Ruth can’t even remember the boy’s name or face. It can’t be right that Adam is hers. It can’t be.
As I lay on his bed I knew that I had been guided to Adam. Why otherwise would Ruth and I have met on a train to Birmingham when we’d not met in fourteen years? It was fate. Adam is part of Tom. He is part of my life because of Tom. He is part of me.
I felt light-headed, as if I were floating, as if I might blow away. Like the night of Tom’s death I felt curiously out of my body, watching myself from the ceiling. I got off the bed carefully and pulled the duvet straight. I switched on the landing light and went dizzily downstairs. I made tea in Ruth’s kitchen.
Tom seemed abruptly near me in this house that belonged to another family. To people he did not know. As if I had conjured him. I looked around at the shadows beginning to fill the empty house and I willed him to stay close to me.
Tom, you have a son.
I walked through to the living room and looked out into the road full of lit houses. The front door of the house opposite was open and light spilled down the dark steps. The family were piling their possessions into a camper van. Up and down the stone steps they ran, laughing and excited, the children in bright clothes like small ladybirds.
They were placing bicycles on the back of the van. They were going to carry their house away on their back. I watched, fascinated, until they were ready to leave, then I wrote down the number of the hire company written in large letters on the side of the camper van.
Ruth and Adam beat the traffic and arrived in Truro triumphant. They stopped in the town to have lunch and shop for food, then headed for St Minyon. As they turned off the main street and took the narrow road to the creek, Ruth’s heart soared as it used to when her godmother was alive and she knew that for an afternoon she could be completely happy in her skin.
Beside her Adam unwound the window and Ruth heard his small sigh of contentment. As soon as the car was unpacked he would be off with his binoculars heading for the other end of the creek. For a few days he could run free and wild, as she and Jenny had done as children.
The tide was out and the smell of mud and hawthorn filled the air. Ruth backed the car as near to the cottage as she could and they unloaded. Then she parked it neatly facing the water near some upturned rowing boats. Mrs Rowe had been in and opened the windows and made up the beds.
An ancient Rayburn and night storage heaters stopped the house from getting damp, but Ruth knew she would have to put in central heating soon, holidaymakers now demanded what they were used to at home.
Adam looked at her hopefully, then at the wave of shopping bags on the kitchen floor.
Ruth laughed. ‘Off you go!’
She handed him some chocolate and a bottle of water, and he shot out of the front door singing like a bird.
From an upstairs window she watched him lift his binoculars to the dense woods on the other side of the creek. Then he lowered them and stood for a moment quite still, looking over the mudflats. Ruth recognised his moment of peace. It brought home to her his carefully guarded misery at a school he had never wanted to go to. She should have listened to Peter. Her work had taken her to a big city and it was a good career move, but it was Adam who was paying the price.
She moved around the cottage touching things as she always did when she first arrived. She loved her city life but as soon as she got here she felt as if she were home; as if she’d shed a skin and somehow become herself.
It was also a rare chance to concentrate on Adam. She knew he liked Peter to come, but she loved having him on his own. Of course you do. You think you are making up for all the evenings you are working, all the afternoons you are not there when he comes home from a school he hates.
She went downstairs and put all the shopping away. She stuck wine in the fridge, made a flask of tea, pulled on another sweater and went out to follow Adam down a path she had walked a million times.
Jenny and I—carrying rods home-made of bamboo and string—eating jam sandwiches and drinking Coca-Cola—bannedat home. Scary adventures round the lake that leads up to the big house watched by old herons, still as sentinels, who sit in small scrubby trees that surround the water; pretending, when the shadows come, that the wood is haunted and running hell for leather back to the lighted house and godmother Sarah, who has tea and tiny thin pancakes made on a griddle ready for us in a kitchen that is always warm. On the table there is a bright cloth and real butter and honey, and a teapot with a knitted cosy from a jumble sale. Safe…safe.
She and Jenny always made a mess and Sarah had never minded. Her fingernails were full of paint and sometimes her hair too. She was vague and eccentric, and Ruth had loved her to death.
In the dusk, if her father had not collected her, tooting his horn from the corner, never coming in or thanking her godmother for having her, Sarah would start up her old Rover and drive Ruth home.
Sometimes, if Jenny was with her, Bea or James drove up from St Ives to collect them. They always came in to see Sarah. They would sit and drink wine together while Jenny and Ruth watched the ancient television.
Sarah had a smoky laugh and long, long hair, which she piled up on her head, and sometimes it escaped and then she looked younger as if she weren’t really old at all. When she said goodbye she always held Ruth gently, but very close, as if she were infinitely precious.
Adam was sitting on a bench with his binoculars trained on the incoming tide. Ruth sat beside him.
‘Look, Mum.’ He handed her the glasses excitedly. ‘On that tree…no a bit to your right…Yes there. Have you got it?’
‘A woodpecker?’
‘A lesser spotted woodpecker. He’s quite rare. Can you hear him?’
Ruth listened to the sound of a small drill. ‘I can hear him, he’s making enough noise.’
They sat side by side drinking tea and watching the waders, and listening to the terns and curlews as the afternoon drew in and the water flowed over the mudflats in small waves. There was only the movement of water and the gentle plop of birds’ footfalls in the mud. Ruth thought of Jenny and hoped she wasn’t too lonely in their empty house.
‘What’s for supper?’ Adam asked and Ruth heard his stomach rumbling.
‘Fish and chips, or scrambled eggs and bacon.’ Adam always chose fish and chips.
‘Fish and chips!’
They walked home as the last rays of a watery sun caught the incoming tide. People would start to exercise their dogs at the end of the day and the fishermen would arrive in their waders, but for now they had the whole world to themselves.
On our first date Tom turns up at the house with the biggest bunch of flowers I have ever seen. It’s eight o’clock and I’m not ready. It has been the most terrible day. Our most experienced cutter has gone sick and Danielle and I are behind with our accounts, again, and we are terrified of incurring a penalty. Danielle is upstairs fighting figures while I try to finish cutting a complicated pattern.
I had it all planned for a quick getaway. My clothes are laid out on the bed and an expensive soak is waiting on the edge of my bath. I wanted to feel calm and fragrant when I saw Tom again but when I throw open the door to him I am frazzled and almost tearful.
He grins at me, buckling under the weight of foliage in his arms. ’Hi, Jenny.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m late, I’m not ready. Come in.’
I