Given to the Water

Chapter One: The Letter

The letter came on a Tuesday, in the flat grey part of the morning when Leicester was still deciding whether to bother with daylight.

Neil Craske heard it drop onto the mat and did not get up. He was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea going cold in his hands and the boiler making the noise it had been making for three weeks, a soft arrhythmic knock, like something small trapped in the pipes and running out of ideas. He had priced the repair twice. He had not booked it.

Upstairs, his daughter was awake. He could hear her moving, the particular careful footfall she had developed, as though the floorboards were ice. Lily was thirteen. In eighteen months she had not spoken one word.

He went out to the hall eventually. Two envelopes. One was the electricity. The other was heavy cream paper with a printed return address in the corner: Chalke & Rowe, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths, Market Place, Sedgeholt, Lincolnshire.

Neil stood in the hall with the envelope in his hand and felt the small cold drop in his stomach that the name of that county always gave him.

He took it back to the kitchen and opened it with a butter knife.

Dear Mr Craske,

We act in the matter of the Sefton Family Settlement (1934, as amended). It has come to our attention, following a routine review of the trust instrument, that the share of the late Mrs Margaret Craske (née Sefton) was never formally revoked or reassigned prior to her death...

He read it three times. The language kept sliding off him. He had to go slowly, sentence by sentence, the way he read structural reports when he was tired.

The gist, when he finally had it, was this. His mother had died six years ago. Her share of the family trust — a farmhouse called Priory Drove and something like forty acres of low ground on the fen — had sat unclaimed, and by a clause nobody in the family appeared to have remembered, it now passed to her next living descendant. That was Neil. There was one condition, set down in 1934 by a great-grandfather he had never met and had heard described only as a hard man: the beneficiary was required to occupy the trust property, personally and continuously, for a period of ninety days from the date of taking possession. Absence of more than forty-eight hours in any one instance, or of more than seven days in total, would void the claim. Forfeiture would be absolute. The share would revert to the remaining trustees.

At the bottom, Mr R. Chalke had added, in a neat handwritten line beneath his signature: A valuation of the property and land is enclosed. You may wish to note that Mr Arthur Sefton has already lodged an objection to the operation of the clause, which was heard and dismissed.

Neil unfolded the valuation.

He put it down on the table. He picked it up again.

The number was four hundred and thirty thousand pounds.

He sat for a long time with his hands flat on either side of the paper, and he was ashamed of the thing that moved in him, which was not grief or memory or anything decent. It was relief. It came up through him like warm water through cold ground.

He owed eleven thousand on the credit cards. He owed his brother-in-law six, which his brother-in-law had never once mentioned and never would. The car needed a clutch. Marianne's treatment had eaten the savings first, then the equity, then the small stupid cushion of things you sell when you have stopped pretending — her mother's rings, the good camera, the caravan they had bought the summer before the diagnosis and used exactly twice.

Pancreatic cancer takes a long time to find and no time at all to finish. Fourteen weeks from the scan to the funeral. Neil had done everything correctly. He had been calm and organised and present. He had held her hand and told her the things people tell each other. He had held it together so thoroughly that when it was over there had been nothing left of him but the holding, and he had gone on holding, of nothing, for a year and a half.

Lily had been eleven and a half. She had been in the room.

The last thing she ever said out loud was said in that room, and Neil did not know what it was, because he had stepped into the corridor to speak to the nurse, and when he came back Marianne was gone and Lily was standing at the side of the bed with her mouth slightly open and her eyes enormous, and she had never made a sound since.

The doctors found nothing. Her larynx was intact, her hearing was perfect, her brain scans were unremarkable. Selective mutism, one of them had written, with a note about trauma response and a referral. She had seen four therapists. She wrote on her phone, and on a small yellow notepad she kept in her coat, and she could laugh silently in a way that shook her whole body, and once, when she cut her hand on a tin, she had made a small sharp intake of breath that was so nearly a sound that Neil had wept about it later in the garage.

But she did not speak.

He heard her come down. She stopped at the kitchen door in her school uniform, hair in the flat ponytail she did herself, and looked at the letter in his hand with the patient wariness of a child who has learned that letters mean money and money means her father goes quiet.

"Sit down," Neil said. "Have some toast. I want to tell you something and I want you to be honest with me about it."

She sat. He made the toast.

"You know I grew up somewhere before Leicester," he said. "Norfolk edge, right up where it goes into Lincolnshire. Village called Moss Fen. I've never really talked about it."

Lily got out her notepad. She wrote: because you hate it

"Because I hate it," he agreed. "My mum's family are farmers there. Seftons. There's a lot of them and they own most of the good land and they've been there for about four hundred years, which in a place like that means they think they invented the sky. I left when I was twenty-one. Big row. I've not been back in seventeen years."

She waited.

"They've left me a house."

She wrote: is it nice

Neil laughed, and the laugh surprised him. "No. It's damp and it's ugly and it's a mile from anywhere. But it's worth a lot of money, and the land with it is worth more, and if we go and live in it for ninety days, it's ours. If we don't, we get nothing. That's the deal. It's a stupid old family rule and I can't get round it."

Lily looked at the table.

"Ninety days," Neil said. "Twelfth of November to the tenth of February, if we go now. It'd mean pulling you out of school for a term. I'd have to sort remote work with the office, which they'll hate but they'll do it. And I need you to know I'm not pretending this is an adventure." He put both hands round the mug. "I'd be doing it for the money. That's all. It's that, or we sell this house too and I don't know what happens after."

She wrote for a while.

do you have to say yes

"Yes," Neil said. "I think I do."

She nodded, and there was something in the nod that shamed him, the ready acceptance of a child who had already been through the worst thing and had concluded that the world simply asked and you simply went.

Then she wrote one more line and turned the pad round.

will there be water

Neil frowned. "How do you mean?"

She tapped the word twice.

"There's a lot of water," he said slowly. "It's fen. It's all drains and dykes and channels. It's below sea level in places. They've been pumping it off that land since the seventeenth century and it still wants to come back. The house backs onto a channel, if I remember right." He tried to smile. "Why? Do you like water?"

Lily looked at him for a long moment. Her face did the thing it did when she was deciding whether the truth was worth the paper.

Then she wrote: no

And she closed the pad, and finished her toast, and went to get her coat.

Neil telephoned Chalke & Rowe at nine o'clock. A woman took his details, and then a dry old voice came on the line and said, "Mr Craske. Well. That was quicker than we expected."

"Should it have been slower?"

There was a pause on the line that went on a beat too long.

"No," said Mr Chalke. "No. Only that the other beneficiaries were rather hoping you'd not reply at all."