“Jessie made me do it,” Bella says, fighting a small smile. Will slings his arm around Bella, hugs her to him.
Jessie notices that Will is wearing his life in layers today: a puffer coat muddied from carrying his midlife toddler; the V-neck cashmere sweater her mother gave him last Christmas (she’d never spent so much on a sweater in her life); a faded Glastonbury T-shirt from 1998, a festival he’d go to with Mandy, and the year Bella was conceived.
“Ah, Jessie can be persuasive,” says Will wryly to Bella.
“You’re back quick. Weren’t the ducks hungry?” Jessie doesn’t mean to sound short. She picks at Romy’s curls. They’re beginning to dreadlock at the back. She looks increasingly feral, like some sort of woodland sprite. A free spirit—“A little too free?” Will wondered yesterday after getting home—Romy is resentful of any constraints: buggies, playpens, and warm clothes. She knows her own mind, her favored routes through the garden, all the better barefoot, the places to forage in the undergrowth, finding a brain-like walnut in the skull of its broken shell, rabbit bones that she offers to Bella, trying to win her affection. She eyes the glasses in Bella’s hand curiously.
“Sorry,” Will says distractedly, looking up from his phone. His eyes take a moment to refocus, the pupils contracting, as if he’s moving from one place to another in his head. “An e-mail from Jackson. Says he’s sniffed out another potential buyer, some friend of a friend in the City. Maybe this will finally be it, Jess? I need to make a call.”
“On a Saturday?” Jackson’s “potential buyers” have led them in a dance so far.
“If there’s a small chance, we can’t sit on it, Jessie.” Stuffing his phone back in his coat pocket, he glances at Bella’s hand. Jessie’s heart sinks; she’d hoped they might go unnoticed. “What’ve you got there, Bella?”
“Audrey’s glasses.” Bella lays them flat on her palm and holds them up for Will’s inspection.
Will sends Jessie a quizzical look. She sends a small shrug back, one that says, Leave it, it’s just Bella’s fanciful imagination.
“Ducks?” Romy presses against Bella’s leg, smiling the kind of smile that would melt any heart—just not her sister’s. “Bell Bell take Romy to the ducks?”
“Bella’s busy, sweetpea.” Jessie smiles, scooping her up. But Romy is resistant. She wants Bella.
“No, it’s all right, I’ll take Romy,” says Bella unexpectedly.
Jessie is so taken aback, she can’t think of anything to say at first.
“Will you?” Will looks pleasantly surprised.
“Sure. We’ll find some ducks on the river.”
The river. Jessie’s heart starts to thump. Bella cannot take Romy down to the water alone. She thinks of the cold, threatening way Bella looks at Romy sometimes. Bella’s hot temper, her unpredictability. Jessie scrabbles about for legitimate reasons, the ones she can voice out loud. “Oh no, she’s such a scamp. She keeps running off and hiding, Bella.”
And this is true. A trying new phase, Romy’s attempts at hide-and-seek. Usually Jessie finds her pretty quickly. But she wouldn’t want Romy trying it on by the river, not with that swell of dark water edging up the bulrushes, its surface fingerprinted with swirling eddies, guilty-looking. A bloated dead sheep was bobbing downstream yesterday, like an overstuffed pillowcase, its eyes pink holes, pecked out by birds. “The river is very high after all the rain. And look at those clouds. It’s going to bucket down.”
“We’ll be fine.” Bella speaks directly to Will now. And Jessie is aware of the self-enclosed lock of their gazes, the way they are silently negotiating without her.
“Off we go!” Romy tucks Flump tighter under her arm. “Romy and Bell Bell and Flump.”
“Will,” Jessie appeals to him, trying to talk in a grown-up code that Bella won’t understand. “I’m really not sure it’s such a good idea.”
“She means she doesn’t trust me,” Bella interjects simply, understanding perfectly.
Will frowns. Jessie feels the day lurch, the first afternoon of the weekend, which was going so well. “I . . .”
“I told you, Dad,” Bella adds.
What has she told him? When? Jessie glances at Will. Is this what they were talking about last night in Bella’s bedroom? Those long phone calls earlier in the week? But Will doesn’t quite meet Jessie’s eye. And something in Jessie sinks: she cannot tune in to Will as she did, she realizes. Is he thinking of what happened in London at the pool? Because she is. She can’t not.
The lifeguard saw Bella holding the girl under the water, the girl struggling, flailing. After he pulled her out—Zizzi Miles, cliquey, popular, an old adversary of Bella’s—she gasped on the poolside like a dying fish. An ambulance was called. Zizzi emerged from the incident unscathed, Bella far less so. After Zizzi swore that Bella “had gone pyscho” and tried to drown her and Zizzi’s incensed parents called the police, Bella was suspended, her place in the sixth form revoked. Offered the chance to defend herself, she barely bothered, only saying that she wished she’d pushed down harder and that Zizzi’s drowning act was faked: “I don’t expect to be believed.” And the headmistress didn’t believe her. But Will did. And Jessie tried to. It’s just that there’s always been this little doubtful voice in Jessie’s head. No, Bella shouldn’t be in charge of the little sister she doesn’t like very much down by that river.
“Bella will be super careful, won’t you?” Jessie hears Will say. And before she can object, she sees Will pull a sandwich bag of bread crumbs from his coat pocket. “Here. Duck feast. Hold Rom’s hand, Bella. Tightly.”
“And Flump’s,” instructs Romy, pushing the elephant’s knitted foot into Bella’s fingers.
Will is talking in his fast London voice while Jessie paces by the kitchen window, peering out of the glass at the darkening garden beyond. The yellow tinge has gone. The sky is heavy, metallic, like a lid. She waits for Will to finish his call, turns to him. “They’ve been gone awhile.”
“Twenty minutes.” He’s looking at her in a funny way, holding her at a distance. “Bella can handle Romy.”
“It’s not a London park, Will.” Worry makes her sound too sharp. Besides, he doesn’t know the river, or the girls’ dynamic, not like she does. He’s never here. “No one’s around. If anything happened . . .”
Will rakes back his hair and says wearily, “I thought we moved here so the girls could roam free.”
His tone takes her by surprise. It seems that a criticism of the entire move is seeded in his question. Rain starts to tap at the window, the sound of little fingers. “Romy hasn’t got her waterproof.”
“That’s never held her back before.”
Jessie’s not sure if there’s an accusation in there somewhere, too, or if she’s imagining it. Maybe he’s just tired and scratchy. “I can feel another storm coming.”
He follows her into the cloakroom, watching as she rifles frantically through the coats on the hooks, her heart starting to jack, her mind flying off to frightening places. “Jessie . . .” he says more softly.