She felt Harry’s hand on her shoulder. ‘Leave him. He’ll be all right. Go for help, now. I’ll find the other one.’ And this time she rose, shivering, and ran back up the beach, through the slackening rain.
Chapter 8
They searched for James Sturton until nightfall, returning again at dawn. It was his father who found his body, washed up by the tide. It was unimaginably awful. He was sixteen, their only son.
When she heard the news, Beatrice fled upstairs and wept on her bed until, bruised and exhausted from her ordeal, she fell into a troubled sleep. Around two in the afternoon she was woken by her mother to be told that Mrs Brooker, Rafe’s aunt, had telephoned. Rafe had been asking for her.
‘I can’t go,’ Beatrice said, burying her head in her pillow.
‘Béatrice, you must.’ Delphine came to sit on her daughter’s bed, and softly stroked her hair. ‘Sometimes we must do things we don’t want to, because it is our duty. And you, who have been so brave in rescuing the boy, must go to help him now.’
She helped Beatrice up from the bed, washed the girl’s scratched face and brushed her hair as though she were little again, then found her a fresh dress from the wardrobe.
‘Do you need me to come with you?’ she asked, as Beatrice opened the front door, but Beatrice shook her head and stepped out into appalling bright sunshine. She walked to the Brookers’ house as though in a trance, aware that only yesterday she’d have been at a high pitch of excitement to be invited there. Not today. The summer blazed on all around, but a page had been turned in their sunny lives, and the story had gone dark.
‘Ah, our young heroine,’ Mrs Brooker said when she opened the door. ‘Rafe will be so happy to see you, dear.’ She was a good ten years younger than her burly husband, elegant and bony like a greyhound. ‘He’s taking it very hard. Seems to think the whole thing’s his fault for some reason. He’s out in the garden. Supposed to be resting, of course.’
Rafe was sitting hunched up on a bench, tossing an old tennis ball from hand to hand. When he saw Beatrice he stood, pocketing the ball and drawing his forearm across his eyes. She saw at once that he’d been crying. His face was blotched and puffy and he had a bruise on his forehead, but seemed otherwise uninjured. ‘The doctor said he’d be right as rain,’ Mrs Brooker said, twisting the rings on her manicured hands. ‘Now I expect some lemonade will make everybody feel better. And Cook’s made a chocolate cake to die for . . . Oh, silly me!’ She saw Rafe’s disbelieving face, and turned and hurried into the house.
‘She means to be kind,’ he said. He sat down again, pulled out the tennis ball and turned it in his hands. ‘I must thank you, Beatrice. They all said you’ve been a brick. Saved my life and all that. What can I say?’
‘You don’t need to say anything,’ she said, sitting next to him. ‘It was Harry who knew what to do.’
‘Poor old Sturton.’ His voice ended in a squeak and his face screwed up, his shoulders shook and he began to sob. Beatrice put out a hand and touched his arm. To her surprise he turned towards her and she found herself pulling him into her embrace and he was crying noisily into her neck. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered between sobs. ‘I’m so sorry. I wish my mother was here.’
For a minute or two they sat like that, she stroking his hair as her mother had stroked hers, immensely moved. He must feel so alone. She didn’t imagine Mrs Brooker to be much use, and the Colonel was nowhere to be seen. Rafe needed her. No one had really needed her before, not even Angelina.
Soon he grew quieter, then drew away. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve funked it. Don’t know what you must think’ He dragged a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and blew his nose.
‘It’s all right, really it is,’ she said, but they were both embarrassed now and sat without looking at one another.
‘I’m to see his parents,’ Rafe said dully. ‘Don’t want to, but of course I must. I don’t know what to say to them. I should have stopped us going out so far. It’s my fault really. All my fault. It’s always my fault.’
What a strange thing to say. Beatrice thought of that moment she’d seen the canoe from the top of the cliff, with the storm coming, and not known what it was. Perhaps she ought to have recognized it and to have raised the alarm then. An abyss of guilt opened in her mind. The hell of guessing what might have been. ‘It’s not your fault, Rafe,’ she said desperately. A phrase Mrs Wincanton used came to mind. ‘Really, you can’t take on so.’