‘Can you make it?’ he shouted to her.
‘Yes,’ she gasped, able to hold the board more tightly now, using it to propel herself forward. ‘Just get him to safety!’
Then there were strong arms reaching for her, pulling her on to the beach. A dry towel draped around her shoulders. Rhona sobbing, clinging to her. Robbie, grey and shivering with shock, being wrapped in more towels.
And the look in Christophe’s eyes as he read her exhausted expression and he realised what she now knew. That she would always, always save her children first.
2014, Edinburgh
We were supposed to be going to The Balmoral – as the North British Hotel is called nowadays – for tea in the Palm Court. That was going to be my Christmas present to Ella. But, in the end, she wasn’t up to it. There are more and more days now, the nurses tell me, when she doesn’t get out of bed at all. Like the days when I arrive to find her deeply asleep as she drifts further from this world, the tide of her life ebbing away, leaving behind a scattering of memories and a few white shells.
So, instead, I’ve brought Christmas tea to her. Propped against her pillows, she smiles and gives my hand a squeeze as I place the tray before her. ‘This is just splendid, Kendra dear.’ I can see she’s tired, but she’s making an effort to get into the festive spirit for my sake.
‘Well, we’re celebrating the end of term as well as Christmas. Two of my favourite things! Finn helped make the mince pies – he cut out the stars for the tops. He made this card too. And Dan sends love.’
Ella peers at the card, bringing it closer to the light, and then smiles broadly.
‘I know,’ I say, ‘it’s not exactly seasonal.’ Finn has drawn the shed at the allotment, in perfect detail. And if you look closely enough you can just make out that the honeysuckle that grows up the side of it is in full bloom, each petal carefully coloured pale yellow.
‘I love it. And I get the message. Your beautiful boy always does my old heart good. It’s well drawn too. He has talent.’
I pour the tea, then settle myself in the chair at her bedside.
I feel awkward and self-conscious, wanting to ask my grandmother a hundred questions and yet wanting to be sensitive about the intimacy of all that happened between her and Christophe – as well as between her and my grandfather – during that pivotal summer of 1957. And I wonder, too, how much my mother knew about it all. Was she aware, at the time, how close to the wind they were all sailing? Could she sense the dangers that threatened them? The emotional storms that were raging and the rocks that lurked just beneath the surface of her family life? Is that why she won’t see her mother now?
As if she can read my mind, Ella dabs her lips with a holly-sprigged paper napkin and says, ‘Rhona and Robbie were oblivious. They were both shaken by the incident at the beach, of course. But they didn’t know how close I came to leaving Angus. Damage limitation. We always try to protect our children, as you know.’
‘It must have been so hard, though, leaving the island at the end of the summer. I can’t imagine how you must have felt.’
She nods. ‘I did a lot of thinking on the homeward journey. But I never looked back. I knew what I had to do and I got on and did it. I don’t think I felt very much for a while, but eventually, when my heart began to thaw out again, I suppose what I felt most of all was guilt. Guilt that I hadn’t loved Angus well enough, that I had betrayed him – long before he betrayed me – every time I thought of Christophe; every time the demands of motherhood and domesticity and your grandfather’s career grated on my nerves. The distraction of a fantasy can make reality seem harder to bear, I suppose.’
She pauses to take a sip of tea. ‘You know, I think the biggest mistake I made was not to see that the imperfect reality was worth so much more than the perfect dream.’
I nod slowly, considering this. ‘So, is it wrong to dream, to want the things we don’t have?’
‘No, my darling, never give up your dreams. But just make sure they don’t distract you too much from the good things that there are in your day-to-day life, even if that life is by no means perfect. Because there always are good things’ – she picks up Finn’s honeysuckle Christmas card again – ‘but sometimes you have to concentrate to be able to see them.’
PART 3
1970, Edinburgh
Ella and Angus took their seats in the painted splendour of the McEwan Hall and Ella fished in her handbag for her glasses so that she could find Robbie’s name in the programme, amongst the hundreds of others who would be graduating that day.
‘Here.’ She handed Angus her cardigan. ‘Use this to keep a seat for Rhona.’
He smiled at her. ‘Quite a thing to have them both finish their education. Finally! It’s been a long haul.’
Ella nodded and smiled, although, sitting here now, the years seemed to have flown past all too quickly. In a few days’ time Robbie would be setting off to drive to Spain with two of his friends, making the most of his last few weeks of freedom. He’d only be back long enough to pack up his things and then he was off to London to start his job in the City. Thank goodness they’d still have Rhona living at home, or she’d have been utterly bereft. Even if she did only catch fleeting glimpses of her daughter these days. Rhona often only returned home from work long enough to get changed before going out with her friends in town or meeting up with her boyfriend to go to the cinema.
Where had all those years gone? After that summer on the Île de Ré, she’d returned to Angus with no word of explanation. He’d asked for none, either. He was simply relieved to have her back. He never asked her any questions about those weeks that they’d spent apart.
The children, oblivious to how close to breaking up the family had come that summer, had prattled on happily, telling their daddy about days on the beach, sailing expeditions with Christophe, helping Caroline in the gallery, and the superhuman quantities of the ice cream they’d consumed. Angus had exclaimed over Robbie’s new-found strength and the fact that he walked with scarcely any trace of a limp now; and he told Rhona that she’d grown at least two inches taller over the summer, as he’d ruffled her sun-streaked hair; he’d admired their collection of shells and pored over the photographs with them; and he kept the paperweight in the shape of a donkey wearing striped cotton trousers in pride of place on the desk in his study, on top of Rhona’s sketch of Ella on the boat.
Only when Robbie recounted the story of being swept out to sea on the surfboard, and the way Ella had rescued him, did Angus meet her eye. ‘She’s an extremely brave woman, your mother. Brave and strong. Luckily for us all.’
For her own part, Ella never wasted time regretting the decision she’d made to return. In fact, she rarely allowed herself to think of it at all. It was safer not to revisit her memories of those weeks on the island. She kept them locked away in a part of her mind that she would not – could not – visit. On the train that had carried them home, the Île de Ré receding into the distance with every clatter of the wheels over the tracks, she’d come to see that she had two choices: she could let her feelings of bitterness and loss define her marriage from here on in, allowing resentment and self-pity to corrode her heart and reduce her to a sad shadow; or she could accept the situation with grace and equanimity, whole-heartedly immersing herself in the life that she’d chosen, fighting to stay in the light instead of allowing the darkness of despair to drag her under.
She knew it would take all her strength and determination to make her marriage work after everything she and Angus had been through. Perhaps, despite all the challenges she had faced, this would be her greatest test yet. She only hoped she had it in her to face the prospect of trying to love again with a heart that felt like it had been shattered into a thousand pieces.
She and Angus had been careful with one another, considerate and thoughtful, conscious of the fragile trust that needed to be nurtured daily if it wasn’t to be destroyed again. They had each upheld their side of the relationship, as good parents and loyal spouses. But, despite Ella recommitting to the relationship, they’d never managed to recreate the closeness that had existed in their courting days and in those first, precious weeks of their marriage before the arrival of Caroline’s letter had changed everything.
Sitting in the grand gilt hall of the university now, a flicker of anxiety fluttered briefly in Ella’s chest: what would happen when they no longer had either of their children at home? What would life be like when it was just the two of them left, she wondered, without the welcome distractions that Robbie and Rhona brought to their daily lives, distractions which filled the silences and papered over the cracks?
She shrugged it off. That they were still together twenty-five years on was no small achievement. And if their marriage was lacking in some ways, there was still friendship in it and a mutual respect for one another, which was more than you could say for some of the people they knew. The blossoming of flower power and free love in the sixties had resulted in several of their friends’ marriages imploding: the so-called Dawning of the Age of Aquarius had turned out, in many cases, to be the Dawning of the Age of Devastation and Divorce. At least she and Angus had managed to avoid inflicting that on their children. And, in fact, she was grateful to him for providing her with so much. They’d moved to Morningside ten years ago, to be closer to schools and Angus’s work as well as to Ella’s ageing parents. She felt she’d come full circle, treading in her own mother’s footsteps as a homemaker.