Free In Her Shadow by Louise Douglas Page B

of the tea. I looked down on Jago and I drew a smiling face on the patch of window glass made misty by my breath. Jago always looked up and waved to me. I held up my hand, and touched the tips of my fingers to the glass, bringing them closer together as he grew smaller as he walked away.
    After he joined the crew of the Eliza Jane , Jago stopped coming to the beach with Ellen and me. He worked long hours and his free time was always taken up with working on the car or helping Dad. He told me he didn’t want to waste time playing with silly little spoiled brats like Ellen Brecht. After a while, I stopped asking.
    Ellen and I still went to Bleached Scarp. It was still our place.
    One day I remember in particular, because it was the day I realized that Ellen’s mother was going to die.
    When I’d called for Ellen, I’d found Mr Brecht pacing the front garden, striding out and smoking, his shirt hanging loose about his hips. His hair was longer and wilder, and he hadn’t shaved for a while; his face was covered in a dark stubble that made him even more beautiful, if such a thing were possible. He was Heathcliff, Mr Rochester, Robert Downey Junior and Kurt Cobain rolled into one.
    ‘Hannah!’ he cried, when he saw me. ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes!’
    He put the cigarette in his mouth and held out his armsand, dreamily, I’d gone to him, expecting to be enclosed and enfolded, held to his chest. He only held me by the shoulders. He only kissed the top of my head.
    ‘Is something wrong?’ I asked, and he said: ‘Everything is wrong, Hannah. I am losing her. My Anne is leaving me.’
    I hadn’t known what to say. I looked up at the dark planes of his face. He was staring at the sky, watching the clouds chase one another, and the gulls drifting on the buffeting wind. He seemed noble and heroic, with his hair and his white shirt and the stubble on his chin. I had moved a little closer towards him. Had reached out my hand and touched his forearm with my fingertips. I felt the softness of his skin, its warmth. I felt a clutch in my stomach.
    I wanted to tell him that I was there for him, always, and that I would help him and do whatever he wanted me to do. I would be loyal and true and I would never, never leave him. I would have said something, but Mrs Todd came out and she gave me an odd look so I moved away from Mr Brecht and pretended to do up the lace on my trainer.
    ‘The doctor’s on his way, Pieter,’ Mrs Todd said. ‘He’ll be ten minutes.’ She looked at me. ‘It’s best you don’t go inside, Hannah. I’ll tell Ellen you’re here.’
    I nodded. And Ellen came out and we left to go to Bleached Scarp. The doctor passed us in his Land Rover as we walked along the lane.
    The sun was hot that day, but there was a chill wind. Ellen lay on a striped towel close to the cliff-face where there was some shelter. I sat beside her with a sketch pad balanced against my knees. I was trying to draw the sea for a school art project, but it was proving too difficult a challenge. I shaded my eyes with my hand, to watch the progress of a small boat across the horizon. It rose on the swell of a wave, then disappeared.
    ‘Do you think that’s the Eliza Jane ?’ I asked.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Ellen mumbled, without looking up. I sighed, and made a bubble with my gum. Ellen’s little transistor radio was balanced on a flat ledge of rock beside us, tinnying out pop tunes. The wind lifted the music, blowing it this way and that. Ellen lay on her front, with her head rested on her folded arms. ‘Put some oil on me, would you?’ she asked in a lazy voice. I popped the bubble and licked the gum back into my mouth, then I put down the pad and my pencil, picked up the bottle of Ambre Solaire, unclipped the lid, sniffed, and squeezed a small pool of the orange oil into the palm of my left hand. I looked down on Ellen’s slim, tapering back. She was wearing a green halter-necked swimsuit, the strings tied in a bow at the nape