Still Waters Read Online Free PDF

got any today.’
    ‘No jobs . . . well, unless you’ve not made your bed, sweetheart?’
    Tess, shamefaced, admitted she’d not made her bed. Peter shook his head at her, but he was laughing behind the sternness, she knew.
    ‘Do that then, like a good girl. And tidy your room. I brought your bag down, and I’ve got some money for you.’
    ‘Money? Oh Daddy, thanks . . . but what’ll I want money for?’
    ‘Ice-creams? Gingerbeer? I don’t know, but I gave Mrs Thrower a bit for the boys, only I thought I’d hand you and Janet yours this morning . . .’ He grinned at them both. ‘Give you less time to lose it, I thought. It’s two bob each, so don’t spend it all at once!’
    Two shillings! It sounded a great deal to both girls, Tess guessed, since she usually got tuppence on Saturday mornings and Janet, to the best of her knowledge, never received pocket money at all.
    ‘Daddy! Thanks ever so . . . we’ll be really careful, won’t we, Jan? And now we’ll go up and do my room.’
    ‘Good. And Tess . . .?’
    ‘Yes, Daddy?’ Tess paused, already through the kitchen door and standing in the hall. ‘What?’
    ‘Take care of yourself. You can’t swim, so don’t go taking chances. The sea’s a tricky old beast, though it can be great fun, of course.’
    ‘I know,’ Tess said tolerantly. ‘I’ve been before, Daddy.’
    Her father snorted. ‘Once, with Uncle Phil and the cousins. But there’s no one I’d rather trust you with than Bessie and Reggie Thrower. They’ll keep you out of mischief.’
    Tess agreed that they would and she and Janet hurried up the stairs and into her room, but her father’s remark had brought the dream back to her mind – the dream and its ending which always happened off-stage, so to speak.
    Now she strained after recollection, but it would not come; it never did. The dream was in some weird way secret, private, a little glimpse into the hell a very small child can uncover for itself and then never share. And anyway, it was over. Whatever the young Tess had seen in the water, the older Tess – for was she not eight years old, now? – knew it meant nothing, was nothing to worry about. She had diffidently mentioned it once to her father, and Peter had stared at her rather blankly for a moment and had then asked her, in an oddly thin voice, just what it was she thought she’d seen in this sea-pool or whatever?
    ‘I don’t know,’ Tess had admitted. ‘That’s what’s so silly, Daddy. I never do see whatever it is I’m screaming about.’
    Peter had lifted her up in the air and then lowered her into a close hug. It was a very different hug from the dream-boy’s hug; there was warmth in it, and comfort, and a solid, protective strength. ‘Sweetheart mine,’ Peter had crooned. ‘That’s what’s known as a nightmare; nightmares come when we’ve eaten the wrong sort of things or had a worrying day, but they don’t have any roots in reality, none at all. Think about it. Where do you live?’
    Tess had been six at the time, still very conscious of identity, time and place. She had said in a singsong: ‘I’m Teresa Annabel Delamere and I live at the Old House, Deeping Lane, Barton Common, Norfolk.’
    ‘That’s it. And have I ever taken you to the seaside?’
    ‘No, never,’ Tess had said, but even as she said it a tiny shadow of doubt flitted across her mind. Never? It was easy to say, but did she really know such a thing to be true? Could she know it? In the time before memory . . .
    ‘There you are, then. So the only time you’ve been to the seaside was last year, when Uncle Phil took you and the cousins. So the nightmare has to come from that.’
    ‘Ye-es, only the beach in the dream wasn’t the same as the Yarmouth beach,’ Tess said uncertainly. ‘It’s a darker sort of colour, and the sea’s different.’
    ‘Ah, but that’s how dreams work, darling. They muddle up reality with fantasy and sometimes good people become bad and bad become good. I