Advent (61 page)

 
Owen shrugged, wiggled in the seat. ‘I always knew, you know.’ He glanced at Gav in the rear-view mirror. ‘About . . . there.’ Finding no encouragement, the glance slid away again. ‘Pendurra. I’ve always known it was . . . different. The one place God forgot to turn off the miracles. Well, I don’t know. Perhaps there are others. You read about marvellous cures and children who see the Virgin. Perhaps there are lots, but people don’t talk about them either. You keep the lid on. No uncovering, no Apocalypse.’ He made the motion with his hands, pressing down. ‘They trusted me to keep their secret; that why I’m their friend. But I’ve always known. I think really I knew even before Swanny came, when it was just Tristram by himself in that extraordinary house.’

 
Something tugged Gawain’s thoughts, a nudge back towards the here and now.

 
‘Swanny?’

 
Owen twisted round again, perhaps surprised that Gav had even been listening. ‘You don’t know about Swanny?’

 
‘I don’t know anything.’

 
‘I thought maybe you . . .’ Owen turned away again to contemplate the nothing in the windscreen. ‘Swanny. Marina’s mother. She . . . she wasn’t like anyone else.’

 
Gav sat a little straighter.

 
‘Marina said her mother died.’

 
Owen winced. ‘What else could we tell her? How else could you say it? She was only a toddler, she couldn’t understand anyway. It would have been all right telling her her mother was a mermaid. Any small child could accept that quite easily. But we couldn’t tell her her mother had abandoned her.’

 
The dream was fading away at last, the day coming back into focus.

 
‘A mermaid?’

 
Owen shrugged. ‘It’s just a word. Who knows what the proper name is? If there even is one. She came from the sea and went back to the sea. I don’t know what she was. We don’t have that sort of knowing. She was something amazing. We all loved her. Gwen loved her almost desperately.’

 
‘Auntie Gwen?’

 
‘So you are her nephew? That’s who you are?’

 
Gawain didn’t answer. A series of images gathered in his mind’s eye, coming together. The white face rising from the water, silk married with stone. A black-and-white photo in a frame on a desk. Marina’s face, with its elfin changes of mood. The three faces whispered to him together, barely audible but urgent.
Find my child
.

 
The creature in the water was Marina’s mother.

 
She’d come to plead with him. She’d known something terrible had happened, and she’d beckoned him down to the water’s edge and strained her airless throat to beg him to help.

 
A plucking tension tightened in the bottom of his stomach.

 
Swanny.

 
He shifted in his seat and reached into the back pocket of his trousers. Owen watched as he drew out the envelope and unfolded it, flipping it over. Auntie Gwen’s scribblings were blotched but still legible, surviving fire and snow. Even the tea stain round what had once been his name was still visible.

Jess!!

chap girl?

(O.J.)

key chap Joshua Acres

well

Swanny’s O?

Swanny
.

 
‘What’s that?’

 
Gawain looked over the list again and then handed it to the priest.

 
‘Is this . . . ?’ Owen furrowed his brows.

 
‘Auntie Gwen’s writing. This was in her house. She wrote it right before she disappeared.’

 
Owen’s lips moved silently as he read the notes down to the bottom. He glanced up at Gawain quizzically.

 
‘Swanny’s ring?’ he said.

Twenty-eight

Horace Jia was
not a particularly imaginative child. In his inner landscape the sense of wonder amounted to little more than an occasional fuzzy intuition that maybe not everything would always turn out to look exactly as he expected. Since he preferred to think of himself as being right about everything, he tended to ignore it. Now, shattered and astonished, and having given himself up for dead – a feeling he could only recall with an odd sort of curiosity (
Oh yeah
?
) as if it must all have been a confusing mistake – and then finding himself alive and apparently being carried home across the river, he’d passed so far beyond his limited capacity for amazement that all he could do was sit in uncomprehending silence in the stern of his boat and wait for whatever might happen next.

 
It was perfectly obvious that something was moving the boat.

 
At first he thought maybe a freakish current had appeared like the answer to a prayer and drawn him away from the shingle. But he was enough of a waterman to know there weren’t currents like that in by the shore, and he’d discounted the idea completely once the boat had spun round at the harbour entrance and started moving with the same steady ease towards the far bank.

 
What happened next was a splash like a fish jumping, very close to the boat. It came from somewhere under the bows. Since the river was otherwise perfectly silent, he crept forward and leaned over the side to see.

 
A white arm reached out of the water.

 
With a stifled yelp, he shrank back from it and began clawing away the snow in the bottom of the hull where the paddle was stowed. He found the wooden shaft and pulled it out, raising it like a club.

 
He stood there, knees braced, panting, the boat still yawing drunkenly. Snowflakes spiralled round him and died silently on the river surface.

 
‘Help me up,’ came a liquid whisper from below.

 
Horace could not begin to guess who had spoken, but he didn’t like the idea that there was someone near him he couldn’t see. Paddle raised and ready, he leaned over the side.

 
Another arm had joined the first, and below them, half obscured by a waving mass of green weed, was a face, just breaking the surface of the water. The arms were slender, oily-smooth and bone-white. Their fingers fanned towards him.

 
‘Give me your hand,’ said the voice.

 
‘Wha-what d’you want?’ said Horace. What was going through his head was something like, I’m not putting up with this. They can’t make me. I’ve had enough.

 
‘Your hand,’ it replied. ‘Help me.’

 
‘Why should I?’

 
The boat rocked violently. Horace dropped the paddle, windmilling his arms as he struggled to keep his balance. He failed, collapsing onto the thwart and knocking the paddle overboard. He flung himself half out of the boat trying to recover it, instinctively terrified of ending up with no oar and a dead outboard, but it bobbed just inches beyond his reach. Then as if sucked down by an invisible whirlpool it vanished beneath the surface. He stared wide-eyed at the fizz of bubbles where it had been. The head appeared there, sodden tendrils floating around it. He tried to draw back but he was too slow. Two hands shot up from the water and clasped one of his.

 
‘Pull me up,’ said the snow-soft voice, ‘or I’ll pull you down.’

 
The hands were cold. They felt more like scales than skin. They also felt strong. Thinking of his sunken paddle, Horace braced his other hand against the gunwale and heaved.

 
A pale body rose, accompanied by a silky rush of water flowing back into the river. For a moment he thought the weight was going to drag him back and drown him. Then its feet appeared on the gunwale, and with a peculiar swift twist he couldn’t follow it – or rather she, as he now couldn’t avoid noticing – flipped herself over the side and, releasing his hand, perched on the bows.

 
Horace squirmed inwardly at her nakedness, half revolted by her fish-white flesh, half mesmerised by its unblemished and glistening sheen. Hair like the trailing fringe of a jellyfish snaked down to her waist, making her a coral-patterned patchwork of pale and dark. She reached her bloodless arms forward and clasped her fingers together.

 
‘Find my child,’ she said.

 
Horace’s mouth fell open.

 
He said, ‘You what?’

 
‘My child.’ The voice wasn’t actually a whisper. It had no breath in it. It was like a stream over rocks, sibilant and narrow. ‘I’ve seen you with her. I saved your life so you can find her. I beg you.’ With a slither of long limbs she came forward from the bows and knelt in the bottom of the boat, clasped hands raised to him. Her face tilted up, and Horace saw its wave-sculpted smoothness, and recognised it.

 
‘You’re . . .’ It was unmistakable, but it sounded impossibly stupid. ‘You’re Marina’s mum?’

 
‘I was. I am. Help me.’

 
His cheeks burned despite the cold. He was acutely aware of her marmoreal shoulders, her flat breasts draped with curling fronds of hair, and a smell like the metallic tang of a pebble in a brook.

 
‘Marina says her mum died.’ He didn’t want any of this to be right. He wanted this to be another thing he could run away from and forget as soon as he got home, another thing that would turn out to have been only a dream.

 
‘To her I am dead. I still watch her, though. I watch for her every day. When she sits in sight of the water I weep with joy and pain. Now there is danger, she has not come and I can do nothing. You must help me.’

 
The steady snow didn’t melt where it touched her skin. Her body gathered its flecks like sequins. Her eyes were milky, with a pearlescent glow of their own. Her hands unclasped and stretched tentatively towards his. ‘I heard the hunter come down to the river, seeking my wedding ring. I slid under your keel and took you to safety. Haven’t I earned your help?’ The chill fingertips touched his sleeve. Horace flinched his arm away. He saw a ripple of anguish flow over the face. It reminded him instantly of Marina, how easily crushed she was.

 
‘OK, OK,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Just—’ He was about to ask her to stop begging and get up, but he imagined her body straightening in front of him and his mouth dried up. He looked away.

 
‘If you were a grown man, you’d not sleep or have an hour’s rest until you had done what I ask.’