Meanwhile your strength, Nick, as your dad towed you in, had almost vanished. I still see your white, drained face, lolling against the blue. Somehow you managed to hang on to his shoulder and kick a bit yourself, while he managed to swim, with one arm and your weight, and still outswim the current.
Please don’t let go, Nick. And please don’t drown your dad.
He got you to a low ledge of rock, where I was waiting for you. You were already like some piece of limp delivered cargo. He was thinking of Kate. He spluttered out, in that same uncontradictable voice, “Wrists! Quick! Pull!”—the last word almost lost in a watery glug. With a strength I never knew I had I got you by both wrists and pulled you out before the downward suck of the wave made you twice as heavy. But I think, even if it had, I would have made you unheavy. I would have made you eject. Up you shot anyway, like a cork from a bottle, into my arms, and I screamed at you, with your dad’s fierce force, “Breathe, Nick! Breathe!” I don’t think you needed telling.
On the way up, you scraped your knee against the rock (you complained like crazy later). Blood ran down your shin. It didn’t matter. Blood was good, it was somehow very good. On your way up too, I noticed, with another strange little intensity of mere observation, that under the lip of the ledge, just beneath the glinting waterline, there were clusters of barnacles, little clenched, packed shells, tresses and twirls of swaying seaweed, a whole world of gripping life.
Mike was already swimming out again. When I could look, I saw that you, Kate, had hardly anything left now, but you managed to hold on to your father in a slightly more efficient way than Nick. And Mike said later that on that second journey back, even in the moments (but they seemed like hours) that had passed, the current had actually lessened. It must have been some trick of just that stage of the tide. And that was just as well. It was a longer journey this time: your dad’s strength was going. But there was a point when I knew, even before it had actually quite happened, like a sudden flooding current itself, fighting back a dreadful anti-current of “ifs” and “might have beens” and eternal anguish for ever after, that my wonderful and adorable family, my incomparable family, every precious member of it, was going to be restored to me. It would be there at the end of this summer’s day, just as it had been at the start.
There we were on that warm slab of firm rock, like miniature people on some giant’s dry, magic, outspread palm. Or rather, there were the three of us. Your dad was still clinging to its edge, still in the water, too exhausted yet to heave himself out, breathing furiously, his wet forearms clear, his head bowed, not even looking at us. What was he thinking?
28
YOU WERE NINE years old. You were too young then to understand that the great wave of anger that heaved up inside me, like nausea, only moments later wasn’t what it seemed. It was its opposite. It was a venting, it wasn’t a punishing. Punish you? For being saved?
“What on earth were you doing?! Just what were you doing?!”
I surprised even myself, I surprised Mike, with my uncontrollable rage. And you were too young not to think that that current itself hadn’t been like some punishment prepared specially for you — never mind your mother’s fury. But you didn’t have to confess, Kate, to the extent that you did. You might just have said it had been a dare, an adventure, to swim back round the headland, and it had all gone wrong. And, yes, you should never have gone off like that out of sight in the first place.
You didn’t have the art yet of concealment. We’d been practising it for nine whole years. It all poured out of you, like water might so nearly have poured that day out of your lifeless lungs. And you did all the confessing. Nick was silent. So was Mike. He’d got himself out now and was sitting hunched and exhausted and (I noticed) shaking just a little. He might have been another guilty party. It had all been your idea, your fault, you said. Nick had just tagged along. Oh Kate. And I’d just seen you swimming frantically round your brother like a duck round a distressed duckling.
And it had all been about concealment. You’d wanted to hide. You’d found a little cave, you said, a cranny at the end of that channel between the rocks — you even pointed, as if the cave itself might have been to blame — just big enough for the two of you and just reachable by scrambling down on foot and wading through what was then just a long, safe pool. And you’d got the idea—your idea — of just sitting there and waiting, till you saw us coming over the rocks, looking for you and calling. When, of course, you’d burst out and surprise us. Woo-hoo! Here we are!
We hadn’t come. You’d waited. We weren’t cooperating, it seemed, in your game of hide and seek. And you hadn’t reckoned on how quickly the tide would turn and how the waves would start to run in along the pool and to fill the cave itself. You couldn’t stay where you were, but you couldn’t get back now onto the steep rocks you’d come down by. The only thing was to swim for it, to go further out along the headland where the rocks were flat (to where we were standing, and I was glowering at you, right then). But there was that unexpected current.
Then the pretend-thing had turned real. This is the bit you didn’t have to say. That it wasn’t just a game. You’d wanted us to think, if only for a while, you were lost, you were gone. You’d wanted to see and hear our panic—“Nick! Kate!”—to measure it. How long before we came? That’s why you’d stayed so long yourselves, too long, in that cave.
Right then and there on that sunny, happy, warm plate of rock I could have hit you, Kate. It was the nearest I’ve ever got, and I think you saw it, to a full-blooded, maternal, non-maternal clout. You’d wanted to test us, our love, how much we cared, how much you mattered to us. Suppose, you’d thought, they were suddenly without us, suppose we weren’t here any more. How would they look? How would they behave?
Well, now you knew. The results of your experiment. Look at your mother, on the point of hitting you, with all the force of her love. Look at your dad there, who’s just saved your lives, his face a strange picture of misery.
You started to splutter, the full-scale, bleating confession, though you didn’t have to say it. You could have just said you were sorry, and that you were glad, incidentally, to be alive. Suppose we’d decided to go that other way first?
And yet I admired you, Kate. I was even in awe of you, even as you blubbed and I wanted to hit you. There was so much else that you didn’t say. Am I wrong? That it would have been you, whether it was your fault or not, who would have made that last-minute decision, while the water gushed in and Nick panicked or just froze. “Come on! Let’s go!” Your little wriggling bodies launching out, breasting the waves, yours just that fraction ahead.
And just a few moments later — am I wrong? — it would have been you who made another, terrifying decision: that you weren’t going to leave your brother, even though it might still have been in your power. Even as we came over the crest of the rocks and saw your two bobbing heads (They’re there! It’s all right! No, it’s not!), that had already become the most important thing. I saw it, Mike saw it, though it’s never been spoken of between us. You already knew that you wouldn’t make it, not the two of you. Your only task now was to make Nick believe that you would and, when the moment came, to go down with him.