Read Island Madness for Free Online Page B

water was cool and glittered a still light blue.
    “Daddy doesn’t know I’m doing this,” she called out, floating on her back, “and when I get back I shall have to take a bath and wash my hair to keep it from him. He wouldn’t like it if he found out.”
    “Why? You’re not doing anything wrong,” Ned said.
    “Oh, but I am. I’m in the sea for one thing, and I’m with you for another,”
    “Well, I won’t tell. And you’re much too smart to get caught, I’ll be bound.”
    “He’s a watchful man,” she replied. “He notices things without you realizing it. He is a surveyor, after all.” She kicked her legs in a plume of water.
    “Try standing,” he said, and, realizing what he had done, feeling nothing but a current of cold water puiling at her feet, she struck out for the beach, arms flailing, eyes tight. Once near the shore she walked out quickly, shaking the water from her hair. Ned followed. They towelled in silence.
    “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “It’s not like getting back after falling off a horse. She drowned.”
    She gestured to him with her hand and he turned to face the sea, which had brought them together and now, like the immutable tide, was puiling them apart. He listened to the hurried sounds she made as she changed, the squeak of her costume as she pulled it down, her quick, strong breath as she rubbed herself dry, the noise of the sand as she lifted her feet into her clothes. He wrapped his towel around him and wriggled out of his trunks, conscious of drying himself between his legs.
    “You can turn round now,” he heard her say. Her hair was wet and fuzzy and the dark hairs on her arms stood out.
    “What about tomorrow?” he asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    “I won’t let it happen again,” he promised.
    “You’d better not,” she replied and together they walked back up the steep hill in silence.
    “In the afternoon, then,” he said when they reached the top. “When the tide’s coming in.”
    “Perhaps. As long as Daddy doesn’t catch me out.”
    But catch her out he did, a week later, her hair stifffrom the salt water, a damp bathing towel tied to the rack above the rear mudguard and the architect of her treachery riding alongside. Her father stepped out from behind the gate and pulled her off, his dark eyebrows and dark moustache joined together by lines of antici-pated anger. He held her by the arm, squeezing it hard. His voice was agitated and clipped, with a curious self-questioning cadence to it.
    “You’ve no sense, girl. Isn’t your mother’s grave enough that you should want to follow in her footsteps? And where did you get this?” He picked up the bike up from the road.
    “I borrowed it.”
    “Borrowed it, you say? One horse is not enough for you, then? Never mind what it costs to feed and house a horse and have its feet shorn. You have to have a bicycle as well.”
    “No, Daddy, it was just…”
    “And where did you keep it all the while? Did you hide it from me? Hide it from your own father. Your only parent.”
    “No, Daddy, I…”
    “Borrowed it. Yes, I heard. Borrowed it. Well, well.” He turned on Ned. “And for every borrower there has to be a lender, does there not, a lender prepared to lend. I presume I have you to thank for lending my daughter this, this, bicycle.” He turned the handle-bars to and fro, as if testing the steering.
    “Daddy, this is—”
    “No matter that the brake pads are defective and it quite lacks a rear reflector. No matter that these lanes are steep and narrow and riddled with ruts and potholes, such that cause bicycles to buckle and riders to fall, and that unlike the rare times when she chooses to sit upon her horse, here she lacks any protective headgear at all, you thought—”
    “It’s not his fault, Daddy.” Isobel broke in again. “I asked for his help, that’s all.”
    “Asked his help! You might as well have asked him for a broken neck and had done with it.”
    Ned