Thin Air

Chapter Forty

In the boat club, at the end of the meal, Polly couldn’t take her eyes off the dancing girl. It was as if she and the child were frozen in time and space and all the other guests were whirling around them until they became a blur of speed and colour. Then the music slowed and stopped and everything became normal once more. The child seemed to be aware of Polly’s eyes on her, because she stared back. Her eyes were blue and unblinking. Not rude, but curious.

Polly stood up to walk around the table to speak to her. She would feel less disturbed if she discovered the child’s name, if she got to the bottom of the apparent haunting and spoke to this strange girl, who appeared only to her and to Eleanor. But everyone was standing up to leave now and in the narrow gap between the trestle tables and the walls there were people struggling to their feet, kissing farewell, catching up on last-minute gossip. Words spoken in an accent Polly could scarcely decipher, adding to her sense of panic. An elderly woman with a walking frame was blocking her route. When she finally did squeeze past, the girl and the two boys had disappeared. So once again she was left questioning her judgement. Had her imagination been playing tricks once more? Was the dancing child like a shadow in the mist?

She pushed her way back to the door and down the stairs, thinking there might be a queue for the cloakroom and the girl might still be there. No sign of her. Polly grabbed her jacket and walked out into the night. The fog was so thick that it seemed she could taste it. It was salty like seaweed and dense on her tongue. A soup made of sea water and sulphur. The wall lamp outside the boat club bounced light back from the screen of grey. Somewhere at the mouth of the harbour a red buoy flashed very dimly. In the car park people were banging doors and shouting goodbye and words of warning about the journey home. Polly could make out some silhouettes, but there was nothing that could be the girl in white.

I’m becoming obsessed. I should leave it and find the others. Walk back to Sletts and finish packing. Tomorrow I’ll be on my way home and this will be just another story. Everything I’ve done here can be forgotten.

Then she heard a child singing. The words were high-pitched and clear:

Little Lizzie Geldard died today

The tide came in and drowned her.

The water swept the girl away,

It was night before they found her.

The words seemed to be mocking Polly and pulling her towards them. They weren’t coming from the car park, which was almost empty now, but from the footpath where she’d walked with Marcus and Ian earlier. Polly knew she should find the others and persuade them to listen to the song and help her to find the singer. For her own sanity she needed witnesses. But the words were getting fainter and seemed to be taunting her, calling her forward. It was night before they found her.

There was a torch in her jacket pocket and she set off after the girl’s voice. She hoped the others would realize that she’d left and would follow, then thought that they might be anxious if she just disappeared. As she walked she pulled out her phone, but the signal was very faint. Marcus answered, but when she spoke to him she wasn’t sure he’d heard what she’d said. Then the connection was lost. She still had a signal, but it had been cut off at the other end. It occurred to her that Marcus had deliberately switched his phone off.

Marcus. Unbidden, thoughts of her last conversation with Eleanor forced themselves into Polly’s head. She was back on the deck the night of the hamefarin’. Both the men were asleep and it was just the two girls, like the old days in Durham. Polly had gone outside again to find Eleanor wrapped up in her theatrical velvet gown, looking like a character in a Victorian melodrama. Polly had fetched her quilted jacket and joined her. A new bottle of wine on the table between them. The fog coming and going and swirling in weird shapes over the shore. Just like tonight.

And then Eleanor had started spilling out her story, her weasel words and excuses. ‘I’m so glad of the chance to talk to you on your own, Pol. This has been tearing me apart.’ And for a brief moment Polly had thought she was about to admit to an affair with Marcus. She couldn’t understand how they might have met, but she could see that there would be an attraction. Two beautiful people, both dark and handsome. Both intelligent. Polly was accustomed to playing second fiddle to Eleanor and might even have got used to that. The woman was easily bored and would have moved on very quickly. Marcus might have settled for Polly in the end. But that wasn’t what Eleanor had wanted to say at all.

‘You should know that Marcus is having an affair.’

‘With you?’ Keeping her voice even, because although she loved Marcus to pieces, her friends were still more important to her than he was. They’d rescued her when she was frightened and alone and had first left home. They’d kept her going in a strange and intimidating city when she’d moved to London.

‘Of course not with me.’ Eleanor’s voice was amused, with that touch of arrogance that never really left her. ‘I don’t want anyone other than Ian, these days. You know that, Pol. I’m a married woman. A reformed character.’

‘Then who?’

There’d been a silence and Polly had thought again that she’d glimpsed a white figure moving along the edge of the tide. A figure with a strange silhouette, hair peaked at the front like a bird’s crest.

‘With Cilla. My mother.’

And that was when something had broken inside Polly. Because Cilla was old and snooty, and always treated Polly as if Eleanor was doing her the hugest favour in the world by befriending her. How could Marcus have anything in common with a woman like that?

Eleanor continued to speak and seemed comforted because she no longer had to keep a secret. She’d probably convinced herself that she was really doing Polly a favour. ‘They met in Jordan when he was leading a group and she was on a field trip. Lust at first sight. For her at least. I saw them at an exhibition together and she introduced me. When you showed me his photo I recognized him at once.’ And Eleanor had paused and taken a swig of wine straight from the bottle and seemed to have no understanding of the effect she was having on Polly. Or seemed not to care. Then she looked up. ‘I did try to stop it, Pol. I tracked Marcus down through his website. I did tell him to stop it.’

On the cliff, lost in the fog now, Polly closed her eyes to blink away the memory of that conversation. She’d decided then that it couldn’t be true, that Eleanor was just stirring up trouble to create a drama. Of course Marcus wouldn’t make love to a woman nearly twice his age. Of course he wouldn’t betray her. Her phone rang, the shrill noise startling her and bringing her back to the present.

When she’d finished the conversation Polly felt sane again. There was no singing, just the distant sucking of waves on the shore at the bottom of the cliff. A faint murmuring that might be the call of seabirds. Then a child’s laughter.