by Sarah Rayne
There was nothing here. He could see traces of the police investigations – some polythene sheeting rolled up and presumably forgotten, and tattered remnants of tape that had probably once said crime scene and been wound round the entire structure. But there was nothing else. If I saw anything it was simply a shaft of moonlight, he thought with relief, and turned to go back up to the house. The dining room light shone like a beacon, and Theo unlocked the French windows and stepped thankfully inside. The warmth of the room closed round him, and he locked the windows again and drew the curtains against the night. Safe.
He was crossing the room to the hall, thinking he would make some supper, when he saw that the portrait of Charmery was no longer in its place. He looked round, wondering if it had fallen off its hook.
It had not fallen off its hook. It was on the table, near his laptop, set upright against the desk lamp. This was surely not possible, because he had absolutely no memory of putting it there. Had Innes done so? No, they had not even taken it off the wall when he was here. Walking a bit unsteadily Theo went over to the table. The desk lamp was still on; it shed a golden glow over Charmery’s enigmatic stare. But something had changed about the sketch. Was it just the light? Was the frame damaged? But even as the questions formed, Theo saw what was different and his mind tumbled in disbelief.
In front of the sketch, half propped against it as if it had been placed there very carefully, was a dried flower. Its colour was faded and cobwebby, and although Theo knew very little about flowers, he recognized this one. Several times in those long-ago summers he had cut one and laid it on Charmery’s pillow for her to find when she went to bed.
It was a Charmian rose.
Theo had no idea how long he stood staring at the fragile, sinister outline of the flower against Charmery’s portrait. He had managed to convince himself that the chiming clock in the bedroom was due to some quirk of the weather or the house itself, but there could only be two explanations for what he was seeing now. One was that someone really was managing to get into the house and that someone had waited outside and crept in while he was investigating the boathouse light. But this was so elaborate and pointless, Theo could not bring himself to believe it.
But outlandish as it was, the other explanation was so bizarre Theo did not intend considering it, even for a second. It was that Charmery herself had returned.
CHAPTER SIX
Theo had been almost twenty-one, at the end of his third year at Cambridge, and Charmery was seventeen, still at school, but already making plans for what she would do when she left.
‘But it doesn’t sound as if she’ll need to do anything, if she doesn’t want to,’ said Theo to his mother who drove him to Melbray at the end of June. Theo was spending the whole of the summer there; Petra would stay for one night, then go off again.
‘Won’t she want to try for university? Or at least get a job?’ said Petra, concentrating on the road.
‘She says not. She says her father will give her an allowance and she’ll probably get herself a flat somewhere trendy like Chelsea or Holland Park. I suppose,’ said Theo thoughtfully, ‘the allowance will be quite generous. Uncle Desmond and Aunt Helen are very well off, aren’t they?’
‘I hope so,’ said Petra rather wryly. ‘Helen certainly spends enough to give that impression – remember the party they gave for the millennium?’
‘Nancy had to be decanted into a taxi at two a.m.,’ said Theo, grinning at the memory.
‘The legend is that Desmond made a lot of money a few years ago when he was attached to the Treasury.’
‘The unpronounceable Middle-European state,’ said Theo, smiling, because the elder Kendals still occasionally planted a gentle jibe about Desmond’s months in some exotic country, just emerged from communism and needing help with its new monetary policy. Great-aunt Emily Kendal, who was Theo’s godmother and who liked to regard herself as the matriarch of the family, was fond of saying it was Desmond’s sole claim to fame. ‘He never lets anyone forget about it,’ she said.
‘Wherever it was that Desmond went, I think he did get some huge fee for the work,’ said Petra. ‘But I wouldn’t like to say whether there’s any of the money left.’ She frowned, then said, ‘I wonder if Charmery will turn into a kind of It-girl. A bit of modelling, a bit of publicity work. Travel and smart parties and getting her name in minor gossip columns.’
For once Petra sounded bitter, which was unlike her. Theo said, ‘What an aimless existence. I should think she’d want to work properly. It’s far better – far more satisfying – to be paid honest coinage for working—’
‘Oh God, next you’ll be quoting Karl Marx at me.’
‘What’s wrong with Marx?’ demanded Theo.
Petra glanced at him, and said, warmly, ‘D’you know, you’re a constant delight to me.’
‘Lot of slop,’ said Theo, which was a family saying, generally used if someone appeared in danger of getting emotional or over-demonstrative. The Kendals, en masse, were not great on being emotional or demonstrative.
It had been an oppressively hot summer but there was an unsettled feeling that had nothing to do with the weather. Looking back, Theo thought it had been the summer of endings: Charmery, seventeen, was approaching the end of her school life, and Theo was facing his final Cambridge year that September. Even Lesley, who was fourteen, had left her school for a new one that had a better art department.
Despite the thunderstorms, the clans, as Desmond said, had gathered in force that year. Desmond himself came and went at intervals, pleading pressure of business, sometimes bringing sheaves of paperwork with him, and shutting himself away in the small room off the hall which Helen had designated as the study, but which was not much more than a general dumping ground for things people could not be bothered with.
Guff was at Fenn as he was most summers, although this year he was calling it the summer solstice because he had recently become interested in ancient religions. He had met a young lady who was instructing him in the history of the druids, he said. There was still an Order of Druids in existence it appeared, and he was hoping to accompany them to their midsummer’s vigil at Stonehenge, although some kind of endowment was apparently required before he would actually be allowed to join the Order itself.
‘She drove him here and spent the night,’ said Helen, after the high priestess of druidism had left next morning.
‘Just don’t tell me which bed she actually ended up in,’ said Nancy.
‘I gave her the spare bed in Lesley’s room,’ said Helen, to which Nancy said that was as maybe, but there had been a suspicious amount of creaking of landing floorboards around midnight.
‘Oh, Guff’s encounters are never physical.’
‘I should think not at his age,’ said Nancy tartly.
Nancy herself was at Fenn House that summer because Helen had invited Great-aunt Emily, and Nancy was going to help with her. She was very good with elderly people, said Nancy, and did not hear Aunt Emily telling Charmery and Theo if she had known that old bat Nancy was coming she would have gone to Frinton-on-Sea instead.
But even though it had been a peculiar summer, what with Guff’s druidism and Nancy’s bossiness and Great-aunt Emily’s bluntness, and what with Lesley’s two small brothers turning the lawn into a football pitch, there were no quarrels. The Kendals did not go in for quarrels any more than they went in for emotions. They sniped a bit and grumbled a bit, but in the main they were civilized and polite to one another.
‘I love them all madly,’ Charmery said to Theo one Sunday afternoon towards the end of that summer. ‘Of course I do. But don’t you sometimes just want to run away from them, as far as possible?’
Theo looked at her. She was wearing her big 1920s-style straw hat, and she had tucked a vivid pink Charmian rose into the band which ought to have clashed with her bronze hair but somehow did not. The hat shaded her eyes, deepening their colour almost to jade, casting light shadows over her high cheekbones. She had on a thi
n silk skirt and a white cotton top – simple but probably expensive – and her bare arms and legs were tanned. He wondered if he would ever stop feeling this overwhelming surge of love and desire every time he saw her. But when she said this about running away from the family, he said, very lightly, ‘I often want to run away from them. Shall we do it together, right away?’
There was no knowing how she would answer which was why he had kept his tone flippant, but she looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, then said, ‘Yes, let’s. Where shall we go?’
‘To the river?’ Theo’s heart had performed a double somersault. ‘The boathouse?’
The boathouse was a bit of a joke because the river frontage was supposed to be the house’s main attraction. Desmond always said ruefully that it had added thousands to the purchase price and when he was declared bankrupt they could all blame the River Chet. In practice, the boathouse was hardly ever used although there was a rather battered rowing boat moored in its leaky gloom. Charmery kept suggesting to her father that he buy a motor launch, and Helen got leaflets about boat furniture and cabin fridges so they could drink chilled wine on deck, but Nancy and Great-aunt Emily said it was a waste of time. ‘In high summer the river smells like a sewage farm,’ said Aunt Emily. ‘I don’t care if Desmond buys the Queen Mary, I’m staying on dry land, thank you.’
Guff had taken the rowing boat on the river a couple of years ago. He had been interested in photography that summer and wanted to capture dappled river banks and weeping willow trailing into the water. There was a very nice young person in his local photographic shop who had been advising him on what cameras he should buy. Lesley had gone with Guff to help carry the light meters and flash attachments which he had bought from the young person’s shop, but unfortunately they had capsized the boat, the cameras had sunk irretrievably, and Guff had to be fished out and given rum toddies to ward off a cold.
The river did not smell like a sewage farm today. As Charmery and Theo went along the rather uneven garden path towards the boathouse, and down the mossy steps there was only the scent of roses and of the lavender from the little herb garden lying on the warm afternoon like a drug.
‘All the perfumes of Arabia,’ said Theo, who had been studying the Elizabethans that term. ‘So perfumed that the winds were love-sick.’
‘If you’re going to start waxing poetical I warn you I shall counter it with “’Twas on the good ship Venus”.’
‘Dear me, what do they teach children at schools these days, I wonder?’
‘You needn’t play the po-faced older cousin, because you taught me that one,’ said Charmery, and grinned. Somehow their hands had linked, and the feel of her fingers against Theo’s palm was the strongest aphrodisiac in the world.
The boathouse was dim and secret. There was the faint lapping sound of water and soft green waterlight rippled on the walls.
‘It’s an enchanted cave,’ said Charmery, pausing in the doorway with delight.
‘It’s very old,’ said Theo. ‘That’s one of the things that always intrigues me about it. It was here long before Fenn House was built. My mamma once told me there’s a local legend that people used to see will o’ the wisps dancing across this part of the river like human fireflies. They’d beckon to you, but if you followed them they led you to a watery grave.’
‘We should have brought a bottle of cider or something,’ said Charmery. ‘We could have cooled the bottle in the river like they do on films. Except the river’s too muddy, isn’t it? We’d probably catch typhoid or dysentery. Let’s sit down – preferably not on the floor, those planks look disgusting.’
But Theo spread his cotton sweater on the planks and Charmery sat down, then pretended to shiver at the cool miasma from the river so that it was the most natural thing in the world for Theo to put his arm round her for warmth. She pulled off the straw sunhat and a swathe of her hair tumbled loose, brushing against his face. The sheer intimacy of this was like the igniting of a touch-paper, and Theo’s long pent-up desire exploded like a thousand sky rockets. Before he knew it, he had pulled her to him and was kissing her with such desperate urgency that she half flinched.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Theo, releasing her at once. ‘I didn’t mean to do that. I didn’t hurt you, did I?’
‘No, but I wouldn’t care if you did.’ The soft radiance of the boathouse reflected in her eyes. ‘Kiss me again, Theo. Do it so hard I faint.’
This time, when she freed her lips, she said, ‘Why did you never do this before?’
‘Did you want me to?’
‘God, yes. For about a year now.’
‘A whole year wasted,’ said Theo, and then somehow they were lying on the planks, and the dank wood of the boathouse floor no longer mattered. Her body was pressing against him and his mind was spinning with the ecstasy. But I can’t, he thought. I daren’t. She’s only seventeen, she’s my cousin… ‘Oh God, Charmery, we must stop.’
‘No! Don’t stop.’
She pushed aside the thin skirt she was wearing and he realized with a fresh surge of desire that she was naked beneath it. When his hand slid between her thighs she shivered with delight, and he felt her hand reach for him.
‘So this is how you feel and this is how you behave when you’re being passionate,’ she said suddenly. ‘Isn’t this weird? We know each other so well, but we don’t know any of this about each other. You’re a different person all of a sudden. You’re not the cousin I’ve known since I was small.’
‘You’re different as well,’ said Theo, but this was not true, because this was a Charmery he knew very well indeed from all the fantasies and dreams over the years. But five minutes later – five minutes of breathless and increasingly urgent passion – he sat up and said tersely, ‘Charmery, we really must stop. Apart from anything else, someone might come in.’
‘No one ever comes down here. Anyhow, I don’t care if the whole family stands in the boat and watches us. Put your hand back… Oh God, Theo, that’s such bliss…’
‘This is something I’ve dreamed about for so long – but I don’t want to do anything you’ll regret afterwards.’
‘I won’t regret anything. Not with you. Will you regret anything?’
‘God, no! I’ve wanted to make love to you since you were about fourteen,’ said Theo.
‘Perv.’
‘Lolita.’
They smiled at one another.
‘Our thoughts fit, don’t they?’ she said. ‘We understand each other without needing explanations.’
‘Yes.’ Theo stared down at her, wanting to print her face on his memory, wanting to fix the moment so that he could keep it for ever.
Her hand slid inside his jeans, at first tentatively as if she was not sure about what she was doing. Theo gasped, and Charmery took her hand away at once. ‘I’m sorry – isn’t that all right?’
‘It’s so incredibly all right that you’d better stop or I might lose control altogether.’
‘Please lose control,’ she said at once, her eyes glowing. ‘I’d love that.’
‘But you might hate me afterwards.’
‘Shouldn’t that be my line? But I’ll never hate you. And don’t you feel this is the right time for us?’
‘The inevitable step forward?’
‘Yes. Only – have you got something we can use?’
‘Not right this minute.’
‘I thought all university students went round with a permanent erection and a pocket stuffed with condoms,’ she said, and Theo blinked with surprise at how worldly and grown-up she suddenly sounded.
‘Not all the time we don’t.’ He hesitated, and she leaned forward and began to kiss him, and Theo, tumbling helplessly into the whirling, desperate ecstasy all over again, thought: It will be all right. I can’t break the mood to go back up to the house and ferret around for a condom – I’m not even sure if I’ve got any. Just this once, it will be all right. I think I’ll be able to stop in time.
She tasted like sunligh
t and summer, and her fingers were like velvet and her skin felt like silk… Several layers down he was thinking he would have to exercise iron control and be so gentle, because she would never have done this before.
But she had.
The way she was twining her legs round him, pulling him in deeper and moving with the smoothness of practice, were the unmistakable products of experience. He shouldn’t have been surprised: Charmery was beautiful and unusual and any man seeing her would instantly want to have her.
He was in no position to criticize; he had not been as wildly promiscuous as some of his friends and fellow students, but he had not lived the life of a monk either. He had been seventeen himself when he lost his virginity at the end of his final school term, and he had had several girlfriends at Cambridge. All of them had been intelligent and attractive and companionable, and with two of them things might easily have developed into something lasting and good. The fact that they had not was quite simply because they were not Charmery.
Afterwards he propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at her. Her hair was tumbling over the timbers of the landing stage and she was smiling at him.
‘So,’ she said, ‘finally and at last, we’ve done it.’
‘Finally and at last and for ever,’ said Theo, managing to beat down the stabs of jealousy that someone else had been first with her.
‘You stopped in time, didn’t you?’ she said, suddenly. ‘I mean – you withdrew in time?’
‘It was a bit of a close thing,’ said Theo, aware it had been more than close. ‘What happens now? When my finals are over and I’ve got a job, we could—’
‘No,’ she said at once. ‘No, don’t let’s do all that undying devotion, love for ever stuff.’ She pulled her skirt back in place, and put the sunhat back on to hide the disarray of her hair. ‘Not yet anyway. Let’s just go back to the house and be ordinary again.’
