The Runaway Read Free Page B

than a seagull; a bird of prey, she hazarded. Mark would know. She furrowed her brow at the memory of Mark’s quizzes on the interminable car journeys to their house in Sussex and his insistence that the children stay awake and spot a Doric column or a Gothic arch, or correctly identify flora and fauna or the make of some car. He had been as ruthlessly intent as the Hanging Judge, his father.
    Lucian had made up for lack of intelligence with diligence and sensibly mugged up in advance. Elly, always off in some dream, was lucky to scrape a point and never won. Gina only knew about horses, which Mark, who didn’t ride, discounted. If he was in a good mood he might toss her a point or two for a gelding, a hunter or some bloated piebald nag. Mark would know what the bird was.
    Isabel Ramsay reminded herself that, with Elly at boarding school, they had all as good as left the nest, like the bird now vanished in the sky. There was just her and Mark.
    Isabel had longed for the time when she would be free to go for a walk by the river without Lucian splashing in the muddy shallows or Elly poking about the beach like a mudlark. She’d be able to bask in the sun and in the full attention of the Poet or the Playwright or the Artist or whoever. No chance of that now. The Poet was dead, the Playwright had found some young thing to leave his wife for and the Artist had stopped pleading for her to leave her husband in 1968.
    She found herself wishing that one of her children were here. Not as the intractable young adults that in their different ways they had become, but the cherub-cheeked creatures she had adored.
    Today Isabel Ramsay was thirty-nine, one year off forty, and to escape this deadening fact – her son and eldest daughter had called her on the telephone that morning and Mark had sent lilies – she had fled to the river. It was no escape. Wherever she looked, there were shadows of lost people: ghosts of the living, as well as of the dead. The older you got the more there were. Pushing forty, she was too old to be anyone’s muse. Elly had once asked whether you could be a parent if your children were dead. She had laughed with Mark about that at the time – now she wondered. Her children had left her. What was she?
    She trudged down to the shoreline and dabbled the toes of her platform boots in the shallow water, regarding her reflection in the murky Thames. The image fractured to colours and shapes and Isabel put a hand to her face as if to confirm she was still intact.
    She shuddered and huddled deeper into her astrakhan coat. Long ago, someone – the Artist maybe – had said she was psychic because she always knew when he was going to call and she was sensitive to atmosphere. Maybe he was right; certain places did give her a bad feeling. This place did.
    The amorphous dread grew. She looked behind her and confirmed that she was alone. As quickly as it had come, her sense of doom evaporated. She made her way back over mud-slicked stones, broken glass and bricks, telling herself that the beach, a stone’s throw from the Great West Road, was the harbinger of happy times.
    *
    Despite the rumble of traffic above, in the deadened air of the tunnel there was a strange stillness. Stella pulled the dog away from brownish-coloured water welling in the gutter at the base of the tiled wall. She had an acute sense of smell and could detect a person was in a room before she entered it. Her dad said it was a gift and would help when she was a detective. It also made her detect horrible smells she would rather not know about. The stench filling her nostrils now was, Stella decided, a mix of toilets before the chain was pulled, exhaust fumes and a dead bird.
    A chill pricked her skin and with a shock Stella took in that she had left the house without telling her mum and dad. She was not allowed to take Hector out on her own. She set off back along the tunnel, but the dog, who moments earlier had led her