Letting You Go (28 page)

‘I think he’s gone mad,’ Jem said shakily.

Alex was trembling. Did it matter? Did it matter what anyone had done, if this was the destination they’d all arrived at? The home waiting for her mum?

‘Jem? Go back with Finn to Susannah’s. Make sure she looks at his mouth. He might need to have it seen to.’

Finn looked up. ‘Alex? Come back with me.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Alex, don’t do this,’ he said.

‘It’s not your fault, Finn. It was never your fault. But we can’t live like this. It’s not fair on anyone. Jem, go with him. I’ll look after Dad. Please.’

‘Alex. Please, come back with me.’

Finn had wiped most of the red away, but his teeth were
stained with it, his face already swelling from the latest wounds she’d caused him. She couldn’t keep hurting him like this. She looked away.

‘Alex,
please.
’ Finn looked wounded, desperate. ‘Don’t make me love you in secret, Alex.’

She was wronging him. Either way, she was wronging him. She should have never come back here, she realised as she turned shakily for the house. Alex swallowed down the shakiness in her voice. ‘I’m sorry, Finn. For everything.’

T
he Old Girl looked calm beneath a summer moon. It hadn’t been a conscious thing, coming down here, Alex’s feet had just led her, through the copse of trees and along the footpath cutting across the meadow. She hadn’t used this route since she and her father had run down here, unaware that they’d already lost the race. Alex re-crossed her legs and felt the cool earth through Jem’s cotton trousers. The fear had gone. How could she be afraid of anything any more when the worst had already happened? Alex watched the moonlight catching on the water and thought back to the moment she’d found her dad sitting in his truck in the layby. The way he’d looked before she’d got to him. Had he been on his way home from high tea with Louisa? She’d suspected but did she really know? For sure? It didn’t matter any more. She couldn’t bring herself to hate him, how could she? He’d still lost his son.

Alex had wanted to take care of him tonight, she’d turned the opera down from the deafening setting he’d cranked it up to in hopes of soothing him off to sleep, but then he’d found Jem’s bottle of red and had taken into the lounge,
throwing Jem’s family tree papers across the room as he went.

Somewhere over Alex’s head, the evening breeze disturbed the leaves of the alder tree Dill had fallen from. She’d thought Dill was in St Cuthbert’s, but he wasn’t. He was still here. By the Old Girl.

You’re driving yourself mad, Alex.

Alex kicked off a shoe. Then the other. The water looked so calm. The Old Girl’s mood wistful, benign. Alex rolled up Jem’s trousers and stood quietly for a few moments in the peacefulness of the night. She took a few steps towards the bank and felt the first bite of nettles at her feet. She stood there for a few seconds, until the stingers had done their worst and the sensations died away to a meaningless nothingness. And then she stepped into the cold embrace of the water.

The water came up to her calves, accepting her without fuss. She hadn’t rolled her trousers up nearly far enough but no matter. Alex moved out into the cold bite of the water. The Old Girl was calm, still. Almost as if she were sleeping.

Wake up, you bitch.

There was no logic behind it, no distant plan, but Alex kept going. The water was rising, tightening that feeling in her lungs as it climbed past her knees, her thighs, her hips. Her breathing became sharp and shallow, and then she gave herself to it, a committal lunge forwards and she was pressing through the cold black water. The Old Girl put up no
fight, no currents, no tree roots to snag her feet on. A matter of a few surreal seconds and she was at the opposite side, huddled breathless to the bank.

Alex’s breathing felt giddied and laboured, she could hear the protestation in her heart, as her body screamed at her,
Are you MAD?

She hadn’t stopped for the sensations of nettles or cold on her skin. But something had got inside, something that stung and ached and was making her convulse in vicious shivers. And then it all rose up. A swell of hurt and anguish and shame and regret. Alex’s head bowed as it all came tumbling out in a flurry of pathetic sobs. She cried that way, for Dill, for them all, shivering and wet until a broken drunken melody found its way through the darkness.

Alex scanned the bank opposite. She could see the clearing near the alder tree, where she’d left her pumps. Was her body going into spasm? She tried to hold herself still as the singing, if it could be called that, made its way closer through from the meadows. The moonlight picked out only his face and silvered hair, the rest of him invisible in the camouflage of dark overalls.

Ted staggered through the darkness, drunk and emotional. He’d never known the words to any of Blythe’s arias, they used to giggle at him when he tried to roar along to them in pidgin Italian.

Ted stopped singing. Alex heard him groan and then glass breaking somewhere over by the trees.

‘God damn you!’ he shouted.

Alex shivered as she listened over the water lapping gently against her waist.

‘God damn you for taking him from me!’ Alex heard his anger break into a free-fall of weeping. ‘You old bitch!’ he tried, but the tears had him in a tighter grip than his anger.

Ted staggered closer to the water, Alex could see him better now in the clearing. Here the river would only come up to his chest, but Alex still felt a flutter of concern, building and building like a tide. He shouldn’t stand so close after drinking so much, the Old Girl knew how to seize upon a weakness.

‘He was my boy.
Mine!
Dillon Edward Foster! He was
my
son!’ Alex’s anguish was making a U-turn, and then something caught her dad’s interest. Ted bent down and picked something up. He seemed to sober, instantly.

‘Alexandra?
Alexandra!
’

Alex twitched at her name. Her shoes fell from his hands and bounced against the earth. Ted started pacing along the riverbank just like Norma paced behind the door before Alex let her out.

‘
Alexandra!
No … not my girl, NOT MY BABY GIRL!’

His voice was thick with panic. Ted jumped down clumsily into the water. He hadn’t even taken his boots off.

He can’t swim in those boots!
And his overalls! Alex had felt the weight in those overalls when she’d tried pegging them out on the line!
No, no, no! You’ll be anchored to the riverbed, Dad!

‘Dad, it’s OK!’ she called.

‘Alexandra? Where are you, baby? I’m coming!’

‘Dad! Wait! Don’t come in any further—’ But talking and swimming was a stretch too far. Alex shut her mouth, fear finding its way back to her where a short while ago it hadn’t even dared to try. She was vulnerable again. Someone she loved was in the water too. Again.

‘Alex? I can’t see you!’ Alex heard the desperation in his voice, high rasps of panic escaping from a man too drunk and too distraught to save anyone. A heavy splash and she knew he’d stumbled.

‘Dad!’ Alex took a mouthful of water. ‘Dad!’ she spluttered. That one mouthful had filled her up, choking the bravery right out of her.

She could hear thrashing, was he under?
Please
, don’t let him be under! Alex dug deep, ignoring the cold in her arms and legs. She wouldn’t run this time, she would swim. She would be efficient. She would be not be useless.

Alex half thrashed, half staggered across the last stretch of water where it petered away against the riverbed. ‘Dad?’ she gasped. She grabbed at his head, pulling it free of the water where he’d stumbled under the weight of his sodden clothes.

‘Dad, are you all right? Dad, talk to me!
Please!
’

Ted ruptured into heavy sobs. ‘Alex, my girl. My baby girl. I thought …’ He pulled Alex into him, clamping huge able arms around her small frame. He held her firm and close to him, like she was a little girl again.
His
little girl again. ‘I thought I’d lost you, girl. I thought I’d chased you
away.’ He pressed a kiss firmly against Alex’s head and held it there, gripping her for dear life.

Alex started shaking. Violent spasms of relief, or maybe it was just the cold. ‘No, Dad. You didn’t lose me.’

She could feel his fingers, clamping her firmly in his embrace and felt something ease, a tightly wound coil that had kept her too tight to function properly all this time. ‘I’m so sorry, Alex. I’m so sorry. Please, can you forgive me?’

A
lex stirred. She lifted her head from the gentle rise and fall of a body asleep beside her and surveyed her surroundings. Norma’s ear twitched, she opened her eyes briefly then went back to sleep on the rug. Alex squinted at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was nearly five in the morning. She stood and wrapped the blankets around her shoulders. Norma watched her lean forwards to stoke the fire she’d made in the front room.
Afire, in August?
her mother would have said. But then a fire had been a far easier option than getting a grown man out of wet overalls. Besides, they’d both been exhausted from the walk back. It had done wonders for purging the alcohol from her dad’s system, a good thing because they’d still had a lot to talk about on reaching the farmhouse.

Alex leant over her dad. He was sleeping against one arm of the small sofa they’d pulled up to the hearth. She pulled his blankets higher up his chest again. He was like an old grey sleeping bear.

No-one else would know about what had happened
between them tonight. How they’d both finally managed to put enough of the noise aside to just talk.

Alex had finally told him. How Rodolfo had barked. How the water had been too quick for her. How hard Finn had tried. She told him how Rodolfo had tripped her into the nettle patch, and how Finn’s shirt was only on inside out because he’d been painting that morning and had called for Alex to go and look at his work. How they’d taken Dill out because he’d been teasing Jem about her attempts to look more like her girlfriends. Alex hadn’t felt on trial, or in danger of tripping over something that might reignite the fires again. She’d just felt that she was setting down a heavy load while her father quietly let her. The only thing she hadn’t told him, was that she’d been struck by lightning once, and had loved Finn every day since.

Alex opened out her blanket and stood in front of the embers, warming herself like a moth at a lantern. Her hair had matted into damp clumps over the ruined vest Jem was going to kill her for. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Jem had bigger monsters coming her way.

Alex stared into the glow.

‘Susannah Finn give you any pearls of wisdom while you were staying over at the Longhouse?’ Ted had asked her. ‘You and her boy … Are you as close as he wants? The way he says he feels?’

Alex knew what Ted was really getting at.
Did she know.
Had Susannah or Finn ever told Alex that her dad been caught huddled up in the corner of Frobisher’s with the
Mayor’s wife all over him. Did Alex realise that Dillon and Malcolm shared too much of a likeness not to share at least some of the same blood. Had Alex pieced it all together.

‘No, Dad.’ Alex had answered him. It wasn’t the truthful answer but it was the answer he most needed to hear.

‘Don’t you think you should tell him then? Put him out of his misery? He seemed … genuine.’ There had been something regretful in her dad’s voice, the first possibility that he might have done wrong by Finn? Maybe that was a wish too far. It was too late now anyway.

‘I’ve done some things, Alexandra, that I wish I hadn’t,’ her father had said. ‘Not told you enough how much I love you, for one. Not been quick enough to bring you back home to us where you belong, for another. What you said in The Cavern the other night, it was right. I wasn’t the only one who lost your brother, but I couldn’t see past that for a long, long time. There were other things happening back then, before Dillon’s accident. Things that clouded my mind.’ Alex had watched the firelight play over her dad’s worn features. ‘I was so angry, at the world,’ he’d gone on, ‘I thought you were best out of it all, away from anything that might make your life any harder than it already was up here after your brother died. And then before I knew it, you were out of sight, in every way, and I didn’t know how to bring you back.’

Alex watched the dying firelight clinging on to the coals.
It’s not about who’s done what any more
, it was about saving their family, giving her mother the husband and daughters
she needed to come home to. The only way Alex could do that now, to head off any more skeletons from rattling out of any closets, was to put some real time and distance between the people they now were, and the people they had all once been. And maybe one day, when he found someone with less baggage to spend his love on, Finn might even forgive her for it.

Alex wrapped herself again and sat back against her dad’s solid body on the settee. Something had changed between them. There had been truths left unspoken, but for the things they had shared, hopefully forgiveness. Or at least understanding.

Still there were other things bothering Alex when she finally drifted off to sleep again against the rise and fall of her father’s chest. The look in Finn’s eyes when she’d sent him away again rejected. The truth that was about to come crashing down on her sister.

Jem.

A tension spiked in Alex’s chest. Jem still didn’t know. And Alex had sent her away with Finn, without first telling her that Malcolm Sinclair was almost certainly their half-brother.

What if Jem hadn’t stayed at the Longhouse like Alex had asked her to? What if she’d just seen to Finn’s split lip and then disappeared somewhere? She hadn’t come back here yet.

Alex gave the clock on the mantel another tentative look and listened to the sound of her father’s heart beating its
steady rhythm while he slept. She closed her eyes tightly and sent a small prayer up to the powers that be.

Wherever my sister ended up last night, please, let it not have been with Malcolm.