‘Go to bed, Kai, you’ll feel better in the morning,’ she says, and smiles to hear herself say what her mother used to say, hovering in the doorway, wanting to leave Nadine.
Kai turns his head against her shoulder and begins to tell her what he’s been waiting to tell her since that morning when she lay in the bath, her back arched and water sluicing off her body. And Enid lay upstairs curled round on the boards of an empty room. It’s growing in him and he’s frightened. He can’t get the dark of it out of his head. The vodka doesn’t work. His hot whispering voice fills the space of the child’s bunk and runs off through the knots in the wood, away into the forest. He tells Nadine what he has done to Enid. He tells Nadine that the Enid she writes to is not there any more. There is nothing and nobody there. His words run like insects over Nadine’s body before they find freedom. He is hot and tight on top of her and she cannot move him. Her smile has peeled away from her lips like wax.
Twenty-two
‘Enid’s dead. Enid’s dead because of me. I’m only alive because Enid’s dead. No, Enid’s dead because I’m alive. No. Enid’s dead–’
Pedalling fast, Nadine shoots out of the forest on her mountain bike. Here the road straightens and its verges widen. Heavy spruce gives way to a scrub of birch. Here there’s light, movement and a flurry of birds. She slows down, her bare brown legs straining to push the pedals. She’s come a long way, and now the forest is at her back, a big shadow, soughing, full of hush, broken by sudden creaks and cries. Soon it will be winter. The long sweeping wind from Russia flexes itself and strokes the crowns of spruce and pine until they moan in anticipation and then are quiet again.
Nadine doesn’t turn round or look back. She can feel the forest like a cold wind behind her. She’s got a long way to go yet, and her legs hurt. She’ll have to stop and rest. She brakes and gets off the bike clumsily. She’ll push it for a while, then she’ll sit down. She won’t look behind her because there’s nothing coming and anyway she’d hear the car miles off and have time to drag the bike off the road into the scrub and hide. She’s sure Kai won’t be capable of driving for hours yet. He’d crash into a tree if he tried. Also, she’s hidden the car keys and it’ll take him a long time to find them. She should have thrown them away, deep into the forest or the lake, but she couldn’t do it. He’d never be able to get to the town without the Saab. He’d collapse on his way through the forest, and lie vomiting on the moss. She looked at him in the grainy first light and then she left him. All she took was a few clothes in a backpack, and the wad of money from under the sauna. If only she had a mileometer so she could tell how far she’s come. Two hours’ riding: say thirty kilometres? No, much less. The track from the summer-house to the road was so rough that she hadn’t dared go fast, even with thick tyres. A puncture would have been fatal. After that it was uphill quite a lot of the way: one of those long gentle slopes you scarcely notice when you’re walking, or in a car. She hasn’t got to the lake with the island yet, and she remembers that the road curves round it and then back into the forest before it reaches the town. A black, still, reed-circled lake. Very deep, Kai said as they drove past it. The town isn’t much of a town, with its dance hall where people come from miles around to dance tango, its little supermarket which is also a bar, its school. You wonder where all the houses are, and where the people come from. The dance hall was packed last night. The express trains going south and north stop there; she’s made sure of that. She doesn’t know the times, and there might be hours to wait. It’s not so easy to hide in a town. She’ll have to dump the bike. She won’t need it any more. Kai can pick it up and take it back to the summer-house. He’s bound to go straight to the station to look for her, once he finds the keys. He’ll guess where she’s gone. But not in time. She’ll be gone. At first he’ll just think she’s gone off for a ride. Yes, she’ll have to get rid of the bike. It makes her much more conspicuous. People will remember her. ‘Have you seen a girl with a bike? A mountain bike? An English girl?’ Kids would notice the bike because it’s the kind they all want. Aluminium frame, twenty-one gears, quick-release saddle. Kai would question the kids who hang round the dance hall or the railway station in the fag-end of after-school.
Will Kai remember what he said last night – what he’s told her? What she knows? And what will he do if he remembers?
Wind shivers through the birches, turning over their leaves. They are dry, beginning to rustle. Their colours are changing. Soon they’ll turn to brief gold and then wind and rain will tear them off their branches and they’ll be mashed brown by storms before the first snow falls. The sky is a low, cool grey. It rained heavily last night and the bog at the edge of the forest smells sharply of autumn. She listened to the rain while she lay for hour after hour, keeping herself awake, while Kai moaned in his sleep and cried out in the language she didn’t speak. Time for cutting firewood for winter and gathering mushrooms. A perfect autumn day, still and mild and smoke-scented.
Nadine plods on, one hand on the saddle of the bike, one on the handlebars. Kai says this is the correct way to push a bike – this way you don’t get backache. Not that she ought to need to push the bike: with so many gears she should be able to pedal up the steepest slope. But even though she’s much fitter than Kai, she’s never been any good at cycling uphill. It makes her legs shake. Ahead of her, dark Sitka spruce are marching towards the edge of the road again. The road’s going to twist back into the forest. She doesn’t like walking between those dark, airless flanks of trees which crowd out the sky. Better to ride and blot out silence with the swish of tyres. She’s had a rest. She mustn’t lose any more time.
But as Nadine cycles round the next bend a flood of light makes her eyes sting. There it is – she’s reached the lake. It’s huge and pale, spilling out before her, rimmed on one side by the whitey-grey thread of the little road, on the other by black bog and forest. It’s a lonely place. Kai’s told her that hunters come here in winter, to shoot in the marsh. There are pike in the lake. Black overhanging rock in a shape like a head and shoulders above the water rears up on the opposite shore. But here, on this side, there’s a little beach facing an island only fifty metres or so out in the water. It’s a tiny island, the kind you dream of discovering when you’re a kid. Short, tufty grass, one birch tree, a fallen branch. A perfect place to put up a tent. It even has its own miniature beach of grey sand, fringed with reeds. The autumn breeze has dropped again and the reflection of the island is flawless, a dark, polished outline on the water. Nadine bumps her bike off the road and down the grass to the beach. It’s small, perhaps ten metres across. There are no footprints but her own. No one comes here. There are no summer-houses, no fishing rods, no walkers or cyclists. This is just an ordinary lake, nothing special, one of tens of thousands. The sphagnum moss just off the road is spongy and deep. It sucks around her boots, then she steps on to the dry, crunchy beach which is edged with fading rushes. Pebble and sand shelve shallowly into the clear water. Something flickers around the base of the reeds. Tiny fish. There’ll be frogs too, and water-snakes. Nadine leans on her bike, peering into the water.
Then, from behind the island, there sails one swan followed by two cygnets. The cygnets are well grown, brown and grey but with a speckle of white feathers beginning to push through. The cygnets paddle behind, eager and dingy against the parent swan. Another swan glides round the island, followed by three more cygnets. Nadine can’t tell which swan is the male, which the female. They sail towards the beach, leaving long rips in the silky lake surface. It is so still that as they come near she can hear their webbed feet plashing under the water. They are close now, and they slow down, watching her. One cygnet drifts off to dive among the reeds. It gives out a frail but confident cry. It is much bolder than the others. The grown swans spread their beaks down flat along the water and sweep from side to side, bills combing the surface. The cygnets bob and imitate, dredging the shallows. The bold cygnet climbs up the beach, its legs awkwardly hinged at the thighs, clums
y out of the water. Its short, stubby wings would never fly. A parent moves in behind it, watching Nadine and the bike. The swan puts down its head and hisses. They can break your arm with a blow from their wings, Nadine remembers. She is miles from anywhere. The swan watches, protecting its young. The other parent bird swims out with two cygnets in its wake. They mate for life, thinks Nadine. They are faithful to one another even if their partner dies. She stands there, watching the swans with extreme attention. The swan stops hissing at her and moves off, plucking at grass. Nadine keeps still, holding the bike upright. It is the bike that frightened the swans, she thinks. When they’ve moved off a little she’ll lower it on to the grass so it won’t bother them. There they go now, slipping back into the mineral quiet of the lake. Its surface is dark as graphite. They float back across the lake, their powerful feet working beneath the water. The sound of them thins and disappears as they go back behind the island. They must have their nest there.
She ought to get on. She’s wasting time, but the small beach and the small island hold her. It’s one of those places you feel you’ve seen once before, tantalizingly, from a train or a speeding car. If only you could stay and explore, find at last the template that makes the perfect pattern of water, island, sky…; She crunches across the beach and carefully puts down the bike so it is supported against a low bank of stones. She looks across at the dark spiky top of the forest. It is like fine handwriting which she cannot read.
So much has happened. She can’t make sense of it. Kai says that Enid is dead. He says that he has killed her. She stands still, hearing those words in his drunken mumble. Fine hairs stand up on her upper arms. Summer’s over now. Everyone’s gone back to the cities, back to jobs and apartments and to starting to think about Christmas.
‘Enid liked Christmas. She said she would show me the place on the Downs where she cut holly to decorate her attic. No one else knew about it.’
Kai can’t go back to England. No more city for Kai, no house, no business, no wads of new money. Only the summer-house in winter, the sky going yellow with snow, the wind feeling its way through knots in summer pine. Kai tells Nadine stories about the winter war, and men on skis gliding through the forest dressed in white, their silent knives in their hands. He’ll hunt, he tells her. As long as there’s a cupboard full of colourless vodka, he’ll be fine. They’d never find him – why should they look here?
‘Enid, darling…; I couldn’t help it. What could I have done? I wasn’t there. I didn’t look after you. I didn’t know it was going to happen.’
Nadine unlaces her boots and puts her socks neatly inside them, pulls her red t-shirt over her head, takes off her shorts, her bra and pants, folds them by the bicycle and walks down to the water’s edge. It is cold. Kai has told her not to bathe anywhere unless she knows the water. Some of these lakes are very deep. She should never swim alone. There’s always the risk of cramp and sudden exhaustion from cold. Kai can be very protective. He didn’t like it when she swam straight out from the summer-house jetty, a hundred metres or so, then lay on her back drifting and watching the clouds while the water lapped her face. She was perfectly safe. She knew how far it was safe to go. Kai never came in the water. Summer was over, he said, it was too late for swimming, but she began to think that perhaps he didn’t know how to swim, even though he’ll grown up by the sea. Or perhaps it was because he knew, long before she did, that they hadn’t come here to swim and boat and fish, like summer visitors. He was drinking so much, more than she’ll ever known. She wouldn’t have thought anyone could drink so much every night. He was slow in the morning, red-eyed, not clumsy but heavy and unnatural in his movements as if he had to remember painfully how to get out of bed, how to dress himself, how to swallow. He wasn’t eating. She made bland porridge for them both but he said his stomach was a ball of acid. Towards evening he might make an omelette. Sometimes he’ll vomit up the food.
Every day she swam, even through the rain, far out on the water where she couldn’t see him or know what he was doing. She didn’t know how late he stayed up at night. She went to bed early, tired out by walking and swimming and chopping wood and making easy food for herself: soups and black bread and cheese and apples. There wasn’t anything to do in the evenings, once it was dark. She couldn’t read. Instead she gorged on sleep. She’ll sleep ten hours or more and when she woke he’ll be at the rickety card-table, a little glass at his right hand, working out calculations on a piece of paper. Something to do with business. Now she knew what those figures represented. She never knew if he’ll been drinking all night, or if he’ll started early, unable to wash or make their coffee without it.
The cold still water licks at her ankles. Kai’s right: it’s really too cold to swim. But she’s used to it. She’s got tough. She tenses, hearing an engine, then relaxes as a high, lonely aeroplane crosses above the clouds. She bends down, kneels on the coarse sandy bottom of the lake, sweeps the water up over her arms and shoulders. The water is very soft, cold, close-grained. It draws her in; she wants to be deep in it, embraced by it. She gets up and walks forward, covering waist, breasts, shoulders. She wades until she is almost floating, then kicks off and glides. Beneath her are weeds and small red and grey pebbles, beautiful in their wetness. Weeds wave up from the lake shore, frighteningly distinct. The water is delicious on her naked body. There are no waves, only her own rippling disturbance. In front of her everything is smooth.
She keeps swimming out. Now it’s deep underneath her and she doesn’t want to look down for fear of what she might see. The pike in this lake are huge, Kai says, but she guesses that the water here is too clear for them. They are fresh-water sharks. They hang in their holes in deep reedy water, waiting for movement. She’s beyond weeds, and the lake is deep and dark all around her. She rests, sculling with her hands. But she must swim farther. She can’t swim round the island because of the swans. Now that she is naked and in their element, she’d have no chance of fighting them off. She heads out towards the crag, laying her face against the water at each stroke. The cold lake is seductive. It washes away Kai’s voice, and the smell of his body metabolizing alcohol all night. It’s an acrid smell that comes out on his skin and breath. The lake is pure. Her solitude in the middle of the water is dizzying. No one is here; no one who knows her; no one to call her back. No Kai. She lets herself sink until her head is just under the water. Now there’s nothing on the surface to show that she’s here. If Kai drove past all he’ll see would be the lake looking back at him, smooth as an eye. She’s a small disturbance, quickly ironed out. Her breath tightens and red spots thicken in front of her closed eyes. Her lungs hurt. She comes up, lies on her back, looks at the sky. The lake is beneath her, supporting her and drawing her down, caressing her, so cold that it leaves her with scarcely any sensation but the one of opening herself wider and wider against the body of the water. She belongs to the lake. The bike and her pile of clothes and the scuff of her footsteps in the sand are drifting farther and farther off.
Nadine flips over, pushes back her wet hair and looks at the crag opposite. She might swim to it. That would be the deepest part of the lake, where the rock goes down sheer into the water, and down and down to its haunted floor. She’s not much more than a hundred metres offshore, and how wide is the lake here? About two hundred metres. She can swim a mile. She has swum a mile before.
‘In this cold? Some of these lakes go down to a thousand feet, remember what Kai said?’
She isn’t swimming fast. She knows better than that. These are slow strokes that will carry her over the water. She watches her hands push through the water. This is all she has now: herself. Her arms and legs, her heart beating hard against the cold. What does the little heap of clothes and the bike add to that? Kai wouldn’t think she could do it. He says she hasn’t got enough fat on her to go swimming in cold water. He loves telling her what to do. If he was here now, watching…;
But he isn’t watching. She’s sure of it. He couldn’t even find the roa
d, he’s so drunk. When he wakes up he won’t remember anything. He won’t remember the things he said, the things he told her. What she knows now and can’t stop knowing. But once he finds that she’s gone, won’t he guess why? No reason why he should, unless he remembers last night. He’ll think she’s got tired of it all: his drinking, and the summer-house in autumn with winter coming fast. He knows she doesn’t want him to touch her any more. Perhaps he thinks it’s because of the drink or the way he doesn’t bother to shave, or the smell of his breath, or because the bunks are narrow and uncomfortable, made for children. He’s got plenty more bottles. Maybe he’ll light the sauna, if he can be bothered. After ad, it’s Friday. Friday night, smoke going up, smelling sharp in the autumn evening. No one to smell it or watch the line of smoke go straight up between the trees.
She stops swimming and looks back. The shore is as far away as the rock. The swans have come out from their island again, and are fanned out across the bay. It wouldn’t be safe to swim back through them. They’d attack her. She’ll have to go on. No use deciding now that she never meant to go to the crag, no chance of coasting slowly back to the sandy safe shore. She’ll have to climb the rocks.
The lake is getting colder, or she’s getting colder. It’s pewtery on the surface, black underneath. Her arms are moving quite slowly and they look thin and weak in the water. She hears her gasping breath. She kicks hard. Her right foot is beginning to trail. It’s never been as strong as the left since she twisted her ankle when she was twelve. Another rest. No. She’s getting too cold. She’ll shut her eyes and swim thirty strokes, then the rock will be much closer. And again. She counts aloud. The rock is getting near. It’s bigger than she thought, and shiny and steep. There’s got to be a ledge somewhere for her to climb. Otherwise she’ll have to swim round to the bog and she might not be able to get out that way. She daren’t risk getting stuck there. Not far now. Count another thirty strokes. The rock is so dark she’s frightened to swim under it. What if there’s a current? What if the water pulls her down?