Chapter Nineteen
THE TURN OF THE TIDE
‘I’ll be perfectly all right,’ Ethie said impatiently to her father. ‘I know the tides by now. I’ve been doing it for six months now.’
Bertie nodded, his face pale as he sat in the wicker chair by the stove. ‘I wish I was well enough to go with you.’
‘Well you’re not,’ said Sally, ‘so stay there, Bertie, or I’ll tell you off.’
Bertie grinned, and wagged a finger at Ethie who stood half in and half out of the door. ‘Tonight is full moon,’ he said. ‘There’ll be a spring tide, and big bore up the river.’
Ethie rolled her eyes. She didn’t want to upset her father when he wasn’t well, but she wished he wouldn’t fuss over her and keep telling her the same things.
‘Let her go,’ she heard Sally saying as she closed the door. ‘She loves the river. And I hope she does come back with a fish. We could do with it.’
Ethie scowled and trudged out into the clear March sunshine. She walked down to the river, swinging the metal bucket. She wanted to be alone, like she was now, free of the expectations and the jealousy. The walk to the river was a wooded path with chaffinches and chiff-chaffs singing and blackthorn in full blossom, the verges yellow with celandine and dandelion. Corners of the river shone blue through the branches, then the whole vista opened up between two gnarled old pines, their bristly foliage covered in new cones. Wooden steps made from railway sleepers led down to the narrow beach and Ethie bounded down them.
After checking that she was alone on the sand, she ducked under the steps, put her arm into a deep crack in the low cliff, and extracted the long-handled fishing net she’d hidden in there.
‘Just check the putts, Ethie. Don’t go trying to fish the pools,’ her Uncle Don had said. ‘You’re not experienced enough for that.’
But Ethie had taken the net from the barn and hidden it. She’d use it to check the shallow pools that shone like opals in the sand at low tide. She found it more exciting than dragging a trapped fish out of the putts. Paddling up to her knees she often caught smaller fish, and once she’d gone triumphantly home with a conger eel in the bucket. How she had caught it was one of Ethie’s many secrets.
In the warm March sunshine she stripped off her boots and socks, something else she’d been told not to do. The velvet sand and the chill of the water on her skin was soothing to Ethie. It cooled the eternal burning of her thoughts, the inner loneliness, the longing for transformation. She felt part of the river, a rare contentment as she wandered from pool to pool, following ridges of hard sand encrusted with the myriad pinks and greys of tiny clamshells.
Far out in the estuary, close to the deep channel of the main river, Ethie felt dazzled by her freedom, as if she looked down on herself and saw her spirit like a flickering candle, reaching out, longing to escape from the body she hated. Why bother to catch a fish? It was hot for March and she was sweating in her heavy farm clothes. Why not strip naked, roll in the crisp sand and let the cool river heal her burning skin? She looked back at her life and it was a switchback of rage and injustice, jealousy and pimples. It coiled after her like a poisonous snake. The only place she remembered being happy was in the water, swimming in the school pool, in the summer river at Hilbegut, rowing a boat across the winter floods with the white wings of water birds all around her.
Ethie lay down on the sand and allowed herself to be sucked into a whirling dream where her itchy clothes became the soft satins of forgiveness, where her hair was long again and rippling like waterweed. She lay on her back and gazed through the shimmer of the sky to whatever was out there, to whoever may know she was lying there, a pearl in the oyster shell of day.
‘Why am I so horrible?’ she shouted at the sky. ‘Why have I got pimples and a fat body and a wicked deceitful heart? Why me? Why?’
She listened for an answer, but nothing came. Only the burble of the turning tide flooding into the pools and stealing over the sandbanks and mud flats, glittering as it came. And in the distance the roar of the Severn Bore, foaming, gathering height as it funnelled into the estuary.
Ethie sat up. She tasted salt on the wind. She looked back at the beach and the line of putts, and saw speeding water where sand had been. She looked at her hand clutching the handle of the fishing net.
‘What am I DOING?’
She scrambled to her feet in a panic, and saw that she now stood on a narrow island of sand. It was shifting and crumbling under her feet as the brown water came churning in ahead of the spring tide.
‘Get back – get back.’ Ethie heard her own voice rasping like a storm twisting a stalk of barley. Clutching the net, she waded into the current, feeling the water sucking sand away from her heels. She was a strong swimmer, thank goodness, she thought. She kept wading desperately, waist deep, the water bitter and fierce around her body, dragging her heavy clothes, lifting her now, her chin suddenly in the water, her mouth spluttering, gasping with the cold. Fighting the weight of her sodden clothes, she swam vigorously towards the line of putchers. If she could only reach them, she could scramble to safety.
In the hours she’d spent by the river Ethie had come to recognise the burbling roar of the Severn Bore. It excited her to watch the edge of creamy foam rumpling up the river hauling the tide like a great silver breath discharged from the lungs of the ocean. Hearing it now, Ethie knew she was going to die, and she shouted to the sky.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mum and Dad and Kate. I did love you. I did.’ And then she fought to stay afloat, the cold reaching deep into her bones, her breath lurching in her chest. She fought, and she cursed, and at last Ethie let go as the brown waters carried her swiftly upstream under the silent, watching, waiting skies.
She uttered a final curse at the sky.
‘I’ll be back,’ she shouted, ‘I’ll be back.’
Kate and Sally stood one each side of Ethie’s empty bed, looking at each other.
‘Come on Mummy. We’ve got to do this,’ said Kate.
‘I know. It just seems so final.’ Sally looked down at the neatly made bed with its white pillows and the green and black tartan rug that Ethie had always wanted. She was glad of Kate’s bright strength there in the room with her. ‘You’re too young to have this happen to you, Kate,’ she said, ‘especially just now, after losing our home and with you worrying about Freddie.’
‘I’m all right, don’t you worry,’ said Kate. Her toe touched Ethie’s slippers which were under the bed. She picked them up tenderly and put them in the wooden tea chest with the rest of Ethie’s things. ‘Now let’s start by folding the blanket.’
Once the blanket had gone, Ethie’s bed looked ordinary, and the two women silently folded the heavy blankets and the starched sheets. Kate took off the pillowcases and added them to the laundry basket. Now they were looking down at the bare blue and white striped mattress and it seemed natural to sit on it and talk about Ethie.
‘If there’s anything of hers you want, you must have it, Kate,’ said Sally. ‘Her clothes perhaps.’
‘I don’t want her clothes.’ Kate shook her head adamantly. To her, Ethie’s clothes were gloomy, and touching them somehow connected her to all the unhappiness and the resentment her sister had emanated. ‘But I’d like this.’ She rummaged in the tea chest and took out a heavy navy blue book, its cover embossed with gold.
‘Oh yes,’ said Sally. ‘The Water Babies. It was her favourite book. She was always reading it, even when she was grown up. Ironic, isn’t it? There must have been something in it, some truth that she needed.’