The weather has put off all but the most determined visitors: Jessie’s sprightly mother; Will’s aged parents; Lou and Matt, Lou entering the house with her hands clapped over her mouth, laughing, muttering, “Oh my God, you’re not serious?”; a small group of Will’s friends who stayed one night fewer than they’d planned, a relief since Jessie and Will seemed to spend most of the time washing up, cooking and justifying their decision to leave London without offending those who had stayed.
Jessie’s much preferred it when it’s been just them, hunkering down in their old damp house in its river valley like a sort of dysfunctional Swiss Family Robinson. None of them have been back to London yet. They’ve been living another life altogether, hazy, unreal, the damp days seeping into one another: she and Will making love by the fire long after the girls are in bed; Romy stomping around in the fudgy mud, her baby curls dreadlocking; Bella wandering down to the stones to be alone, wearing her huge silver headphones and, to Will’s quiet consternation, her dead mother’s summer caftans, retrieved from the Mandy Boxes that Jessie has started to fear are bottomless, their contents tumbling out like lost treasures from a tomb. Occasionally, Jessie’s glimpsed a local, necklaced in dog leads, peering through their gate, and more than once she was pretty sure it was that woman again, the one with the dogs. But by the time she’s gone to greet her, or any of the others, they’ve melted back into the mizzle and it was as if they were never there.
“Dad!” Bella shouts from inside the house, over the drum of rain. “Phone!”
Hearing her approach, Will and Jessie instinctively edge apart. Jessie goes to close the glass door. She sees the rain has splattered her red dress with dark spots, like blood.
Bella appears, trailed by Romy, who is now dressed inexplicably in knickers and a swimming cap, waggling a fistful of dirty bird feathers above her head. Bella speaks into Will’s phone: “I’m handing you over now, Jackson.”
Will looks at Bella quizzically. “He says it’s urgent.” Bella shrugs, pushing away Romy’s hand with the feathers a little too roughly.
Will takes a breath, clicking his brain out of Applecote mode, and presses the phone to his ear. “Jackson, old boy, what’s going down?” He stops, frowns. “I’m sorry to . . . What? Wait a minute . . .”
“What is it?” Jessie whispers, wondering why Will’s business partner should be calling on a Sunday, why Will’s face is growing suddenly so serious. But Will doesn’t hear her. He is already walking away.
Jessie takes a breath and dives into the deepest channel of the river. The current is surprisingly strong after yesterday’s heavy rain, tunneling cloudy, brown-black, like marrow in a bone. As she emerges, her hair caps her skull, the dark rich copper of Applecote’s pipes, and her face glows with the river’s mineral cold, unexpectedly so. Although she’s a strong swimmer, she can suddenly imagine the deadly creep of that coldness, the way it would stiffen the muscles, weaken a stroke. She’s never felt this with Will swimming beside her. She misses him—he left for a crisis meeting with Jackson yesterday morning, stayed in a hotel last night. She misses the summer already.
She can sense that something is over. And she doesn’t know what comes next.
Neither of them could have anticipated Jackson’s bombshell, his sister in Australia’s breast cancer diagnosis. Jackson wants to be there. Single, unencumbered, he’s long thought about moving to Oz. (News to Will.) A wake-up call, he says. Will’s changed his life, scaled back; why not him? The only difference is he can’t run a European-based company from Brisbane. He’s really sorry to bail, but he wants to sell his share.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time. However much Will sympathizes, it feels more like a divorce—old university friends, Jackson and Will started the company from a kitchen table fifteen years ago—and it leaves him with the problem of either raising a huge amount of money to buy Jackson out or selling the stake to an outsider, losing control of half the company, which he desperately doesn’t want to do. If he’s to raise investment himself, Will needs to be in London more than ever, not taking his foot off the gas, as planned, but flooring it. How the hell is he going to do it from here?
Jessie pushes the thought away—they will manage somehow—and starts to tread water, waving to the girls on the bank.
Huddled under a gray hoodie, Bella’s watching her carefully, protectively even, whilst ignoring her vulnerable charge, who is picking her way along the gravelly river beach in her bumblebee swimsuit, carrying a red bucket rattling with pebbles. When Romy starts wading farther out, oblivious to the chill on the chub of her thighs, the sudden shelving of the river floor, Bella does nothing to stop her.
Jessie swims back fast, tugs Romy up the bank. “What were you waiting for, Bella?” she says, more sharply than she intends, still on edge from the night before. Hearing noises in Romy’s room in the small hours, Jessie had investigated and gotten the fright of her life: a figure in the gloom, standing motionless beside Romy’s toddler bed; Bella, blank-faced, sleepwalking. Shaken, Jessie had led her back upstairs. Bella didn’t remember anything about it this morning, which sort of made it worse.
“She was fine.” Bella shrugs, hands Jessie a towel. Rain starts to fall in a fine mist, like a collapsing cloud. Bella rolls her black eyes upward. “There can’t seriously be any water left up there.” She unfolds her long heron legs and stands up, digging her hands into the pockets of her denim cutoffs. “I’m off, then. I’ve got pictures to put up in my room.”
“Oh, yes, I forgot about that. Perfect rainy afternoon activity. It’ll make that bedroom finally feel like yours, Bella, it really will. Wait for us.” By the time Jessie’s grappled Romy out of her swimsuit, the meadow is empty, only the stones huddled like a group of small old men in long gray coats. She doesn’t like it much, not with Will in London, the responsibility of the girls suddenly all hers.
The isolation that Jessie’s relished these last few weeks feels almost threatening now. All August, it’s seemed almost unearthily quiet—“With a sort of two-centuries-behind lag feeling,” as Bella cannily described it—and Jessie’s loved that, too, the way the roads have been empty, apart from the occasional coach full of bemused tourists, usually pulled up in front of Cornton Hall, the grand house on the outskirts of the village, even though it’s shrouded in scaffolding and green netting that billows in the wind like ragged sails. Sometimes it feels that everyone’s left but them.
“Dog,” Romy announces with a grin.
Jessie looks up from the swim bag and is immediately struck by a sense that something is not quite right. There are two black dogs charging along the riverbank, as if called by their owner, a shadowy figure hidden beneath a huge umbrella, walking smartly away. Is it that woman again? Was she secretly watching her swim? The thought makes Jessie feel strange. She stuffs the towels into the bag quickly, wanting to get home.