THE GAME HAS FINISHED, JESS IS BUTTERING CRUMPETS while Lorna sets out an assortment of chipped plates and mugs. The rain has finally stopped, the sun slow-winking in and out of view from behind fluffy clouds. Izzy hasn’t come back yet and he’s not sure what to do, whether to say anything. He doesn’t think anyone saw him come in.
He watches the three older girls through the door to the snug. Pansy and Freya are on the brown corduroy sofa, Taisie lounging on a beanbag at their feet while Freya plaits her hair. The twins are singing show tunes, Jess joining in with a little too much gusto from behind him. It’s like a scene from a painting transposed into modern life. Three nymphs. In the painting Taisie would be in the water. Then she turns her head, catches his eye and it’s not the same snarling hostility he’s become used to over the past week; it’s not the old Taisie either. It’s like she’s taken off her carapace. She looks lost and anxious and he’s suddenly sorry that he allowed himself to be targeted by Rosa, that he didn’t take the hint. He had kissed Taisie at the barbecue and then chosen to pretend it didn’t happen. He had been confused, a little repulsed, angry at himself, scared of starting one thing and destroying another. Shit. This is his fault. All he needed to do was apologize and none of it would have happened, the summer wouldn’t have been spoilt. Izzy would be sitting here eating crumpets with them, giggling, instead of sulking.
He’s getting really worried. It’s his fault she’s outside. He scared her. Should he have said something, done more, grabbed her hand and dragged her home, told her not to be silly? What if she isn’t playing a game, what if she’s punishing him? She won’t go in the water; why would she? But in that case, where the fuck is she? He doesn’t want to have to explain what happened, because they’ll look at him like he’s mad, but maybe he should say something. He opens his mouth to speak but is forestalled by Rory.
‘Where’s Izzy?’
‘Must be still hiding,’ Nick says, relieved.
‘One of you ring the bell,’ Lorna says.
Rory leaps up and dashes to the front door. The peal is loud and long, designed to call errant children in from the fields and woodland beyond the garden.
Listening to it fade out, Nick feels a knife-twist of guilt, though there is no reason why he should. Izzy kissed him, mid-nightmare. It was hardly his fault. He wishes she had listened to him, though.
‘Go and find her, would you, Alex?’ Jess says. ‘She won’t want to miss out on these.’
Alex pounds up the stairs and along the landing, shouting for his sister. His footsteps echo through the house. No one speaks.
‘I can’t find her,’ he says, standing in the kitchen door, panting.
Jess frowns and Nick’s nerves prickle. The three girls slowly stand up and come into the kitchen. Lorna smiles and says she’ll be around somewhere. ‘Perhaps she went outside. Why don’t you all go and look for her? Spread out.’
Rory and Alex glance regretfully at the crumpets, butter melting through their perforations, and Lorna offers them to Nick with a smile.
‘Take them with you.’
Within seconds the plate is empty. Nick sprints out of the back door with the others. They fan out across the garden, the younger boys towards the barn, Nick to the woods and the older girls to the swimming pool with its clapboard changing room.
He’s on his own, running along the path, deliberately obliterating his own footprints, rain dripping from leaf to leaf before landing on his forehead, his nose, his shoulders. He calls her name as he runs, then reaches the river and stops, short of breath. He’s going to address his fitness when he gets home. A six-pack by Christmas. He can hear distant shouts. The river has risen considerably. It must be a metre deeper than it was yesterday, swollen by the torrential rain. Out of the corner of his eye he sees something that looks out of place with the mud and trodden-down grass of the riverbank. He squints and walks towards it. A pair of trainers. He picks them up, turns them round in his hands and looks out across the water, and his blood pounds in his ears.