by Emlyn Rees
‘We thought you were a burglar. I’m Sam Delamere,’ Sam explained curtly, shaking his hand as briefly as was polite. ‘Laurie and I have been sailing.’
‘Sam, of course! I know all about you. I talked to Rachel,’ James said. ‘She thought it would be great if I came and just sort of turned up! She organised Maria to come and let me in,’ James laughed and moved to put his arm around Laurie’s shoulder. ‘Looks like the surprise worked. Hey, gorgeous,’ he said, as he kissed the top of her head.
There was a brief pause.
‘I was just dropping Laurie off,’ Sam said, his tone curt and businesslike. ‘I’m sure you have a lot to catch up on.’
Every word felt like a slap to Laurie. She watched him look James up and down and then his eyes flicked towards Laurie’s. ‘Thanks for a lovely day, Laurie,’ he said.
‘Sam?’ Laurie called after him, but he pretended not to hear her. And in a moment he had gone.
Chapter XIV
Stepmouth, June 1953
‘Bastard,’ Arthur said.
Pete sniggered and Tony glanced across. Arthur was addressing a willow tree behind them. He’d got his fishing line snagged in among its leaves on his last cast and was now trying to yank it free.
Ferret-faced and skinny, stocky and chiselled, Pete and Arthur couldn’t have looked less similar. Standing here side by side in their shiny rainproof jackets and wellington boots, they looked like a vaudeville act in search of a stage. Not that Tony was in any kind of mood to laugh.
It was Sunday afternoon and the three of them were out for a day’s fishing, loaded up with bottles of beer and sandwiches to take them through till teatime.
Summerglade Hill rose up behind them to where the murky sky stirred and shifted like a great grey soup coming to the boil. They’d seen lightning a few minutes before and had counted three seconds till the thunder had rumbled across the valley. The storm was three miles away then, but hopefully it might still pass them by.
Tony glanced up. It had grown darker since then. That’s when he saw them, two white shapes, fast as bullets, darting across the sky.
‘What the hell –’ he said, pointing them out.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Arthur gasped. ‘They look like bloody space rockets . . .’
Pete laughed. ‘You read too many comic books, you great lump. They’re jet planes, from over at the airbase.’
The planes disappeared, leaving Tony wondering what it would be like, flying up there, speeding away from the town, watching it disappear behind you like a speck of dust. He whipped the tip of his grandad’s brown cane fishing rod over his shoulder and sent the line hissing out like a snake across the swollen River Step.
‘Nice cast,’ Pete commented, as Tony started to wind the slick dripping line steadily back in, monitoring its tension with his fingertips, patiently waiting for the tremble, or sudden jerk, that would indicate a fish biting down and starting its run.
‘Thanks.’
Tony’s answer came out as a kind of bark, the same as his comments had done all day. Because he didn’t want to be talking to Pete. He wanted to be talking to Rachel instead. Only he couldn’t. Because she was under strict curfew, busy revising for her summer-term exams which started in less than two weeks’ time.
Tony hadn’t spoken to her for two days now, not since they’d grabbed five precious minutes together after she’d run an errand for Bill to the Sea Catch Café. A delivery which had been accompanied by a sealed letter to Emily from Bill, Tony had noted. One which had made his boss blush as she’d read it.
‘Dating,’ Emily had described the situation with uncharacteristic brevity when he’d asked her about it. ‘We’re just having some fun . . .’
Which was what Tony wanted, too. But instead he had to subsist on stolen moments. And, of course, the weekly letters which Rachel had been leaving in the vase in the churchyard for him, every Sunday of the two months they’d been going out.
He’d learnt a lot about her from what she’d written. Small aspects of her life now loomed large in his mind: how her favourite poet was Christina Rossetti; what verb tables she’d learnt in French at school; that she loved the radio, but secretly longed for a television set; and how each night when she went to bed she stared up through the skylight and wished he’d appear . . .
But it was a different letter which he could feel in his trouser pocket now, digging into his thigh, fuelling his bad mood. It was one from his brother Keith which Pete had given him. (Keith always wrote care of Pete Booth, because if he’d written to Tony direct, his mother would only have torn up the letter.)
Up until now, Tony had always dealt with Keith by not thinking about what he’d actually done. He’d kept the murder just that: a word. He’d stopped himself ever attempting to imagine what it was that had actually happened at Vale Supplies that night. Instead, he’d separated the Keith who’d committed the murder, from the Keith who was his brother and who now lived in prison – in much the same way that, as a child, he’d always separated the drunk Keith who’d hit him at night, from the sober Keith who’d been his friend during the day.
Only, lately, Tony had started worrying himself sick about Keith getting out. In the letter in Tony’s pocket, Keith had told Tony his lawyer was working on grounds for a new appeal.
And if he did get out, what then? How would Keith fit into the new life Tony was building with Rachel? How could Tony then pretend that Keith hadn’t done the things he had?
The answer was he wouldn’t and he couldn’t. Tony loved his brother, but he had feelings now for Rachel, too. And he’d protect her. Not from the violent Keith, who Tony genuinely believed no longer existed. But from the memories of her past, which he knew Keith embodied.
He knew he should write to Keith to explain all of this – to tell him that their lives would have to diverge – but also knew that he didn’t know how.
‘What’s she like, then, this mystery girl of yours?’ Pete now asked him.
Tony sat on the upturned wooden beer crate. As he continued to wind in the reel, he stared poker-faced across the deep wooded gorge.
Pete scratched his sandy hair and cleared his throat. ‘I said –’
‘I heard you well enough the first time,’ Tony interrupted. ‘It just didn’t make enough sense to warrant a reply.’
The truth was, Pete’s question had thrown Tony. Apart from Emily, he’d spoken to no one about Rachel Vale.
‘Well, you’ve certainly been spending all your time with someone,’ Pete persisted. ‘And it’s certainly not us.’
‘I work for a living, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ Tony replied. ‘Which is more than can be said for you two –’
Tony managed to stop himself before he said schoolkids. But it didn’t stop him from thinking it. Because they were different to him now. They learnt; he grafted. They lived with their parents; he fended for himself. They wanted to feel girls up; he wanted to know how Rachel felt about him.
‘And I’ve known you long enough to know there’s more to it than that,’ Pete chided him.
Too long, Tony thought. The days they’d spent shooting milk bottles off walls with catapults now felt like they’d happened to someone else. Like the river before him, their lives had moved on.
‘Pretty, is she?’ Pete teased. ‘Goes like the clappers, does she?’
A few months ago and Tony would have been happy enough to dish the dirt. He’d been the first of his friends to lose his virginity, a year and a half ago now, to a sour-faced Australian tourist twice his age. Other girls had followed, and he’d kissed and told on every one.
But Rachel Vale was different. Telling Pete and Arthur about having sex with her had been inconceivable, right from the start. Not only because, like every other aspect of his and Rachel’s relationship, it was imperative that it remained a secret, but also because Pete and Arthur simply wouldn’t have understood.
Four weeks ago, it had happened, his and Rachel’s first time. They’d been fooling around on the
dusty box bed he’d rigged up in his grandad’s shed, when she’d presented him with a French letter that she’d pinched from Pearl’s father’s surgery the last time she’d been round at their house.
It was strange, thinking of it even now, but of the physical sex – the stripping off of their clothes, the awkward entwining of limbs and sliding and adjusting and eventual fitting together of their bodies – he now had almost no memory. It had been brief, uncomfortable, even painful for her, he knew. So much so that halfway through they’d had to stop.
It was what they’d gone on to feel as they’d lain beside one another on the crumpled blankets that he remembered most. A cool breeze had drifted through the window and stroked across his bare, sweating skin. As he’d moved his hand towards her, she’d reached for him. When their fingertips had touched, he’d felt peace flowing through him in a way he’d never experienced before. It was like the sensation he’d once undergone as he’d stood alone in St Hilda’s Church as a child and stared up at the vaulted ceiling. Like that, but magnified a thousand times more. It had been like dying, feeling that much alive, being so aware of everything around him, as if he’d only had seconds left to live.
‘Do you feel it, too?’ she’d asked.
‘Yes.’
Her hand had squeezed down on his.
He stared now at the river sliding past beneath him, as deceptively sluggish and solid as a flow of setting lava.
‘Or maybe this one’s not pretty at all,’ Pete continued to muse aloud. ‘Not like Margo Mitchell.’ He winked across at Arthur who immediately picked up on the cue.
‘The girl who puts the tit into titanic,’ they simultaneously said.
Tony smiled at the old joke, but it was a weak smile. He stood up and cast the spinner out over the waters again.
‘And not like Alice Banks with her luscious lips and yo-yo knickers,’ Pete went on. ‘In fact, I wouldn’t mind betting that Tony’s new lucky lady is a bit of a horse-frightener, and that’s the real reason why he’s keeping her to himself.’ He sniggered. ‘Aye, face like a pig, arse like a pig, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Arthur snorted with laughter.
‘Is that what you make her do, Tony?’ Pete enquired. ‘Wear a bag on her head when you’re slipping it in?’
‘You know what?’ Tony answered.
‘What?’
‘If you’re gonna fish, then why not fish for something you’ve got a hope in hell of catching?’ He shoved the rod into Pete’s hand. ‘And until then, why don’t you just change the record or shut up?’
‘You’re a bad-tempered bastard, Tony Glover,’ Pete told him. ‘And whoever she is, she sure as hell isn’t making you happy.’
Tony drained the last of his Guinness from the bottle and tossed it into the river. It disappeared beneath the surface, before bobbing back up again, several yards further down.
Tony was sick of the secrecy. Sick of bottling up everything he felt. Rachel didn’t make him ashamed. She filled him with pride. And that’s what really got to him the most. He didn’t want to lie to his friends about her. Or act as though she didn’t exist. He wanted to shout about her from the rooftops and tell the world that she was his.
He felt washed through all of a sudden with weariness. And longing, too. Because the one person who’d understand how he felt right now was Rachel, and she was the one person he couldn’t talk to.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Pete.
If Pete answered, Tony never heard, because at that exact moment the clouds burst open and rain battered down, so hard you could scarcely believe it was liquid.
Then they were running, dragging their bags and rods behind them, tripping over each other, stumbling and slipping and scrabbling up the steep side of the valley to the shelter of the beech trees at the top.
As they stood there laughing, gasping for breath, all of them with their backs against the same tree, Tony felt himself relaxing for the first time in days. He took the beer which Arthur had opened for him and drank, tipping back his head and staring up, following the line of the trunk to the top of the tree.
Then his smile switched to a grin as he thought of a way to make himself feel happier still.
By ten o’clock on Monday night, the streets of Stepmouth were empty and quiet. Five minutes had passed now, since Tony had been leaning up against the broad shadowy trunk of the old oak tree which stood next to Vale Supplies.
Bunting left over from Coronation Day the week before hung from the branches. There’d been a street party here, which Tony had avoided. Rachel had spent it with her family and he hadn’t wanted to be out celebrating with anyone else. He took a final pull on his Double Ace cigarette, before flicking it towards the gutter where it expired with a hiss on the slick wet pavement.
The rain had been drumming down steadily all day. In fact, the last time Tony could remember it not raining in the last week was in the few hours prior to the cloudburst he, Arthur and Pete had been caught out in the day before.
It all added up to bad news for the Sea Catch Café. The deluge of out-of-town customers which Emily had been banking on to sample her new evening menu had entirely dried up. Each afternoon Emily had covered the word Café on the sign above the door with a smaller, hand-painted sign which read Bistro, in an effort to woo more adventurous trade. But each night she’d taken it back down, with little or no results. Their consommés and sauces and puddings, on which they’d worked so hard, had all ended up in the bin.
Tony felt for her. Truly, he did. She’d been good to him and he wanted her to succeed. He’d invested enough of his own time in the café to make it personal. Now that her parents had finally moved to Pembrokeshire, the café’s future was down to Tony and Emily alone. That said, he’d been glad that no one had showed up tonight, hungry and wanting to be fed, because he’d been let off work early as a result.
‘No point in both of us hanging around waiting for no one to arrive,’ Emily had declared. She’d offered him a lift home in her father’s van, back to his grandad’s shed near Brookford, but he’d declined. The cycle ride would do him good, he’d told her, as he’d taken his black oilskin jacket from the hook on the door.
She hadn’t tried to change his mind. A few weeks ago, she’d offered to help find him a room to rent, but he’d turned that down, too. He’d told her he was fine taking care of himself, and she’d accepted it without prying any further. Self-reliance. She had it by the truckload. It had now taken root in him, too.
He stepped out from under the oak tree’s shadows and stared up once more at the long, canopied branches which stretched out over the edge of the roof of Vale Supplies like a giant umbrella. Once more, he calculated the drop from the high branch to the roof, while once more wondering if it really would be strong enough to hold his weight.
It was risky, dangerous and stupid, he told himself, checking his jacket pocket for the folded piece of paper. He remembered the words he’d written there that lunchtime on his break, copied from the anthology he’d found in the town library.
‘Always be this romantic.’
That’s what Rachel had told him that first time they’d kissed in the graveyard. And that was why he was here now: to prove to her that he always would be.
The thought pushed him on. Ducking back under the tree, he reached up and gripped a branch. Then his arms snapped into motion. A swing of his legs, a twist of his abdomen and chest, and he was up, spreadeagled between the tree’s limbs, like a fly in a web.
He moved quickly then, negotiating his way up through the thick foliage. Branches swished and hissed. Water showered down. He pictured the whole tree shaking. His heart pounded. Just one look, he thought, from Bill or his mother from that near first-floor window and he’d be rumbled. Just one person hurrying homewards down the street and the same . . .
Quick then. Faster, faster, as fast as he could. He was sweating, burning up, in the treetop now, drawing level with the roof. Now moving sideways, edging inch by inch, away from the trunk, towa
rds the building. Under his feet, the branches grew thinner. The branch he clung to above started to bow. Still he kept working his hands along it, spreading his weight, tightrope-walking, balancing, trying not to slip.
As he looked down, he saw it: the overflowing guttering, the edge of the roof, the greasy black Welsh slate and the yellow rectangle of the skylight in Rachel’s room.
It was all there, all within his reach . . .
When he jumped, he didn’t consider the possibility of failure. If he had done, he would have faltered and fallen. They’d have found him tomorrow with his back broken and his neck snapped on the hard stone pavement below.
Instead, his jump became a leap of faith. He let go of the branch above and as the branch below wilted, he sprang upwards and outwards like a cat. Conviction carried him, stretching him, pushing him, taking him to Rachel.
He hit the roof hard, landing flat and slithering down its slope. The noise was horrific. An almighty creak. It sounded like the whole structure would cave in. He lunged at the skylight’s slight wooden frame, reached it, got a grip. With a final effort, he hauled himself up and stared down through the glass at Rachel who was staring back up at him with burning, unflinching eyes. A slate cracked by his foot. It rattled thunderously over the guttering. A moment’s silence – then smash! – it shattered on the pavement below.
Rachel had the window open in seconds. He scrambled inside. Intoxication, elation . . . he felt like he’d jumped from sobriety to drunkenness in the blink of an eye.
He’d made it.
In the weak light thrown off by her desk lamp, her skin looked translucent, as if it had been drained of blood. The long white nightdress she wore only added to her ghostliness.
‘You’re crazy,’ she whispered in disbelief.
He reached out to take her in his arms.
