Come Away With Me. Sara MacDonald

came downstairs, clean but still pale. Ruth went to him and gently turned the boy to face James, who stared. What was he supposed to be looking at? Then the boy flicked his hair back and looked at James out of those extraordinary deep, blue-flecked eyes.

      Tom’s eyes…Of course, the eyes…James saw the boy’s adolescent likeness to Tom was remarkable and would grow more so as he reached maturity. It was not just the shape of the head and the way the hair grew, but the way he looked straight at you.

      James suddenly felt tired and old and sad. He met Ruth’s eyes over the boy’s shoulder and saw a defensive wariness in them. He looked back at the boy.

      ‘What’s going on? I don’t understand,’ Adam said, moving away from his mother.

      That makes two of us, James thought.

      Ruth said quickly, ‘Now is not the time to talk, Adam. When you’ve slept, in the morning, I’ll try to explain things.’

      How would Ruth explain things to Jenny? James wondered miserably. How would she explain away this boy? He took a deep breath. ‘How are you feeling, Adam? What you did was very brave. It must have been extremely frightening.’

      ‘I’m OK. Like, I didn’t swallow much water. I was only just out of my depth, and the fisherman came to help me.’

      ‘Can you tell me what happened between you and Jenny out there?’

      Adam sat at the table and fiddled with one of the mugs. ‘I knew someone was watching me this afternoon. They’d been following me for days. I didn’t know it was Jenny. I thought they had gone and I was, like, rushing to get to the path home, and I suddenly saw her lying all curled up on her coat.’ Adam looked up at James, his eyes anxious. ‘It was sad, not scary any more. I knew Jenny must be ill. I woke her and she told me she was sorry she had frightened me. I asked her why she was following me and she said I was like…Tom…her husband who died and that she had thought she was my mother. She said she must have gone a little mad. I told her I would run to get Mum. I got to the lake and I heard a noise and I looked back, and she was just wading into the water really fast with her heavy coat on. I yelled at her to stop but she took no notice. I went in after her but she didn’t want me to…pull her out. She struggled and fought. Then the fisherman came to help me. It was awful. She wanted to drown…’ His voice wobbled.

      James said gently, ‘It must have been dreadful, Adam. You kept your head and you saved Jenny from drowning. That took some courage. Words aren’t enough to thank you.’

      Adam sniffed, embarrassed. ‘Jenny will be all right?’

      ‘I hope so.’ James got up from the table and went to get his bag. ‘I’m sorry that you had to go through something so distressing. I’ll leave something with your mother in case you can’t sleep. Don’t be afraid to take it.’ He looked at Ruth. ‘I’d like to get Jenny home now. I’ll go and back up my car to the cottage.’

      ‘But your tea…’

      ‘It’s getting late. Bea will be worrying. I think it might be a good idea to go to your doctor in the morning and get Adam checked out. The water is undoubtedly polluted.’

      James went abruptly out of the front door to get his car. Ruth helped him with the heavily sedated Jenny and they put her in the back seat under a rug. She was feather light and James felt inexplicably and unfairly angry with Ruth. He nodded a curt goodnight, got into his car without another word and drove away up the hill.

      The moon swept out from behind clouds and hung dramatically in a navy-blue sky, and James heard again the haunting sound of swans flying in perfect unison over the dark waters that had almost swallowed up his daughter.

       TWENTY-THREE

      Ruth sat in the window seat of the cottage in the dark. Adam had at last fallen asleep. She gazed out into the thick black night, numb and shocked. The cottage felt cold, and she pulled an old moth-smelling rug round her and tried not to shiver. If she started she wouldn’t be able to stop.

      She tried to steady her breathing, calm the panicky beat of her heart. She went over and over the moment when she had read the newspaper cutting.

      She could not focus on any one thing. Her mind dithered about in alarm, she felt unable to assess the implications of all that had happened in nightmare sequence down on the creek. She felt as if something were slowly breaking inside her and she were falling back down a deep black hole into childhood.

      All these years of carefully blanking everything out; all these years of self-induced amnesia had been swept away in an afternoon. She felt like a spy whose cover had been blown and here she was exposed, naked to the world; the reality of her life cruelly laid bare for Adam—for everyone to see like a hideous birthmark.

      All the years of love, reassurance and sense of worth nurtured by her aunt had disappeared in the look James Brown had given her over Adam’s head, before he strode out of the house taking Jenny with him. She was flung back to the desperate adolescent she had been and the horror of exposure.

      Life had a habit of turning full circle. For fourteen years she had locked Tom Holland behind a heavy door, marked not ‘Do not enter’, but ‘Did not happen’.

      The cottage creaked around her as she sat thinking of Jenny. She would never forget the sight of her struggling in the water with Adam. For a second she thought Jenny had been trying to drown him. Her movements had been wild and desperate as Adam hung on to her. It had been surreal.

      Ruth got up and, without turning on the light, poured herself a large brandy and carried the balloon glass back to the window seat. It had been terrifying. Both Adam and Jenny could have sunk into the mud and drowned.

       To feel so hopeless that you want to end your life. To come to that.

       Am I capable of feeling such a loss, such a love? Feeling so bereft that even inching forward to some future holds no power. And dying holds no fear?

      Tomorrow she would have to talk to Adam. She would have to explain the unexplainable, tell him that Jenny’s husband was his father. That was why Jenny had wanted to drown herself.

      Ruth quailed at the thought. God! A totally random meeting on a train had triggered a series of events that would change all their lives for ever. Despair made her limbs feel weak.

      What if she had not gone to that party when she was seventeen? What if Jenny had been with her? Could she and Jenny have been rivals over this man?

      If Jenny had been with her she would not have got pregnant, but then there would have been no Adam and that was inconceivable.

      She and Jenny could have met on a train to Birmingham when Tom was alive. What would have happened then? Would Tom have acknowledged his son?

      Why was she thinking like this? What was the point? The point was the pretence was over. That private part of her life that she hugged so secretly to her had ended that afternoon as she watched Adam pulling Jenny, crazed with grief, from the water.

      Adam had been difficult to get to bed. Disturbed and shaken, he had wanted answers and Ruth needed this night to herself before she could give him any. She drank the brandy, let it burn down her throat.

      She remembered the heavy feel of the coats on top of them. The excitement of him wanting her and her own overpowering need and desire. She remembered the painful, stinging feel of him entering her; the heady wonder of another body glued warmly to hers and the thrill of his gasp as he climaxed. She felt again the poignant musky smell of sex, the hot rush of semen glutinous and foreign between her thighs…

      She had trusted absolutely that the boy who had taken her virginity and shared that tremulous, intimate moment would find out where she lived and call her. Naively, she never doubted it.

      He had said, God! What a beautiful girl you are.