by Liz Trenow
‘Not going back?’ I repeated, stupefied. ‘But I thought you liked your school?’ Kit nodded miserably. ‘What on earth are you going to do instead?’
He shrugged. ‘Dunno. Ma and Pa want to send me to a crammer.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Where they force-feed you, to pass your exams.’
So he’d been slacking and this was his punishment. ‘Is that what you want?’
‘Nope.’ He shrugged again, picking at a loose thread in the upholstery. He looked so fed up – no, not fed up, but blank and distracted.
‘Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do at school?’ I asked. ‘Get you through exams?’
‘It’s no good, Molly. I’ve been through all the arguments, but I’m not allowed to go back.’
‘Not allowed?’
He gave a great sigh. ‘I’ve been expelled.’
I could hardly believe it. A boy like Kit, who seemed to have everything: good looks, sporty, clever in his own way. What terrible offence had he committed?
‘For good?’
‘That’s what “expelled” usually means.’
‘Sorry.’
‘No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. It’s just that, oh, I don’t know . . .’ His legs jiggled with pent-up energy.
‘And you’ve been keeping this to yourself all this time?’
‘I thought – oh, I don’t know – that if I put it to the back of my mind and got on with other things, it would go away somehow.’ I remembered his sudden, intense focus on the plans for our protest; his almost manic energy at the birthday party and when we were playing pirates; the way he’d seemed so distracted when we were together on the island. It was all beginning to add up.
He dropped his head into his hands. ‘Oh God, I’m so miserable.’
‘But what did you do that was so terrible?’
He shook his head.
‘Tell me, Kit. I’m the best keeper of secrets in the world.’
‘It’s no good, Molly. I just can’t tell you. I’m sorry. You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Try me.’
‘You’re the ruddy vicar’s daughter, for heaven’s sake.’
‘But you know I’m not the churchy type, Kit. I won’t judge you, whatever it is you’ve done. I promise.’
He took a deep breath and sighed. He started to speak, and stopped. ‘No, I can’t tell you. It’s hopeless, Molly. Perhaps one day I’ll explain.’ He turned to me with tears in his eyes and buried his face in my shoulder. ‘Oh God, whatever am I going to do?’
I wrapped both of my arms around him, and he reciprocated. This was the physical contact I’d so longed for, but not in this way – not as his comforter.
After a short while Kit sat up and wiped his face with his hands, leaving dirty smears. ‘You must think I’m ridiculous, snivelling away like that.’
‘I suppose you’ll just have to do what your parents want you to do.’
‘But what about Eli and his hut – all of that? I’m so sorry for letting you down.’
‘Don’t worry. We need to find another way of helping him, I think.’
A distant clock began to chime and we paused, counting to eleven. ‘Cripes, is that the time already?’ he said, leaping up. ‘My parents will be back soon. Will you be all right, going up the lane in the dark?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, my heart breaking. My friend, my love, was leaving and my world was falling apart around me. As we stood by the open front door, Kit took my face in his hands. I will never forget that expression: his eyes darkened with sadness, but were still so beautiful. In that moment I so badly wanted to kiss him.
‘Thank you, Molly. We’ll get through this, somehow.’
‘I’ll miss you.’
‘I’ll miss you too. You’re a really good mate.’ Then, just as I turned to go, he handed me a rucksack. ‘Just in case you decide to go ahead.’
It weighed a ton. ‘Crikey, what’s in here?’
‘Things I promised to bring for the protest: the chains from the boathouse, with padlocks, a tarpaulin and a sleeping bag. Good luck. And give my love to Jimmy.’
‘But . . .’
‘Just in case . . .’
I ran most of the way home, with tears streaking my cheeks. My romantic dreams were shattered. Kit was going away, and heaven knew when we might see each other again. All the plans we’d made together were lost. There was no one else to turn to, no one else I could trust. Being a ‘really good mate’ was no consolation at all.
A breeze was stirring the trees. The rumbles of thunder were more frequent now, and louder, the lightning flashes lighting my footsteps. The storm was definitely coming and I welcomed it. At least it might clear the air. As I reached the vicarage I felt the first drops of rain.
21
There was little sleep to be had that night.
The wind howled like a tribe of banshees, whistling through the window casements and lifting the curtains with ghostly hands. The storm seemed to pause right over the village for a full half-hour. I tried counting the seconds between the lightning flashes and the bangs of thunder, but gave up. There were just too many of them, and at times they were almost simultaneous.
At its height a series of deafening cracks seemed to shake the house. I huddled under the bed covers, expecting Jimmy to join me at any moment: he hated thunderstorms, and no amount of explanation could persuade him that they were just a natural phenomenon and very unlikely to cause any harm. But he never came, and I assumed he was in a deep slumber, dreaming of dragons and perhaps parrots. At last the storm seemed to abate a little, and I managed to get back to sleep.
Jimmy was late down the next morning, and no one was surprised; we were all rather short of rest. The rain had stopped and the sky was already beginning to clear, but the street outside the vicarage was a lake of puddles. The garden was a mess, with shrubs and trees destroyed by their pummelling from high winds and torrential rain.
Father appeared, hungover and hollow-eyed, just as Mrs D bustled in.
‘What a terrible to-do last night. Didn’t get a wink,’ she said, hauling off her rubber boots and hanging up her mackintosh in the scullery. ‘They say the wind was hurricane-force at times. There’s a load of trees down in them woods – they takes it bad when they’re still so heavy with leaves. The river’s flooded its banks at Bures and there’s talk of a lightning strike up Assington way. But our church looks safe and sound, leastways from what I could see from the road. Thank the good Lord we was spared, eh, Vicar?’
It was just a five-minute walk from her house to ours, yet somehow she’d managed to gather all this information by half past eight in the morning.
‘Where’s the little laddie then?’ she asked.
‘Sleeping in, I expect,’ I said. ‘After all that disturbance, it’s not surprising.’
After a few more minutes I decided to check. Jimmy was not in his bed. The covers were disturbed, but the mattress and pillow were cold. Downstairs in the scullery his wellington boots and mackintosh were missing.
‘Not to worry. He’ll have gone out to play,’ Pa said.
I was certain he was right – jumping in puddles was one of Jimmy’s favourite occupations – but somehow it didn’t reassure me. While Mrs D rabbited on about the storm and the damage to the apple and blackberry harvest, I couldn’t help worrying.
‘I’m going out to find him,’ I said.
‘Finish your porridge, dear, while it’s hot,’ Mrs D said. But I had no appetite and excused myself. Jimmy should be easy to spot, I thought, in that red mac. But he wasn’t in the garden, nor did he appear when I called his name. I went to the church and walked all round the graveyard, even into its furthest recesses; I knew he liked to hide in the shed where Eli and the volunteer gardeners kept their tools, but he wasn’t there, either.
Everywhere was sopping wet; the puddles linked into small streams. It had stopped raining, but the trees were so laden that each gust of wind brought further torr
ents of water down on my head. I was glad of the rubber boots Pa had insisted we bought before moving to the country. I’d mocked him at the time – when would I need such ugly, uncomfortable footwear? How wrong I’d been. They’d been useful right up until the hot weather began and sandals became the only option, and now here I was wearing them again.
Pa came out to join me and we continued searching together, agreeing that the most logical explanation was that Jimmy had got up and gone out early, for some reason known only to himself. He couldn’t be far away, surely? Neither of us spoke about the previous day: the diocesan visitors, his humiliation. His drunkenness. Nor the fact that I had crept out without telling anyone.
We stopped everyone we passed – there weren’t many at this time of the morning – but no one had seen any sign of Jimmy.
‘Should we knock on doors?’
‘Let’s not trouble people so early. It’s been such a rough night. We’ll find him soon enough.’ Pa didn’t sound convinced. We reached the last house, then retraced our steps along the street, back to the church.
‘Could he have gone into the woods?’ Pa asked.
‘It’s possible. He was quite upset when we found Eli’s hut locked up and barred yesterday. He’s his special friend, Jimmy always says.’
Just as Mrs D had warned, the wood was a scene of devastation: trees had fallen everywhere, and it was impossible to keep to the usual paths. The normally dry, springy floor was heavy going and in places so muddy that we struggled to stay on our feet. We hurried on, calling Jimmy’s name every few seconds. Towards the bottom of the hill, as we reached the path that led up to The Pines, I said, ‘Stay here, Pa, while I just nip to the top. It won’t take more than a few moments, and from there I might catch sight of that red mac of his.’
The once-proud stand of pines looked as if they’d been hit by a bomb. Of the ten or twelve ancient trees only three were left untouched and still standing. The others had either been felled completely, their great roots upturned, or their trunks snapped into sharp shards pointing accusingly to the sky, as though a giant had trampled through the copse wielding an enormous axe. The sight brought me close to tears: those trees had stood there for hundreds of years, marking the site of something important to the early inhabitants of the area. And now, overnight, they were gone.
There were further scenes of devastation in the other direction. The river had flooded, turning the water meadows into wide lakes. The woodland was ragged, as though that same giant had pushed the trees aside as he strode through it. I scoured the landscape until my eyes burned, but there was no sign of a red mac.
We set off again along the other path through the woods, still calling Jimmy’s name. When we reached Eli’s glade, another horrible shock awaited us. Where the hut had once stood was a pile of charred timbers and sodden grey ash. All that was left of the structure were the four metal wheels, now fallen at crazy angles as their wooden axles had burned away; and the cast-iron stove, which now stood upright in the centre of the devastation, as though wondering what all the fuss was about. It would have looked comical, had it not been so terrible. The hut’s metal chimney had been felled like a tree and now lay in several charred and crumpled sections, strewn around the glade. We stood for several moments, stunned into silence.
It was Pa who broke it. ‘Lightning strike, do you think?’
I could hardly speak. My stomach churned, and I felt sick and shivery. The place I’d come to see as some kind of haven was now showing all the signs of hell. The blaze had clearly been so ferocious that it had consumed almost everything, even metal items. The large milk churn in which Eli kept his water lay on its side, partly melted. Enamel mugs had apparently been thrown by some fiery force – I spied one several yards away from the main blaze. Saucepans had taken on crazy shapes; a frying pan was folded in two, like an omelette.
Blackman would be pleased. This is what he wanted, wasn’t it, getting rid of the hut? And now the storm had saved him the bother. At the back of my mind was something Blackman had said. It had sounded slightly odd at the time, and now I remembered. ‘That hut was neither suitable nor safe,’ he’d said. Was. Past tense. Could he have torched it himself? Or got someone else to do his dirty work?
We retraced our steps to the vicarage, feeling certain that Jimmy must, surely, have grown hungry and decided to come home by now.
Mrs D was waiting by the front door, her face pale and strained. ‘No sign of the little laddie?’
‘You haven’t heard anything?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ll get Hubby onto it, shall I, Vicar? The more eyes, the better?’
‘Oh, I don’t think we need to mobilise the troops yet, thank you, Mrs D,’ Pa said. ‘Jimmy’s so well known in the village that surely someone will have seen him.’ He seemed quite convinced that Jimmy had strayed away unthinkingly and would turn up at any moment now. I prayed he was right.
Mrs D persuaded us to take a cup of her hot chocolate and, after drinking it, we took to the street again. More people were out and about now, gathered in groups, sharing gossip about the storm. I found myself burning with irritation, as Pa listened patiently to their stories of narrow escapes from flying slates or falling trees, how outhouses had been demolished and gardens devastated, until he could find a moment to interrupt: ‘You haven’t seen Jimmy, have you? He went out before breakfast and hasn’t come back.’
The answer was always the same. ‘Sorry, Vicar. Not this morning, we haven’t.’
‘If you could check any sheds or outhouses where he might have taken shelter,’ we asked each one.
‘Will do, Governor,’ they’d say, or something similar. ‘We’ll definitely keep an eye out and be sure to let you know. He can’t have gone far, can he? Lovely little fella. He’ll turn up soon enough.’ They would return to talk of the storm and we would struggle to get away.
‘Yes, yes. It’s terrible. Of course. Thank you. Thank you.’
And so it went, all the way up the street and back down again to the end of the village. No one had seen Jimmy.
‘Good morning. What a terrible storm last night,’ Mrs Waddington said as she opened the door. ‘My husband is in London and we haven’t been able to contact him. The telephone lines must all be down. Do come in.’
‘Sorry, our boots are so muddy. It’s just that . . .’ Pa began to explain, when Kit appeared.
He looked shocked and seemed to read the anxiety in my face. ‘What’s happened?’
As soon as we explained, they both immediately went to get coats and boots and then, in unspoken agreement, the four of us began walking towards the lake. The gardens, with their low box hedges and neatly trimmed borders, seemed to have been relatively untouched by the storm, but as soon as we rounded the corner and the full stretch of water came into sight, the destruction was evident: willow trees had fallen like ninepins into the water all round the shore and along the edges of the islands. It became clear that, in the waterlogged ground, their roots had been unable to provide a strong enough anchor against the hurricane.
‘Oh my Lord.’ Mrs Waddington clasped her hand to her mouth. ‘What a terrible mess.’
Kit took my hand and squeezed it. ‘Don’t worry, Molly. It looks bad, but I’m sure Jimmy’s not far away. We’ll find him soon enough.’
The boathouse appeared intact from the outside. I noticed the padlock was missing, but said nothing. It was only when we went inside that we discovered how, even here, the storm had taken its toll. The double doors leading out onto the lake had been blown inwards and one of them partly wrenched off, now hanging lopsidedly from a single hinge. The sturdy Mary Jane rocked safely at the end of its mooring line, but the canvas boat was nowhere to be seen.
‘Bloody hell, where’s Robin?’ Kit said.
‘Language, Christopher,’ his mother muttered.
‘Sorry, Vicar . . .’ He need not have been so embarrassed, as Pa often said worse than that.
‘Did you tie it up properly?’ she asked.
/> ‘Of course I did,’ Kit snapped.
‘It’s not your fault,’ I whispered. ‘She’ll have just blown away across the lake. I’m sure you’ll find her.’
‘Surely Jimmy wouldn’t have taken her out all on his own?’ Kit said.
‘He can’t row,’ Pa said.
Kit and I exchanged glances, but neither of us corrected him. ‘He was really worried about that lost parrot,’ I said. ‘You don’t suppose . . .?’
‘What about the oars?’ Mrs Waddington asked.
‘Left them in the boat,’ Kit said.
‘For goodness’ sake, why do you think we’ve put up these brackets? You know you’re supposed to stow them away every time?’
‘Leave me alone, Ma,’ he snapped back. The tension was getting to all of us. ‘I’ll take Mary Jane and look. I expect Robin’s blown away in the wind.’ I wanted to hug him for his decisiveness. It gave me strength, too.
By the time we got back to the vicarage it seemed as though the whole village had been mobilised. A large group was gathered at the church gate.
‘The wife told us about Jimmy, Vicar,’ George Diamond explained. ‘Mr Blackman’s been getting everyone organised. There are three search parties out already – one group’s gone up to the main road, another is covering the woods, and we’re searching houses and gardens. We’ll find the little fella, don’t you worry.’
‘That’s very reassuring. Thank you, everyone,’ Pa said. Somehow I didn’t find the idea of search parties at all reassuring. In fact, it made everything frighteningly real. The need for search parties meant that my brother was properly missing.
My guilt was hardening into something so painful that it seemed to grip me by the throat, threatening to throttle me: I was probably to blame for Jimmy’s disappearance. How could I admit that I had gone out last night, when Pa was asleep in a drunken stupor? Suppose Jimmy had been woken by the lightning, tried to wake Pa, then went out searching for me and somehow got hurt? Because of me, he would have been out all night in that terrible weather, cold and wet and afraid. If only I’d checked on him properly after I got home, then we could have found him sooner and brought him home. But now . . .
