The Water Children

by Anne Berry

  ‘Owen, come and join us. Would you like a beer?’ she cries. Without waiting for a reply, she starts burrowing in the fridge. A second later and the cap comes off with a sizz. Bottle in each hand, she goes to the settee, then jerks her chin up at Enrico. Lazily, he lifts his feet from the seat and swings into an upright position. He is wearing worn grey jeans, Jesus sandals, no shirt, his belt unbuckled. The top metal stud of his jeans is undone. His belly is flat, toned. Over it, wisps of dark hair glisten with sweat.

  ‘Come and sit with us,’ Naomi says, perching next to him.

  ‘Actually, I thought I’d take a bath, a cold bath.’

  ‘Do you want company?’ Naomi flirts tipsily. ‘Another time,’ Owen parries, smiling at her easy coquetry. He is thinking that if Sean finds out about Enrico being here it will cause more aggravation.

  ‘Sit down. Have your beer first,’ Enrico insists. ‘We have something to talk over with you.’

  Owen lowers himself onto the settee arm, accepts the beer and sips it gratefully. The icy bite of it on his parched throat is sheer heaven. Naomi seems much brighter, and yet he senses that her shift of mood is ethereal. The record has moved on. The track ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’ is playing. ‘Enrico has had an idea,’ she opens. ‘He thinks we should take a holiday.’

  ‘We?’ Owen queries. Who does she mean? Her and Enrico? Or all three of them? Perhaps, he hazards, the surreal impinging on his thoughts after the tension of the day, the invitation includes Sean, Catherine, and even baby Bria.

  ‘You and me,’ she qualifies.

  Enrico lounges back, beer in one hand, the other curling about Naomi’s shoulder. He plucks at the shoulder strap of her bikini top. ‘She’s not been well. She told me. A virus. She needs to recuperate. I can’t get the time off at the moment, but you two could go.’

  ‘It’s the peak of the tourist season,’ Owen protests. ‘We can’t just drop everything and leave Sean in the lurch.’

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ Naomi pouts. ‘It will do him good to put in some solid hours at the market.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘You never know, it might keep him out of mischief.’

  Enrico takes a couple of gulps of his drink and wags his head. His orange rat’s tail jiggles impudently. ‘I’ll see he’s okay. If necessary, I have some cousins over here this summer. They can lend a hand.’ He puts his empty bottle on the floor and thumps his chest with a closed fist, suppressing a belch.

  ‘You’d like a holiday, wouldn’t you, Owen?’ Naomi pleads, her eyes imploring.

  It is unlikely, Owen broods, that Sean will want his rival’s support, so he stalls. ‘Well, yes, of course. But what about the cost? I’ve a little saved, but not much, not enough for an expensive holiday.’

  He sees her and Enrico exchange a conspiratorial look. ‘That’s just it, Owen. It won’t cost you anything, except petrol. Naomi says that you mentioned you had a car?’

  Visualizing his Triumph Spitfire, under wraps in the garage at home, Owen nods. Naomi blows into the neck of her beer and it gives a ghostly whistle. ‘Enrico says we can go to his village in Tuscany, Vagli Sotto. We can stay in the cottage his father and his brother have renovated, for free. We’ll see the lake where the other village was drowned,’ she entices. Owen flinches and drains his beer.

  ‘I’ve spoken to my father. The cottage is not let for the next few weeks. He is happy for you to go.’ Enrico gets up and pads off to fetch another bottle.

  ‘I want to see it so much. I’ve pictured it in my head often.’ She flicks a finger playfully on Owen’s bare arm.

  ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘Why not? What’s stopping us?’ Her eyes shine with impetuosity, while her bitten nails pinch his arm. ‘It’ll be so much fun.’

  He lowers his voice, humiliated. ‘Naomi, I’m . . . I’m nervous around water.’

  She leans closer to him. ‘I’ll be with you,’ she flutes. He scratches his head, rakes back his hair. ‘Only one week. That’s all. We can go to Florence. I really need this, Owen.’

  Enrico is crouched over her record collection, selecting the next album to play. ‘Moondance, Van Morrison?’ he murmurs.

  ‘Do you really think it would make a difference?’ Owen’s head is close to hers now. ‘Would it help you to . . . to recover?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says decisively.

  He conjures cypress trees, tall and swarthy, tickling a sky streaked with violet. He sees fields felted with scarlet corn poppies, and sucks in air clotted with spiky, black and cream, swallow-tailed butterflies. He sees villas stained the colour of the ochre earth, hugged by lemon trees. The soporific scents of rosemary and wild thyme assail him, along with the lulling drone of drowsy bumblebees. He does not see the sunlight diluted in the gloom of Lake Vagli, dappling the moss-cloaked walls of the drowned village.

  ‘All right. I’ll speak to Sean, square it with him.’

  She is on her feet, stooping, sliding her hands behind his neck. The palms and fingers are wet and cold from the beer bottle. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Crisis? What Crisis? Supertramp?’ Enrico says over his shoulder.

  ‘If you like,’ she agrees, her hypnotic lapidary eyes fixed on Owen’s.

  ‘Is it all settled then?’ Enrico wants to know, lifting the record out of its sleeve and fanning himself with it.

  ‘Yes,’ replies Naomi. And her lips as they brush Owen’s cheek are cool and determined.

  Chapter 16

  Owen’s parents give him and Naomi a cautious greeting when they arrive. More than once he looks at his mother to find her eyeing this woman her son has in tow, with an expression not far removed from suspicion. He is visited by a sudden uncomfortable awareness of how short her white skirt is, how much cleavage her low-cut top reveals, the diaphanous fabric virtually see-through. For the most part his mother keeps a low profile, saying little. But if he is not mistaken, she listens astutely to Naomi’s conversation, as if searching for a key to her character in it. His father seems perturbed by the sudden news of their holiday plans. He corners him in the hall, and asks how the box office will cope without him.

  ‘Isn’t this their busiest season? Tourists flooding the capital, all wanting to catch a show in the West End.’

  It takes a second for Owen to recall his elaborate deception, then he is quick with his explanation. ‘Well, actually, Father, this heat wave is leading to a drop in takings. It’s too hot to sit in a theatre. The city’s dead. So really, before this weather breaks it’s the ideal time to go.’

  His father nods, accepting this reasoning without qualms. ‘Oh, the weather! It’s causing havoc everywhere, it seems. What I wouldn’t give for a little drop of rain.’

  ‘You and me, both,’ Owen empathizes.

  After this there is no more talk of theatre. Instead, his father embarks on an animated monologue on the trials of gardening in drought conditions. In the midst of the unusual flurry of activity, Sarah’s room alone remains conspicuously silent, as if it has taken umbrage at all the irreverent chatter, and is sulking. A bed is made up for Naomi on the battered chintz settee.

  ‘I hope you’ll be comfortable here,’ his father tells her anxiously. And she smiles and assures him that she will. Dinner over, he leads her out into the garden, to examine the pathetic casualties of the freak desert conditions. Owen and his mother are momentarily by themselves in the kitchen. She sits at the small Formica table stirring a cup of tea. Having dried up the dinner things, he finishes off putting them away.

  ‘How have you been, Mother?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Up and down.’

  ‘Not back at work yet?’

  ‘Summer holidays.’

  An intake of breath, then ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll go back at the start of the winter term.’

  ‘Probably do you good to have a break.’

  ‘Owen?’

  He turns round at her lift of tone. His mother is sitting staring directly at him, unusual in itself. ‘Yes?’

  ‘So Naomi, she’
s a lodger in the flat you’re living in?’

  ‘Mm . . . yes. Where do I put this?’ It is a new salad bowl and he is unsure where it lives.

  ‘In the middle cupboard, bottom shelf.’ As he is fitting it in she speaks again. ‘How well do you know her?’

  ‘Only since going to London.’ He wonders if his mother, like the doctor, thinks that they are having a relationship and adds hurriedly, ‘She has a boyfriend.’ He joins her, pulling out the chair next to hers.

  ‘But you’re going on holiday together.’ It is a statement of fact.

  He looks into his mother’s brown eyes, taken aback by this interrogation. ‘He couldn’t get the time off work. The boyfriend. Pity, actually. So she just wanted a bit of company, that’s all.’ He pauses. ‘She hasn’t been very well.’

  ‘Oh? What’s the matter?’ She takes a sip of tea and waits, head to one side.

  ‘Ah, some . . . some nasty tummy bug. She’s over the worst of it now.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, it dragged on and she’s a bit low.’ He strokes a hand over his cheek, clears his throat. ‘The trip will do her good.’

  ‘Italy. The Tuscan mountains. Sounds very nice.’ She is on her feet.

  ‘Hopefully. We’re staying in her friend’s house, an old stone cottage. You and Father should have a holiday.’ He says this without thinking, then bites his thumb. She rubs the back of her neck and drops her gaze. He recalls the holiday in Devon, the sun, sea and sand, and the funeral that followed it.

  ‘You know, I really am awfully sorry. Would you mind very much if I go and lie down? I’ve a bit of a headache. Half-an-hour. That should perk me up.’ Her hair hangs limply around her face, and her eyelids are heavy.

  ‘Of course not,’ he says, when he would give almost anything for her to stay.

  ‘I’m the most dreadful bore. Why don’t you go and join them in the garden?’

  ‘Shall I bring you up an aspirin?’

  ‘No thank you. I’ll be fine.’

  After she has gone he sits at the table in the sun-filled kitchen wondering what she feels for him now, his mother, if anything. And wondering, too, at the interest she showed in Naomi. He is not surprised when she doesn’t reappear. Later, after his father has also retired to bed, Naomi pesters Owen to show him the hidden interior of Sarah’s room. He stammers out excuses.

  ‘My . . . my mother prefers to keep . . . keep it private. Anyway, I’m sure the door is locked, and I don’t know where the key is. Besides, we might disturb my parents, who are very light sleepers.’

  But she persists, curious as Bluebeard’s wife. She must see the box bedroom, must open it up and rouse the little ghost, Sarah. So Owen relents, and lets this Fatima have her heart’s desire. He looks on uneasily, arms folded, leaning against the wall by the door, as she explores. He feels as if he has ushered a gawking seeker of cheap thrills into his dead sister’s tomb. He imagines Sarah’s somnolent ghost disturbed by the intrusion, her bleached spectre levitating from the pillow, and staring reproachfully at him with her stark, enamel-blue eyes. When, after investigating Sarah’s cupboard and remarking on the rows of socks bundled into fat white cocoons, and her pairs of polished shoes, she seems suddenly to lose interest, Owen is relieved. Downstairs once more, and she questions him about the day itself, the day Sarah drowned.

  ‘I told you what happened.’ He is unusually abrupt.

  ‘Not the details. Tell me again,’ she begs, undeterred. ‘You ought to talk about it, not keep it all bottled up inside you.’ But he will not be drawn. ‘Can you really not swim, Owen?’ she asks, changing tack. She sits on her makeshift bed, wings her legs up and hugs her knees. Owen shakes his head. ‘Not a single stroke?’ Her tone is one of disbelief.

  Owen feels as though an infected tooth is being probed. ‘No, not a single stroke,’ he rejoins stiffly. He is at the lounge door, his back to her, his eyes tracing a dribble of black gloss paint. Then, ‘Shall I turn the light off ?’

  ‘I find that hard to believe. So . . . if you fall into a swimming pool, or off a boat into the sea, or . . . or into a lake, you . . . you would sink like a stone?’

  The nerves in Owen’s shoulder muscles give an involuntary spasm. ‘I would drown.’ His voice is barely perceptible. ‘Like my sister did. Goodnight, Naomi.’ He is sure that the nightmares will come the moment he shuts his eyes. But the Water Child is ready for them and sees him safe asleep. The next day they drive into the breaking pastel pink of dawn. The Triumph Spitfire, none the worse for its sojourn in a darkened garage, sputters valiantly through France and across a spur of Switzerland. They break their journey at Dijon and Geneva, then take the Mont Blanc Tunnel, cutting through the Alps to Italy. After a night spent in a quaint hotel in Varazze, they set out for Lucca and the peaks of Garfagnana.

  As they near their destination, 600 metres above sea level, among the steep wooded slopes of sweet chestnut, hornbeam and beech, Catherine ambushes his thoughts. Where her cheek brushed his chest, it felt soft as lint. She has a slight overlap of her front teeth. There is a tiny white dash above one eyebrow, a childhood scar. Her hair is red at the tips and at the roots. Then, swinging round the tight bends of the mountain roads, there is Vagli Sotto, built on a headland jutting out into a huge reservoir. Then he remembers the drowned village haunted by its own siren, Teodora. In all other respects it is enchanting, a clutch of stone cottages and whitewashed houses, and the square tower of an old church rising up from a grassy hillock. It is set against a vista of awe-inspiring, charcoal-grey summits, festooned with streamers of glistening snow, the Apuan peaks. At once he is reassured by these curmudgeonly, humpbacked, ancient gods. They preside in grandeur over the ruinous doings of men, while the trails of their pipe-smoke swag the world’s roof.

  They have phoned ahead and Lorenzo Gallo, their landlord’s son, Enrico’s elder brother, is waiting for them. He directs them to a small patch of rugged ground on the outskirts of the town, where he says they can park the car, explaining that the narrow paths are unsuitable for traffic. They scramble out, stretching their cramped limbs after the long journey, and genially he gathers up their luggage. As they make their introductions, his eyes, shying away from Owen, dawdle on Naomi.

  ‘Come, follow. I will take you to the cottage. Then later you will join us for a meal, homemade cheese and sausage and wine, then grappa.’

  Scampering ahead of him like a mountain goat, Naomi glances back at Owen, then at the lake. Fear has planted its stake in Owen’s heart. But as he trudges after them, the little village of Vagli Sotto draws the pessimism from him. He follows the sweep of banks matted with an entire palette of greens, the rich moss-green velvet of lush grass, the citrus green of the regimented rows of cultivated crops, the tawny green of scrub and bracken, the silver green of olive trees, the grey green of flinty rocks cloaked with sparse growth, and the lacy darker greens of the tall majestic pines, some of which are near black in their coloration. And here and there daubs of brilliance capture his attention, pinks and whites and reds, a cockerel proudly strutting about displaying his comb and wattle, a cluster of crimson-faced poppies, a pig scratching its pastel-pink rump contentedly on a dry-stone wall, the snowy blaze of a goat’s beard.

  He lifts his eyes once again to the peaks, then lets his gaze drift over the blue ceiling of sky, where the clouds are as diverse as the greenery mapped beneath them. Some are just ghostly scribbles, some no more than a hazy dove’s wing, some are swollen milky pillows with pregnant mousy underbellies, and some, sheets stretched taut until they are torn asunder. There is nothing dormant about this celestial arena. It is an endlessly changing display buttressed by the craggy mountains. Storms will brew fast up here, he judges, as the hot air glissades up the cant of blue-grey rock, cooling rapidly.

  He drinks in a breath heady as wine and pauses for a moment to let Vagli Sotto take his measure. He pulls his eyes back from the slide down to the lake. There, skating on its polished rink will be the clouds. The shoulders of the mounta
ins will thrust themselves up from its ebony depths. The green slopes, the winding stone-paved paths, the huddle of buildings that make up the village, they will all be wallowing in the water. Even the inky pines will seem to dip their branches in the mere, waving gently like mammoth ropes of seaweed. And if he looks closely enough, leans over the rough-hewn wooden fence that borders the incline, and cranes his neck, he knows he will meet the face of that other Owen, already possessed by them. Oh, he is wise to the baffling mirage, the phantasm of air and life and vibrancy, where there is only another Atlantis sealed in a water-logged womb. Suddenly dizzy, he feels the drag of the Merfolk, hears them serenading him, calling his name. He covers his ears with the flat of his hands, and catches up with Naomi.

  The three-storey stone dwelling that is to be their home for a fortnight, nestles into the shoulder of the hillside. There is a kitchen and dining-room on the first floor, a living-room on the second, and a bedroom on the third. And there is a small paved patio, where a solitary mulberry tree provides partial shade for a table and two deck chairs. From here and from every window in the property, spectacular views of the mountains are afforded, and of the lake too, lying like a mammoth oil slick below them. The rooms are furnished simply with heavy wooden furniture, decorated with primitive paintings of flowers in bold colours. They smell of permanence, of pine resin and lavender and clay. Like most of the buildings in the village, the property seems as much a part of this landscape as the vegetation and rocks rooted round about it.

  ‘It dates back to medieval times,’ Lorenzo explains with pride. ‘What do you think? We undertook the renovation project ourselves. Harder work than my brother, Enrico, has ever done, let me tell you.’ He hands Owen the heavy iron key, leaving him astounded at the weight of it. ‘Vagli Sotto is lovely, yes?’ They nod. There is no denying it. The village is bewitching, soaked in the salmon-pink glow of early evening. The dramatic, remote setting ploughs its rugged beauty into the newcomers. There is something intoxicating about the isolation, Owen reflects. If only it wasn’t for the lake . . .