The Ladies' Lending Library Read Free Page B

her arms sticking into her like pins, her fear like a rag in her mouth. Even if all four of them were to plead with her from the bottom of the lake, their arms stretched out, their mouths wide open, she wouldn’t be able to put a foot—not so much as a toe—into the lake to save them.
    The children think it must be God’s hand drawing ridges in the sand beneath the water every night. The God whose eye is painted on the dome of the cathedral back in the city: one huge, blue, unshuttable eye, trailing gold and locked in a triangle.
    There is no churchgoing at Kalyna Beach: no onion-bulb cathedral, no bishop with a glass eye and thick black veil strung from a pillbox hat high on his terrible grey head. No cross to kiss, no thick, consecrated bread to force down to an empty stomach, no incense smoking from censers in front of the ikon screen with its gold grapevines and glimmering lamps. Here there’s just the bay, what they call “the lake,” though it’s a mere scallop on a gigantic body of water stretching farther north than any of them has ever dreamed of going. The lake and the cottages on the bluff above it, and the tree-tunnelled roads behind them. And the beach, ofcourse, a snaking shore of sand coasting up to dunes with spikes of grass like long, green needles stuck in a cushion.
    Sometimes the lake’s a pale blue, cloudy as shards of glass smoothed to pebbles by the waves. Sometimes the lake is orange, rose, peach, after one of the perfectly calm, bright days, when the children have camped out at the beach, except for the naps they’re forced to take in the afternoon, lying in cedar-scented rooms, watching leaf-shadows dart and flicker on the walls. After sunset, when darkness pools in the roofs of the cottages and the cars stranded beside them, the lake becomes the colour of night itself, so that if you were to flout the rules and sneak down for a swim, the children think, you would emerge with skin blue-black, telltale as ink.
    But their days are far too full of sun and sand and water for them to think of anything but sleep by the time dark falls. Under the covers of their narrow beds the older ones may read with flashlights, but when they hear the grown-ups yawn and stumble off to sleep, the children finally give in. Letting their eyelids shut at last, they walk out the doors of their dreams to shores where it’s impossible to tell where water ends, and sky begins.
    A gilded barge with sails of purple silk and a hundred silver-mounted oars beating through the oiled and snaky waters. Pyramids on either side of her; palm trees like huge green moths overhead. Charmian and Lotos kneeling with jewelled beakers of strawberry juice. Languid under a canopy of cloth of gold, her raven tresses fingered by the breeze raised by her slaves’ ostrich-feather fans, her bosom rising like dough in a mixing bowl, she waits for Marc Antony. Together they will rule the world and found a dynasty of mighty kings and queens.
    Sails billowing, oars beating through the waves—but the harder they beat, the clearer it becomes that the barge, far from moving, is stuck in water thick and stiff as week-old Jell-O. She is about to call to her oarsmen to go faster, faster, when the chief slave, who has the face of her younger sister Katia, turns to her with her hands on her hips, saying, “
You
—Cleopatra? Who do you think you’re kidding? You’ve got no breasts, your hair’s the colour of dirty dishwater, and you wear glasses. Big, ugly, blind-girl glasses!” And then the voice alters: “What on earth do you think you’re doing, spilling strawberry juice all over the clothes I’ve just washed!” For Katia’s taunts have turned into their mother’s exasperated scolding; the billowing cloth of gold is a ripped flap of screen, and waves, not oars, pound at her ears.
    It’s still dark when Laura wakes, though she can make out a streak of light at the window, feel it like a tongue against her open eyes, as if she’s got