The Windsurf Boy, page 19
‘Were they twins, George?’ she asked softly. I didn’t know that.’
He nodded. The hysterical chatter of a cartoon film drifted through the sitting-room door. Anna heard Tom laugh, and Mary say something in a soft low tone – a note rarely heard in the shop, but one which Anna recalled from her childhood when the three of them would go to the shop for errands and be spoilt by the stout woman. Her parents talked in whispers about the tragedy that had happened the year before they bought the cottage, warning the children in louder tones always to be careful on the river.
‘Just seventeen they was,’ he was sighing, ‘and fine big lads. And you should have seen the way the girls ran after them! They was a dev’lish pair, our Thomas an’ Edward.’
Anna smiled at him, amazed all the while at her own courage. ‘I bet they were good-looking, George, just like their father!’
‘Oh aye, that’s for sure,’ he said, and after a second the far-away look disappeared from his face, he winked at Anna and turned to call his wife. At the sight of Anna, Mary Treadle’s smile faded a fraction, but Anna did not notice. Tom ran after her. ‘Oh, it’s you, Mum. Can I stay a bit longer? There’s a good programme just starting.’
‘No Tom, you must come home now.’
‘But it’s boring down there and the telly’s no good.’
‘Yes it is. It’s perfectly all right, Tom.’
‘But it’s not in colour. And you never let me watch …’
His voice had become a whine; Mary Treadle seemed self-satisfied, looking from mother to child, her arms folded. George frowned. ‘Now you listen to me, young man,’ he boomed. ‘When your mother do say “Go ’ome”, she do mean go ’ome. You be good to your mother, now, because she’s the only one you’ll ever get. Now you think about that.’
Tom looked at him, his mouth open, suprised at this unfamiliar tone from his friend. Then he followed Anna from the shop quite meekly, muttering ‘Thank you for having me’, in response to her jab, and quite forgetting to ask about the television once they were home.
That night Hilda telephoned and Anna’s heart sank as she recognised the mood of decision in her sister’s first words. ‘Hello, I’m back. How’s mother?’
‘Just the same. How was Brittany?’
‘Oh, the usual chaos. Our equipment worked perfectly, of course, and the new tent is marvellous. Two rooms. But the camp site was terrible, and so we had to move on. The next one was just as bad. The loos were absolutely frightful. Disgusting. I made Alan go and complain but it didn’t do any good. How’s your holiday?’
‘Oh fine, considering.’
‘That’s what I was coming to. Tell me about Mummy. Richard’s filled me in with all the details so I’m not going to waste time saying how awful. What I want to know is, has she decided?’
‘Decided what?’ asked Anna, determined not to help.
Hilda clicked her tongue. ‘Honestly, you are vague! Richard told me you were going to persuade her to leave that place and come back with you to London. I bet they’re not treating her properly anyway. She’d be much better going to a London teaching hospital where we could all keep an eye on things. Alan knows a radiotherapist at Bart’s, it always helps. It’s quite ridiculous for her to use up all her savings down there, when she’d be so much better with you – and us.’
‘She doesn’t seem to think so.’
‘Oh Anna, it’s nonsense. Have you talked to her – I mean, really talked to her?’
Annoyed, Anna spoke sharply. ‘Look Hilda, I’ve talked more to our mother in the last two weeks than ever before in my life. She’s quite determined to stay put, and you know what she’s like when she’s made up her mind.’
‘But she’s just being silly.’
‘Maybe she is,’ said Anna, ‘but frankly, if she wants to be silly I think she has the right to be silly, and we should leave her alone.’
Hilda sounded shocked. ‘Anna! How can we leave her alone if we know she’s doing the wrong thing?’
Picking at the peeling wallpaper with her nails, Anna asked, ‘How do we know it is the wrong thing?’
The conversation bounced backwards and forwards for several minutes, with Hilda’s irritation growing, and Anna’s answers becoming shorter and shorter. She tore a long strip of paper down, revealing the plaster underneath, with its mottling of damp. At last Anna interrupted her sister’s flow. ‘Hilda, I’ve done all I’m going to do. I’m not suggesting any more that she comes to live with me, because to be honest I don’t want her to. I didn’t really want her to when I made the offer, and maybe she sensed that. Now I’ve got my own life to live, and to be honest with you, I think she’s got her own death to die, and we should all respect the situation. Is that clear?’
The voice on the other end of the line was cold. ‘Well, if that’s the way you feel, Anna. I’ll see what we can do when Richard and I see her. When are you coming back?’ Anna told her. ‘Oh good. That means, let’s see, there’s a week before the boys start school. We’ll drive down on the Monday. It’s a pity we’ll miss you.’
‘Yes,’ said Anna, thinking wryly that they still had to go through all the motions of affection.
There was a short exchange about leaving the cottage clean and tidy (from Hilda) and not trying to browbeat Barbara (from Anna) before the sisters said goodbye. Anna reflected gloomily, as she prepared for bed, that surely her sister could never have believed in anything that was nameless – and certainly never have left a teddy bear to cope with it.
Chapter Twenty-One
It was four mornings from the end of the holiday, and the sky was cloudy. Anna lay still for a moment, then stretched, thinking of how much better Barbara seemed, now that she and Tom went every day, and the future was no longer mentioned.
Tom ran into the room in his pyjamas; when she stretched out an arm he climbed gladly into her bed, cuddling up against her as he used to do. Anna smelt his hair and noticed how dark it was at the roots, so that the child who had been pale blond would end up a man with ordinary brown hair. Brown eyelashes shadowed his cheek, long, like Matthew’s.
He asked what they would do that day, but Anna shivered and snuggled farther down into the bed. ‘It sounds really stormy out there. It’ll probably pour with rain later, so we’ll just go to town and say hello to Granny as usual, then come back and play games.’
‘I don’t want to stay inside. Is it autumn yet?’
‘No, not quite. But sometimes at the end of August the weather’s really bad, and the river’s rough. That’s why you have to bring lots of woollies, because you never know.’
‘I don’t mind it when it’s stormy,’ he said.
‘It can be fun to go out in it, like we did when I was a little girl. Long walks in the rain.’
He made a face. ‘No fear.’
There was still no day when they did not see Matthew Paul, though more often now it was they who sought him, as they had at the beginning, always in the vicinity of the river. He rowed, or fished from the end of the pier, or waved to them from the deck of Invader, and if there was a wind he would spend a part of each day on his windsurfer – sometimes waving to them, sometimes oblivious to everything but his own motion.
He had become, Anna thought, an essential part of this landscape: something that had never been there before, in twenty-five years of seeing this same river and those distant trees, yet something so beautiful that now the river would seem incomplete were a day to dawn when Anna could no longer glimpse that blue and white sail.
Now and then she would see him far off, talking to the sisters from ‘Rose Cottage’. Sometimes the three of them would be lounging at the end of the pier, forgetful of the river’s reverberating stillness, so that scraps of their conversation would float across the water to where Anna stood, leaning on her garden wall. Things she had forgotten – school meals, the top twenty, straight-legged cords that could be tapered, mock exams, parents. Their laughter would reach her.
Those moments pinched her, although she made the effort to tell Tom that it was good for Matthew to have friends his own age, and so he must not mind. ‘He must not mind … !’ she thought, taking a certain pleasure in the irony. Then, an hour or two later, Matthew would loiter by to say hello, and she would tease him about his girlfriends, pleased when he denied them, scowling. Then the odd, contracted feeling disappeared and it seemed as if she and Tom and Matthew were suspended, and that she was in her teens again whilst Tom was older, all of them, mysteriously, one. Their imminent return to London seemed unreal, meaning as it did that she must pick up the threads of another design, with work, and the morning rush to get Tom to school, and weekend following week so quickly, and John making his awkward visits. The month in ‘Ahoy’ had blended Sunday with the rest of the week; Anna felt that someone had unloosened the screws at the corners of her life.
Barbara herself noticed the change. That day as they were leaving she called Anna back and whispered, ‘I’m so glad, darling. You seem to have come to terms with … everything. You look much happier.’ It was not so much true of Barbara herself. Her cheerfulness was like a glaze, applied too quickly in an attempt to cover up the flaws in a piece of pottery. She was often in pain and breathed with difficulty; her eyes and hair had lost their life. Neither of them mentioned it; Anna avoided all encounters with the nursing-home staff. There were no words now, she felt, and no point in miming to those uttered by others.
It was very stormy now. As they drove back from Synemouth huge drops of rain dashed against the windscreen and the wind increased, so that the tall hedgerows each side of the lane were tossed about, and they might have been driving in the furrow of enormous waves. Wild flowers were whipped from side to side; dried leaves and flower heads whirled upwards on currents of air.
‘Wow, what a storm,’ said Tom, pressing his nose against the car window. Then he asked, abruptly, so that Anna felt the question like a physical shock, ‘Mum – is Granny really going to die?’ After a moment she replied, ‘Yes, she is, Tom.’
‘When will it be?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Will it be soon?’
‘Yes – I think so.’
‘Why does God let people die?’
She caught her breath and said helplessly, I don’t know the answer; I can’t tell you. What do you think?’
There was a short silence, broken by the swish of the tyres and the regular slice of the windscreen wipers. Then he said, ‘Because they’ve got bored with being old.’
‘And what do you think of that?’
After another pause he said, ‘Nothing, really.’
She was shocked. ‘Don’t you care, Tom? I always thought you cared about people.’
‘I do,’ he said defensively, I meant that I can’t do anything about it, and so there’s nothing I can say, is there? Granny is old, isn’t she?’ Anna agreed. ‘Well, there you are,’ he said, as if solving an experiment and writing QED at the end. ‘I’ll die when I’m old.’ His voice was matter of fact; it made Anna feel rebellious.
By the time they had finished their soup the wind and rain had increased, and Anna went to find a sweater, even though the atmosphere in the cottage was muggy rather than cold. They sat on the window seat, warily because it sagged in the middle, and looked out at the river, leaden under its veil of sky, with the rain forming a mist as it drove across. The water was very choppy. Anna pointed out to Tom that there were no regular white-capped waves, only a churning and a bubbling as wind and tide fought against each other.
‘Anybody home?’ They heard the kitchen door open, then slam in the wind, and the voice repeated the question. ‘Yes! In here!’ she shouted. It was Matthew’s voice. He appeared at the door of the room in a yellow oilskin, shaking drops of water from his glowing face.
‘What on earth are you doing out in the rain?’ she asked, happily, feeling the dull little room infused with light.
‘I was bored in our house. Mum and Dad were griping at each other so I thought I’d get out.’
‘What’s griping mean?’ asked Tom, but Matthew winked at Anna. ‘Questions, questions,’ he jeered. ‘And you’re too young to know the answers. You’re a baby!’
Unoffended, Tom asked if Matthew would play Lego and help him make something complicated. ‘Aw God, no. Anything but that. All your things are boring.’
Tom grappled with the older boy, half in earnest, and Matthew pretended to be afraid, retreating across the room. They collapsed in a heap, playing at fighting and knocking over the light coffee table so that Anna’s books went flying. She groaned and turned to stare out of the window again, listening to the faint, desperate drumming of the rigging, barely audible above the wind. She felt restless. The wind which tossed the boats upon their mooring penetrated the tiny cracks in the ill-fitting window frames so that she felt it upon her face, ‘It never used to be as draughty as this,’ she thought. This cottage is falling apart.’
Tom had started to cry in earnest now. ‘He hurt me,’ he sobbed, rubbing his head, and burying his face in Anna’s breast. Matthew was sulky, I didn’t. He always tries to fight properly, and expects me to take all his punches, while I go on pretending.’
‘But you’re so much stronger than he is,’ Anna said reproachfully, rubbing Tom’s head. ‘You see, it always ends in tears.’ Matthew snorted contemptuously, ‘My gran always says that, but God knows what it’s supposed to mean.’
‘Don’t you know what it means, Matthew? It’s obvious to me.’
He walked around the room, picking things up, looking at them and then putting them down, as he always did. He left a trail of water on the floor as he rocked upon his heels. His restlessness infected Anna. ‘Why don’t we all go out for a walk?’ she suggested.
‘Oh Mum, it’s too cold and it’s raining,’ whined Tom.
‘It’s not cold, it’s August,’ she said.
‘More like October,’ grunted Matthew.
She protested that they must do something. They discussed the possibility of snakes and ladders, only to reject it. It seemed to Anna suddenly that the room was growing smaller and smaller, so that some vast energy inside her was compressed, crushed into a tiny space, and she wanted to cry out with passion and frustration. Instead she said, in a cajoling voice, ‘Matthew dear, think of something to do.’
His face lit up. ‘I know. Let’s go out on the river. It’ll be great out there – wild! I’ll row.’
She shook her head and Tom made a face, but Matthew was already on his feet. ‘Well, it’s boring in here, and boring just going for a walk, but if you get togged up like me we can get Dad’s rowing boat and get a taste of the storm. Come on!’
Tom looked worried. ‘Will it be safe, Mum?’
‘Of course!’ Matthew cried, ‘It’s not even very choppy out there. I’ve been out in much worse – and you know what a brilliant oarsman I am.’
With a surge of recklessness, Anna decided. It was as if all the windows of the little house had opened and the wind swept through, scouring the dust from all the corners and carrying with it the dried-out wild flowers she had stuck into a jam jar on their first day and never bothered to remove. For a second she fancied that the place was pure and empty, the useless objects tumbled into a heap at the bottom of the river.
‘All right, we’ll come. Why not?’ she said, ‘It’ll be an adventure, Tom.’
Not giving him time to protest she bundled Tom into a small oilskin, and wellington boots, pushing her own arms quickly into an old oilskin jacket of her mother’s. She tied sou’westers on both their heads, and he caught her mood, giggling up at her from under the brim, repeating, ‘It’s a real adventure.’
They left the house, not bothering to lock the door, and climbed the orchard path, slipping occasionally on the wet ground. Anna heard the drops of rain patter through the trees; the storm had even dislodged a few young apples and pears, before their ripeness. Walking quickly down the lane they passed the village shop, all silent, and hurried downhill to the waterfront. The pontoon was completely deserted. Only the gulls, wheeling and crying savagely above, gave life to the scene – except that the river itself was alive, tossing the boats on their moorings and slapping against the pier and pontoon, as if to threaten whatever man had put there for his foolish moments of holiday fun. A child’s bucket, left on one of the walkways, was caught by the wind and skeltered along, crashing against upturned dinghies before being whirled into the water, where it was hurled about like a miniature coracle before it sank.
Matthew led them along to the pier, where, tied to the steps at the end, the Pauls’ dinghy lay with its oars still inside – a carelessness William Lewis would never have tolerated. The boy climbed into it first, then held out his arms, balancing expertly as Anna helped Tom down. He moved as if he had lost all use of his joints, moaning, ‘I’ll fall, I’ll fall.’ But Matthew guided him to the bows, then turned to help Anna into the boat. His hand was warm, but damp because of the rain, and she let it go quickly.
Matthew pushed off, then fitted the oars into the rowlocks and started to pull. From ‘Ahoy’ the river had looked choppy but not as rough as in winter; now they sat so low upon it that they were tossed up and down in an increasingly violent motion, and it seemed as if not even Matthew’s strength at the oars could control their motion. The wind blew in their faces, and Anna laughed aloud with the spray in her face and the rain drumming all around. Her sou’wester had slipped back but she did not care; already her hair was wet and whipped around her face in long strands. Smiling to see the water cascading from Matthew’s plastered hair down his flushed, smooth cheeks, she leaned forwards and tenderly wiped at it with both her hands. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
By now they were about a hundred yards from the pier, allowing the current to dictate their course. Over Matthew’s shoulder Anna could see Tom’s face, pale under the vivid yellow hat, and his knuckles white where they gripped. Seeing her look at him, he forced a grin.
‘Isn’t this fun?’ she shouted.
