The River Within

by Karen Powell

  Marina—a grandiose name, Venetia had thought, for such a nondescript little thing, but she seemed useful in her way. It was good for Angus to have someone with whom he could share his worries about the finances. Someone who, it turned out, could make him laugh again.

  CHAPTER 18

  Danny, 1954–1955

  My handsome boy.’ His mam said, pushing a packet containing his lunch into his hands. ‘Just like your Dad, you look. Don’t go getting in any trouble now.’

  Well there would be trouble if Mary Stockton didn’t keep popping up everywhere he went, when she was supposed to be engaged to Jackie. Hattie Merriot from up at the Hall was just as bad, always pestering about what he was doing at the weekend, how she loved going to the pictures on her day off. He wasn’t sure he liked being thought handsome all of a sudden, not if it meant girls who’d once been friends, like Bridie who was working in her Dad’s hardware shop, went all stiff and red in the face when he stopped to talk. There was no use being handsome if Lennie wasn’t around to notice. Now that school was finished she was only likely to come when the shops were open, while he was stuck at the sawmill, right at the other end of the village. Once he’d felt sure the village was too small for the two of them. Now the distance between here and there seemed vast and he didn’t feel certain about anything anymore.

  Autumn quickened the air and it made him brave. As casually as possible, he enquired of Hattie Merriot about Lennie, came to hear about the scarlet fever. She wasn’t in any danger, only taking longer to recover than people expected. Danny searched his mind for some excuse to venture up to Gatekeeper’s Cottage, came up with nothing. Peter Fairweather wouldn’t welcome some village lad asking about his daughter, and Danny hadn’t spoken to Thomas in years, not properly. The only feeling he’d registered, seeing him step off a train as he arrived home from university, was that someone that lucky in life oughtn’t to look so angry all the time. Besides, it was Alexander he’d liked best when all of them were small. Thomas was too unpredictable to be fun, you never knew whether he’d be storming off over something.

  He had to wait until Christmas to see her again when the staff party gave him an excuse to go up to the Hall. Lennie stood behind a trestle table, helping Lady Richmond to serve mulled cider and mince pies to the estate workers. All evening he waited, trying to find the courage to approach her, but when he finally made his way across that great, glittering salon, she’d disappeared. He drank until he could barely stand—Sir Angus being on ale duty and in typical generous mood—and then staggered home along the river path, barely noticing the cold. New Year came and went. After a fine start to the year, February came in raw and wet, day after day of weeping skies pressed down on Danny like a damp sod. His hands grew damp even inside his winter gloves as he walked home from the sawmill, rainwater seeping through the lace holes of his boots. By early spring it was no longer enough to read his book of Tennyson in the lamplight of the cottage. He needed to see Lennie.

  She saved him a journey. The sawmill was just a hundred yards or so from where the last of the cottages petered out, but the shadow of the woods made the whole idea of a village seem insubstantial, a temporary aberration on the landscape. That morning the foreman was standing over Danny, making sure that he was planing his plank of wood correctly. Lady Richmond had commissioned a dresser for her sitting room, so it was important to take special care. Danny was in two minds about the task: he liked the way his hands moved more assuredly these days, his palms thickened in places, but he could hear the wind outside, stirring up the trees and it seemed a shame then, this reducing of nature to smooth, uniform portions. As if you could ever know the woods like that. He paused for a moment; saw Lennie standing right in front of him, in a slice of sunshine that fell across the gate of the sawmill. Forgetting the foreman, the dresser, he half-raised a hand in greeting and then let it hang in the air in case she hadn’t recognised him, in his work-clothes and his skin furred with wood dust. But she smiled right at him, a beautiful serious smile that made his heart leap in his chest. Lennie stayed only a moment. He watched her disappear into the trees and carried on planing just as the foreman had instructed. Seeing and hearing nothing.

  Why had she come? The track that led to the sawmill ended at a narrow bank at the edge of the woods. There was nothing that might have drawn Lennie along that dead-end road. She must have sought him out, gone out of her way to do it!

  He slept fitfully that night and awoke in a state of anxiety, wanting to be out of the cottage as soon as possible in case she should return. He waited but she did not reappear. As the evenings grew lighter, he took to walking the river path in the direction of the Hall. He would liked to have gone home first, wash the smell of wood and sweat off his skin; his mam already thought it odd, him needing to go walking after work instead of coming straight home for his tea.

  The weather took a turn, growing unseasonably hot. On one particular day, when he’d walked twice up and down the river path, almost to the front of Gatekeeper’s Cottage and back, Danny stopped at the pool that lay safely downstream from the Stride. He stripped off his clothes and plunged into the water. It was cool and deep. Danny felt the heat and dirt of the day roll off his skin as he turned onto his back and allowed himself to drift, the faint currents that lay beneath the green surface taking him where they would. Back on the river bank, he shook the dust from his clothes and there was a strange feeling then, as if someone was watching him. He checked all around; no-one was there; no sound of feet in the undergrowth. It made him suddenly conscious of himself—the muscles in his thighs and arms and the new breadth of his chest from carrying planks at the mill. He hurried into his clothes and went home.

  Just once he was lucky, on a day in early summer. He almost missed her because she was crouched down by the edge of the water, near the Stride. It took him a second to realise what she was doing: cutting roses from the scrubby patch that grew there, laying them down one by one in a dark pile at her feet. He’d been desperate for such a chance encounter but now a part of him wanted to shrink back, return home along the track through the wood, so that she might never know. He hesitated and the Stride quietened for a moment. Lennie turned.

  ‘You should be careful,’ he said, as she came towards him, onto the footpath. ’That close to the water.’ He’d meant to show concern but the way he put it was all wrong, more like telling her off.

  ‘I wanted these though.’ She’d lost weight since her illness. How strange her beauty was, like something from another world.

  ‘They’re not really black,’ he said, staring down at the roses she carried. They were darkest purple with petals like crushed velvet. ’People don’t look properly.’

  ‘No.’ She shook that thought away. ‘Wild things shouldn’t be kept inside.’ She smiled. ‘But the flowers in our garden have no scent.’

  ‘You don’t believe what everyone says about them? Kids, I mean,’ he added, trying to distance himself from the kind of ignorant superstition that someone who worked in a sawmill might harbour.

  Lennie laughed. ‘How could something so beautiful do any harm?’

  He stared at her thinking: you do me such harm that I cannot go on with it. Wanting to speak so badly that the blood beat painfully inside his skull. All his life, the truth had come easily to Danny, straight out of his mouth without thinking, and now it stuck in his throat like something unnatural. Lennie bent down, gathered the rest of the blooms to her breast; was gone before he had time to think of a single thing to say in response. He arrived home, his feelings still wild and torn up by his meeting with her, to find that time had run out of patience with him. His mam was in tears and beside her on the kitchen table was his call-up letter.

  CHAPTER 19

  Venetia, 1948

  Fishnet stockings. That had been the beginning. No, before then. But that was the moment when Venetia had acknowledged that something was wrong. Like a vague itching that had, at last, deman
ded her attention.

  Marina had lost weight. As she turned at the top of the staircase, on her way to Angus’s office, Venetia saw her in profile. For once she was wearing a properly fitted suit. The puppy-fat around her midriff had slipped away at some point during the weeks she’d been coming and going from the Hall, revealing a rectangular outline; heavy breasts; sloping shoulders; a body designed for harsh eastern European winters rather than the neatness of rural England. She was by no means pretty—there was too much of the masculine about her—but Venetia, standing on the landing beneath her, was suddenly alert to something that had been missing before, a self-awareness, some element of display. One of the stockings had a rip in it. Marina must have snagged it on the train journey from London that morning. Forever afterwards Venetia would wish that she had drawn attention to it, called up the stairs and gained some kind of victory over the girl.

  Look how you are failing to disguise yourself! I see what you are. I am watching you.

  ‘I do think Marina should join us sometimes,’ she said to Angus over dinner that evening. ‘It’s feels rather odd, her eating alone every night.’

  ‘She’s working,’ said Angus. ‘There’s a lot to do.’

  He spoke little during the rest of the meal, left as soon as they were finished, needing to return to his office.

  Alone at the dinner table, Venetia wondered, not for the first time, why everything must take so long. She understood enough to know that things were bad—with Sir Laurie gone, there were death duties to think about, on top of crippling new taxes. The roof on the garden wing was in urgent need of replacing too, and all of these things needed thinking about for a long time, with many hours at the books and walks around the estate to be had. There were stories in the paper every other week of country homes that could no longer support themselves, that were being sold off as hotels or even demolished. Yet it seemed to her that it ought to be simpler by now: either it was possible to carry on as they were, or it was not.

  There was part of her too that could not bring herself to worry about a future that might never happen. It was far worse for Angus, of course, she understood that. Unbeautiful as it was, Richmond Hall was his home; the history of his family mapped out in the portraits and photographs in the hallway. Venetia had learned proprietorship too, yet there were moments when she wondered if all the landscaping, the duck-egg blue paint and fresh plasterwork in the restored salon, were only pretty icing over the past. She was not one for dwelling on unpleasantness though; neither had she ever questioned that she belonged here, beside Angus.

  The next day, coming in from the stables, she saw Marina sitting alone at breakfast. The younger woman was wearing her black suit, this time with plain stockings and low heels. The bright morning air had rid Venetia of yesterday’s unease. Birds were singing in the trees; the world brimming over with optimism.

  ‘You must take one of the horses out sometime,’ she said, stopping in the doorway of the breakfast room. ‘While the weather’s so fine. Just talk to the stable lads.’ The sunlight through the window was citrus-sharp, cutting across the room in crisp lines. Despite her bountiful mood, Venetia stopped short—just—of offering her own horse.

  ‘I don’t ride.’ said Marina, looking up from her coffee. ‘Never had the opportunity, I’m afraid.’ She smiled but her mouth remained tight around the edges, as if the rest of her face was resisting. Venetia felt herself flushing, angry at her own mistake. Angus had already told her that Marina had grown up in some part of Kent which was not like the garden of England but a place of flint and nettles and rusting barbed wire, of chalk pits blown out by bombs during the war. ‘Or the time,’ added Marina. The disdain was barely noticeable, but it was enough to turn Venetia’s mortification to something colder.

  ‘No. I suppose not.’ She went upstairs to change.

  Amphibious eyes, the girl had. A pretty shade of green but nothing beneath the surface. Eyes made for watching, not for giving away. Still, Venetia doubted her own instincts.

  ‘You must miss London?’ she asked her later that day. ‘Your fiancé?’

  When this and further attempts were steadily and subtly rebuffed, she gave up on it, assuming some inaptitude for womanly intimacy on one or both of their parts. Venetia had grown up in a man’s world, with mostly her brothers for company on the farm. The few friendships she’d had in her youth were with girls from the neighbourhood who were too bound up with the practical demands of farming life to find time for the finely-gauged destructiveness, the obliquity, of teenage girls, while acquaintances since her marriage had remained just that.

  If this made her naive about Marina, it became obvious only in retrospect, when everything was revealed in simplified form, as if time had stylised the edges of things. For now, Venetia was too busy with other concerns to dwell on her suspicions: Alexander needed urgent help with his lines for the school play, having not bothered to learn them until the week before term started; her mind was greatly taken up with plans for the garden too, most which had been given over to vegetable plots during the war. Food was still in short supply, but Venetia felt no guilt in claiming back one or two beds for herself. The world might be chaotic and ugly sometimes, but you could not just give up on it.

  CHAPTER 20

  Lennie, August 1955

  I can’t stay long,’ she told him.

  ‘Lie down for a minute,’ said Alexander. ‘The grass is quite dry.’

  A crow bounced over a nearby grave and Lennie hesitated.

  ‘Won’t they mind?’

  Alexander laughed. ‘They’re dead, Helena. And father won’t object to us keeping him company. I don’t know why I didn’t come before.’

  Lennie dropped down to her knees beside him. The graveyard was a peaceful spot on a day like this: sun-warmed headstones, butterflies rising and falling in a pollen daze. A lovely breeze shook the meadowsweet.

  ‘Did you get into trouble with your father?’ Alexander said, stretching lazily. ‘Disobeying orders.’

  ‘He was upset.’ She chose her words carefully. ’He hadn’t really understood about . . . us.’

  ‘I hope you reassured him that my intentions are honourable.’ Alexander grinned. He pulled up a long piece of grass and bit down on it. ‘Well, fairly so. Anyway, your father likes to fret. Normally about Tom, so this must make a pleasant change.’

  Picturing her father’s face, white and troubled, she could not laugh with Alexander.

  Alexander’s expression switched to sullenness. ‘Tom’s become horribly earnest this last year, you know. Palled up with a bunch of politicos. They spend all their time holed up in some dank little printing press off King’s Parade. Always banging on about Oliver Cromwell or suchlike. He’s no fun at all.’

  ‘Tom always takes things seriously. It’s just his nature.’

  Yet her brother had laughed off the news of her behaviour at the party, said it was about time she showed some spirit. Lennie sensed that it was the disruptive element of her behaviour—the part that had least to do with her normal self—that had won his approval.

  ‘I feel so much better today.’ Alexander said. They lay side by side, looking up into a sky whose depth of blue foretold autumn. ‘The whole of last term I wanted to be somewhere else. I didn’t know where.’

  ‘Even when I came?’

  ‘Not then. Greece seemed like a good idea but as soon as I got to Athens that wasn’t right either. I kept getting on ferries, needing to be in the next place, and on and on like that. After a while everything started to look the same—same dust, same villages, even the faces started to look familiar. I grew quite sick of it.’

  ‘Home is better,’ she said. It was the closest she had come to admonishing him for his absence.

  ‘I thought so at first.’ His fingers drumming on his ribcage. ‘Then I couldn’t see the point of that either. Or anything else, come to that. Masters’ dying has cheered
me up though.’ Lennie started. Danny’s grave lay on the other side of the yard, just beyond the old mulberry tree; she had been sure to avoid looking. ‘I’m joking,’ said Alexander. ‘But it has woken me up in a funny sort of way. I’d almost forgotten how to feel.’ She felt for his hand, lying in the soft grass. ‘I am trying to be a better man.’ As if she had suggested otherwise. ‘I suppose I owe that to father now that he’s gone. He won medals in all sorts of battles, you know. I always encouraged him not to talk about it, partly because I loathe nostalgia. A bit peculiar for a classicist, I must admit.’ He mimed dismay.

  Lennie remembered Sir Angus and his kindness towards her and Thomas. His laughter that was large, seemed to include the world, making everyone feel easy in their own skins. It was difficult to believe he lay close by, just feet beneath the soil, his generosity all stopped up.

  ‘Grandpa was at the Somme,’ Alexander said, ‘so there’s all that to live up to as well. ‘Your father loves the war stuff, of course. All those bloodstains on the floor of the garden wing—his favourite stop on the tour. I always thought it great fun having all the soldiers here when we were small; I suppose you don’t really understand suffering at that age. Imagine dying for your beliefs and nurses having to mop you up. It’s so much easier to be a hero in wartime, I reckon.’

  ‘Your uncle won a medal too, didn’t he? Father said he was supposed to stay to keep the farm running but found some way round it.’

  ‘God knows.’ Alexander propped himself up above her. ‘Anyway, who cares about him?’

  His kisses always came out of nowhere, just when she had stopped waiting for them. His hair was hot and blond against her skin; hand on the curve of her hip. She thought of all the bones that lay beneath them, lodged in the dark soil. He moved his hand down to her thigh; long fingers beneath the hem of her dress, reaching. Night scent of the woods. Leaf mould and the rich, giving earth. But it was daylight.