Forty Summers

Everyone in Wrenmouth knew the story of the girl from the tide pools, and Edith Vane had known, for forty years, that the story was wrong. The story went like this, and it went like this everywhere — in the pub, in the post office queue, in the careful way mothers told it to children who wandered too far at low tide. Forty summers ago, a girl named Lucy Pell, sixteen years old and a visitor to the town, had gone down to the rocks below the east cliff to look at the tide pools, and had been caught by the tide, which comes in across those flats faster than a person can credit, and had drowned. A summer tragedy. A lesson. The kind of story a coastal town keeps the way it keeps a lighthouse — as a warning, polished by retelling, useful. Edith had been the town librarian for thirty-eight years before she retired, and a librarian learns, above all other things, that a story which is told the same way by everyone is not a story that has been remembered. It is a story that has been agreed. She had known Lucy Pell. That was the thing the town had mostly forgotten, because Edith had been young then too, just a girl herself, and the young Edith and the visiting Lucy had spent one short summer as the particular intense friends that girls become for the length of a single season. And Edith knew — had known for forty years, and had said to no one, because what was there to say and who was there to say it to — that Lucy Pell had been afraid of the sea. Not nervous of it. Afraid. Lucy had told her so, lying on the warm grass of the cliff top that summer, in the confiding way of girls. There had been something in Lucy's childhood, some bad water, some near thing Edith could no longer reconstruct in detail, and the upshot of it was that Lucy Pell did not go down onto the rocks, did not paddle, did not so much as walk the wet sand below the tide line. She liked the sea from the cliff top. She liked it as a view. And the idea that this girl, this specific girl, had wandered out alone among the tide pools at the bottom of the east cliff and lost track of the water was, to Edith, and to Edith alone in all of Wrenmouth, simply not believable. But Edith had been young, and grief had a current of its own, and the town had wanted its useful tragedy, and a sixteen-year-old girl who tried to say *but Lucy wouldn't have gone down there* had been gently, kindly, completely talked past. And then the summer had ended, and the visitors had gone, and the years had come in over it the way the tide comes in over the flats — fast, and total, and smoothing everything down. Forty years. Edith had let it lie for forty years, and she might have let it lie for whatever years she had left, because she was seventy-one now and tired and the dead were beyond help and the living had to be lived among. What changed everything was the cove. A developer had bought the east cliff. The whole stretch of it, the cliff and the rough ground above and, crucially, the small enclosed cove at its foot where the tide pools were — and the developer's plan, posted up in the library Edith no longer worked in and pinned to the noticeboard outside the post office, involved a sea wall, and a marina, and the partial draining and reshaping of the cove. The plan used the word *reclamation*. Edith stood and read it twice, in the salt wind, and understood that for the first time in forty years the bottom of the east cliff was going to be uncovered, and drained, and dug. The cove where Lucy Pell was supposed to have drowned. The cove that had kept its floor hidden under water and weed for forty summers. They were going to drain it. And Edith Vane, who had been told her whole long life that the past was past and the sea kept what it kept, found herself standing outside the post office with her shopping bag and a feeling she had not had since she was sixteen years old — the clear, stubborn, unwelcome certainty that a thing everyone had agreed upon was not true, and that she might, now, at seventy-one, with a developer's machines about to do the uncovering for her, be the only person left alive who both knew it and would say so. She walked home along the front with the tide going out, the flats opening wet and shining below her, and she made a decision that surprised her with its firmness. She was going to go to the cove. Before the developer's machines did. She was going to go down to the tide pools at the bottom of the east cliff, where the town said a frightened girl had wandered to her death — and she was going to begin, forty years too late, to ask the question the whole of Wrenmouth had agreed never to ask: if Lucy Pell would not go down to the water, then who took her there.