The Water Children. Anne Berry

it and began to heave.

      Meanwhile, a short way from him, Stephen, his own legs gripped by his father in possibly the most intimate contact they had ever had in their lives, snaked over the ice, grasped Catherine’s arms and pulled. He didn’t say much but his eyes looked more animated than Catherine had ever seen them before. It was tricky man oeuvring her stiff body onto unbroken ice but he succeeded in jerks, levering her out in a side-to-side movement. Once she was lying on her stomach, no longer impeded by the lip of ice, it was comparatively easy to drag her to the safety of the bank. With Stephen, her gawky brother, folding his lanky limbs round her, Catherine raised her head to see Rosalyn being drawn steadily over the iced pond. She resembled a seal in her drenched clothes, a seal being slowly but surely reeled in by her father, the red beret still perched waggishly on her head.

      After that Catherine seemed scarcely aware of her coat being pulled off, of her body being hoisted up into Stephen’s arms, of the march back to where the car was parked in the lane. Rosalyn was also being carried by her father. Catherine caught a flash of his face, the expression no longer seemingly blithe, but one of entrenched concern. Her own father appeared occasionally at the edges of her field of vision, his arms full of their wet clothes. He looked absurdly like a photograph of a Sherpa she had seen when they were studying the Himalayas in geography at school. Also, he had the air, Catherine thought, of a non-relative, a man who didn’t quite belong to their party, who had just tagged along, a hanger on, somehow unconnected to the tragic events.

      The cousins were propped side by side on the back seat of the car, and staring down, Catherine found herself worrying in case the water that seemed to be leaking from them stained the upholstery. They were back at ‘Wood End’ within minutes, which seemed odd to both girls. Only moments earlier they had been on the brink of death. Now they were being set down in a steamy kitchen where saucepans bubbled on the stove, and where a discussion was blaring from the radio about Kenya and somebody they called the Burning Spear. And in this increasingly surreal world, Catherine’s mother swung round and berated her for being so daft, before they were whisked away by Rosalyn’s mother to have a bath.

      Catherine was on the verge of protesting that she wasn’t dirty, but it was clear from the set of her face that Aunt Amy would brook no argument. Modesty too seemed to have been abandoned in this curious dimension. Her aunt and her uncle were both in the crowded bathroom, and oblivious of proprieties, were jointly unbuttoning, unzipping and tugging off the girls’ dripping clothes. Catherine stared at Rosalyn, who stared back. Their bodies looked very white, deathly white, their flesh was tinged with blue here and there. Still more outlandish, the water, which Aunt Amy insisted was tepid, scalded Catherine the way she imagined having a kettle of boiling water poured over her nakedness might.

      ‘Oh, oh, oh. It stings. It really stings!’ she whimpered, trying to get out but being prevented by her uncle.

      ‘It will, after the freezing temperatures you’ve endured. But it shouldn’t last too long,’ he insisted.

      If Rosalyn was suffering, she was more stoical than Catherine was, allowing herself to be manhandled, to have her limbs rubbed vigorously by her father’s big hands. Aunt Amy ministered to Catherine in much the same manner, cooing soothingly all the time. Then the bath that had nothing to do with soap was over, and they were being briskly towel dried, put into pyjamas still comfortingly warm from the airing cupboard, and bundled into blankets with hot-water bottles cunningly concealed in their folds. Once again they were borne aloft to the sitting-room and given mugs of warm, sweet cocoa, while Catherine’s father banked up the fire. This was when the discomfort that she had thought was over, returned with a vengeance. Her entire body seemed to be tingling painfully now, as if it was gradually coming back to life, as if she was defrosting like something her mother took out of the freezer.

      Intuitively she knew everything had changed. The atmosphere in ‘Wood End’ had grown unaccountably funereal, though neither of them had died. The radio was turned down, everyone talked in low voices as if they were in a doctor’s waiting room, and Aunt Amy hardly spoke at all, which was completely out of character for her sociable nature. Catherine noticed that her eyes darted warily all about her, alert, on guard, as though possible threats lurked everywhere. Permission for walks were denied the pair of them, and even a suggested game in the garden and a quarter of an hour in the tree house had to be strictly supervised. But as Rosalyn didn’t seem very keen on any activity at all, preferring to curl up on the settee or in their den, it didn’t much matter that their antics were being rigidly curtailed.

      When Catherine awoke the next day and the day after that, there was no hump that was Rosalyn on the other side of the bed, no black curls spread on the pillow. Seeing her emerge from her parents’ bedroom on both occasions when she ventured downstairs, Catherine concluded that she had stolen into their bed some time during the night. Whether inside or out, Simon now shadowed Rosalyn protectively all day long, so that the privacy previously afforded them that Catherine had so relished, was entirely lost. She felt uncomfortable speaking to Rosalyn within his hearing, so their conversations lapsed into an uneasy silence.

      Then Stephen took off on his motorbike, claiming he had to get back to work, that cars needed to be repaired and ready for their owners by the first week of January. Coupled with this unscheduled departure, Catherine’s mother was more than usually irritable with her. And her voice began to ascend into that piercing register of hers that normally she reserved for behind their closed front door. Suddenly they were going too, packing the suitcase and bags and loading up the car. They had planned to stay for New Year’s Eve, to see the New Year in, her mother had enigmatically said, as if the New Year was a person you let into the house in the middle of the night. But now it seemed her father had been summoned back to London.

      ‘I’m so sorry, Amy, but he’s required urgently. That was what that telephone call he had to make was all about. He was checking up on some problem he thought had been solved. But apparently things have worsened. And now there’s another crisis. Very hush-hush, so I can’t really say much more. Such a disappointment! So, darling, I’m afraid you mustn’t try to stop us.’

      Aunt Amy didn’t. In fact she hurried away to cut sandwiches for their journey, and then assisted them with an alacrity Catherine read as eagerness, in ferrying their baggage out to the car. So there it was. They were going home. Although Aunt Amy had promised that Rosalyn was coming out to say goodbye, she did not appear, could not even be glimpsed in the hall through the front door which stood open like a shocked mouth.

      ‘It can’t be helped,’ said her mother laconically, only just succeeding in keeping her tone level, and holding the car door open for Catherine to climb in.

      But it could be helped, so Catherine dashed back into the house and galloped up the stairs to their attic room, where she found Rosalyn lying on the den floor sucking her thumb. She pulled it out the moment Catherine tore breathlessly into the room, and sat up as her cousin kneeled down.

      ‘I was just coming to say goodbye. I’m sorry, I must have—’

      But Catherine interrupted her. ‘You’ll always remember me as the cousin you almost drowned with. That’s how you’ll think of me now. The feeling will be all black and bad.’ She hadn’t realized but she was crying, her cheeks were wet and her pitch was warlike. From downstairs she heard her mother’s impatient call.

      ‘Catherine, do come! We’re all waiting for you.’

      ‘Oh no, no, no!’ appeased Rosalyn. She took Catherine by the shoulders and held her gaze for a long moment. Dinah Hoyle’s imperious voice rose to them again.

      ‘Catherine, do I have to come up there and get you?’

      ‘I have to go,’ said Catherine miserably, dashing away her tears.

      ‘Because of you . . .’ But Rosalyn could not go on. A deep intake of breath, and then most awful of all, the mouth that never had, wobbled. An unsure, childish wobble that brought more tears to Catherine’s eyes.

      ‘Catherine!’ came her mother’s furious shout.

      Her cousin didn’t say anything else. She looked as if the effort of speaking that much had utterly depleted her. Then