy?’

  ‘Adam. He’s shaken, but he’s fine. Luckily the tide wasn’t fully in. It was terrifying seeing them both struggling in the water…’ She hesitated. ‘You don’t think Jenny should be checked over in hospital?’

  James smiled grimly. ‘I know the system. If I admit her to a county hospital in this state she will have to be questioned by a psychiatrist. It’s possible she could be sectioned. I don’t want that. You saw how malnourished and underweight she is; that alone can cause mental problems. I want to help her myself and get the opinion of colleagues I trust before I consign my daughter to psychiatrists.’

  Ruth nodded and went to switch on the kettle. James, watching her, asked, ‘Has Jenny been staying here with you? What made her…what suddenly tipped her over the edge after six months?’

  Ruth put mugs on the table between them. She sat opposite James. ’Jenny hasn’t been staying with us. We didn’t even know she was in Cornwall until this afternoon. I think she’s been living in a camper van. She’s been out there stalking Adam for days, but of course we didn’t know it was Jenny.’

  James stared at Ruth, horrified. ‘Why on earth…? I don’t understand…stalking?’

  ‘I think you might understand in a moment, James.’

  Adam came downstairs, clean but still pale. Ruth went to him and gently turned the boy to face James, who stared. What was he supposed to be looking at? Then the boy flicked his hair back and looked at James out of those extraordinary deep, blue-flecked eyes.

  Tom’s eyes…Of course, the eyes…James saw the boy’s adolescent likeness to Tom was remarkable and would grow more so as he reached maturity. It was not just the shape of the head and the way the hair grew, but the way he looked straight at you.

  James suddenly felt tired and old and sad. He met Ru
th’s eyes over the boy’s shoulder and saw a defensive wariness in them. He looked back at the boy.

  ‘What’s going on? I don’t understand,’ Adam said, moving away from his mother.

  That makes two of us, James thought.

  Ruth said quickly, ‘Now is not the time to talk, Adam. When you’ve slept, in the morning, I’ll try to explain things.’

  How would Ruth explain things to Jenny? James wondered miserably. How would she explain away this boy? He took a deep breath. ‘How are you feeling, Adam? What you did was very brave. It must have been extremely frightening.’

  ‘I’m OK. Like, I didn’t swallow much water. I was only just out of my depth, and the fisherman came to help me.’

  ‘Can you tell me what happened between you and Jenny out there?’

  Adam sat at the table and fiddled with one of the mugs. ‘I knew someone was watching me this afternoon. They’d been following me for days. I didn’t know it was Jenny. I thought they had gone and I was, like, rushing to get to the path home, and I suddenly saw her lying all curled up on her coat.’ Adam looked up at James, his eyes anxious. ‘It was sad, not scary any more. I knew Jenny must be ill. I woke her and she told me she was sorry she had frightened me. I asked her why she was following me and she said I was like…Tom…her husband who died and that she had thought she was my mother. She said she must have gone a little mad. I told her I would run to get Mum. I got to the lake and I heard a noise and I looked back, and she was just wading into the water really fast with her heavy coat on. I yelled at her to stop but she took no notice. I went in after her but she didn’t want me to…pull her out. She struggled and fought. Then the fisherman came to help me. It was awful. She wanted to drown…’ His voice wobbled.

  James said gently, ‘It must have been dreadful, Adam. You kept your head and you saved Jenny from drowning. That took some courage. Words aren’t enough to thank you.’

  Adam sniffed, embarrassed. ‘Jenny will be all right?’

  ‘I hope so.’ James got up from the table and went to get his bag. ‘I’m sorry that you had to go through something so distressing. I’ll leave something with your mother in case you can’t sleep. Don’t be afraid to take it.’ He looked at Ruth. ‘I’d like to get Jenny home now. I’ll go and back up my car to the cottage.’

  ‘But your tea…’

  ‘It’s getting late. Bea will be worrying. I think it might be a good idea to go to your doctor in the morning and get Adam checked out. The water is undoubtedly polluted.’

  James went abruptly out of the front door to get his car. Ruth helped him with the heavily sedated Jenny and they put her in the back seat under a rug. She was feather light and James felt inexplicably and unfairly angry with Ruth. He nodded a curt goodnight, got into his car without another word and drove away up the hill.

  The moon swept out from behind clouds and hung dramatically in a navy-blue sky, and James heard again the haunting sound of swans flying in perfect unison over the dark waters that had almost swallowed up his daughter.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Ruth sat in the window seat of the cottage in the dark. Adam had at last fallen asleep. She gazed out into the thick black night, numb and shocked. The cottage felt cold, and she pulled an old moth-smelling rug round her and tried not to shiver. If she started she wouldn’t be able to stop.

  She tried to steady her breathing, calm the panicky beat of her heart. She went over and over the moment when she had read the newspaper cutting.

  She could not focus on any one thing. Her mind dithered about in alarm, she felt unable to assess the implications of all that had happened in nightmare sequence down on the creek. She felt as if something were slowly breaking inside her and she were falling back down a deep black hole into childhood.

  All these years of carefully blanking everything out; all these years of self-induced amnesia had been swept away in an afternoon. She felt like a spy whose cover had been blown and here she was exposed, naked to the world; the reality of her life cruelly laid bare for Adam—for everyone to see like a hideous birthmark.

  All the years of love, reassurance and sense of worth nurtured by her aunt had disappeared in the look James Brown had given her over Adam’s head, before he strode out of the house taking Jenny with him. She was flung back to the desperate adolescent she had been and the horror of exposure.

  Life had a habit of turning full circle. For fourteen years she had locked Tom Holland behind a heavy door, marked not ‘Do not enter’, but ‘Did not happen’.

  The cottage creaked around her as she sat thinking of Jenny. She would never forget the sight of her struggling in the water with Adam. For a second she thought Jenny had been trying to drown him. Her movements had been wild and desperate as Adam hung on to her. It had been surreal.

  Ruth got up and, without turning on the light, poured herself a large brandy and carried the balloon glass back to the window seat. It had been terrifying. Both Adam and Jenny could have sunk into the mud and drowned.

  To feel so hopeless that you want to end your life. To come to that.

  Am I capable of feeling such a loss, such a love? Feeling so bereft that even inching forward to some future holds no power. And dying holds no fear?

  Tomorrow she would have to talk to Adam. She would have to explain the unexplainable, tell him that Jenny’s husband was his father. That was why Jenny had wanted to drown herself.

  Ruth quailed at the thought. God! A totally random meeting on a train had triggered a series of events that would change all their lives for ever. Despair made her limbs feel weak.

  What if she had not gone to that party when she was seventeen? What if Jenny had been with her? Could she and Jenny have been rivals over this man?

  If Jenny had been with her she would not have got pregnant, but then there would have been no Adam and that was inconceivable.

  She and Jenny could have met on a train to Birmingham when Tom was alive. What would have happened then? Would Tom have acknowledged his son?

  Why was she thinking like this? What was the point? The point was the pretence was over. That private part of her life that she hugged so secretly to her had ended that afternoon as she watched Adam pulling Jenny, crazed with grief, from the water.

  Adam had been difficult to get to bed. Disturbed and shaken, he had wanted answers and Ruth needed this night to herself before she could give him any. She drank the brandy, let it burn down her throat.

  She remembered the heavy feel of the coats on top of them. The excitement of him wanting her and her own overpowering need and desire. She remembered the painful, stinging feel of him entering her; the heady wonder of another body glued warmly to hers and the thrill of his gasp as he climaxed. She felt again the poignant musky smell of sex, the hot rush of semen glutinous and foreign between her thighs…

  She had trusted absolutely that the boy who had taken her virginity and shared that tremulous, intimate moment would find out where she lived and call her. Naively, she never doubted it.

  He had said, God! What a beautiful girl you are. He had held her body tight to his. No one had ever held her that close, hot skin to hot skin. The foreign but comforting warmth of a male body pressed to hers. Someone touching her. She was unused to touch, new to tenderness, but here was someone of her very own, loving her.

  He had taken her face in his hands so gently afterwards and kissed her forehead. ‘I will never forget this evening,’ he had whispered. ‘I’ve got to go now or I’ll miss my lift back to Plymouth, but I’ll call you!’

  Ruth had relived that evening a million times while she waited day after day, week after week for a phone call that never came. By the time she finally made herself accept the dreadful truth, that he was not going to call her, that she had been a one-night stand, a ‘wham bam, thank you, ma’am’, she had missed her first period.

  It was almost impossible to believe or accept his rejection. How could it have meant nothing to him? What had been an earth-moving moment for her had been a quick
fuck for that unknown boy.

  Some of the powerlessness and panic of that unbalanced period of her life crept over Ruth now. Terror had made her insentient. With hormones screaming round her thin body she had become uncharacteristically passive. Her parents were able to inflict wounds on a heart already broken. Desolate, Ruth had had no more resources to draw on.

  The look James Brown had given her over Adam’s head had made her heart jump and her legs go weak. It had brought with it the bitter taste and memory of her beginnings and that dark place of shame that she had resolutely turned her back on.

  In its place she had built false memory in order to live with hope, however frail. She had distorted her encounter with Tom into something fantastical and acceptable in order to live with herself. She had changed and enlarged the evening so many times that the truth had been eclipsed from the moment of Adam’s birth.

  For the rest of her life, Ruth had longed for a man who could sexually arouse her in the dramatic, immediate way that far-off boy had done. It had never happened. Sex was never what she remembered it could be. How could it when she had embellished the moment into something exquisite, with never a second of awkwardness or disappointment.

  She could acknowledge that sex with a stranger was obviously more exciting than the reality of a long relationship, but somehow it did not stop her childish yearning for that ephemeral lost excitement. For something more.

  Tom’s face, looking out at her from a yellowing newspaper, haunted her. The memory of the boy he had been had long faded. It was a shock to see an older mature edition of Adam. Here was the man Jenny had loved and lived with. The man she had shared her child with.

  A man with crinkly laughter lines on his good-looking face. A man who had died too young, obliterated in one horrific moment with his child on a hot summer evening. She had read the article over and over again, and made herself face the truth of his dreadful death. Then she had carefully put it away in a drawer until she had talked to Adam.