Ninepins (22 page)

‘Oh, good boy,' cried Beth at his approach, clapping her hands so that he launched himself at her across the final yard, blotching the front of her jeans with mud and almost knocking her flat.

Vince hooted with laughter and Beth and Willow joined in. Laura was smiling too, even while she said, ‘I hope that's going to wash off.'

After that, Dougie didn't stray as far. He still trotted ahead of the party, and sometimes sprinted off at tangents after some scent, real or imagined, but his attention was never entirely elsewhere. Every now and then he threw a glance back at them over his shoulder, slantwise, just to check.

Soon they came to a junction of tracks and turned right, crossing a wooden footbridge and then swinging left along the bank of Wicken Lode. The path was elevated here, commanding to one side, across the ice of the lode, a view of the nature reserve, and to the other an expanse of frozen reedbeds. Now and then, above their own breaths and the panting of the terrier, the croak or whistle of some waterfowl split the silence.

‘What a great place,' said Willow, stopping to gaze out over the marsh. ‘Weird, but beautiful.'

‘Most of the fens must have looked like this once,' said Laura, ‘before it was all drained.'

Vince drew alongside them and followed their gaze. ‘Like looking back in time.'

‘Yes.' Laura glanced at him in surprise. ‘Yes, I suppose you're right.'

At the next bend of the lode, two boats stood moored, bound fast to the bank by ice as much as by their slack ropes. One was a traditional narrowboat, the once gaily-painted woodwork peeling to naked grey beneath the blues and reds, the chimney-pipe leaning at a drunken angle. The other was shorter and taller, more of a broads cruiser shape, metal-hulled and rusting. It was not only the ice which lent them an air of permanence here, of immobility, of being a part of the landscape. The ropes were decayed, the windows filthy and filmed with green.

Beth tried to peer in through the algae. ‘D'you think anyone ever lived in them? All the way out here?'

‘Someone must surely have used them once,' said Laura. ‘Nobody buys a boat and doesn't use it.'

‘Wouldn't it be so cool, to live on a boat?'

‘Well – ' Laura smiled at her daughter ‘ – these might not have been lived in, as such. They might have been used for holidays.'

‘Not in a good long while.' Vince had joined Beth in squinting through a window of the narrowboat. ‘And not here, I'd guess. I think this might be the place where houseboats come to die.'

‘A boat graveyard?' Beth gave a theatrical shudder. ‘Spooky.'

Willow had stopped, too, but without coming near. She stood back a few paces in the centre of the path. ‘Careful,' she said.

They all turned.

She nodded at the frosty grass which edged the sloping bank beneath their feet. ‘Looks slippery.'

Laura looked down into the space between the narrowboat and the land, where ice and icemelt merged in blackness, and experienced a moment of vertigo. She stepped back hastily, drawing Beth with her.

They moved to set off again, but Willow still lingered, staring at the boats.

‘I remember …' She tailed off, her brow set in a puzzled frown.

‘What is it?' They had all come back, and Vince laid an arm round her shoulder.

She shook her head, as if trying to shift an irritant. ‘Nothing, really. It's just, I think I stayed on a houseboat once.'

‘Tell me,' he said.

Another shake of the head, slower this time. ‘I can't remember anything much. But I think it was a boat.'

They all waited, feeling the stillness.

‘It must have belonged to one of her friends.' She looked hard at Vince. ‘Mum was there, but she wasn't, if you know what I mean. And I can't remember the friend, either, really, except that I think she knew we couldn't swim. I think I told her we couldn't swim. She kept me inside, in this little wooden room with bunk beds in, and we played Snap. The window was high up so you couldn't see the water, but there were blue checked curtains and I'm sure there was one of those orange rings, outside on a post. A lifebuoy. So it must have been a boat, mustn't it?

He nodded, eyes on her face. ‘How old do you think you were?'

Willow shrugged, still frowning. ‘Four? Three?'

Just then, Dougie, bored by the extended halt, came back and began sniffing impatiently at ankles, huffing under his breath. Willow bent and ruffled his head, in the process ducking out from under Vince's arm. But after a moment she looked up, her hand still buried in the terrier's grey hair, and they saw that she was smiling.

‘I do remember I was rubbish at Snap.'

 

They had an excellent lunch. It wasn't a pub any of them knew. Laura had found it in a pub guide still on the shelf from Simon's day, back before Beth, when they used to head out regularly at weekends to find new places to eat. The pub must have changed hands three or four times since the book was published, but by good luck the current proprietors understood the virtues of traditional steak and kidney pie, and of local winter vegetables, properly cooked. Beth managed all of hers, along with the last of Willow's roast potatoes. She even had room for the apple crumble, and Vince gallantly kept her company. Under the table, Dougie, despairing of scraps, lay flat and dreamed of moorhens.

It was half past three by the time they arrived home. They'd had coffee in the pub, so it seemed redundant to ask Vince in for tea, but Laura did anyway, since he had done the driving. It was the last hour of a beautiful winter's afternoon and house and dyke were basking in watery sunshine, the air milder than it had felt for weeks. On the grass, as they stepped from the car, the frost was turning greasy underfoot.

‘I won't stay long,' Vince was saying. ‘I've got some case notes I need to write up before the morning. Why do I always leave doing any work until Sunday evening?'

There he broke off, and Laura followed his gaze down along the lode. At first glance, just for a moment, she thought it was the heron, though it was rare to see it this close to the house, and why would it be standing there so still in the middle of the ice? Then her eyes focussed and she saw that it had been a trick of distance and perspective. The shape was further away – perhaps a hundred yards in the direction of Elswell – and much larger. A chill doused her stomach. The shape was human.

‘Who on earth … ?' she murmured, then took two strides forward, calling out, ‘Hey! What are you doing?'

The figure on the ice neither moved nor reacted, but continued to stand hunched and immobile, facing away from them along the frozen water. Her mind panned for sensible solutions but none of them fitted. A fisherman, when the lode was ice-bound? It made no sense. Certainly no fisherman would venture on to the ice in this thaw.

‘Hi there!' she shouted again. ‘Come off the lode. It's not safe.'

Willow began to run. She was running along the top of the dyke in the direction of the figure, with Vince close behind. Beth ran after them, Dougie barking and tugging at his lead. Laura's legs felt unconnected to her: they started to move of their own accord, and soon she was running too. Her eyes were locked on the dark-coated shape. It was the unnatural stillness that triggered recognition, even from the back. She was suddenly certain. It was her – the same woman as before. Marianne. Willow's mother.

Level with her, they stopped and all stood looking at her, unsure quite what to do next. The water had been at mid-height when it froze, and the lower path, visible here sometimes at low ebb, was covered over. There was nothing but twenty feet of slippery, rimed grass, pitching down at an angle of maybe fifty degrees towards the treacherous ice.

‘Mum.' Willow didn't shout; she spoke in her normal voice, conversational. ‘Mum, you need to come off there, OK?'

‘Marianne,' said Vince. ‘It's all right. We're here – you're all right now. Just come over to the bank.'

There was no answer, no acknowledging movement.
Mum was there, but she wasn't, if you know what I mean.
Laura wondered if she knew where she was at all. The ice beneath her boots – the same biker boots – was no longer a uniform white, nor really white at all, but a dull putty grey, only veneered in silver. Darker greys bubbled and pooled beneath the surface. And at the margins where the ice met the bank, especially at the near side which lay most in sunlight, there glinted black snatches of water.

‘It's all right,' said Vince again, coaxing. ‘Come to us.'

The woman moved a step forward, away from them and further out of reach. Under her feet the ice creaked audibly. Beth slipped a hand into Laura's.

‘Mum,' said Willow, voice still level. Then, with only the slightest rising note, ‘Please.'

On the ice, still without turning, her mother took another step. There was a sound like a whipcrack, not loud but eerily resonant, ricocheting off the embankments and magnifying through the surface of the ice. From a point beneath her left boot a dark, jagged line appeared, tracing a path with meandering slowness towards the near bank. It was followed by another, shorter but broader. Water was clearly visible now, creeping above the ice.

‘Mum!'

Dougie gave one sharp, high bark. It was never clear to Laura, afterwards, what was in his mind: whether he thought to see off danger or to make some valiant, crazed attempt at rescue. For a second, Beth succeeded in holding on to the end of his lead as he flung himself over the rim of the dyke; she was jerked forward, to the very edge herself, before Vince grabbed her by the shoulders and drew her back. With a cry, she let go of the lead.

Down on the lode, Willow's mother dropped to her knees as the terrier half ran, half tumbled down the slope towards her. Then she was crawling off the sinking ice and on to the safety of the far bank. Behind her, at the shift of weight, the fractured surface parted, leaving clefts of gaping black.

‘Dougie – no!' screamed Beth, and seized hold of Laura, twisting round away from the lode, hiding her face in her neck. Laura closed her eyes, too, and clung tightly to her daughter, seeing nothing, thinking nothing, hearing nothing, beyond Beth's disbelieving wail.

Laura had no idea what she would have done without Vince. It was he who shouted at them to stay put while he slithered down the steep embankment towards the surface of the lode and beyond until he was shin deep in ice and water, in a vain attempt to save the terrier. It was he who, still perching at the base of the near bank, talked Willow's mother quietly into calm, he who persuaded her to turn round, there on the far bank, and look at him, and to promise him to remain exactly where she was. And it was Vince who hiked up to the main road along Ninepins Drove and back along the opposite dyke until he reached her and coaxed her home, while Willow phoned the consultant to arrange an ambulance. Laura was left with nothing to do but deal as best she might with a pale and shaken Beth, who couldn't even look at her mother, nor listen to assurances that it was nobody's fault and particularly not her own, nor speak herself, except to repeat the same words over and over.
I let go of his lead. I let go. I let go
.

She was even more grateful later, when it was Vince, who – having escorted Willow and her mother to the psychiatric hospital and Willow home again once they had seen her settled – walked back along the lode in the darkness by himself with an old corduroy jacket from the boot of his car and a long-handled rake from the shed, returning after half an hour or so with a sorrowful bundle in his arms. Beth, thank heaven, had been persuaded to go upstairs and have a bath. Laura met Vince at the door and when she saw what he was holding, her fingers trembled on the latch.

‘Is he in there?' The jacket hardly bulged at all. ‘I mean, it looks so small.' She swallowed, twice, but her throat still filled with salt liquid.

‘I can take him home with me, if you want.'

‘No.' If only it could be that easy. Carefully, she looked anywhere but at the jacket. ‘No, Simon might want to … have him back.'
Bury him
. It was too hard to say.

Vince's boots, at which she had been staring, shifted into focus. Mud coated the leather and clogged the eyeholes. Duckweed clung to his trousers, which were darker almost to the knee. How could it have taken so long to dawn on her that his feet were soaking? That they'd been drenched in freezing water for three or four hours?

‘What am I thinking of? You're going to catch five kinds of pneumonia. Come on in and I'll see if Beth is out of the bath yet so that you can have one.'

‘Pneumonia, perhaps.' He laid his burden down gently on the step, then straightened up and gave her a grin. ‘Frostbite in the toes, certainly. And maybe just an outside chance of leptospirosis.'

His trousers were thick canvas, and even the Rayburn's side oven could not dry out the legs in an hour. The only thing she could provide was an old pair of Simon's jeans that she used for decorating and that had stayed when he left. They were spattered with paint but at least they were dry. His coat was damp and smeared with mud, but her big blue walking fleece seemed to fit him all right, as did a pair of her outdoor socks.

‘Have you rung and told him?' he asked, over the cocoa she made him, topped up with a dash of rum.

‘No. No, I haven't. I can't tell him over the phone, not a thing like this. I'll have to go round. I owe him that, at least.'

He nodded his approval.

‘But not yet. It'll be better when the boys are asleep. Supper first. Will you stay and have some?'

It was a subdued meal, functional and with little attempt on anybody's part at conversation. Willow wasn't hungry; she toyed with half a slice of bread and escaped back up to her room almost at once. Beth ate wordlessly and mechanically, rarely raising her eyes from her plate.