Bringing the Summer (8 page)

Found
me? As if I'm some sort of object, lying around waiting to be discovered! But despite that, his words leave me feeling – what, exactly? Excited, I think. As if I've got some sort of power or magic of my own, now, to match his.

 

Maddie's cooking in the kitchen. She looks up as we come in. ‘Nice swim?'

‘Yes, thanks,' I say. ‘Freezing cold but still delicious. How's Gabes?'

‘Awake, bored. Watching some film. Go and find him. He'll be glad to see you.'

Theo doesn't speak. He goes straight out of the kitchen. I listen to his feet thumping upstairs.

Gabes looks very fed up. He flicks the remote to turn off the film.

I sit down at the end of the sofa. ‘Are you feeling better?'

‘You were ages,' he says.

‘You were sleeping. I didn't think you'd mind.'

He flicks the film back on. I watch with him for a while. ‘I need to hang out my wet things,' I say. He nods without looking at me.

I rinse out my swimsuit at the kitchen sink. ‘Wring it out well, then put it to dry in the utility room,' Maddie says. She smiles. ‘I'm assuming you're staying for supper, Freya? And you're welcome to stay over, tonight. Laura's room's free. Or I can take you home later, if you prefer?'

Nick comes in with the twins, one on each arm. Phoebe stretches her arms out towards me and makes little crowing sounds. She can't talk yet.

I'm absurdly pleased. ‘Hey, Phoebe!' I say, taking her from Nick. Her small body is so warm and light. She hardly weighs a thing. Her head, downy soft, nestles under my chin.

‘I'd love to stay,' I say to Maddie. ‘Thanks. I'll call Mum.' I pass Phoebe back to Nick, so I can use my phone. I take it into the hallway.

Mum isn't there, so I leave a message on the answerphone. I go back into the kitchen. ‘Where am I, exactly? This house, I mean? So I can tell my parents.'

Nick laughs. ‘Home Farm. The village is Southfield. We're a mile from the village, though.' He opens a bottle of wine, pours a glass for himself and one for Maddie. ‘Freya?'

I shake my head. ‘No thanks.'

I help lay the table.

‘Would you be a love and go and see if there are any courgettes in the kitchen garden?' Maddie asks me. ‘And spinach. Enough for eight. Thanks, darling.'

I go back to the sitting-room door. ‘Gabes? Want to come with me, to pick stuff? You can practise with your crutches!' I mean to be encouraging, but he gives me such a withering look I'm happy to leave him behind.

I'm used to pottering in Gramps' vegetable garden, helping him. This one is much more overgrown and unruly. I find a handful of courgettes under the big star-shaped leaves, and then start cutting spinach. Something makes me look up. Theo's standing in the doorway to the walled garden, lurking there in the shadow. Not exactly creepy, but a bit . . . But perhaps I'm just imagining things because he comes over and is ordinary enough.

‘Spinach goes to a mush when it's cooked. So you need loads,' he says.

‘I know.'

‘I found that poem for you.
Pike
.'

‘Thanks.'

‘Are you staying?'

‘Yes.'

‘Good.'

I don't say anything.

He starts asking me questions. ‘So, Freya. You still at school?'

‘No, college. I'm doing A levels there. That's how I know Gabes.'

‘Then what?'

‘I don't know. I haven't decided.'

‘University. Or travel. Like everyone does.'

I look at him. Why does he have to be sarcastic? ‘Actually, Theo, no. I'd like to do something wild, and wonderful, and different. I want my life to mean something; to count. I don't want to waste it. Not any of it.'

I don't tell him why. I don't say,
when someone you love dies young, it makes you think about all these things, over and over
.

There's a long, awkward silence.

‘And you? What do you want to do, Theo?'

‘Write,' he says.

‘Like your mother?'

‘No, not like her. Not
like
anyone.'

‘That's enough spinach,' I say.

He picks up the cut leaves from the path where I've laid them, and carries them into the house in both hands, like a dark green bouquet.

 

Just before supper, I go to find Gabes. I pick up one of the framed photographs on the piano, put it back, select another. ‘Tell me who everyone is,' I say.

Most of the family group ones are fairly obvious. I peer at a particularly beautiful black-and-white photo of Maddie and Nick on their wedding day, looking totally in love and amazing. There's another wedding one with two bridesmaids that Gabes tells me are Beth and Laura. ‘Nick was married before, to their mum, Lorna,' Gabes explains. ‘Maddie isn't their real mother, though she's looked after them practically for ever.'

‘And this one?' I hold up the square photo of the thin-faced little girl with short dark hair, the one picture that doesn't fit with the others.

‘Bridie, when she was about six.' He starts hobbling to the door.

Nick's calling us from the kitchen: supper is ready and everyone's starving. But I linger a moment longer, staring at the girl in the photograph.
This is her. I'm face to face with Bridie
. . . I study her face; look into her dark eyes. But of course there's nothing there, nothing you can see, that is; nothing that says what will happen to her later . . .

‘Freya?' Gabes calls.

‘Coming.' Carefully, I put the photo back between the others and go through to the kitchen.

We take our places at the table. Everyone's there except Laura, this time. Maddie has cooked an enormous fish pie. Theo watches me across the table, but I keep my eyes on my food, and on Gabes, and let the conversations waft over my head. Someone's bought an injured fox into the surgery, Nick's saying. It will need a quieter place to recuperate: he might bring it back to the house next week, if Maddie doesn't mind . . .

Afterwards, Gabes practises going upstairs with crutches. I walk along the landing to find Beth bathing the twins. She's red-faced and shiny from the steam. She sits on the floor, keeping an eye on both babies and playing with them. She wipes her hair back from her hot face and sits back for a moment. ‘Don't ever have twins!' she says, but laughing at the same time, and I know she doesn't really mean it. She loves those babies to bits.

She stands up, stretches out her back. ‘Watch them for me, while I get their pyjamas?'

I take her place on the floor. Phoebe's pouring water from one plastic beaker to another, while Erin pushes a blue and yellow plastic whale to make it go under the bath water. Each time it pops back up she laughs. It's unsinkable, that little toy whale. I take a small blue boat from the basket of toys and float it. It tips sideways. Not an unsinkable boat, then. The brief, painful thought of my brother, Joe, catches me unawares.

Beth hangs the pyjamas over the warm towel rail; one pink and white pair, one blue and yellow. ‘Thanks, Freya. You OK?'

I nod.

‘Gabes isn't his normal self. It's his foot, it's nothing to do with you.'

‘I know.'

She smiles.

 

I find Gabes stretched out on his bed, listening to music.

I sit next to him for a while, but he seems so remote, listening to music on headphones, making no effort to talk to me, that in the end I get up and go back downstairs. He hardly seems to notice.

Piano music is drifting from the sitting room. I follow the sound. Theo's playing something haunting and rather lovely. I read the name from the music book on the piano stand:
Trois Gnossiennes
, by Erik Satie. Nick and Kit are engrossed in a game of chess, and Maddie's sitting in the window seat, reading. Family life, I think. This is what it's supposed to be like.

I pick up a book from the pile on the side table, and start to read the beginning. It's called
The Behaviour of Moths
, but it's a novel, about two crazy sisters. Every so often I look up at Theo, and one time, he's looking straight back at me, and that feeling comes again, something running between us, a little bit dark, and edgy, and exciting.

Maddie turns on more lamps as it gets dark outside. She goes over to the bookshelves and pulls out a big hardback art book for me to look at. ‘You might like this, Freya. Do you know her work? I think she's a wonderful painter. Very underrated. You know St Ives, I expect, in Cornwall. She lived there for a while.'

Winifred Nicholson
. I leaf through the pages. I've seen some of the paintings before:
Gate to the Isles
is pretty famous, but there are others I haven't seen, and yes, Maddie's right, I do love them. The colours, and the emotion that they evoke. How, exactly? I'm not sure. I stare for ages at one called
Dawn Chorus
.

Theo stops playing, and stretches out on the rug, reading too. It's quiet except for the sound of wooden chess pieces on the board, and heavy sighs from Kit as Nick steadily and inexorably defeats him. The almost-silence of people in a room, all happily absorbed in something: I love it.

At last, Maddie looks up from her book. ‘Time for bed, for me. Shall I show you Laura's room, Freya?'

I nod. I take the art book with me upstairs, and pad behind Maddie, past the rows of doors, where Beth and the twins are already sleeping. We go past Gabes' room, and Maddie pauses there, listens, opens the door and closes it again very quietly.

‘Fast asleep. Good. That's when the healing happens: while you're sleeping. Like
growing
does, when you're a child.'

We take another step down, turn a corner. I've not been this far before, or seen the narrow wooden steps leading up to an attic bedroom.

‘There you go. I put a towel on the bed. Help yourself to anything you need.' She hugs me briefly, as if she were my own mother. ‘Sleep well, Freya.'

I step carefully up to the attic, with its sloping walls and narrow single bed, cream covers, cream rug, a single wooden chair. A green-covered book is lying on the pillow: Ted Hughes,
Selected Poems
, and a thin slip of paper marks page 59. A shiver runs down my spine; I don't know why. I pick up the towel and go back down to the bathroom for a shower.

I make myself wait till I'm actually in bed, under the white duvet, before I open the book. I read the poem about the pike, first, then one about an otter, and a fox. The poems are full of darkness, and sounds, and something disturbing that I can't quite fathom.

 

I find a message from Mum on my phone. She's got mine, she hopes I'm having a good time, she'll see me tomorrow. And there's one from Miranda:
How's it going???? Tell all!!

I text her back:
We had a bike accident! Gabes broke his foot. I'm staying over, in his sister's room,
and then I turn off my phone because I don't want to speak to anyone right now. Even the tiny clicking sounds of texting sound loud in the deep silence of this ancient, solid house.

 

I dream of St Ailla. The colours are as bright as a Pre-Raphaelite painting. In the dream, I'm walking across the sandbar at high tide: it's a neap tide so there's a strip of sand a metre or so wide at the top of the bar. If it were a spring tide, the sea would cover it completely, and the water would be rushing and swirling and eddying in dangerous currents. But no: I can walk right the way across to the next island without getting wet feet. At the far end of the bar I scramble over big stones and stinky seaweed, on to the short turf path that runs between tall bracken, up to the top of Gara. The island is uninhabited except by birds: black-backed gulls wheel over it, calling incessantly, and dive-bombing you if you come too close to their nesting places on the rocks. I cross to the other side, in the lee of the wind, and sit for a while against the huge lichen-covered boulders at the edge of the cliff. Oystercatchers with their bright orange legs and black-and-white plumage make their piping song and fly off as I walk down to their beach. The sun's prickly hot on my skin. I strip off, walk out into the water and begin to swim. Ahead, there's nothing but blue sea, on and on to the line of the horizon where the dark blue meets the paler blue of sky. I am utterly at peace, swimming into the wild blue.

 

I wake up, the dream vivid in my head, full of that sense of peace, and purposefulness. In the dream there was no uncertainty, no muddled feelings. I lie in the darkness for ages, and then I switch on the bedside light, get out of bed to find my notebook and a pen, and begin to draw. I'm drawing from the dream, and from the memory of the real place, vividly alive for me. But I'm drawing as if I am an observer, watching myself in the scene: a series of sketches like a storyboard, or a cartoon strip. I draw fast, instinctively, without stopping to think. The drawings retrace my journey across the island, but at the top of the cliff I stop and there's something else there, something I didn't see the first time: a dead bird, a patch of soft feathers around the torn corpse of a brown speckled hawk, its ribcage stripped open to reveal the red raw inside. The girl changes, too. She isn't me, I realise after a while. She has short dark hair, and she looks the way I imagine little Bridie from the photograph might have looked when she was older: about eighteen or nineteen.