The Children's Hour (28 page)

The arrival of the tea gives Connor a moment in which to rally but Nest, watching his face, knows that her premonition is a true one. He smiles briefly at the waitress and sits forward in his chair, pretending to rearrange the cups, checking the hot water. At last he looks at her and the truth is there in his eyes for her to see.

‘Yes,' he says. ‘I met Henrietta.'

As he picks up the tea-strainer and the pot and fills the two cups, Nest knows that she could never have done it with so steady a hand. At this moment the full ten-year age-gap stretches its whole length between them: he is controlled, steady: she knows that at any moment she might cry. She thinks of Henrietta, of her beauty, ready wit and sophisticated confidence, and is miserably aware of her own immaturity. He places the milk and sugar near at hand and pushes her tea towards her.

‘Drink it.'

The quiet, bitten-off command causes her to glance up at him. With a slight jerk of the head, he directs her attention to the other interested families and she responds instinctively, sipping her tea obediently, lifting her cup with a trembling hand and setting it back in the saucer with only a tiny clatter. He fills the teapot from the hot-water jug and offers the tiered stand of cakes, turning it slowly, almost teasingly, as though to tempt her appetite. She stares at them: rock buns adorned with glacé cherries, a long chocolate eclair, oozing synthetic cream, in a paper frill, an assortment of iced squares topped with crystallized orange pieces. Revulsion heaves in her stomach and she swallows with difficulty at the thought of the sticky sweetness. Connor continues to turn the plate, watching her. She takes a rock bun, the least offensive, and puts it on her plate.

‘I wanted to see you,' he says gently, ‘because I needed to tell you myself, not by a letter. And it's not just to do with Henrietta. I'm too old for you, Nest, and you know that this is something that's worried me from the beginning. When I met your family it underlined it. I'm Mina's contemporary, older than Henrietta even. It never occurred to them, even for a second, that there could possibly be anything but a chance acquaintance between us, triggered by the fact that I had friends at Porlock. They still regard you as a child – oh, yes, I know you're nearly eighteen – but suddenly I saw it with their eyes and I realized what I'd done.'

He leans forward, smiling very slightly, as if telling her a story; deliberately disguising the tension of the moment from her school friends and their parents. It is a grotesque parody of the intimacy for which she yearns and she sees now why he was careful to seat her so that she is partly protected from their interest. Mrs Crowe is still trying to catch Connor's eye.

‘Cradle-snatching, they call it.' His warm, flexible voice makes it sound almost amusing. ‘I can't do it, Nest. It was one of those magic interludes which happen out of the real world but shrivel once they're exposed to harsh reality. I knew that when I met your family.'

She takes another sip of tea and crumbles the corner of the rock bun. Her sheltered life at Ottercombe and at school has not equipped her for this kind of experience. If they were alone, she could plead with him, hold on to him, try to change his mind, but what can she do here in this flowery, genteel environment surrounded by her watchful peers?

‘Try not to be too hard on me. It's not easy, Nest, I promise you, letting you go.'

Oddly, it's the plea for sympathy that stiffens her spine. She pushes her plate aside, dropping the remains of the napkin upon it.

‘I have the most terrible headache,' she says, quite clearly, so that others might hear if they're listening. ‘I'm terribly sorry, Connor, but I can't manage any cake. Do you think we might go back now?'

She smiles at her friends as she passes between them on her way out, ignoring Mrs Crowe's ostentatious gesture of concern, and they drive the half a mile to the school in silence. He is too intelligent to risk any further conversation which might lead to tears or appeals or recrimination: he conceals his own sadness, knowing that she needs all her pride and courage to get back inside with her dignity intact.

A few days later, she receives a short letter from him, a repetition of the things he has already said – kind but firm – but still she cannot quite take it all in: she loves him too much. In fact she is back at Ottercombe, more than a month later, before Nest truly believes that it is over, that he will not telephone or suddenly appear, telling her that it was all a
dreadful mistake. She makes up scenarios in which he returns to her; she rushes to answer the telephone and to pick up the post, longing to tell Mina the whole truth but unable to admit it even to herself. Then, on the morning of 15 August, Mina receives a letter from Henrietta.

As Mina reads Henrietta's letter aloud – but carefully edited – to Lydia, as they are at breakfast in the morning-room, Nest understands at last that it is finished.

‘ “Connor and I are seeing rather a lot of one another” – You remember Connor, Mama? He came to visit us here. – “and he comes to London quite often. We've discovered one or two mutual friends and he's invited me to a party in Oxford next weekend, which sounds rather fun . . .”'

Nest is gripped with such agonizing jealousy that the rest of the letter passes unheeded. She pictures them together knowing that now she has no chance at all of regaining his love. Once he has spent a period of time with the most glamorous of all her sisters how could she possibly hope to compete?

Mina finishes the letter, folding the sheets and putting it beside her plate, whilst Nest stares into a bleak emptiness; a future that no longer contains Connor. The rain, beating against the windows, lowers her spirits further.

‘I can't remember a wetter summer,' says Lydia. ‘The lawn is like a sponge.'

‘Lots of the rivers are flooding,' says Mina, ‘but surely it can't go on like this much longer. Even our own little stream is over its banks.'

There is some kind of melancholy satisfaction to be had from the walk to the beach, although Nest watches anxiously as a duck with her ducklings is swept at high speed on the current; tumbling against boulders and overhanging branches, they scramble almost comically in
their mother's wake, seeking a quiet shelter in a peaceful backwater. Following them, Nest is so preoccupied that it is some time before she truly appreciates the weight of water flowing down from the high moors. All manner of tiny springs gush from the rock-face as though – as the locals say – the rocks are being squeezed, swelling the stream as it cascades to the beach. To begin with, the drama of the scene, the ceaseless roaring of the water, the crying of the gulls, is in keeping with her mood. Nevertheless, she has on odd sense of foreboding; as if, today, nature's force is too great for her. Usually its implacable size and power brings solace, putting her puny fears into perspective, but today there is a rising ferocity in the sheer noise of it: the water tumbling from the cliffs, the waves crashing onto the beach, the increasing heaviness of the rain drumming on the rocks.

When she arrives home, she is relieved to see that Mina has already lit the drawing-room fire.

‘Mama is restless,' she tells Nest. ‘It's this wretched weather. It's madness to have a fire in August but I think we need it. I'm just getting tea ready so take off that soaking mackintosh and go and talk to her. Try to remain cheerful or she becomes anxious. Nothing specific, it's just how she is. If only this wretched rain would stop!'

The rain, however, does not stop; it increases as evening wears on and, at about half-past eight, there is a cloudburst and five inches of rain fall in one hour. Up on the Chains, no longer able to penetrate the unyielding ground, the torrents of water pour off the moor, gathering all before them as they hurtle towards the sea; huge boulders and savagely uprooted trees smash into bridges and carry them onwards so that, finally, the debris represents one huge battering ram. Houses and buildings are demolished as though they are cardboard; the West Lyn – changing course, destroying
roadways, a chapel, shops, houses – rushes to join the East Lyn River. They swirl violently together, twenty feet deep, bearing along one hundred thousand tons of boulders, building a dam twenty-five feet high, until the pressure becomes too much and the great tide gives way in a mighty roar, sweeping houses, cars and animals far out to sea.

At Ottercombe, using old sandbags to keep the water out of the kitchen, watching the swollen stream pouring across the lawn and rising to the bottom of the terrace, Mina and Nest are too anxious for their own safety to give too much thought as to what might be happening further up the coast. It isn't until the morning that the devastation becomes apparent – on Lynmouth Street hotels and houses have disappeared without trace, the road buried deep in silt and strewn with boulders, whilst half a mile out to sea, hundreds of great trees stand upright supported by their enormous roots, torn from the ground – and the acts of heroism begin to be told, along with the tales of tragedy.

The women at Ottercombe listen, shocked, to their wireless, read the newspapers in horror and give grateful thanks for their own safety. For Nest, her personal grief becomes a part of a larger mourning and, for ever afterwards, the twin disasters of the Lynmouth Flood and losing Connor are inextricably entwined.

From:
  Mina
To:
      Elyot

Dear Elyot
What a household we are! Lyddie arrived just after breakfast looking haggard. Oh dear! Things are clearly every bit as bad as we feared. I took Georgie off to Lynton – which is another story! – leaving Nest to be quiet with Lyddie. We hoped that Lyddie might be able to talk her problems through with her and, apparently, this was the case although Nest is finding the whole thing very painful, as you might imagine. You won't know that there has been a long pause between the last sentence and this one. My dear Elyot, it shocks me to think how much I have trusted you. I have made a present to you of so many of our secrets, by so doing lifting part of the burden from my shoulders but putting us all into a vulnerable position. The odd thing is how easy it has been to become intimate with someone I have never seen. I know it
took a little while for us to become true confidants but, nevertheless, the ease with which I've grown to trust you is frightening and I can see why parents are anxious about their children talking on the Internet. Would it be as easy by telephone? I don't think so. Or at least, not quite so quickly. We've all had those odd moments with strangers, a sudden outpouring of a worry, knowing that each will go her separate path very shortly, but I have come to depend on your advice and encouragement in a quite different way. Writing seems to lend a natural familiarity.

Anyway, Nest is finding it difficult. ‘How would you feel if the man you adored went off with another woman?' asked Lyddie, or something like that. Well, Nest told her exactly how she'd felt and is now in a fit of anxiety lest Lyddie should question her more closely. Oh, how deceit and self-image does make prisoners of us all! Yet it hasn't been Nest's fault that she's practised deception all these years. It was forced upon her. Still, we managed to get to bedtime without any more terrors although we're like cats on a hot tin roof. The thing is, Elyot, I can feel it coming: a kind of nemesis for us all. Nest felt it first, of course. All those weeks ago when Helena telephoned to ask if we could look after Georgie until the nursing home was ready for her, Nest felt the first stirrings of it.

As for Georgie . . . Well, you might not believe this, Elyot, but this morning I lost Georgie! Oh, the horror still grips me, although I find I can't help laughing too. She was in merry pin, all dressed up for Lynton, and only the sharpest eyes would have noticed that she was wearing matching shoes but in different colours. One black, one brown. We went off very cheerfully, dogs in the back, nice, bright morning. She was sharp too, remembering places very clearly as we went
along. Have I said to you that I wonder whether coming to Ottercombe is the worst thing we could have done for Georgie? Well, I think it is. She's been hauled back into the past and you can see her struggling to remain rooted in the present. It seems to me that it is easier for her to drift back, that she remembers things from forty years ago more readily than she can remember what we did yesterday. Maybe that's part of the dementia. Of course, nobody has dementia any more, do they? And especially not
senile
dementia! Oh dear, what a politically incorrect word ‘senile' is –
much
better to mask it with the smarter, more acceptable, name of Alzheimer's. The point is, are the two diseases the same?

Whatever the truth is about that, Georgie certainly seems ready to slip into the far past and remembers many odd things. This morning we talked of Papa dying just after the war and how she tried to keep an eye on Josie and Henrietta whilst they were still single. Quite lucid, even amusing, and this is the tragedy of it all. So we arrive in Lynton, park the camper and set off to the library. We are at the age, dear Elyot, which brings out the best in our nice local people and we are assisted, waited for, smiled upon. And very nice it is too. The shopping is put into the camper but it is not until we get to the cafe and we are having some coffee that I remember that I need some bread. I tell Georgie that I must dash out to buy some and tell her not to go anywhere until I come back.

I rush away, buy the bread and when I get back – no Georgie. The waitress, rather surprised by my anxiety, said that she'd suddenly remembered something and went off. Now though I might have been startlingly indiscreet to you, my dear friend, I have not yet made the local people aware of our
personal problems so I could do little more than check that she'd paid the bill – she had! – and hurry out onto the pavement. Which way had she gone? I run this way and that, panting along, checking her favourite places. No Georgie. People glance oddly at me and I see myself in a plate-glass window, a bundly old lady, red-cheeked, hat awry, scarf flying. Lynton is not a big town and before too long I have covered all the main streets. I even check the health centre. Suddenly – oh, let it be true! – I wonder if she has returned to the camper. She might, even now, be sitting peacefully inside, waiting for me. I begin to run – why didn't I think of it before? I never lock the camper lest some accident should happen and the dogs couldn't be got out. After all, if anyone needs a battered ten-year-old vehicle, complete with dog-chewed seat cushions, then, poor souls, their need must be greater than mine! But she is not inside. Captain Cat barks encouragingly, Nogood Boyo stares anxiously through the window at me, but no Georgie.