Wishing Water (5 page)

‘You brought me up. That’s not quite the same thing, is it?’ The tone was cruelly mocking but Lissa didn’t care. She wanted to hurt Meg as she was hurting, deep inside.

‘Of course it’s the same. You are very special to us and always will be.’
 

Hot tears pricked her eyelids and Lissa blinked them angrily away. ‘That was only duty. You had no choice. You didn’t even choose me. I was dumped on you.’ With tremulous pleasure she watched the terrible effect of these words dawn on Meg’s face. Instantly the feeling drained away and she was drenched in guilt. She wanted to run to Meg and smooth away the stricken look, to beg her forgiveness and say she hadn’t meant it.

‘Oh, Lissa,’ was all Meg said, which made her feel worse than ever. Desperately, she tried to put it right.

‘Come for a ride. Not to Brockbarrow wood but somewhere different. I’m bored with everywhere round here.’
 

Meg looked distressed. Tam had got Lissa a lovely little mare, but Meg never let her go too far alone, insisting she was always accompanied. ‘I can’t. Not today, love. Why don’t you ask Tam to go with you?’
 

Lissa pouted. ‘Tam says he has to do all
your
jobs as well as his own these days. He’s too busy.’
 

‘It’s a difficult time.’

The kettle was rattling furiously on the stove and Meg quickly lifted it to pour the scalding water into the teapot. There was so much she wanted to explain, about life, about trust, about love, but she couldn’t seem to find the right words, the right approach to get through to Lissa any more. The huge farm kitchen filled with the comforting aroma of hot tea but when she turned back to the table, loving words of caution on her lips, Lissa was already on her feet, knocking back her chair with a fierce hand.

‘Don’t bother. I knew it was a waste of time to talk to you. You aren’t interested in me any more.’ With that she stormed out of the house.

She rode defiantly right along the quarry road, forbidden territory. The triumph she felt at breaking Meg’s strictest rule made her hum with pleasure. It promised to be a beautiful autumn day. The late afternoon sun was shining brilliantly by the time she’d ridden Goldie through Brockbarrow wood and onwards to the tarn. It glittered on the rippled surface wrinkled as an old man’s bald head.

Lissa reined in the pony and let it take a drink at the water. A picture of herself and Nick, shaking their bottles of liquorice water, came to mind. What a childish thing to do. What innocent babes they had been. As if a stretch of water could answer their wishes. As if wishing could find a mother, or make Meg still love her. There was a tight feeling in her throat but she ignored it. It wasn’t her fault if no one understood or cared for her? Or was it? A bleak thought.

‘What will I do when I’m grown up, Goldie? Where will I go? I can’t stay here where I don’t really belong.’ Lissa thought about this for a moment. What would it feel like to be a woman? What was she now? Not a child, surely.

‘Perhaps I’m invisible. Perhaps that’s why Meg doesn’t notice me and Kath forgot all about me. I don’t really exist.’

There was a sharpness to the air, filling her with a sudden rush of exhilaration. Energy flooded through her, as if she could reach out and touch the whole world spread out before her.

What did it matter if Meg and Tam didn’t love her? She was young and they were old. This was her time. If she did not know exactly who she was or where she belonged she could at least be free to do as she pleased.

Forgetting the last of Meg’s rules, Lissa pulled off her clothes and sank beneath the icy surface. She couldn’t risk more than a minute in the water but it felt good.
 

Afterwards she lay on the bank to dry herself, and fell asleep.

Lissa woke to watch the morning mists lift like a bride’s veil, revealing the purple mountain tops, making her give an involuntary gasp of pleasure. How beautiful they were. How magnificent. Again she swam in the tarn, unable to resist the sparkling water, and this time she splashed and even laughed, a natural youthful optimism starting to grow inside her. When she had done, she put on her clothes and set off for home.

Meg would be cross with her for staying away all night and make her feel worse than ever. Lissa tried to work out how best to explain. She supposed it had been wrong to break Meg’s rules, but what would she care now that she had the baby to think of? Nor did it help her case that Goldie had disappeared. Which was a worry. Lissa could only hope the pony had trotted home.

Oh, but how she longed for some of Meg’s loving comfort.

Lissa still hadn’t decided how to explain staying out all night when she pushed open the heavy door and walked into a kitchen alive with activity.

‘Where have you been?’ These sharp words came from Sally Ann, who was dashing about in a frenetic sort of way quite unlike her usual placid self. ‘Meg has been worried sick. Been out all night looking for you. We all have.’

Grabbing a towel she ran off into the living room. Lissa followed, frowning as she struggled to find an answer. She never did find one.

There was Tam who should have been out on the fells at this time of the day. Nick and Daniel in muddy boots not usually allowed in the kitchen, standing about looking helpless and goggle-eyed. And a strange man she didn’t even recognise. In the midst of all of this pandemonium, Meg, quietly sobbing as her life blood spread out on the rush matting, rather as Lissa’s had once done at Larkrigg. Only this was worse, far worse. This meant there was to be no baby and Lissa knew that was her fault too.

When Meg came back from hospital she was not the same. A light seemed to have been switched off behind her face and Lissa could not bear to look at her. Tam had warmed the bed with a stone hot water bottle and now she was installed in it, her hair scraped back like a child’s, grey eyes translucent and sad.

Lissa knew she had to speak. ‘Am I very wicked?’

‘No, of course not. What a thing to say.’
 

‘My mother was.’
 

Meg took a deep breath and plucked at the bedclothes, as if she was too tired to be bothered with all of this now but knew she must put Lissa’s mind at rest. ‘Kath is different from you. Besides, she wasn’t wicked. You mustn’t take any notice of your grandmother’s warped view of things.’
 

But Lissa felt compelled to purge her soul. ‘I didn’t want that baby. I was jealous of it.’
 

Meg’s eyes pricked with tears. ‘I know. There was no need to be. Anyway, that was my last chance. I’m too old to try again.’
 

A terrible silence as Lissa shouldered the guilt of this bleak reality. ‘Are you sad?’
 

‘A little, but I have you.’ Meg managed a smile. Her lips were trembling. Lissa wanted to ask if that would be enough but dare not, fearful of the answer. Meg turned her head away and did not notice her need. Was it possible to will a baby to die? She had never meant that to happen. Never. Lissa left the room, unable to witness Meg’s distress.

Jeffrey Ellis died and Lissa attended the funeral with Meg as was only right and proper. Larkrigg Hall seemed even more gloomy than before and her grandmother’s glare only marginally less frozen than the stag’s head in the hall.

Meg informed her that her grandfather had not forgotten her, as she had imagined. ‘When you were small he gave me a sum of money to invest for you. Not great, Lissa, but it will provide a nest egg for you when you come of age.’
 

Lissa wasn’t interested in nest eggs. She wanted life to happen. She wanted action, to lift the gloom that had grown to be a part of her. She hurried back to school where everyone was singing ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’ and tried not to think of her witch of a grandmother who lived alone high on the fell.

When she turned sixteen she left without taking her exams, despite all advice to the contrary.

There was pressure from Meg to stay at Broombank, surprisingly enough, from Nick too.

No longer a boy, he was broad and strong now, a grown man with a shock of red-blond hair. She could tell by the glances he gave Lissa that he did not see her as a nuisance any longer. Nor did she miss the looks exchanged between Meg and Sally Ann. Lissa knew that if she stayed at Broombank, in no time at all they would have her married off and settled at Ashlea with Nick, her life decided for her. That wouldn’t be right. Not for her, nor for Nick.

The trouble was, she didn’t know what she wanted and that made her feel unsettled and inadequate. In the end Lissa decided she could only find whatever it was outside the dale. When she told Meg she was to leave, her face seemed to crumple.

‘Leave? Why? Where would you go?’

‘To find a job.’
 

‘But you’re too young to leave home. We could work together, at least until you decide what you really want to do. Wouldn’t that be fun?’ Meg’s hands were red raw with the salt she’d been rubbing into some freshly killed pork and Lissa looked at them with distaste.

‘There’s no work for me here, Meg. You have your sheep, and Tam. I don’t belong.’
 

‘Of course you belong.’ Meg again felt the grip of loss around her heart. She reached for a cloth and wiped her hands upon it, then rested them on Lissa’s shoulders, drawing her close. ‘How lucky I am to have you,’ she said. ‘No woman could have had a better daughter.’
 

‘Nor I a better mother,’ Lissa said, hugging her, knowing it was true and wishing it could be enough. The two exchanged tentative smiles.

‘We’ve had our differences, our difficult times, but what mother and daughter doesn’t? Broombank will always be your home.’
 

‘Broombank is your home, not mine. Turner was your name before you married Tam, not mine. Who am I? Not Lissa Turner. Not Lissa Ellis. Who? Where do I belong? I have to build a new life and find my own place in it. Don’t you see?’
 

A small silence then Meg blinked and gave a tiny nod. ‘I suppose so.’ She wanted to talk about the baby, to say that she didn’t blame Lissa for what had happened, but couldn’t trust herself to say the words without crying. Perhaps a part of her still did blame Lissa for so thoughtlessly staying out that night, causing them so much worry and anguish. She could not offer the forgiveness Lissa so desperately needed so the breach between them was soothed, but not entirely healed.

It came as a great relief to Meg that Lissa decided not to go to Canada. She’d been almost sure that she would. But Lissa had been adamant.

‘I won’t go where I’m not wanted.’ There was such bitterness in her firm young voice it cut Meg to the heart.

‘Are you sure this is what you want?’

She had agreed to drive Lissa into central Lakeland to look for a summer job, with many provisos of course, and words of caution. Lissa had not spoken all the way through Staveley and Windermere, nor as they drove the long road that followed the lake as far as Waterhead at Ambleside.

Meg changed gear and eased her way out of the traffic and into Borrans Road, driving past the steamer pier, closed at this time of year, and on past the open field wherein lay the Roman Camp of Galava, her mind full of worries instead of the magnificent view.

As they turned left and headed out towards Clappersgate and Skelwith Bridge, the mountains of the Langdales rising ahead of them against an unusually blue sky, Lissa spoke.

‘Yes, this is what I want.’

Birdsong filled the air, and the scent of new grass, but neither remarked upon it. Spears of pink and green were about to unfurl on the oak and horse chestnut and for a moment Lissa’s heart lifted. Her life was not over. She could begin again. She was sixteen years old and could make of her life whatever she wished.

Chapter Three

Jan Colwith stood on a box behind the huge glass drapery counter and adopted the pleasant expression of polite enquiry necessary for a difficult customer.

‘I’m sorry, madam, these are the only kid gloves we have in at present. Would you wish me to order a particular size or colour for you?’
 

Jan could hear the hiccuping sounds of her brother’s deep voice trying to imitate Bill Haley issuing from the stockroom. The woman raised finely arched brows and Jan smiled apologetically, vowing to kick him the moment this dreadful woman had gone.

‘I see little point,’ the customer said tartly. ‘I shall call again when you have more time to attend to me, or perhaps I should wait until I go into Kendal. I am sure they will have a much better selection there. Good day to you.’
 

‘Good day, madam, and thank you for calling.’
 

Derek Colwith erupted through the curtain behind her, snorting with laughter. ‘How can you be so polite to that dragon?’
 

‘The hideous noise you were making didn’t help one bit.’ Jan pushed back her straight brown hair, hooking it behind her ears with agitated fingers, brown eyes narrowing short-sightedly at her brother.’ Are you quite mad, Derry? You shouldn’t even be here Miss Stevens will have my scalp if she spots you.’ She glanced nervously about the shop, expecting her employer to emerge from among the dusty mannequins which stood, arms raised in silent appeal, in the wide window.