Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  That year, there was one big house overlooking the sea. It was a maze of rooms opening out of each other, with a glassed-in sun room to one side that smelt of dried seaweed and rubber overshoes. The children ran through the rooms, shouting their discoveries to each other while the maids and nannies unpacked.

  Later, in the early evening, there was the first scramble down on to the beach. The clean air was full of salt and the cries of gulls. Nathaniel put on his panama hat and went with the children, letting them run ahead to the water’s edge and not calling them back to walk properly as the nannies would have done. From the high-water mark, where the girls hesitated in fear of wetting their white shoes, they looked back and saw Nathaniel talking to a fisherman.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Julius called. ‘Can we go fishing?’

  When he rejoined them, Nathaniel was beaming. ‘Surprise,’ he announced, waving his big hands. The children surged around him.

  ‘What is it? What?’

  ‘Look and see.’

  They followed him across the sand. There was an outcrop of rock draped with pungent bladder wrack, and an iron ring was let into the rock. A rusty stain bled beneath it. A length of rope was hitched through the ring, and the other end of it was secured to a small blue dinghy beached on the sand. A herring gull perched briefly on the boat’s prow, and then lifted away again.

  Grace stooped to read the faded lettering. ‘It’s called the Mabel.’

  ‘Your Mabel, for the summer,’ Nathaniel told her.

  ‘Ours? Our own?’

  ‘I’ll teach you to row.’

  Hugo was already fumbling with the rope. ‘I can row.’

  Nathaniel and the fisherman eased the dinghy down to the water’s edge, steadying it when the keel lifted free and bobbed on the ripples.

  ‘Six of us. You’ll have to sit still. Hugo in the front there, Jake and Julius in the middle. Leave room for the oarsmen. The girls at the stern.’ He ordered them fluently, and they scrambled to his directions, even Hugo. The fisherman in his tall rubber waders lifted Clio and swung her over the little gulf of water.

  ‘There, miss. Now your sister’s turn.’ He went back for Grace, and hoisted her too.

  ‘She’s my cousin, not my sister,’ Clio told him quickly.

  ‘Is that so? She’s like enough to be your twin.’

  ‘He’s my real twin,’ Clio pointed at Julius.

  ‘But he’s nothing like so pretty,’ the man twinkled at her. Clio was sufficiently disarmed by the compliment to forget the mistake. Nathaniel dipped the oars, and the Mabel slid forward over the lazy swell.

  There had been boat rides before, but none had seemed as magical as the first trip in their own Mabel. They bobbed out over the green water, into the realm of the gulls. Only a few yards separated them from the prosaic shore, but they felt part of another world. They could look back at the old one, at the holiday house diminished by blue distance and at the white speck of a nanny’s apron passing in front of it. Out here there were the cork markers of lobster pots, a painted buoy with another gull perching on it, and the depths of the mysterious water.

  Grace leant to one side so that her fingers dipped into the waves. She sighed with pleasure. It was the first day of the holidays. There were six whole weeks to enjoy before she would be returned to Miss Alcott and the tedium of the schoolroom at Stretton. Jake and Julius were here. She was happy.

  Nathaniel bent over the oars. The dinghy skimmed along, and the sea breeze blew the railway fumes out of their heads.

  Jake said, ‘I can see Aunt Blanche. I think she’s waving.’

  Nathaniel laughed. He had a big, noisy laugh. ‘I’m sure she’s waving. It’s our signal to make for dry land.’

  He paddled vigorously with one oar and the boat swung in a circle. When it was broadside to the sea a wave larger than the others slapped against the side and sprayed over them. The girls shrieked with delight and shook out the skirts of their white dresses.

  ‘Rules of the sea,’ Nathaniel boomed, as the Mabel rose on the crest of the next wave and swept towards the beach.

  The rules were that no child was allowed to take out the dinghy without an adult watching. The girls were not allowed to row unless one of the fathers came in the boat. The boys would be permitted to row themselves, once they had passed a swimming test that would be set by Nathaniel.

  The boys often bathed in the summer holidays, wearing long navy-blue woollen bathing suits that buttoned on the shoulders. To their disappointment the girls were not allowed to do the same, because Blanche and Eleanor had never done so and didn’t consider it desirable for their daughters. They had to content themselves with removing their shoes and long stockings and paddling in the shallows.

  ‘Are the rules understood?’ Nathaniel demanded ferociously.

  ‘We understand,’ they answered in unison.

  The keel of the dinghy ran into the sand like a spoon digging into sugar. The fisherman had gone home. The boys jumped ashore, Nathaniel lifted Clio and Grace launched herself into Jake’s arms. He staggered a little with the weight of her, and a wave ran up and licked over his shoes.

  They all laughed, even Clio.

  As they trudged back up to the house Grace said to Clio, ‘I must say, I think your father can be splendid sometimes.’

  ‘So do I,’ Clio answered with pride.

  The days of the holiday slipped by, as they always did.

  John Leominster was in Scotland for the shooting. Nathaniel went away to London, then came back again. Blanche and Eleanor stayed put, happy to be together, as they had been since babyhood. They wrote their letters side by side in the morning room, walked together in the afternoons, took tea with their children when they came in from the beach and listened to the news of the day, and after they had changed in the evenings they ate dinner alone together in the candlelit dining room, the food served to them by the manservant who came from Stretton for the holiday.

  The children, from elsewhere in the house, could often hear the sound of their laughter. Clio and Grace listened, their admiration touched with resentment at their own exclusion. They knew that the two of them could never be so tranquil alone together, without Jake, without Julius.

  For the children there were races on the beach, picnics and drives and hunts for cowrie shells, and, that year, rowing in the Mabel. The boys passed their swimming tests, and became confident oarsmen. They learnt to dive from the dinghy, shouting to each other as they balanced precariously and then launched themselves, setting the little boat wildly rocking. The girls could only watch enviously from the waterline, listening to the splashes and spluttering.

  ‘I could swim if they would just let me try,’ Grace muttered.

  ‘And so could I, easily,’ Clio affirmed. ‘Why isn’t Pappy here, so that we could at least go in the boat with them?’

  They weren’t looking at each other when Grace said, ‘We should go anyway. Prove we can, and then they’ll have no reason to stop us any more, will they?’

  ‘I don’t think we should. Not without asking.’

  Grace laughed scornfully. ‘If we ask, we’ll be told no. Don’t you know anything about older people? Anyway, Jake won’t let anything happen.’

  It was always Jake they looked to. Not Hugo, even though Hugo was the eldest.

  ‘I’m going to go,’ Grace announced. ‘You needn’t, if you’re scared.’

  ‘I never said I was scared.’

  They did look at each other then. The fisherman had been right, they were alike as sisters. Not identical like their mothers, the resemblance was not as close as that, but they had the same straight noses and blue-grey eyes, and the same thick, dark hair springing back from high foreheads. When they looked they seemed to see themselves in mirror fashion, and neither of them had ever quite trusted the reflection.

  Grace turned away first. She lifted her arm, and waved it in a wide arc over her head. The white sleeve of her middy-blouse fluttered like a truce signal.

 
‘Jake,’ she called. ‘Ja-ake, Julius, come here, won’t you?’

  Jake’s black head, glistening wet like a seal’s, appeared alongside the dinghy. He rested his arms on the stern, hoisting the upper half of his body out of the water. He was almost thirteen. His shoulders were beginning to broaden noticeably under the blue woollen bathing suit.

  ‘What?’

  Hugo and Julius bobbed up alongside him. Hugo’s head looked very blond and square alongside his cousins’.

  Grace’s arm signal changed to a beckoning curl. ‘Come in to shore for a minute.’

  Jake began lazily kicking. Julius and then Hugo dived and swam. Under Jake’s propulsion the Mabel drifted towards the beach. Clio thought, They always do what she wants. She turned to look up the sand. The two nannies were sitting as usual on a blanket on the lee of the sea-wall. Tabitha’s perambulator stood close by. The two younger Strettons, Thomas and Phoebe, were playing in the sand. They were turning sandcastles out of seawater-rusted tin buckets. Hills the chauffeur had put up the canvas awning ready for the mothers, but they had not come down yet. They would still be attending to their volumes of correspondence. Their empty steamer chairs sat side by side, and Hugo’s red pennant flew bravely above them in the stiffening breeze.

  Clio saw the fisherman a little further up the beach. He was busy with his coils of nets.

  When she looked behind her again it was to see the boys plunging through the shallows in sparkling jets of spray. Mabel rocked enticingly at the end of her painter.

  ‘It isn’t fair,’ she heard Grace saying. ‘You have all the fun in the boat. I think you should take me out now.’

  ‘Us,’ Clio insisted, and Grace looked at her but said nothing. She stood characteristically with her hands on her hips, her chin pushed out. Hugo laughed and Julius began to recite Nathaniel’s rules of the sea. Jake stood and looked at Grace, smiling a little.

  Grace fixed on him. ‘There are grown-up people on the beach, the nannies and the fisherman. You three have been rowing and swimming all week. What difference will there be just in having us in the boat? And once we’ve been, they won’t be able to stop us going again, will they? The rules are petty and unfair.’

  ‘That’s true, at least.’ Support came from Hugo, who was never anxious to accept Nathaniel’s jurisdiction.

  ‘But we were told,’ Julius began.

  ‘Stay here with Clio, then.’

  The twins shook their heads, and Grace smiled once more at Jake. ‘Wouldn’t it be fun for all of us to go out together, on our own?’

  He put out his hand and took hers, making a little bow. ‘Will you step this way, my lady?’

  Grace bobbed a curtsey, and hopped into the dinghy as Hugo held it. Her white cotton ankles twinkled under her skirts. Clio followed her, as quickly as she could. Julius sat in the prow and Hugo and Jake took an oar each. The rowlocks creaked and the Mabel turned out to sea. The nannies were still watching the babies.

  It was exhilarating out beyond the breakers. The swell ran under the ribs of the dinghy, seeming to Clio like the undulations of breath in the flank of some vast animal. The waves looked bigger out here than they had done from the shore, but Hugo and Jake pulled confidently together and the boat rode over the wave-breaths like a cork. On the beach Nanny Brodribb suddenly stood up and ran forward, with her white apron moulded against her by the wind. She was calling, but none of the children heard her or looked round.

  Grace let her head fall back. Her even teeth showed in a smile of elation. The satisfaction of getting her own way together with the sharp pleasure of the boat ride and Jake bending in front of her made her eyes bright and her cheeks rosy.

  ‘You see?’ she murmured. The question was for Clio, wedged beside her in the stern. ‘I was right, wasn’t I?’

  They rowed on, turning in an arc away from the horizon, and once again a wave caught them broadside and washed in over them. This time, instead of laughing, Clio gave a small yelp of alarm. The water seeped in her lap, wetting her legs and thighs. It was surprisingly cold.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Jake told her.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Grace sang. She was filled with happiness, the sense of her own strength, after being confined on the beach with the women and the babies. She saw the blue sky riffled with thin clouds and wanted to reach it. It was joy and not bravado that made her scramble up to stand on the seat with her arms spread out.

  Look at me.

  They did look, all of them, turning their faces up slowly, as if frozen. All except for Clio, whose eyes were fixed on Grace’s feet planted on the rocking seat beside her wet skirts. She saw the button fastenings, and the rim of wet sand clinging to the leather. A second later the dinghy pitched violently. There was a wordless cry and the shoes flew upwards.

  Jake shouted hoarsely, ‘Grace.’

  Clio looked then. She heard the cry cut off and the terrible splash. She wrenched her head and saw the eruption of bubbles at the stern of the Mabel. Grace was gone, swallowed up by the sea. The boat was already drifting away from the swirling bubbles. It pitched again, almost capsizing as Jake and then Hugo launched themselves into the water. The boat began to spin helplessly. The sun seemed to have gone in, the brilliant morning to have turned dark.

  ‘Take an oar. Steady her,’ Julius screamed.

  Clio was still staring into the water. In that instant she saw Grace, rising through it. Her face under the greenish skin of the sea was a pale oval, her eyes and mouth black holes of utter terror.

  ‘Row,’ Julius was shouting at her.

  ‘I don’t know how to,’ Clio was sobbing. She stumbled forward, took up the wooden oar, warm from Jake’s hands, and pulled on it.

  Grace’s head had broken the surface. She was thrashing with her arms, but no sound came out of her mouth. Then she was sinking again, and Hugo and Jake ploughed on through the swell to try to reach her.

  ‘Pull with me,’ Julius instructed. Clio tried to harness her gasping fear into obeying him. She stared at his white knuckles on the other oar, dipped her own and drew it into her chest. Out, and then in again.

  When she looked once more, Jake and Hugo had Grace’s body between them. She was lashing out at them with the last of her strength, her staring eyes sightless, and for a long moment it seemed that all three of them would be submerged. A wave poured over them, filling Grace’s open mouth. Jake flung back his head, kicking towards the Mabel and trying to haul her dead weight with him. She hung motionless now with her head under the water.

  Julius rowed, and Clio battled to keep time with him. Her teeth chattered with cold and terror and she repeated over and over in her head, Help us, God. Help us, God.

  The gap narrowed between the boat and the heavy mass in the water. Hugo had his arm under Grace’s shoulders. ‘Come on,’ Julius muttered. On the beach the two nannies had run to the water’s edge. Their thin cries sounded like the seagulls. Julius saw too that the fisherman had shoved out in his much bigger boat, the one he used to row around the lobster pots. The high red-painted prow surged through the breakers.

  Hugo and Julius were closer. Grace was between them, a tangled mass of hair and clothes and blanched skin.

  ‘Ship your oar,’ Julius ordered Clio. He leaned over the side, tilting the boat dangerously again, stretching out his arms. His hand closed in Grace’s hair. He hauled at her, feeling the terrible weight, and another wave flung the dinghy upwards so that his oar rammed up into his armpit. Hugo was choking and flailing now, and Jake’s lips were drawn back from his teeth as he gasped for breath.

  ‘Hold her,’ he begged Julius. In spite of the pain Julius knotted his fingers in the sodden hair, and felt the body rise as Jake put his last effort into propelling Grace towards him. Between them, they forced one dripping arm and then the other over the dinghy’s side. Julius took another handful of the back of her dress and her head rolled, pressing her streaming cheek against the blue ribs of the Mabel. Jake and Hugo could do no more than cling on to the same side. Clio lea
nt out the other way as far as she dared.

  She was dazed to realize how far out to sea they had been carried. The beach and the headland and the houses seemed to belong to another world, a safe and warm and infinitely inviting place that she had never taken notice of until now, when it had gone beyond her reach. The words started up in her head again, Please God, help us.

  The red prow of the fisherman’s boat reared over Jake, Hugo and Grace. The man lifted one oar and paddled with the other, manoeuvring the heavy craft as if it was an eggshell. He leant over the side and Clio saw his dirty hands and his thick, brown forearms. He seized Grace and with one movement lifted her up and over the side of his boat, her legs twisting and bumping. The fisherman laid her gently in the bottom of his boat. The sight of the inanimate body was shocking and pitiful. Clio knew that Grace was dead. She forced her hand against her mouth, suppressing a cry.

  With the same ease, the fisherman hauled Hugo and Jake in after Grace. They sank down, staring, huddled together and trembling. Their hair was plastered over their faces, fair and dark, and seawater and spittle trailed out of their blue mouths.

  The man leant across and lifted the trailing bow-rope of the Mabel. He made it fast to the stern of his own boat and then lifted his oars again. The two boats rose on the crest of a wave and plunged towards the beach.

  A little knot of people had gathered, watching and waiting. As soon as the red boat came within wading distance, two men splashed out and hoisted the bundle of Grace between them. They ran back and grimly spread her on the sand, rolling her on to her belly, lifting her arms above her head.

  Clio let herself be lifted in her turn, and then she was set gently on her feet. She wanted to run away up the beach, away from the sea that gnawed at her heels, but there was no power in her legs. She almost fell, but someone’s hands caught at her. Part of the murmuring crowd closed around her, and then she heard the very sound of the warm world, the lovely safe world. It was the faint crackle of starch. She lifted her head and saw Nanny’s apron, and half fell against it. The scent of laundry rooms and flatirons and safety overwhelmed her, and she looked up and saw Nanny Cooper’s face. Her cheeks were wet and her eyes were bulging with fear.