Bringing the Summer (12 page)

I've been working on my sea paintings. It would be so much easier if I were actually there, on the island. I've got my sketchbooks, and my memories of it all, from so many summer visits, but it's still not the same. I have a habit of seeing what I want to see, what I want to remember: an idealised landscape. I blot out the rest. And that's not going to work for this project.

My eye catches the whale photo, dusty and fading in the sunlight. On impulse, I phone Evie.

It's funny, listening to the telephone ring and being able to see exactly where everything is in that house, imagining Evie in the sitting room reading, and Gramps pottering in the greenhouse, or bringing in the crab pots; knowing the particular way the house smells – the faint salty fishy tang from cooked crab – hearing that background sound of the sea pounding the rocky shore.

‘Hello?' Evie's voice comes, bright and full of energy, like she always is.

‘It's me,' I say.

‘Freya! How lovely! How are you? We've missed you so much this time. Did you get the photo? It's been very exciting here, what with the whale and all the fuss it brought.'

‘The photo is why I phoned. I mean, to talk to you and everything, but I wondered if you had more photos like that?'

I explain about my art project, and Evie makes encouraging noises, and she says she'll send all the photos she took, all thirty-six on the film.

‘Can you send copies?' I say. ‘So I can keep them and don't have to worry about them getting spoiled. I'd like to be able to do things with them, like stick them in my notebooks or cut out bits.'

‘Of course,' Evie says. ‘It'll take a few days, mind you. I'll go over to Main Island tomorrow on the early boat, if the wind isn't too strong. We've had the most magnificent storms!'

‘I wish I'd been there for them,' I say.

‘The storms brought lots of unusual birds, too,' Evie says, ‘as well as the whale. Rare species, blown off course on their migrations. We've had a lovely time with the field glasses. Now, Gramps would love a word. Have you got time?'

I hear their voices, and Gramps fumbles over the receiver as he takes it from Evie. ‘Sweetheart,' he says. ‘How's tricks?'

‘I'm fine,' I tell him. ‘The weather's changed. No more river swimming. How are you, Gramps?'

‘Fair to middling. Are you studying hard, Freya? You want to make the most of it.' I can hear the smile in his voice. ‘What are you reading just now?'

I tell him about
The Mill on the Floss
, and then I remember the Ted Hughes poems, so I mention those, too. Gramps loves poetry.

‘Not my cup of tea, Hughes. That funny business with his wife,' Gramps says. ‘Though he knows his animals and fish. I'll give him that.'

Gramps starts telling me the old lighthouse buildings are on sale again. He knows Joe and I used to imagine living there, when we were little. I wanted a bedroom in the round stone tower, with a circular bed and curving shelves and table and cupboards. Joe would have the room right at the top. The buildings have been derelict for years.

Evie's in the background, chipping in, and then telling him I'm paying for the phone call and not to talk for too long.

When I put the phone down, I feel slightly sad. They are getting older, Evie and Gramps; I can hear it in their voices, especially Gramps'. It comes over me in a rush that they won't be around for ever. I can't bear that. Evie and Gramps have been the steady, constant loving thread through my whole life. My rock.

 

The photos arrive five days later. I spread them out on my table and study them. It's exciting: I'm going to use them as my starting point for a new series of drawings. Stormy skies and seas; cloudscapes; the rough textures of stone and pebble and seaweed, and the huge bulk of the whale carcass. Evie's taken a series of photos showing people trying to move the whale with ropes and tractors, and the grainy texture of a slightly blurred photo makes me think of much older photos I've seen somewhere, of a different place: Newfoundland, I think, when whales were caught for food and oil and the seas would be red with whale blood and blubber, only the photos were black-and-white, so it looked like a spillage of black ink.

I experiment more, with black-and-white images: pencil, charcoal, pen and ink. I try a collage with chopped bits of photo of the whale on the shingle beach, and thick paint. I know these pictures are good.

Powerful
, Jeanette says when I show her in class on Monday morning. ‘You are really getting somewhere now, Freya.'

Gabes, his foot still in plaster, carries on filling his canvases with colour and light. He frowns as he goes past my table on his way out of the studio. He doesn't stop to look at my pictures properly, and he doesn't mention them when we meet up, later.

I don't tell him I've heard from Theo, or that I'm planning to visit Oxford. I know I should, really. But he seems so preoccupied with his own things: he's doing his application for art college in London. He's not interested in my paintings. And it's not as if he's showing much interest in me, either: not anything more than as friends.

When we go for lunch together, we chat about other things.

‘How's your dad's fox?' I ask. ‘Is she getting better?'

‘I guess so,' Gabes says. ‘But she's lost her foxy spark.' He looks at me. ‘You know? The fox-ness of her. She looks like a mangy pet, fed up with being in a cage.'

‘Perhaps you should just let her free,' I say. ‘Perhaps she'd heal quicker like that.'

‘She'd die, Freya. She wouldn't be able to catch her own food or anything. That's the point.'

‘Sorry for being so stupid.'

‘I wasn't suggesting that.'

‘No? It sounded as if you were.'

Neither of us speaks for a while.

People leave us alone; our usual crowd go and sit inside the café instead of joining us at the table outside under the awning.

‘Did something happen?' Gabes asks me, eventually. ‘We were starting to be good friends, and then something changed. Did I do something wrong?'

‘No,' I say. I can't tell him what I'm thinking, that the thing that changed was Theo, turning up like he did.

Muddling me.

‘Come for supper again,' Gabes says, generously. ‘Come home with me after college on Wednesday. Dad'll give us a lift.'

I know he's making an effort to be nice. ‘OK,' I say. ‘Thanks.'

 

It's a different sort of household without Beth and the children, and with Theo away. It all feels more normal, I suppose: an ordinary family mid-week. We have sausages and baked vegetables for supper; there's no pudding. Maddie's busy with paperwork and Kit does homework at the kitchen table once supper's over; Nick falls asleep sprawled in front of the telly.

Gabes and I do the washing-up together, and then we go outside to feed the fox and to shut away Maddie's chickens.

It's already dark, and hard to make out the fox hunched in the pen. It smells rank. When we open the door to put the scraps of food inside and top up the water in the bowl, she stays cowering in the shadows at the back of the pen. Her eyes gleam in the torchlight: dark pools.

‘Poor thing.' I crouch down next to the cage. ‘I see what you mean. It is like the spirit has gone out of her. I still think it would be better to let her go free. Her leg must be nearly better by now. What does your dad think?'

‘Six weeks, he says, for healing a break. So only another week or so, and we can release her. Not too near here, obviously, because of the chickens.'

That's our next job. We cross the vegetable garden into the orchard. In the daytime, Maddie lets the hens out to scratch and peck under the apple and plum trees. But there's no sign of any of them now.

‘They've all gone up their wooden ramp into the hen-house. They do that as soon as it gets dark,' Gabes explains. He fastens the latch on the door, and then goes round the other side to lift the lid of the nesting box. The hens stir when they hear us, and make that soft crooning sound in their throats. Gabes picks out two eggs from the straw and places them in my cupped hands. They are still faintly warm.

I carry them carefully back to the kitchen and put them in the bowl with the others. We join Nick briefly in the sitting room in front of the telly. I watch the tail end of some programme about a community choir on some estate, while he and Gabes talk about what Gabes should say in his personal statement for his UCAS form.

‘You got homework?' Nick asks.

Gabes shakes his head. ‘I'm all up to date with my projects. Just reading and research, now.'

It strikes me how clear Gabes is; how focused on his own plans. There's nothing wrong with that; it just doesn't leave much room for someone else. I guess he never really wanted me as a
girlfriend
. And the more I think about it, the more true that begins to sound. Gabes loves having
friends
: lots of friends, not just one special one. He likes people in groups.

Maddie settles down in her favourite chair, under the lamp near the window. She pulls out sheaves of paper from a big brown envelope, and sits to read them, pen in hand. ‘Page proofs,' she explains to me. ‘For my new book.'

I sit down next to Gabes on the sofa.

‘I'll have the plaster off on Friday,' he says. ‘Then I can get the bike going again. My life will be much easier.'

I don't know what to say. It isn't going to work out, Gabes and me. I know that now. The spark, the magic, just isn't there for him. Maybe, after all, it wasn't Gabes I was
falling for
anyway. I guess it's easy enough to make a mistake like that.

We don't hold hands. We don't even kiss goodbye when it's time for me to go home.

Dad collects me from the farm for the first time. I hear him waxing lyrical about the stone roof tiles and the beams in the kitchen with Nick.

‘You coming to meet my dad?' I ask Gabes.

‘OK.' Moving around is still an effort with his foot in plaster, though he can rest the heel down, now. He follows me into the kitchen.

Dad smiles. ‘All set, Freya?'

I nod. ‘Thanks for having me,' I say to Maddie. ‘And for supper and everything.'

‘You're always welcome here,' Maddie says. ‘You know that. We love seeing you, don't we, Nick?'

‘We do.'

‘Dad, this is Gabes. My friend from college.'

Gabes steps forward to shake hands.

‘Pleased to meet you, Gabes. Heard lots about you,' Dad says, even though it isn't true. I haven't mentioned him once.

I steer Dad towards the door. ‘See you at college, Gabes.'

 

Dad drives us home. ‘Gorgeous house,' he says. ‘All that land, too. Nice people. Had a good time?'

I nod. ‘We're just friends,' I say, quickly, to stop him before he starts going on.

Fourteen

Mist curls along the river, punctuated by the dark shapes of trees on the banks. It's early morning; the train rattles along the track, the rhythm of the wheels like a pulse in my skull. I'm travelling again, and it feels good to be moving. Through the window I glimpse a fox slipping through a gap in a hedge: I think of the one at the farmhouse, now free and living its own wild life.

The girl,
Bridie
, comes vividly into my mind. Just as we go through the tunnel at Box station, I remember that website I looked at, and the list of places where other train
fatalities
have happened. It doesn't help that the train manager keeps going on about reading the safety cards, and to report anything suspicious . . .

I change trains at Didcot, find the one for Oxford. I'm going to ask Theo about Bridie this time, I decide. A pale thin sun is just visible through the mist, and by the time the train's going past the backs of houses and parks on the outskirts of the city the mist is a thin layer, the spires and towers of churches and colleges piercing through, and the sun itself breaks out as I step on to the platform.

The station car park's full of bicycles. Everyone in Oxford rides bikes, apparently. For a fleeting second, I can imagine myself here, riding up the street on my own bike, on my way to lectures.

I get my map out, and start walking towards the town centre. The road crosses the canal: I stop to look at the houseboats and barges, just like the ones along the canal at home. Theo's student house is somewhere near this canal, further along, in an area he calls Jericho, but I'm meeting him at a café in the covered market, off High Street. It's exciting to be here, but I'm shaking with nerves, too, thinking about being alone with Theo. I put Gabes out of my mind. Try to, at least.

It's still quite early, but the streets are packed: students, tourists, ordinary people shopping. Every so often I stop to peer through the small wooden doors within bigger, ancient wooden doors that open on to beautiful grassy courtyards: cool, green spaces of privileged quiet, a stark contrast to the city streets. Two worlds, so close together –
town
and
gown
, Dad called them – it's all exactly like he described.