Still Waters (14 page)

So school had many good points and when she came home for the holidays Daddy insisted that she did more or less as she liked, provided she gave Marianne some help in the house and took her turn at looking after Cherie. Janet, who had been such a good friend, had her own life to lead now in the holidays so Tess was often alone, but she could take off in her dinghy, catch the bus to Wroxham and wander round Roys, or watch the boats ducking their masts to get under the bridge. Or she could go for a long bicycle ride, with her lunch in a bag, pushing the boundaries of her knowledge of the country surrounding her home wider with each excursion.

The bicycle was wonderful. It enlarged her horizons – it gave her wings! She could set off early in the morning and stay out until late when the summer evenings were long and light. Marianne encouraged this and so did Daddy, though they had different reasons. Marianne liked her home, husband and child to herself. Daddy simply wanted Tess to be happy and free, as he had been as a boy.

‘Cherie will have to fight free of Marianne one day,’ he told his daughter once, as he drove her back to school on the first day of the new term. ‘She’s a very possessive woman and she won’t want to let Cherie go even a little bit. But you, my poor darling, you’ll never have to do that. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry, Daddy,’ Tess had assured him. ‘I’m much happier going my own way just like you did when you were a boy. Cherie will be a dear little indoor girl, but I’m not like that. I like the outdoors best.’

But she was lonely. She missed Janet’s companionship horribly, having taken it for granted for so long, and even Sara’s newer friendship would have been welcome as she pedalled along the dusty country lanes or rowed along by the reed beds, spotting bird-life.

‘Marianne loves you, you know,’ Daddy said cautiously. ‘It’s just that you were eight when she first met you, so she can’t think of you in quite the same way that she thinks of Cherie. And you’ve never felt you could call her Mummy, have you?’

‘No,’ Tess said decidely. ‘She’s too young, Daddy. And anyway, I do have my own mother . . . I mean, there’s the photograph.’

She had the photograph in her room now. It was in a heavy silver frame richly decorated with vine-leaves and swags of grapes and she loved it and, on the rare occasions when she felt sad and unwanted, she talked to her mother’s photograph, quietly and secretly, before she turned off the light.

‘Yes . . . but a photograph isn’t the same thing as a real, live mother, darling,’ Peter said. He never took his eyes from the road ahead but Tess knew he was unhappy with the situation and hastened to reassure him. She understood that her father had needed a wife, she thought it a pity he had chosen Marianne, but Marianne was pretty, a good cook, she kept the house immaculate and managed her housekeeping money well. Tess knew, without understanding it, that Marianne made her father happy. That, for her, was enough. But as always, she felt she must make her father see that no blame attached to either himself or his wife because she could not think of Marianne as her mother.

‘I know a photograph isn’t like a real person, Daddy,’ she assured him. ‘But it would be awfully hard for me to call Marianne anything but that, because as you said, I was eight when I first met her. And besides, she doesn’t really want me to call her Mummy, honestly she doesn’t. She said the other day she wouldn’t mind Cherie calling her Marianne, as well. It makes her feel young, she said.’

‘Oh,’ Daddy said rather blankly. ‘Well, I’d never try to persuade you one way or the other, you know that.’

She did know it. And valued more than ever the light touch which could run the household smoothly, for she knew who really ran the household, whatever Marianne might think. Peter kept everyone in the place he had chosen for them. She was his beloved daughter, Cherie his beloved baby, Marianne his beloved wife. Because he showed, plainly, how he thought things should be, most of the time all three of them did their best to play the parts that had been assigned to them. Tess tried not to resent Marianne’s bouts of jealousy, Marianne, she knew, tried to hide that same jealousy, and Cherie, lucky little thing, simply adored her older sister, her mother and her father indiscriminately – and was adored in return.

She was a pretty child, placid and sweet-tempered and perhaps not terribly bright. She always did as she was told and was content to be around the house and garden, never trying to wander further afield, happy to play alone or with a doting parent, asking no other company. She was delighted to see Tess at the end of each term, yet she waved her off at the beginning of the next with perfect aplomb. She clambered all over Peter when he came home after work, but if Peter gently put her down and told her to go to her mummy she went at once, sweet and docile, her light curls clustered around the white or pink or blue bows which perched like butterflies on top of her head, her clothing always in place, her strap shoes always on her feet. Sometimes Tess wondered if her baby sister was not a little too obliging and good, but she wouldn’t have dreamed of saying so. Marianne was apt to boast that Cherie was the perfect child and who was she, Tess, to disagree? But she knew that other three-year-olds were not like that. Podge Thrower had been a little beast when the fancy took him and the present baby Thrower, Dickie, was always ambling off after mischief and seldom clean, let alone neat.

But still, I’m no expert, Tess told herself now, skilfully untangling the
Roger
from the reeds and wiping impatiently at the perspiration running down the sides of her face and neck. Perhaps Marianne is right, perhaps little girls are better behaved than little boys. But she could never forget that in her dream she had run down the beach, where she was not supposed to be, and taken off her shoes and socks . . .

It was only a dream, though. Perhaps, in reality, the small Tess had been as good as the small Cherie. Tess untied the painter, pushed the
Roger
into open water and jumped aboard, causing the dinghy to rock alarmingly for a moment, until she dropped on to the seat and unshipped the oars. A couple of strokes cleared the reeds and she was on the great, silver expanse of water.

It was mid-afternoon and breathlessly hot still, though there was more air here than on land. A tiny breezelet, so slight that only the very tips of the feathery reeds moved under its caress, touched Tess’s hot brow. Tess sighed deeply and pushed her hair back behind her ears, than glanced around her. It was too hot to exert oneself; what should she do? Scull gently across the Broad to the Atkins’ house? Go round to the staithe to see if Janet was in a coming-out mood? Or just get the boat in the shade of a willow and dream a little?

She and Janet were still friends, but boarding school had spoiled their closeness and now that they were old – twelve – Janet had changed. She’d made friends with three girls from her school, girls who were older than she, girls Tess neither knew nor wanted to know. Violet, Elsie and Ruby were in the top class and in their last year of school. They wore make-up, talked – and thought – about nothing but boys, and made Tess feel gawky and young. And Janet copied them. She wore her skirts long, sometimes did her hair in a bun at the back, rubbed her cheeks with geranium petals and talked about boys. Not all the time, of course, but a good deal of the time. Now and again Tess persuaded her to take a trip in the
Roger,
but the new Janet screamed when she was splashed, fussed about the sun giving her freckles, had no desire to lie on the bottom boards and talk, or put out a line in the hope of a fish, or go round Mr Thrower’s eel-traps to see what he’d caught.

‘It was you goin’ to boardin’ school, my woman,’ Mrs Thrower said heavily, when Tess asked why Janet had changed so much. ‘She din’t have no one to do things with, see? She were lonely for another gal. Then Vi took her up and she began to imitate, like. Whass more, Tess, she’ll be workin’ in another couple o’ years. That’s bound to make a difference to the pair of you.’ She paused, eyeing Tess thoughtfully. ‘And there was suffin’ else, too – Mrs Delamere weren’t too welcomin’ to Janet, were she?’

Marianne had been beastly to Janet as soon as she had settled into the house in Deeping Lane. She had chased the pair of them out of the kitchen, had talked to Janet in a sneering sort of voice and had finally told Tess bluntly that her friend was a common little village girl and, as such, was not welcome in her home.

‘But Mrs Thrower comes here,’ Tess had said. At eight, she had scarcely understood what Marianne was saying, though she realised that her stepmother was deliberately being nasty to Janet to keep them apart. ‘You have Mrs Thrower here three mornings a week, sometimes more.’

‘She’s my charwoman,’ Marianne said at once. ‘She scrubs my floors and cleans the lavatory. She is not a friend.’

It was tempting to tell Peter and demand that he make Marianne polite to her friend, but Tess could see that it wouldn’t work, or not for long. So she said nothing and for that first year, when school holidays came round, she and Janet played outside or in the Throwers’ cramped cottage. But then she became a term-boarder and Janet met Violet, Elsie and Ruby . . . and Tess became, perforce, a loner. Janet still liked her, she knew, but she couldn’t simply drop the others, it wouldn’t have been fair.

So Tess tried to understand, tried not to hang around when the four girls came whispering and giggling down to the staithe, and though it had been difficult at first, she really did see Janet’s point of view. After all, at boarding school she had heaps and heaps of friends. If Janet had suddenly been slung into that school would she, Tess, have been able to ditch her school friends for the other girl?

She would have liked to have a school friend to stay from time to time, though. Quiet Vanessa, noisy Vera, sweet, funny little Hilary. She had actually arranged to have Vanessa for a week once, but Marianne had put a stop to that.

‘I can’t entertain in a house which has no sitting-room for the children,’ she had said sulkily. ‘I can’t have two great girls underfoot all day long.’

Peter had done his best, and then Marianne had played her trump card, though Tess had not recognised it for what it was at first.

‘There is another reason,’ Marianne had said, looking at Peter under her lashes. ‘Come upstairs for a moment, darling, and I’ll explain.’

Secrets aren’t nice, the eleven-year-old Tess had thought resentfully, as the time stretched and stretched and still she waited. Marianne wouldn’t like it if I said I wanted to speak to Daddy alone and went off with him for almost an hour.

But then they came downstairs again, Marianne looking sleepy and smug and something else, though Tess could not put a name to it, and Peter looking hot and rather furtive.

‘Darling, Marianne can’t cope this time,’ he had said, patting her shoulder in a rather perfunctory way. ‘Later in the year, perhaps.’

This meant that Tess couldn’t accept invitations to stay with friends either, since there could be no reciprocal visits, but she didn’t mind that, particularly. She loved her own home too much to want to swap it for someone else’s, even for a few days. But it would have been nice to show a friend the Broad. In early summer, when the water lilies bloomed, the surface of the Broad was carpeted with yellow, gold and white, whilst every shade of pink, from pastel to deepest rose, abounded. And in the clear water sleak, red-finned rudd, pale green roach and pink-eyed tench swam, feeding on the facinating insect life which was supported by the green reed beds. Yes it would have been nice to take a friend out in the boat, for the two of them to bicycle off along the quiet country lanes, to have a friend to giggle at with breakfast, or to share a midnight feast.

Still. With the
Roger
for company, she was better off than most, Tess told herself, sculling lazily across the polished pewter of the Broad. She headed for the further bank because of the willows; shade was a pleasure on such a day.

When she reached the further bank, Tess lowered the anchor overboard – the anchor was an old paint tin, which filled with water as it sank – and looked thoughtfully about her. Nothing stirred. In the drooping branches above her head and even in the great reed beds which ringed the Broad there was silence, for the birds were too hot to sing or call. A dragonfly, thin as a needle and a vivid electric blue, hovered near the prow of the boat for a moment, and Tess stared at it, fascinated as always by the transparent blur of its wings, the great round eyes, the movements which were so quick that the onlooker could not follow them. She put a finger near the insect but it took no notice, suddenly darting over to a clump of water forget-me-not where it clung for a moment, blending in beautifully with the flowers’ ethereal blue.

‘There’s no one but you and me about,’ Tess told the dragonfly. ‘Everyone’s either sleeping or lying in the shade, because it’s too hot for anything else. Even the birds are asleep; why don’t you go somewhere quiet and sleep, too?’

As though it had heard her the dragonfly rose from the water forget-me-nots, hovered for a moment, then darted sideways into the nearest reed bed and disappeared. Tess turned and stared out across the Broad once more. Should she go over to the Atkins’ place? But it was far too hot for sculling all that way – far too hot for any activity, now that she came to think. The whole world was resting, waiting for the sun to begin to sink in the heavens.

Near at hand, a fish jumped, then fell back into the water with a splosh and a widening spread of ripples. Tess put her face near the water, breathing in the exciting smell of it, the peaty richness. She could see her own reflection, gazing back at her; the pale triangle of her face, the wide-apart dark-blue eyes, the straggle of coal-black hair, so different from her little sister’s smooth fair locks. She pulled a face at herself, then turned her head sideways; on the surface water boatmen skated, a leaf rocked as she moved in the boat, and a tiny moth skimmed the water, to land triumphantly on a burr-reed.

Tess sat up. The only people to feel really comfortable today were the fish, so why not follow their excellent example and go for a swim? She tugged her shirt over her head, then undid the buttons on the side of her navy-blue pleated skirt. It was, of course, rude to go swimming without any clothes on, but Marianne would not be pleased if she went home with a burden of wet clothing. She might as well swim in the buff, as Daddy called it. There wasn’t a soul about.