of the air felt different – thicker, dense, populated with tiny shining, watchful eyes and the myriad sounds of the nocturnal world. Still she ran, weaving a warp thread through the pines until the pewter sea glimmered in flashes, growing ever larger . . .
She heard something behind her, she was sure. Footsteps? Breathing, too?
No. She couldn’t stop. She wouldn’t. Her imagination was playing tricks, her childish fright rearing in scant breaths, and she could see now that Linus was on the jetty. His slight figure was a silhouette against the glimmering water as he carried an oar down the gangplanks towards the rowing boat, slack-tied to the ladder.
She went to call out, to stop him as she reached the beach, but the word caught in her throat like a sleeve on a nail. She watched in silence as he lifted the oar – which was not an oar at all.
‘Bell –’ The word was a whisper, a pant, the hand on her shoulder a pull-back, and she turned in fright to find Emil behind her. He too was in his bedclothes – pyjama trousers only, no shirt, nor even any shoes – a wild look in his eyes, like hers. ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’
But the questions didn’t need an answer, because his gaze fell on the boy behind her, waving a white flag. And across the water, a white flag was waving back. A silent communication in the dead of night. The forlorn attempts of a son to reach his mother.
Bell looked back at him with angry tears in her eyes, seeing how he shrank before her. ‘Now do you see what you’ve done?’
Emil watched in splintered pain as his child waved the giant flag. It was tattered with age, holes worn through where the sun had broken down the fibres, the former tent-pole heavy on his still-little arms. After several minutes, the movements slowed, becoming jerky, and his every instinct was to go over there and help him, be his father and take the weight for him. But Bell was right. It was because of him that his son even needed to do this. He could see from the strong rhythmic waves coming from Summer Isle just how much Hanna was missing him, trying to convey her love and longing through a consistent, unfailing stroke. None of them – not Hanna, Linus nor Bell – wanted him here, and to intrude, even to help, would bring their moment of connection to an abrupt stop.
He heard a sound coming from the jetty. Linus was groaning as the weight in his arms became too much. He couldn’t wave the flag now, only hold it, and after another few moments he was forced to lay it down.
‘Mamma!’ Linus called, waving his arms frantically and jumping so that the boards rattled. ‘I’m still here, Mamma!’
But across the water, the waving stopped, the flag becoming almost instantly invisible in stillness. It was impossible to see Hanna from here, not from this distance in the crepuscular light, a tendril of sea mist winding its way into the lagoon.
‘Mamma!’
His heart twitched at the anguish in his child’s voice. For the thousandth time, he questioned what he was doing – dragging Linus here and holding him, to all intents and purposes, against his will.
He saw Bell flinch too, her shoulders hitched high, as Linus jumped higher, his calls becoming more frantic, desperate, pleading – but Hanna had gone, and Linus began to weep at the prospect of facing another night and day here without her. Would he be back on the jetty tomorrow night? Had he been doing this every night since they’d arrived?
Emil felt the rejection like a blow to his chest. He loved that child with every fibre of his being, but his attempts to bond, to connect . . . What he was doing wasn’t enough. He wasn’t enough, and he never would be. He’d missed out on everything – his son’s first day at school, learning to ride his bike, skiing together for the first time, Christmases, birthdays . . . and now nothing could make up for the time lost. His son was a stranger to him, and he called another man ‘Pappa’. Those were the facts. That was the hand Fate had dealt him. He was ‘lucky’ to be alive, everyone kept telling him, as though that should be enough. But what was the point of it all, if he’d lost the only thing worth living