Come Away With Me. Sara MacDonald

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       TWENTY-TWO

      Ruth lifted the primroses out of the orange box and began to plant them under the window. She was shaking the earth out of the box when her eye caught a name in a headline in the old newspaper lining it.

      She flicked the dirt away and looked closer. There was a picture of an army officer called Tom Holland. He had been killed by a bomb. It had been placed under his car in London. He had been driving home from the zoo with his small daughter. Ruth looked at the date. It was 20 August 2005.

      His good-looking face smiled up at her. Ruth rocked on her heels in shock and sat on the hard ground. Oh, Jenny.

      Ruth stared down at the photograph and her world receded fast and dangerously in a rip tide. Memory culled, blotted out all these years as if it had never happened, flooded sickly back.

      She was once more among the coats, the dusty, sweaty, charity shop smell of them; lying, almost naked, with this man pictured here.

      Tom Holland…Just a boy when she met him. Here he was, this same man, dead; murdered. This was what happened to the man she so casually conceived a baby with in a cold room at a Christmas party. It was Adam’s face looking up at her. His face was an older, eerie version of Adam. The face she had taught herself to forget. This man had been Jenny’s husband.

      Ruth lifted out the paper and turned to the inside page. There were pictures of Jenny. There were pictures of a dark little girl with Jenny’s laughing eyes and wild curly hair. Ruth’s hands trembled. She wanted to cry out, Why didn’t you tell me the truth, Jenny? Why didn’t you tell me you lost both your husband and child in this terrible tragic way?

      She would have understood so much more, Jenny’s almost catatonic grief, her sudden illness. Ruth remembered the way Jenny had looked at her, her odd behaviour when she stayed at the house. Her preoccupation with Adam…

      Oh, my God! Ruth jumped to her feet. I’m so stupid. I’m so slow.

      She was out of the gate and on to the path running, running, the breath catching painfully in her chest. Through the beat of her heart and the noise of her feet, Ruth heard Adam screaming.

      James Brown parked the car by the upturned boats on the grass and strode towards the cottage. The front door of the house was wide open. He called out as he walked down the path. There was evidence of someone recently gardening. A fork and trowel lay discarded on the path. A page of an old newspaper was blowing around the garden and, irritated by it, James grabbed it as it blew around his feet.

      He stared down at the photographs of a wrecked car, obscenely mangled. Pictures of his daughter, granddaughter and son-in-law were blowing about in the wind. The world seemed suddenly silent as he stood looking at the images engraved indelibly on his mind. Out of this silence he suddenly heard a woman screaming.

      He moved quickly back to his car and grabbed his doctor’s bag, then made his way purposefully along the side of the creek towards the intermittent sounds. He was too old to run. It would serve no one if he had a heart attack. As he got nearer to the sounds, two white swans flew over him in perfect unison across the water into the mist. Underneath them the creek shimmered for a moment in late-afternoon sunlight.

      From the path he caught a glimpse of movement on the foreshore at the mouth of the creek. It was hard to make out what was going on. As he rounded the corner of the derelict barn and crunched over seaweed and pebbles, James saw a group of people at the water’s edge in the mud.

      They were bending over someone. A man in waders bent and lifted a small body and carried it up on to the shingle. A muddy, frightened boy was being clasped by a blonde woman.

      James broke into a run, his heart racing, towards the fisherman who was splashing out of the muddy water and laying Jenny carefully on to the ground. ‘I’m a doctor. I’m her father.’

      He turned Jenny on to her stomach but before he had time to pump her free of water she started to retch and vomit. Relieved, James turned her on her side and held her there, realising she couldn’t have been in the water long. He bent and felt her pulse, pushed her hair away from her muddy face, laid the back of his hand on the side of her neck. She was going to be all right but she was shivering with cold. He looked up at the fisherman. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

      ‘Don’t thank me,’ the man said. ‘It was the lad that went in the water after her. I was fishing by the lake, I heard him yelling. I just helped pull her out.’

      James took his mobile phone out of his pocket to ring for an ambulance, but abruptly changed his mind. He turned as the boy, covered in mud, walked towards him. He recognised Ruth despite the fact that she too was dishevelled and muddy.

      ‘Is Jenny going to be OK?’ the boy asked anxiously, his teeth chattering with cold and fright. His vivid blue eyes stared out at James from his dirty face.

      ‘James?’ Ruth said, surprised. ‘Oh, thank God you’re here.’

      ‘Yes, she’s going to be OK. Thanks to you,’ James said to the boy, then to Ruth, ‘You must get him home, he’s frozen.’

      The fisherman came back with an old rug. They wrapped Jenny in it and he offered to carry her back to the cottage. ‘She doesn’t weigh nothing, poor maid.’

      James looked down at the small muddy face of his daughter. ‘Jenny?’ he said softly. ‘Darling, it’s all right. It’s going to be all right.’

      Jenny’s eyes opened. She stared back with a blank hopelessness that seared him. He felt furious with himself. I should have seen this coming.

      They hobbled in a strange little procession back to the cottage. He and Ruth got Jenny out of her soaked clothes, put her in a hot bath, wrapped her up with hot-water bottles and placed her in Ruth’s bed. James gave her an injection and she stopped shaking as the sedative worked and fell asleep.

      Ruth got Adam into the bath and James rang Bea.

      When Ruth came downstairs she took one look at James’s face and offered him a drink.

      ‘I’d love a stiff whisky, but I’m driving. A cup of tea would be good. How’s the boy?’

      ‘Adam. He’s shaken, but he’s fine. Luckily the tide wasn’t fully in. It was terrifying seeing them both struggling in the water…’ She hesitated. ‘You don’t think Jenny should be checked over in hospital?’