The River Within

by Karen Powell

  The sudden change of both tone and subject shocked her. Alexander was like some exemplar of the power of confession, completely purged of guilt by the act.

  ‘Please don’t speak to anybody else,’ she said. ‘Promise me that.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Alexander walked, waving away the idea. ‘Just don’t expect me to come to some hole-in-the-corner wedding. He swung round abruptly. ’I have such terrible dreams, mother.’

  ‘I can’t think about it anymore today, Alexander. It’s too much. We’ll talk again tomorrow.’

  ’Oh, not just about Danny, though that’s been bad. Since father died. You know, once I dreamed he came back to life again. I was so happy until I realised that he was still ill, that he’d have to go through the dying all over again, that we didn’t know when it would begin or end or how awful it might be. That was almost more terrible than him being dead.’

  Venetia put a hand on his forearm in comfort, though the truth was that Alexander had arrived too late and then kept himself too separate to really understand the dying: the beginning and the middle, the end that would not end. ‘It made me think of how useless I felt when he was suffering so much,’ he said. ‘I should have done more for him and I didn’t. I stayed in my room, left it to everyone else. Remember when Papa tried teaching me to sail up near the farm in Scotland? I dreamt about that too. He wanted to tell me something in the dream but I couldn’t hear because of the wind and the water, then something changed and I could hear him perfectly.’ Alexander turned to her. ‘All along he was trying to let me know something terrible about you.’ Alexander gave a wild little laugh, as if this second confession had freed still more in him. ‘I shouldn’t have told you, I suppose.’

  CHAPTER 58

  Lennie, September 1955

  The forest floor damp, frangible, curled in on itself. Layer upon layer of secrets. Sycamore branches limey in the slanting sunlight. A silver birch was ghostly and elegant among the great oaks. Here she could breathe at last, cool green air filling her lungs. She had flung back the lid of the cottage and run all the way.

  Feet light but powerful, like a wary cat. Something was swelling inside of her, she could feel it, a deep muscle ache. Dropping to her haunches now; a hot spatter of urine among the leaves. Damp leaves turning darker, the hiss from the depths of her. Her feet looked so pale, the pink and white skin tender, like something raw, raised in darkness. Wetness clung to her skin. They would put her back in that box of blackness, push down the lid. She could still hear the terrible sobbing. Someone should shut that child up.

  She hugged the fox stole to her, so beautiful, the fur dense and lustrous beneath her fingers. Forgot to be scared. Goddess of the trees someone had called her. That’s what dryad means. Who and why? Her hair was too pale. Milky flesh of trees, axe-scarred, sap like tears, tears like sap. They would find her, put her back. Take handfuls, pale strands rubbing the bark of this oak. Giant leg rooted in the forest. Rough and tangled as the undergrowth now. A great strength flooding into her limbs which were not pink and plastic but pliable like branches.

  Ahead. There the treetops thickened, like a scab along a thin wound. She heard it, filling the air with its coolness, damp tendrils touching her face. Like a cat, she moved all stealthy and camouflaged, and then she was close by. The roar of it, how it sung in her ears and the trees full of it too, canopies exploding above her head. You could smell the roses from here. Look. Danny Masters was a good boy though he had fallen to pieces in the water. I don’t want to hurt you, Lennie. I love you. She could not be snapped in two just like that. Murderously strong, she was, her bloodbeat as powerful as the water. How it forced its nose through rock like a blind snake. Close at hand she felt it, just over that little rise in the land. Smell of wet, the scent of dark petals. On her hands and knees now, ground rearing up before her, goose-shit green. Scrambling through the undergrowth to the call of the river.

  CHAPTER 59

  Venetia, Spring 1955

  If there was no teddy bear on the plastic cup it might just have been possible. She would rather withhold water than push the spout of that cartoonish infant’s cup into her husband’s mouth, the only sensuous feature of his aquiline face.

  She watched as Angus moaned to himself in whatever twilight world he inhabited, dry lips moving as if in supplication. He reached for the enamel cup on the bedside table. His hand fluttered, shook. He muttered in what seemed to be some nascent form of language, some proto-speech, then gave a little cry, dropped his hand back onto the sheets. Those hands that once reined in the strongest of horses lay useless and almost transparent in the late afternoon light. Still his lungs dragged in air, chest heaving like some awful machine, the air rasping in his throat.

  Venetia stood. She took the cushion from her chair and stepped towards the bed. How long would it take to push him beneath the surface? His body might fight on, even now that the flesh hung loose on his limbs. What if she wasn’t strong enough to overcome him? She hardly dared to think, knew only that she must act before terror undid her. She lifted the cushion, stared down at Angus’s face in order to register any change in awareness. The cushion was sea-blue. It felt heavy in her hands, dense enough. She could feel the prick of a feather against one palm. What was she was waiting for? A miracle that would make all that had gone before a mistake, a terrible misdiagnosis? Forgiveness? Or just an imprint of his still-living face on her memory?

  Angus’s eyelids were like parchment and the whole room seemed to breathe with him, roaring in her ears, in, out, in, out. She lowered the cushion.

  She threw it aside. She could not do it! She had been so sure, convinced she was strong enough. She had failed him as always. There would not be another chance, that was a certainty. Never again would she find the courage. She had failed him and she did not know how she could go on with that knowledge.

  ‘Venetia.’

  A voice in the doorway.

  Her eyes were wild, she could feel it. She could smell her fear, the failed blood-lust upon herself.

  ‘I can’t.’

  They gazed at one another, she and James, her husband’s brother, a man who knew how to put an animal out of its misery, who had loved her all these years. Venetia bent down, plucked the sharp feather from the sea-blue fabric, offered the cushion to him.

  They would never speak of it; how Angus’s eyes opened just before the cushion descended for the second time, a last pulse of consciousness as he lay propped up on his pillows like some terrible, broken mannequin. How he gazed at his brother, standing over him, then directly at Venetia with the clear eyes of youth.

  Three figures caught for a moment in the frame of time.

  What did he feel in that moment? If he had been able to speak, what would he have said? Venetia was sure of only one thing: Angus understood exactly what was about to happen to him. And, though she would like to think she saw gratitude, acceptance, there was no evidence of either. She would not pretend otherwise to herself. There was no comfort to be had in lies.

  Finding himself observed, James panicked, thrust down the cushion with a desperate strength. Angus’s legs began to kick like a panicking swimmer, his back arching from the bed, body still fighting for any kind of life. She might have cried out, though she could not be sure that the strangled sound issued from her own mouth and not his.

  James came to her later. It seemed like hours. On the darkened landing, she lay huddled on her knees, dared at last to take her hands from her ears. He stroked her hair in the darkness. Silence. Somehow she stood, walked towards the guest bedroom. In the doorway she turned to James, unbuttoned her dress.

  He hesitated, confused, but it was better this way, with no time to think. A deal had been struck and she would not renege. He moved above her in the darkness. Her back arched involuntarily. It felt as if they were the only two people left alive in this world.

  CHAPTER 60

  Venetia, September 1955
r />   No one could work out how Lennie had escaped the cottage unnoticed. All anyone knew was that she was seen entering the river with the Turkey rug trailing behind her. The children who saw her were from the village, knew better than to go in after her. They tried to rescue her by way of sticks and branches, following her progress a short distance downstream, almost to the point where the river lost its force quite suddenly, opening out into the glassy pool where Danny Masters had been found, a gentler place where dragonflies skimmed the surface, where the first autumn leaves drifted over the coppery shallows. Lennie did not seem to hear their cries or notice the sticks they held out for her. She reached up to the pendant branches of the willows as she passed beneath their shadows, made no attempt to grasp at them. The children could make no sense of it. Lennie was singing to herself as the water closed in, her hair floating on the surface for a moment like some pale water plant. No, said the smallest of the children, a girl of about five, she wasn’t singing, she was definitely crying.

  Such an exquisite corpse, poor Lennie, once they’d put her in her pretty cornflower dress and her bright hair had been dried and arranged. Sam Bracegirdle had pulled her to the bank just a few minutes after the children came running for him. There had been no time for the water to find its way beneath her lovely surface. Someone had placed a spray of stiff tea roses in her hands—Venetia would have liked to take it away, replace the bouquet with something less formal, some of the late-flowering scented damasks from the garden, even the roses from the river bank if they weren’t finished, but there was no point trying to make things better now.

  Alexander made a scene at the funeral, lurching towards the narrow coffin as it was lowered into the clayey ground as if to impede its progress, as if he wanted to attach himself to it. Part of Venetia felt desperate for him as he sank down, covered his face, the first handful of earth thudding onto the pale wood, yet why must he take centre stage when Lennie’s own father was sitting beside the grave in his wheelchair, his face locked into a permanent parody of horror, and Thomas stood frozen in grief, his face set.

  ‘Alexander . . . ’ she coaxed, because others were joining in the weeping now.

  ‘Stop it!’ Thomas seemed to wake up. He stared round at the mourners, eyes black and angry. ‘All of you. Is there no peace for her even now?’

  Alexander smashed his fist against the greedy earth, oblivious; Venetia gave up, focused her mind on practical matters. They must find a nurse to live in at the cottage with Fairweather, it was the least she could do. She looked across the mouth of the grave at Thomas, who was weeping uncontrollably now, his head in his hands. He could not know it, but in time he would find resilience within himself, the urge to continue. It was the only wisdom she had to impart. Hardly wisdom really. It was more that her ear had become attuned to some communal human instinct to persist.

  CHAPTER 61

  Venetia, September 1955

  Wakes have a particular rhythm, thought Venetia, as the mourners streamed into the salon. She had attended enough of them over the years to recognise the pattern. The funeral has been endured, a feeling of relief follows. At first everyone behaves as if the taking of food and drink is a painful, unwanted obligation, a vulgar concern for the body’s needs. There is no avoiding it though, this playing out of the newly updated division between the living and the dead. After a time, someone will smile, if only in the remembrance of some aspect or act of the departed; later people might laugh out loud for the same reason, and before long a celebratory mood sets in, albeit too intense, too heightened. All of it a distraction from a body lying alone in its cold grave for the first time.

  Lennie’s wake was different. The young people from the village came up to Richmond Hall as invited, but slunk away early, perfectly sober. The atmosphere in the salon remained hushed, never showing any sign of slipping towards merriment. Fairweather became distressed, was taken back to the cottage to rest by Nathan Lacey and his wife who offered to sit with him for a few hours, trying hard not to show the relief they felt to be gone. Thomas barely spoke to anyone and so Venetia, with some help from James, did what was necessary, moving between the small groups that had gathered in uncomfortable knots around the room to thank them for coming, to urge more wine or food on them.

  Alexander was alone, standing by the fireplace in what seemed to be deepest thought. He had a glass in his hand but did not appear to have eaten. Venetia put a few small items on a plate, took them to him.

  ‘I can’t eat,’ he said, registering her approach.

  ‘You must try.’ She set the plate down on the mantelpiece.

  ‘It doesn’t feel possible or right.’ He looked up at her. ‘I still can’t believe she’s dead, mother. I have no idea how to go on.’

  There were none of the usual layers of meaning beneath Alexander’s words, no archness. These were just statements of fact. Simplicity that was the opposite of childlike.

  ‘Just today,’ she said. ‘Don’t think about more than that.’

  ‘I saw what happened with father,’ said Alexander. ‘I’ve been wanting to tell you.’

  ‘What?’ Fear pitched in her stomach, cold and certain.

  ‘I was so scared of him dying in front of me if I was alone with him. I wondered if I’d know, whether you could tell without pulses and mirrors and all that. Then I saw him and I knew he was dead right away, even from the doorway.’

  ‘But you weren’t there . . . afterwards.’ When we came back.

  ‘I lost my nerve all over again. Couldn’t even keep him company, just waited in the chapel until I heard Dr. Harrison arrive. I often wondered what I would do if the pain grew too bad for him to bear. I’m hoping you tidied up . . . things before he came?’

  His voice remained flat, puzzlingly gentle. Venetia felt her throat constrict. He knew. Must have seen the cushion by Angus, guessed. Oh Angus, was all that she could think, because only he would know what to say about his own death, what to do. She clutched at the mantelpiece to steady herself against the true nature of his absence, permanent as stone, closed her eyes for a second and pushed her chin down into her chest. When she opened them Thomas was standing directly in front of her.

  ‘You knew,’ Thomas said.

  Thomas was very still and yet something was happening beneath his skin, as if a vibration was taking place in some visceral part of his body, then making its way to the surface.

  Venetia’s first instinct was to ask him to go away. She needed time to absorb Alexander’s words, his full meaning, could not be expected to fight on another front. The two of them had caught her with a pincer movement on this most dreadful of days, when she had invited mourners into her home. The word that came into her mind, quite bizarrely, was ungentlemanly.

  ‘Reverend Jones admitted everything about my mother. Dr. Harrison was part of it too, keeping the whole thing quiet. You all agreed it was for the best.’

  ‘Thomas, please understand . . . ’

  ‘How could you not warn us?’ His voice rose, twisted into anguish. People were turning to look. ‘I might have been able to save her.’

  Venetia remained silent. No good could come of telling Thomas that his terrible temper, his moods, had taken up so much space. That his father had by turns placated and fretted over him all these years and in doing so had turned his gaze from the quiet storm in the very same room. ‘If I’d known I could have protected her!’ said Thomas. She took a step back towards the fireplace as he thrust his face towards hers. ‘Even if the rest of you didn’t care enough to bother—’ spittle flew from his lips, landing on her face. Venetia tried not to flinch, then suddenly Alexander was there, filling the small space between the two of them.

  ‘Stop it, Tom!’

  ‘Did you know about any of it?’ Thomas said. ‘After all, you were supposed to be in love with her, so perhaps they allowed you in on our shameful little family secret.’

  ‘Of course I
didn’t! Not till it was too late.’

  Alexander had Thomas by the arm. For a moment Venetia thought their mutual agonies were about to spill over, that they might strike one another and for no reason except to make their suffering physical, finite, fight it out, right here in the salon. Tom stared at Alexander, seeking veracity in his eyes, his expression.

  ‘Then why aren’t you as fucking angry as me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Alexander shook his head. ‘I am.’ They are not warriors at heart, Venetia thought. ‘I do enough damage of my own,’ Alexander went on. His face contorted as if he might cry.

  ‘But all the lies . . . ’ said Thomas.

  He was obdurate, yet the rage had gone out of him. Venetia could sense it.

  ‘All families have secrets,’ Alexander said, and there was a steadiness in his voice that she’d not heard before. ‘Maybe the truth was too difficult; people were just trying to protect you.’ His eyes moved to his mother, holding her gaze for a long moment. ‘How else are we supposed to go on?’

  James came to find her when everyone had left. She was in the garden, cutting stems of fragrant phlox for her sitting room, when she glanced up to find him watching her. His expression was tentative, tinged with melancholy, just as it had been the night they met. Even then he seemed to apprehend that life would not be as he willed it or dreamed it to be.

  ‘I came to say that I don’t think we should carry on as we are,’ he said.

  Venetia put down her secateurs but did not rise from the flower bed where she was crouched.