Accidents in the Home Read Free Page B

when she was a teenager: a plastic armchair pocked with cigarette burns, the suspect slickness of a greasy carpet under bare dancing feet, men with ponytails and slow-burning smiles who brought her and Helly drinks in plastic cups and didn’t bother even to learn their names. Like good little girls they swallowed and smoked everything that was put in front of them. The slow black ink mushroom-clouding in her mind came back to her, a fearful sensation of cold deep water slipping past, tugging the ground out from under her. All sorts of things could have happened to them—did happen to them—at those parties. She splashed out of the water and ran along the shoreline, staggering with the pain in her feet, shouting for Rose.
    A high sheer stone wall came down into the water, too high for Rose to have climbed. Clare ran back up the beach alongside it, her breath coming jaggedly in sobs, stopping to peer into a hollow culvert that pierced the wall, wide enough for a child to crawl into: it was dark and foul and stank inside, with nameless black shapes half submerged in an oily black puddle, but no Rose. Clare became convinced again that she was being dangerously distracted from the real disaster, which was happening somewhere else, and she ran back down to the sea.
    *   *   *
    D AVID FOUND R OSE . She was quite unhurt and only thirty yards from where they had been standing and shouting, hidden from them by a grassy bluff. Clare made him show her the place afterward, at the back of the beach where a wet trickle that might have been a stream and might have been sewage emerged from a big concrete pipe set into an earth bank: Rose had been dabbling her feet where the water spilled over the lip of the pipe. She might possibly have been contemplating crawling up into the pipe, and possibly if it had rained (as it proceeded to do shortly after she was found) there might have been a rush of water off the land. But these dangers were too remote to count, or even to produce any retrospective jolt of imagination at a horror narrowly skirted; the only one hurt was Clare, who had cut her foot on something in the water.
    David looked funny—improbable—holding a pink naked baby, balancing her as he picked his way down the beach, concentrating warily; Rose clung on with her arms round his neck. Clare had known all the time they were looking for Rose that if anything bad—anything sickeningly terrible—had happened, she would have never seen either of them again, David or Helly. There would have been a few hours of unspeakable practicalities with doctors and police and then they would have got out of it as soon as they decently could and driven back to London in their special Citroen that rose up on its wheels when you started it, and she would never ever in the remainder of her ruined life have been able to forgive them their association with that day. But now they were all reprieved; now she could like these friends again and smile at them. David was pleased with himself for finding Rose and tickled her awkwardly on the cheek, like a man who has not had practice at such things; she was still clinging to him as he handed her over, and Clare up close felt gratefully his friendly heat. Now she would be able to tell Bram that they had lost Rose and it would only mean an ordinary manageable hitch in the day; he would not be able to see through it to any deep dereliction, any dangerous absence of mind.
    Helly put her cardigan around Clare’s shoulders, as the rain came pattering in dark spots on the stones, and tried to help her get Rose dressed, pulling tight socks on the wet feet, T-shirt on the twisting little body.
    â€”You’re a naughty naughty girl, said Clare. You mustn’t take your clothes off, and you mustn’t wander away. Mummy was seriously frightened.
    Helly looked abashed at what the moment had unleashed in Clare, the excess of reaction. It was excessive, Clare supposed: all