The Girl by the River

by Sheila Jeffries

  ‘I’ll never get my fat legs into those,’ Kate said, eyeing the slim pair of jodhpurs Susan had pulled out of a drawer. ‘Haven’t you got a bigger pair?’

  ‘No.’ Susan frowned. She caught the twinkle of mischief in Kate’s eyes. ‘You could borrow a pair of Ian’s trousers.’

  ‘Will he mind?’

  ‘He won’t know. He’s gone to an auction.’

  Giggling, the two women raided Ian’s wardrobe which smelled of cedar wood and red wine. ‘How about these?’ Susan dragged out a pair of cavalry twill trousers and held them against Kate who stood there in her blouse and petticoat.

  ‘They’re miles too long,’ Kate said, laughing. ‘They’ll be in concertinas round my ankles.’

  ‘You can roll them up. Go on, put them on.’ Susan threw the trousers at Kate, her eyes sparkling with fun. ‘Ian won’t know. Men never know what clothes they’ve got, do they? Come on – take your Charlie off. You can’t ride a horse with yards of lace petticoat flying.’

  Kate grinned wickedly at Susan, and stepped into the heavy pair of trousers. She stuffed her petticoat down inside, and fastened the leather belt. The two women stood in front of the mirror laughing at Kate’s reflection. ‘Well!’ she said, ‘I look ready for the sack race. Let’s hope nobody sees me.’

  In high spirits they skipped downstairs and headed for the stables. It was the first time Kate had had any fun for years. She’d met Susan in the post office and Susan had noticed how pale and tired her friend looked. ‘Come home with me, and have a ride, Kate,’ she’d said. ‘You must be feeling lonely with Tessa gone to Art College. It’ll do you good to have a ride.’

  It was doing her good, Kate thought. The laughing and larking about with Susan was something she had missed. The endless washing and ironing, cooking and cleaning, keeping Annie happy, and coping with her two girls had taken its toll. Kate was exhausted, and Freddie hadn’t noticed. He was preoccupied with his engines, his stone carving, and the vegetable garden. They both fell into bed at the end of the day, mentally and physically tired, and lovemaking was last on the list.

  There was an uneasy truce with Lucy. After the miscarriage Kate had persuaded her to enrol for a secretarial course at Taunton Tech. Lucy caught the train every day to Taunton and often came home late, but she’d stuck to her course and found a job with a firm of solicitors in Taunton. Kate knew she wasn’t happy, and her relationship with Freddie had been damaged, it seemed, forever. Freddie was silent and grim-faced in Lucy’s company, and there was an occasional flare-up, usually about the length of Lucy’s skirt or the smell of alcohol on her breath. Kate found her own role as peacemaker very stressful, and getting Tessa off to college had been yet another emotional rollercoaster.

  Kate knew Freddie didn’t want her to go horse-riding, especially with Ian Tillerman around, and she tried to respect his wishes. But this morning she felt rebellious. With the October countryside basking in an Indian summer, she wanted to be cantering through the sunlit woods with Susan.

  ‘I haven’t been on a horse for years,’ Kate said as they saddled up in stables next door to each other, and led the horses into the yard.

  ‘You’ll be all right on Toby,’ Susan said. ‘He’s very steady. Lexi uses him sometimes, for teaching.’

  ‘He’s gorgeous.’ Kate gave the kindly black horse a hug round his solid neck. His dark eyes were peaceful and he stood rocklike while she turned the stirrup to her foot and swung herself up, her heart beating hard with excitement. She adjusted the stirrup leathers and gathered the reins. ‘Let’s hope these trousers don’t fall down!’

  Kate loved being out in the soft October light, trotting past orchards where trees were laden to the floor with heavy scarlet apples, and standing up in her stirrups to pick clusters of pale green hazelnuts from the lush foliage of coppiced hazels. Entering the woods, the horses walked peacefully, side by side, the path ahead lit by a shaft of sun slanting through the beeches. The woods created silence, the horses’ hooves making no sound on the carpet of leaf mould, the contented, magic quiet that didn’t need conversation. Kate didn’t want the ride to end. She felt healed by a joy she had forgotten, a sense of being fully alive and awake, and part of the planet in its ripest, most rich, abundant harvest time.

  ‘I’d love to do this again,’ Kate said as they returned down the road towards the stables. ‘It’s done me the world of good.’

  ‘You look better,’ Susan said. ‘You’ve got colour in your cheeks, Kate. We could do this once a week if you like – I’d enjoy it too.’

  ‘Freddie won’t like it,’ Kate said sadly. ‘He doesn’t want me to ride. He worries.’

  ‘But he doesn’t own you, Kate. You’ve got to have some free time – one afternoon a week isn’t much. You’ve had such a hard time, haven’t you? – with his mother there – and Tessa. You’re worn out, Kate – worse than you were in the wartime when we were nursing. At least we had fun sometimes, didn’t we?’

  ‘Yes, we did – and I miss it.’

  ‘Does Freddie have to know?’ Susan asked. ‘Can’t you just say you’re spending time with me? It won’t do any harm, surely? What the eye doesn’t see!’

  Kate was tempted. Why not?

  ‘What about Ian’s trousers?’ she laughed. ‘Can we smuggle them out once a week?’

  So it was arranged for Kate to ride every Tuesday with Susan. She went off on her bike, with Ian’s trousers in a brown paper bag in the basket, and Freddie never questioned her about it. Spending time with Susan was obviously good for Kate. It was Annie who made a fuss. ‘Gallivanting off again on that bike,’ she complained. ‘I never had a life like you.’

  All through autumn the rides continued, even when storms howled in the tree tops and golden leaves sped through the woodland twilight like shooting stars. As the winter light sharpened, the bare branches turned to stone like the vaults of a Gothic cathedral. Frost glistened in the blue shadows of the hedges and there was a sense of shifting time.

  On their rides, Kate watched for the winter birds, the vast flocks of fieldfare and redwing, snow buntings and bramblings. They didn’t come. The hawthorn berries hung heavy on the trees, uneaten, and carpets of apples remained under the orchard trees like cobblestones, far into the winter. She couldn’t help feeling that something was wrong. Could it be true what Tessa had said? That the earth was sick?

  ‘But I don’t WANT to use yellow ochre,’ Tessa said furiously. ‘I hate yellow ochre.’

  ‘Tough. I’m your painting tutor and you’ll paint the way I think you should paint.’ Tony Bulletti’s penetrating stare challenged Tessa. He was much shorter than her, a stocky dwarf of a man with an angry quiff of hair that flew over his face. Tessa had hated him on sight. It was deep. Ivor Stape, she thought, that’s who he reminds me of – and he’s got eyes like acid drops.

  ‘I don’t want to paint like this,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I like pure spectrum colours.’

  ‘Pure spectrum colours are what they use in Primary School. This is Bath Academy of Art, girl.’

  ‘My name is Tessa, not girl. I don’t care who you are, and I don’t care if you have got your sludgy brown paintings in the Tate Gallery. That doesn’t give you the right to bully me.’

  Jen was looking at Tessa in concern. ‘Don’t push your luck, Tess. Back off,’ she mouthed.

  ‘Where’s your turps?’ Tony Bulletti demanded.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Right. Take a rag and scrub it all off, and start again.’ He sloshed turps onto a cloth and smeared it over Tessa’s painting. ‘And don’t give me the drama queen stuff.’

  He walked away, leaving Tessa holding the two ends of a paintbrush she had snapped in half, her face locked into fury.

  Moments later Faye was beside her, offering her a new paintbrush. ‘Borrow this one. I’m not using it.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Later that day, back in the haven of her bedroom, Tessa heard a tap at the door. She opened it, surprised to see Faye standing there.
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  ‘I’m looking for someone to hitch up to London with me,’ Faye said, ‘for a concert at the Royal Festival Hall.’

  ‘What kind of concert?’ Tessa asked. It was December, two weeks before the end of her first term at Bath Academy of Arts. Faye had hardly spoken to her, apart from the odd, begrudging ‘Hello,’ but Tessa felt she knew Faye by the music that came through the wall. Faye practised her cello most evenings, working on the Bach sonata for solo cello. Tessa’s experience of music had been confined to Freddie’s radio blaring out Music While You Work in his workshop, the town band playing marches, the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas they had done at the grammar school, and Lucy’s record player blaring out The Beatles and Cliff Richard. None of it appealed to Tessa. Yet once she had been deeply moved by hearing the church organ, feeling the stone-trembling power of it. And once, at Hilbegut, hearing Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture in assembly. It had moved her so much that she’d felt profoundly disturbed for days.

  ‘It’s the Brahms’ Symphony No 1,’ said Faye, her eyes coming alive with passion. ‘It’s SO powerful – and SO magical. It’s got this theme tune that keeps coming back, like the light in the forest.’

  Tessa stared at her. She didn’t know what a symphony was. She’d never been to London. Hitchhiking with Faye sounded scary. But the light in the forest? Words that spoke to her soul. Words like that, from a girl who had shown her nothing but scorn and hostility!

  ‘And in the second half of the concert,’ Faye continued, now with stars in her eyes, ‘it’s the Respighi – The Pines of Rome, and it’s STUNNING. It blows my mind. It’s got a nightingale’s song in it, a recording of a real bird.’

  Tessa couldn’t speak. Suddenly she was back in Monterose, on the edge of the woods with Lexi and Jonti on that magical night of the nightingale picnic. The night of the cloak of stars. She was completely overwhelmed. The sobs welled up in her, old sobs that had been there all of her life, sobs that lurked in the catacombs of her soul like gremlins, never, ever satisfied with her efforts to appease them. She slumped onto her bed, crying bitterly, her hands over her face.

  She expected Faye to slam the door and stalk off, but she didn’t. Faye came right into her room, closed the door quietly, and sat down beside Tessa in silence, and let her sob.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tessa said, when she managed to regain control.

  ‘You don’t need to apologise.’ Faye looked at her with concern in her eyes and Tessa felt it was the first time she’d seen a spark of humanity in Faye’s eyes. Or maybe she’d never looked, she thought.

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Tessa heard herself saying.

  ‘Great!’ Faye looked pleased. ‘Wear a mac. It usually pours with rain when I’m hitchhiking.’

  Faye didn’t ask why she’d been crying. Instead, she fetched her cello from her room, and sat on Tessa’s bed with it, her skinny legs planted firmly on each side of the glowing instrument. ‘I’ll play you the theme tune, the one like the light in the forest,’ she said, ‘then you can listen out for it.’

  ‘Okay.’ Tessa looked at the cello in awe. She felt the vibration from its belly as Faye tuned it and drew the bow across the taut strings, and played eight evocative notes.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said, and played it again. ‘Then – at the end of the symphony – it leads into this really emotional tune as if you’ve come out of the forest and ended up on the wild Atlantic coast of Cornwall, with the sun making a sheet of light on the water.’

  Again, her words touched something deep and sacred in Tessa’s soul. She listened, spellbound, as Faye played the eight-note theme again and then flowed on into the ‘really emotional tune’, her arm moving in waves, her eyes closed under their fringe of black mascara. A girl in black, with the brightest aura Tessa had ever seen, light blue, lemon, and pure white. An angel in disguise, she thought, a streetwise angel. She wanted to tell her so, but Faye’s defences were intimidating and strong.

  ‘Meet me straight after class Friday afternoon – at the main gate,’ Faye said, gathering up her cello and bow. ‘See you then, Tessa!’

  Freddie walked up through the woods, his boots crunching over frosted leaf mould. Overhead the twigs made a lattice of ice against a dove grey sky. He turned his collar up and drove his hands deeper into the warm pockets of his heavy overcoat.

  He wanted to see for himself what was happening in the woods, why it was no longer silent, why the wild creatures were moving out. A family of badgers had set up home in the hedge opposite The Pines. The rooks whirled in the sky in huge, distressed gatherings, searching the tree tops for a new safe haven. Rabbits sat along the grass verges, ill and dying from myxomatosis. And a new smell drifted through the wood, the smell of petrol and sawdust.

  Freddie had loved those woods since his childhood. Since his early courtship with Kate. Even now, walking up there in the frost, he thought nostalgically of their first picnic together, the pony and cart plodding through the lime trees and hearing the hum of thousands of bees in the linden blossom in early summer. The times when he had walked through those lime trees on his way to Granny Barcussy’s cottage, and seen the spirit of his grandfather there, shining in the dappled twilight.

  It was lunchtime, and today he’d chosen not to go home. Kate was out with Susan, and Freddie hadn’t felt like coping with his mother’s negativity. He’d been depressed just lately, especially after reading Tessa’s latest letter. She hated her painting tutor at college. She hated the painting classes and the sludgy colours they insisted she used. She hated being in the photography group, didn’t see the point of it. She hated life-drawing. She missed Jonti and Selwyn. But, she’d written, at last she had friends, and this weekend she was hitching to London with Faye. Freddie found that very alarming, the thought of his little Tessa standing at the roadside, thumbing a lift, like a hippy. Everyone does it, she’d said, but that didn’t reassure Freddie.

  He missed both his daughters. Tessa because she wasn’t there, and Lucy because he felt estranged from her. She no longer ran to meet him with shining eyes. She no longer adored him. She was sour-faced and rude. It made him feel cast aside and powerless.

  Jonti trotted staunchly beside him through the wood, his paws rustling on the crisp ground. They walked along the edge of the nightingale wood, between coppiced hazel and ash, and Freddie could see Lexi’s place across the fields which were silvery with frost and the blue shadows of hedgerow elms. It would soon be the shortest day, Freddie thought, and he smiled as he heard a song thrush shouting across the valley.

  Then, suddenly, came the sound he dreaded. Chainsaws. Men shouting. Birds rising in panic from the wood. He stooped and picked up Jonti. ‘You stay with me,’ he said, and the little dog looked up at him and licked his face.

  Freddie stood still and Jonti listened with him, ears pricked, nose twitching, hackles at the ready. The whole wood seemed to be listening. A few snowflakes scattered down, as if shaken loose by the tension. Jonti began to whine and tremble in Freddie’s arms as if he sensed impending doom.

  The chainsaws stopped, a man shouted, and there was a mighty echoing crack. The trees stiffened and the woods shuddered with a great gasp of shock, followed by a sickening and thunderous crash. A sense of finality ricocheted through every twig and every crystal of frost.

  A giant had fallen.

  Freddie felt it in his heart. And he knew. It was a lime tree. He walked quickly now, in the ice-cold air, towards the Lime Wood, holding the memory in his heart of that summer day with Kate, the day of the bees in the lime flowers. He felt as if his entire life had gone suddenly cold. Yet he felt compelled to go on. He had to see it.

  Minutes later he stood by the fallen lime tree looking down at the mess of broken twigs. He sensed the tree still quivering with shock, its nerves twitching like those of a dying animal. All around were the stumps of other lime trees, newly sawn, their majestic trunks cut into lengths and stacked, waiting for the two long timber lorries to come roaring up the new track and take them away.


  Freddie put Jonti down, and walked over to the man who stood beside the fallen tree, a chainsaw in his hand. Freddie wanted to wipe the satisfied grin off his face. He wanted to challenge his right to destroy hundreds of years of ancient woodland. He stood in silence, like a man at a funeral, his head bowed, his grief sealing the door to powerless anger.

  There was nothing he could do.

  Or was there?

  Snow floated down from the leaden clouds, tiny flakes like petals from plum blossom in springtime, then large flakes like gypsy lace, hurrying, as if to cover the fallen lime tree in crystal. As he watched it pitching on the wreckage, Freddie noticed the seeds still hanging in delicate clusters from the twigs. With frozen red fingers, he gathered a handful of the round seeds and tied them into his hanky, like money.

  ‘What d’you want them for?’ asked the man with the saw.

  ‘The future,’ said Freddie, looking through the snow at the man’s eyes, ‘and for my daughter, Tessa. She wants to save the world.’

  ‘Don’t ’em all?’ the man said. ‘Bloody hippies.’

  ‘She’s an art student. Bath Academy of Art,’ Freddie said, and walked away into the whirling snow.

  The grin on the man’s face haunted him like a joker in a pack of cards, forever impudent. He felt sadness gathering itself into a spike of pain in the middle of his chest. A hacking cough had plagued him for weeks, and it came now, convulsively, causing Jonti to pause and look up at him, one paw in the air. The pain seemed to ignite like a blowtorch, scorching his throat. He loosened his scarf, and touched his brow with frozen fingers. His skin was hot and sweaty, and the pulse roared in his ears. The cough got tighter and suddenly he was struggling to breathe. I’ve gotta get home, he thought. The weather was closing in, blowing curtains of ice around him, the snowflakes hard and fast, obscuring the glimpse of landscape between the trees. He couldn’t see Lexi’s place, or the rooftops of Monterose, or the station with its signal box and footbridge.

  The faces he loved swam before him. Kate’s bright brown eyes. Lucy. Tessa. His mother. No one knows where I am, he thought, and tried to walk faster. But with every step his breathing tightened until he was gasping. He stumbled the few steps and reached the rustling shelter of the Evergreen Oak tree, leaned against it, and slid to the floor, fighting for breath. As he closed his eyes he heard Jonti running off into the snow, his paws pattering over the frozen ground.