The Water Children

by Anne Berry

  She asked Bill to stop at the supermarket on the way home. When she emerged with cardboard boxes and no groceries he was perturbed. ‘Whatever are those for?’ he wanted to know. She gave him a wan smile in reply. When they got home she made a bee-line for Sarah’s room and began sorting through her things. Bill hovered uneasily outside the door. ‘What are you doing, love?’ he asked at last, peeping in. By then she had filled one box and made a start on the other.

  ‘I’m going through Sarah’s things, sorting out some bits and pieces for the Church sale, and some for Oxfam.’ He looked stricken when she glanced up.

  ‘Is that a . . . a good idea?’ he said hesitantly, stroking the bald crown of his head, where the line of his Frankenstein scar could still be clearly detected.

  She smiled to herself wistfully. ‘After fifteen years, ooh, I think so. We’ll have a memory box for her treasures, our treasures, but not a memory room.’ He helped her for a while. Then, sensing that what she craved most was to be left alone, he busied himself filling his watering cans with the used bath water they saved each day for the purpose. What struck her suddenly, as she folded small items of clothing, was the sudden revelation that she had to earn Sarah’s love, that every glorious day she spent with her was a labour, not of love, but for love. And here was the difference between her son and her daughter, Owen and Sarah. Owen’s love for her was unconditional. She was overcome with a choking sensation, and deep inside her chest there was a stab of pain. She took a sharp intake of breath at the realization. She had taken her son’s rare devotion, the more mature accepting love, entirely for granted. She thought about the shop-bought carnations, the way they duped you into believing they still had life in them, when in fact they were long dead.

  Now she leaves Bill cloud gazing, comes indoors and tries her son’s ’phone number twice, but no one answers. Throughout the evening the calm that is not calm, persists. She finds that she cannot settle to an episode of Dad’s Army, that she is up and down fussing constantly. So that when the doorbell rings, she is ready for it.

  It is Bill who seems entirely flabbergasted to find two uniformed policemen standing on their doorstep.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Abingdon, I wonder if we could come inside and have a word with you,’ asks the taller of the two. She is aware of her heart suddenly, aware that it is starting to beat extremely fast. They wait for her to sit down, wait for Bill to lower himself into a seat beside her. They take their caps off respectfully. ‘It’s about your son, Owen.’ She is keening, a high shrill note. It is too late, she thinks. He is dead. My son is dead. I have woken up too late.

  The rain that started to fall as they left Wantage is cascading down by the time they reach London. Ruth stares out of the car window and she sees that there are people dancing in the streets, dancing in the deluge sheeting down from dark grey skies. They are tearing open their clothes and letting the rain wash the dust of this ceaseless summer away. Her son’s injuries are not thought to be life threatening. This is what the police told her, that he was attacked with a knife, that his hand was badly cut, that he is receiving treatment at hospital. She can hear the raindrops hammering down on the car’s roof. She can see the gutters running with shining life-giving water.

  Chapter 28

  Sitting in the hospital corridor, his hand bound up so that it resembles a white boxing glove, Owen feels like what he is tonight, a little boy. A mobile of busy people turn around him, receptionists, nurses, doctors, patients, relatives. Rush, rush, rush. Everyone is occupied. Everyone seems to know what to do, everyone except him. His hand throbs and his shirt is soaked with blood, hers, whoever she was, and his. Two policemen stand nearby talking in subdued voices, waiting for the cut in his hand to be stitched up, waiting until they say that the young man is sufficiently well to go to the station and make a statement. After the paramedics pronounced Naomi dead, they took Owen in an ambulance to the hospital, with a police escort. Catherine was driven away to make her witness statement. She told him that she’d come back as soon as she could, but for now he is alone.

  The lights shrill down on him, making his eyes hurt. And the pattern on the lino floor also bothers him because it isn’t sym metrical. They are not equilateral triangles. They are all made up of varying angles. All those angles and none of them appearing the same. It makes him feel insecure somehow. He closes his eyes and he is on the beach all by himself. Looking about him, he can see that there is a whole desert of sand here, dunes of it. And instinctively he knows if he crests one hill there will be another, and another, and another after that. He turns his back on the sand. But this is worse, much worse. The sea stretches before him for eternity. And he has to fish Sarah out, but he doesn’t know where to start. He ought to run roaring at the surf and demand that it regurgitates her, spits her back into life. But he knows the waves will only shake with mocking laughter at this.

  ‘D’you want a cuppa, son?’ one of the policemen asks. He shakes his head. He wants his mother. There is some kind of commotion at the far end of the corridor, raised voices, a row. Nothing out of the ordinary. This is casualty late at night. Owen turns his head robotically towards the rumpus. Who is flying down the corridor, crashing into the placid nurse, sending her papers fluttering to the ground, knocking over a chair, jogging the man by the coffee machine, making him drop his cup? Who is this creating a scene? It is a mother who has lost her son. She has been searching for him for fifteen years. There is no room for English reserve here. Ruth does not care about the nurse hurrying after her calling, ‘Miss, Miss. You’re not allowed to . . .’ Nor does she care about the man with the coffee splattered over his shirt who is swearing at her, or the fact that an orderly has bustled off to alert security. The cotton dress she is wearing, a pink and white patchwork print, is saturated. It immodestly hugs the contours of her body. Her brown hair is loose and dripping. Her sandals squelch as she sprints down the corridor. She is bowling people like skittles out of her path.

  ‘Owen! Owen!’ And the small boy hunched alone on the sand hears his name, hears the desperation in it. His head comes up instantly. Then he is on his feet waving his bandaged hand, tears gushing down his cheeks. Her arms strait-jacket wetly around him.

  ‘My son!’ And he is shaking with shock and relief, and mumbling incoherently. His father is here now, too, in the background, nodding at the policemen and looking rather sheepish.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Owen says.

  ‘No . . . I’m sorry,’ she whispers back.

  Epilogue

  The seagull breasts the evening air with the grace of a glider. The setting sun has given a golden blush to its plumage, and made an eagle of the scavenger. Its eyes swivel tirelessly over sea and land. It spies many things winking in the blue goblet of the bay. There is a secluded cottage built of Cornish stone. A path leading from it meanders across a shoulder of meadowland speckled with wild flowers. It winds down a cliff-face fretted with bracken, chequered with boulders and slabs of rock. The gull anchors on pockets of sea kale, dainty white scurvy grass, and cushions of fluffy pink thrift. Finally, the neck of the path splays out onto a harp of golden-brown sand. Here the armadillo rocks that burrow below the tide line are blanketed with banks of blue-grey mussels, and sequinned with crushed shells.

  A balding man sits on a towel in the shade reading a newspaper. A young couple stroll together on the sand, arms linked. He is fair haired, blue eyed, while she is a redhead with pale-green eyes the colour of grapes. A short way from them a tall, willowy, middle-aged woman walks a little girl through the sparkling aqua-marine shallows. All five wear bright bathing costumes, scarlet, rich blues and primrose yellow. The girl has a mop of gingery curls tucked beneath an orange sunhat. And when she looks up the gull spies her vivid blue-green eyes. She squeals in delight as the running wavelets break about her feet and ankles. The willowy woman glances at her watch, and then she bends and whispers something to the child. For a few minutes while she collects up their belongings, she leaves her under the watchful eyes o
f the young couple.

  The sun’s rays fire the shoulder-length red hair. The gull screeches at the flash of lucent copper, and all of them raise their heads at the cry. The girl sits in the skittish water. She cocks her head and listens to the waves burbling their secrets into the sand. Digging, she finds a pearly shell. She shakes it in the surf, washing the sand grains off it. She likes the taste of sea salt, likes it when it dries to a fine white dust on her skin. She clambers up and toddles a few steps forward. She has no fear of the sea, for she is a water baby. She has been swimming with her mother since the age of two. She likes to draw the mermaids she has seen in her storybook, mermaids with fishtails instead of legs. She uses all the blues and greens and greys to colour them in. In her last picture she drew a small flesh-pink baby in the arms of a mermaid. And when her mother asked who it was, she answered, ‘It’s me, Mummy, can’t you see?’

  The tall woman is back. There is a serene expression on her face as she holds out her hand to the child. The girl goes willingly enough, because she knows that the sea will be here tomorrow, waiting for her. She stands patiently while she is towel dried, and they both tug on sandals. They collect the balding man with his newspaper and all three trudge over the sand. They pause once to look back and smile at the couple, and at the waves. Then they climb the cliff path hand in hand. After they have gone the young couple wade into the sea until they are waist deep. Then they climb onto a large rock, its plateau top well clear of the lapping water. They sit and stare out at the felt-tipped line of the horizon. They can see a sailboat and a distant ship, a tanker, he thinks. Gazing upwards at the giddy azure sky, they tail the seagull still eyeing them curiously.

  That amber eye has grown wise on wonders, on the moon and the sun at either ends of the corridor of the sky, on storms that make flotsam of mighty ships, on the rigours of an un forgiving sun, on doomed sailors, and pods of whales singing their eerie songs. And now he spies one more. Beside the couple sunning themselves on the rock, sits a child, a Water Child, an enchanted silver jitterbug of pure light. He is no stranger to the seagull. It has seen him before and it will see him again. Together, the man, and the woman, and the Water Child slip into the sea. They swim in triplicate. The couple take huge breaths and dive, opening their eyes on a marvel, a salt-stung vista. A world of flaxen sand. The sponged shapes of rocks in aubergine and maroon, bisque and oatmeal. Forests of glassy brown weed. Pastures of apple-green moss, peopled with prickly sea urchins. Rose-pink and violet anemones. Varnished apricot crabs. Shoals of tiny fish that sparkle like puffs of glitter. The blue fists of the sea pummel them, sparring with them, goading the swimmers on that little bit further. So that it is the Water Child who has to halt them with a starry burst of brilliance, making them know that this is his element, not theirs, that they must turn back now. They see him wriggle away, joyous to be free, like a silver eel slicing into the deep blue. Then they surface, suck in air gratefully, and strike out confidently for the shore. But the seagull, beguiled by the astonishing silvery foxtrot, bolstered by the thermals, tracks the Water Child out into the sorcery of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Legend of Lake Vagli

  The legend of the lake springs from seeds of truth. The ghost village of Fabbriche di Careggine, featured in The Water Children is no myth. Founded in the 13th Century, it was once a bustling community. In 1941 work started on the construction of a dam that would harness the might of the Edron River, providing hydroelectric power for the region. With its completion in 1953 the Edron valley was flooded, drowning the deserted village. But folk tell of one inhabitant who remained in her little cottage, the beautiful Teodora, that Lake Vagli became her watery grave. Feared by the villagers, she was thought to be a witch. It is said that this young, lovely sorceress had worked her charms on Anselmo, a man much older than her who became her husband. When he went foraging for firewood in the treacherous mountains, an icy storm blew up. He stumbled and broke his leg. Teodora awaiting his return did not raise the alarm. She knew that if he had been injured his only hope was rescue. He was discovered frozen to death. When the lake was first drained in 1958, as it is every ten years, they searched for her bones. They dug for them in the mud, but found no trace of the enchantress. She is forever the lady of the lake, a siren haunting the silvery depths.

  Acknowledgements

  My deepest thanks to my incomparable agent, Judith Murdoch, and my exceptional publisher and editor, Patrick Janson-Smith, and to my inspirational editors, Laura Deacon and Susan Opie.

  About the Author

  Anne Berry was born in London and spent her childhood in Aden and Hong Kong where she was educated. She worked for a short period as a journalist for the South China Morning Post, before returning to Britain. After completing a three-year acting course, she embarked on a career in theatre, playing everything from pantomime to Shakespeare. Her first novel, The Hungry Ghosts, was shortlisted for The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and The Desmond Elliott Prize. She now lives in Surrey with her husband and four children.

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  Also by Anne Berry

  The Hungry Ghosts

  Copyright

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © Anne Berry 2011

  Anne Berry asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-00-730347-2

  EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007352067

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