Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection: Moon Island, Sunrise, Follies - Rosie Thomas - Страница 10

The rain fell in a steamy curtain. It hissed into the sea and blurred the windows, and pounded out a drumbeat on the roofs and decks of the five houses. Unseen in the darkness, rivulets coursed down the beach steps and washed the day’s sand prints into miniature river deltas and estuaries.

The car windscreen washers swept plumes of water aside as John Duhane followed the unfamiliar road out towards the beach. The route from Pittsharbor to the bluff was narrow, twisting back on itself two or three times, and as he drove he hunched forward to try to see ahead through the downpour. A flicker of lightning hollowed the sky and an instant later a thunderclap shook the car. The echoes rolled overhead for long seconds and the rain beat harder.

‘Great,’ Ivy sighed. ‘Just great.’

She sat slumped in the seat beside her father, twisting her body away from him even though the seat-belt bit into her bare neck.

‘It’s only a summer storm.’

In the back seat May said nothing at all. She hadn’t spoken for more than an hour, since they had passed Bangor and turned towards the coast.

They had driven all the way up from New York, stopping for a night to stay with John’s sister. May was tired of the journey and of Ivy’s sulking, but even so she was not looking forward to their arrival at the beach house. Everything would be the same as it always was, except that it would go on being the same in a different place. How could a family vacation be anything of the kind if there wasn’t a family to live it; if there were only a father and two daughters who didn’t get on?

May leant her head against the window of the station-wagon and closed one eye, squinting so the smears of rain blurred and shimmered into rainbow fragments against the lights of the last houses on the road out of Pittsharbor.

Elizabeth Freshett Newton stood in the window of her house up on the bluff. This was the evening room, that was what her mother had called it. It faced north and west, away from the beach and the ocean, and overlooked part of the sheltered pocket of garden, which had once required the full-time efforts of a man and a boy to maintain in the English style favoured by her mother. Elizabeth’s parents had liked to entertain in the evening room, where blinds filtered the setting sun and brightened squares of pattern in the old rugs. She remembered bridge evenings, and impromptu piano recitals on the baby grand that still stood between the two tall windows. The memories of those parties of fifty years ago made the house seem the more empty and silent now.

The lamp at her shoulder shone on the window glass and made broken reflections in the wash of rain. Aware that her silhouette against the light would be visible to anyone outside, she reached up and clicked off the switch. There was no one out there to see her, of course, but she felt easier in the dark. Until the sudden crack of thunder came the only sounds were the measured ticking of the long-case clock and the rain. Her hand held the cord of the curtains, ready to draw them and close out the storm. Then she leant forward, peering into the dark. The headlights of a car were veering slowly along the road.

Elizabeth stood still. The beam of the lights came closer and swept across her windows, before turning towards the gateway of the Captain’s House. She heard the engine stop and through the drumming of the rain a car door slammed.

Another sheet of lightning ripped the sky. In its split-second eerie brilliance she saw a girl, running, with her shoulders hunched and one arm crooked over her bent head in an attempt to shield herself from the storm. The flash froze her into immobility and left the image burning behind Elizabeth’s eyes.

The thunder crashed again. Elizabeth’s hand had flown up to her mouth, but as the darkness resettled she let it drop. She waited for her heart to stop pounding with shock.

It wasn’t the same girl.

It was someone else, just another girl of a similar age and build. The Bennisons had rented the old house out for the season and these were the summer tenants, that was all.

Two or three years ago Sam Bennison had laid out fancy garden lighting along the path to the Captain’s House and now these little flares suddenly shone out, lighting up sopping-wet billows of overgrown foliage. The back door of the house stood open and two girls were trailing mournfully back to the car, their hair already draggled and soaking. The lights picked out their T-shirts and denimed legs and big white sneakers. A man gave each of them an armful of luggage from the open back of the station-wagon and they trooped back to the house.

The younger girl was indeed in her early teens, just like Doone. She was stocky, too, with the same shoulder-length hair. Otherwise, Elizabeth now saw, there was no real resemblance.

She turned away from the window, leaving the curtains open.

May dumped her bag on the bed in the bedroom Ivy had not chosen. Then she sat down beside it and looked around her.

The bedhead was made of curly wrought iron, kind of French-looking, May thought, although she had no idea what a French bed might really look like. There was a pine bureau with a framed mirror screwed to the wall above it, an armchair with a worn slipcover and a set of bare shelves. Beside the bed lay a blue and grey rag rug hiding, as she saw when she pushed it aside with her foot, a burn mark in the haircord carpeting. The walls were wood panelled and painted a greyish white that reminded her of a bird’s egg. There were sticky-tape marks on the panelling showing where someone else’s pictures had once been fixed.

Except for the faintly exotic bed, the room looked what it was – a bare shell in a beach house, stripped ready for a summer’s rental. A smell of dust and salt was trapped inside the closed windows.

But there was also a forlornness about it, which went beyond mere emptiness. It made May shiver. Or maybe she was cold because her hair and T-shirt were wet from the rainstorm. She hugged herself and tried with numb fingers to rub some warmth into her arms.

Ivy pushed open May’s door with the toe of her sneaker. She came in without waiting to be asked and leant against the door frame. ‘You going to sit there all night?’

May shrugged.

Her sister sighed and her pretty top lip lifted. Once, at school, May had heard an older girl describing Ivy. ‘She’s drop-dead gorgeous, of course,’ the girl had whispered in what had seemed a knowing, adult way. Ivy was just eighteen and May fourteen. She supposed that Ivy was gorgeous, if you went for that sort of thing. She also knew that she herself was anything but.

Ivy said in her condescending way, ‘Look. We’re here, aren’t we? Can’t you try and be half-way happy about it?’

‘Yeah, all right. I notice you’ve been Miss Sunshine since we left home.’ And without waiting for Ivy to answer she got up and went to the window. After a small struggle she pushed up the sash and leant her elbows on the sill. Needle points of rain drove into her face, but the storm was already passing. Patches of faintly paler sky showed in places through the ragged masses of cloud.

‘Dad’s sending out for pizza,’ Ivy said to her sister’s back.

‘I don’t want any.’

‘Why not? Are you on another of your diets?’

‘Is that any of your business?’

‘Jesus. Suit yourself,’ Ivy snapped. She went away, slamming the door.

Left alone again, May moved slowly around the room. Lightly, with the tips of her fingers, she touched the exuberant metal curves of the bedhead, and the empty bookshelf, and the faintly splintery grooves of the panelling next to the bed, then circled with her forefinger and thumb the worn knob of one of the bureau drawers. There was a distant, fluctuating, deep-throated sound, which she only now identified as waves breaking on the beach.

The sad room seemed to enclose her, embedding her within itself in a way that was almost comforting. She sank down again on the bed. Sitting motionless, with her arms hanging between her parted knees, she let her mind wander.

‘May? Can you hear me?’

She became aware that her father had been calling from downstairs for some time. She stood up reluctantly and went to the door. Yeah?’

‘What’s the matter with you? Will you get down here?’

‘Yeah. Right, I’m just coming.’

Ivy dropped a fistful of cutlery on to the table. In the low, L-shaped downstairs room were chairs and two battered chesterfields, and a television set at one end of the long arm, and the heavy old oak table with a collection of unmatched dining chairs at the other. Even with all the lights on, the corners of the room remained obstinately shadowed. There was a yawning hearth with a stacked log basket beside it and the stone chimneypiece was blackened with smoke. The room still smelt of the driftwood smoke, as if the walls and beams were ingrained with it. In the wall facing the sea was a set of new-looking french doors, flanked by the original small-paned windows.

The unmodernised kitchen was in the short section of the L. John opened and banged shut cupboard doors as he searched for plates and glasses. Two pizza boxes stood unopened on one of the worktops. ‘There must be some goddamn glasses somewhere.’

The steep stairs rose straight up from the back of the room. Surprisingly the banister rails were carved with leaves and flowers.

May drifted down and hesitated beside the table. ‘How old is this place?’ she asked, looking around.

‘Pretty old,’ John answered, pleased by her question. ‘The original house was built sometime in the eighteen-fifties, by the captain of a whaling ship. Which is why it’s called the Captain’s House. Probably it was just this room and the bedroom above. The rest was added later.’

Under her breath Ivy made a small, dismissive sound, ‘Tchuh,’ to show she couldn’t care less about the house or its history, or about being here at all.

John found the glasses in the last cupboard. ‘Let’s eat, shall we?’ he said patiently.

They sat at the oak table, wide spaces between them. Ivy opened her pizza box and began to eat the doughy triangles straight out of it, ignoring the plate she had laid. A thread of cheese looped out of her mouth and she caught it with a silver-varnished little fingernail and pushed it between her pursed-up lips. Ivy could make even such an inelegant manoeuvre look cute and sexy.

May felt hungry enough to have wolfed down Ivy’s entire pizza and her father’s as well. But the waistband of her jeans bit into the solid slab of her belly and the stiff fabric dug into the creases of her thighs. She ate fruit and some plain crackers from the box of supplies they had brought up from the city. She cut the pieces up small and ate very slowly, as the plump mother of one of her friends had once told her they were advised to do at WeightWatchers.

Ivy left two-thirds of her dinner. The mozzarella solidified into a greasy waxen mass around the chunks of mushroom and pepperoni. Even so, May still eyed it covetously.

‘We’ll do the marketing tomorrow,’ John said. ‘It’ll help us to find our way around.’

‘Great,’ Ivy said without inflexion. She tipped her left-over food into the garbage pail, meticulously removing the traces of her own dinner and touching nothing else. ‘Mind if I go upstairs now?’

The taut thread of John’s patience finally snapped. ‘For Christ’s sake, Ivy, couldn’t you sit here with us for five more minutes? You know, family together time? Talking. Sharing things, the three of us?’

Ivy only stared at him. ‘Fantasy,’ she murmured. ‘I told you all along.’

John stumbled to his feet as if he might hit her.

‘Don’t you,’ Ivy breathed. ‘Don’t you ever.’

There was a silence. He had come close to it sometimes, after Ali had gone, but he never had hit either of them.

Ivy went briskly up the stairs. After a minute they heard music thudding out of her room. May sat still at the table, her bottom lip stuck out in a mixture of embarrassment and depression. John went back into the kitchen with the plates. He stacked them in the dishwasher and rubbed down the counter-top with a folded cloth. Then he poured himself a Jack Daniels. There was no ice yet.

Looking at him, May noticed dejection in the slope of his shoulders. Her father was a big man, broad-backed and still dark with only a few feathers of grey showing in his hair, but in her eyes he suddenly appeared smaller and weaker, the way he might turn out to be when he was really an old man. Although what she actually wanted was to hold back and keep herself safe inside the confines of her own skin, she made herself put her arms around his waist and rest her head on his chest.

‘It will be all right. Ivy’ll get over being mad because you wouldn’t let her stay in the city all summer. We’ll have a good time up here, I know we will.’

The warmth of her gesture was contradicted by a much stronger impulse, which kept her body stiff, micromillimetres removed from him, all the way from her forehead to her knees.

‘I guess so.’

He patted her shoulder and she stepped back in relief. ‘I think it’s stopped raining,’ she offered.

John tilted his whiskey glass in the direction of the doors.

‘Want to come out on the beach? Take a walk before bed?’ Slowly, May shook her head. Knowing that she should have accepted and returned his peace gesture, she wanted more urgently to be on her own in the melancholy stillness of the new bedroom, to lie on the European bed and lose herself in a book.

‘I’m pretty tired tonight. I’ll come tomorrow, okay?’

‘Okay.’ He smiled at her.

He refilled his whiskey glass and opened the door to the beach. As he slid the screen aside and stepped out on to the deck a blast of salt-laden wind hit him full in the face. He shivered and lifted his head. There was a covered porch and sandy wooden steps led down from it to an expanse of soaking grass. John walked carefully, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. Rainwater drenched his ankles. Glancing up, he saw a wan moon momentarily revealed by flying clouds.

At the far end of the rough patch of garden was another deck, and a heavy wooden post and rail fence on the seaward side. When he reached it John saw that the fence ran along the top of a low wall of rock. On the other side was a short drop down to the beach. The tide was out and he caught the windborne reek of low water. Only a few years ago he couldn’t have stopped the girls from racing out here to explore, even in the wet darkness. Now the deadness of their indifference weighed them all down.

A gate in the fence gave on to a short flight of rough wooden steps. He took a long pull of whiskey and descended to the beach. Crescents of coarse sand lay between patches of shingle. The stones grated beneath his deck-shoes as he crossed to the water’s edge. Ahead, across the mouth of the little bay, he could see the black hump of an island. John knew from the realtor’s description that this was Moon Island. And so the sheltered beach that faced it was known as Moon Island Beach. On the map it was just one of the dozens of bays and inlets that fretted this part of the Maine coastline.

He stared out towards the island until his eyes smarted in the wind. Then he swung south and began to walk the curve where the waves ran out in murky lacings of foam. Up on the bluff the Captain’s House lay directly behind him. There were four other houses overlooking the sheltered bay, strung in a line to his left. From down here their roofs and gables looked gothic and sinister against the storm clouds, but the lighted windows made cosy little squares of glowing amber.

The tide had turned. A seventh wave ran over his feet and soaked his shoes. He swore and directed his path further up the beach.

Back in the spring John had suggested to his daughters that they should share a last, proper summer vacation before Ivy went to college in California. He had in mind that he would teach the two of them to sail, and they would picnic and barbecue and take cycle rides together along the coastal paths. He and his sister Barbara had enjoyed just such a holiday with their parents thirty years ago.

The girls had protested. But in the end, in their different but equally reluctant ways, they had agreed that they would come.

John had written at once to the local realtors and almost by return, from Pittsharbor, they had received the details of the Captain’s House. It sounded perfect. The house was old and picturesque. The beach was partly sandy, unusually for this section of the coast, and private except for a short length at the southern end. One of the bluff houses was occupied year-round by local people, the others had been owned or rented by the same families for years. Pittsharbor was a pretty fishing town with a thriving artists’ colony. It was busy in the summer season but not yet spoilt.

The woman realtor had been quite direct. ‘It’s an unusual opportunity,’ she told John on the telephone. ‘We almost never get one of these houses becoming available for a summer let. The Bennisons have owned the Captain’s House for – oh, let me think – it must be ten years now. They’re doctors, from Chicago. I’m sorry to say that last summer their daughter, their only child, was tragically killed in an accident up here. The family haven’t yet decided whether or not to sell the house. We have been instructed to find a suitable tenant for the place for this season only.’

‘I see. That’s very sad,’ John said. ‘But I think we’ll take the house. It sounds just what we want.’

The whiskey glass held in the crook of his arm was empty now and he had reached the southernmost end of the beach. There were sailing dinghies and little rowboats beached here, tethered at the extremity of anchor chains that ran from concrete blocks half-buried in the sand. The running tide was just lapping at the bow of one of the dinghies, a fourteen-footer with a white tarpaulin cover that shone in the dark.

A flight of stone steps cut in the sloping headland led from the public part of the beach in the direction of the Pittsharbor village road. John retraced his path up the beach towards the Captain’s House.

The wind had dropped and the house was silent. He turned off the downstairs lights and went slowly up the steep stairs. The girls’ rooms were in darkness, their doors firmly closed. His ears sharpened in the stillness and he heard the old timbers overhead shift and creak, as the house settled itself after the storm.

In the sunshine next morning Leonie Beam stood at the top of the steps and surveyed the beach.

Marian, her mother-in-law, was wading into the sea. Her faded cotton skirt was tucked up out of the water, tight across her generous backside. She was wearing a rakish straw hat and a crumpled white smock, and there was a fat, naked baby hoisted astride one hip.

The sky was pearly, washed by the night’s rain. On a patch of sand scraped by the receding tide Marian and Leonie’s husband Tom had already laid out the day’s paraphernalia. There were canvas chairs and a pair of parasols with their white cotton fringes teased by the breeze off the water, sand toys and beach bags and rubber rings, and a rug spread for the babies.

Tom was doing his run. He was at the far end of the beach now, his feet sending up little sparkly silver plumes of spray as he plunged along at the water’s edge. Next he would thud up the stone steps and disappear down the coast road to the village. In Pittsharbor he would buy bagels and newspapers, and come home with snippets of gossip about whom he had seen and what messages they wanted relayed to Marian.

Leonie stood expressionlessly watching him until he reached the end of the beach. Then she went on down the steps and laid her book on one of the canvas chairs.

‘Leonie!’ Marian called to her from knee-deep water. ‘Angel, there you are. What have you been doing? Ashton needs his little sun-hat. Will you find it in the bag there … no, no, the red bag, darling. And bring it to me.’

Leonie obediently paddled out with the hat. Marian swung round and the baby on her hip waved his fists and laughed with delighted pleasure.

‘There’s the boy. Hat on for Grammer, there we are.’ She smoothed the white cotton with a sun-tanned, capable, heavily ringed hand.

Marian Beam was a widow. In her middle sixties she remained handsome, her broad face creased with the lines of a lifetime’s emphatic emotion and marked with the irregular sepia freckles of sun damage. Marian liked to be noticed. She emphasised her large, dark eyes with smudgy charcoal pencil and kept her silvery streaked hair long and flowing. For convenience she pinned it off her face with a series of combs.

Marian loved children. She had had five of her own. Kids were her thing, she often said. And as for grandchildren, well, they were the greatest gift God could bestow. It was her sadness that poor Dickson couldn’t be here to share the joy of seeing them grow up. Dickson was Marian’s late husband. He had died fifteen years before, most probably, Leonie thought, of sheer exhaustion from living alongside Marian for nearly thirty years.

‘You could have married again,’ Leonie remembered saying to Marian years ago, not long after she had married Tom. ‘You were only fifty when Dickson died.’

Marian had smiled luminously. ‘My dear, Dickson was my husband. I couldn’t have thought of anyone else. And I had my boys, and Karyn. I felt rich enough.’

That was how she always talked about them. There were the four boys, of whom Tom was the second, all strapping replicas of their father, and then there was the late, longed-for girl. Karyn was thirty now. She had given her mother plenty of problems but lately she seemed to have settled down. Ashton was her second baby by her live-in partner Elliot. Elliot was black, and the two children were exquisite, plump cafe au lait armfuls.

With the addition of Sidonie and Ashton, Marian now had eleven grandchildren. None of them was from Tom and Leonie.

The two women stood side by side in the water, looking back at the bluff and the houses. The old clapboards and pointed gables were softened by the benign light. Even the tarry dark-stained shingles of the Captain’s House shimmered as if washed with a milky glaze.

The Beams’ was the largest of the five summer cottages overlooking the beach. It stood majestically in the centre, the complicated pitches of its steep roof pierced by dormer windows and surmounted by a widow’s walk. From the flagpole in centre front a faded and frayed American flag twitched in the fitful breeze. Marian always hoisted the flag as soon as she arrived at the beach. Dickson’s flag, she called it.

The house was entirely surrounded at ground level by a wide porch, the home of sagging hammocks and swing seats and surfboards awaiting rehabilitation and windsurfer sails and ancient bicycles, tangled up with driftwood trophies and shells and all the other relics of past holidays. It was just this endless continuity about the place, the silted layers of historical minutiae, which oppressed Leonie.

‘We’ve always done this,’ Tom explained to her at the beginning. ‘Moon Island Beach is embedded inside us all. I can’t imagine spending a summer anywhere else.’

‘Not Europe?’ Leonie had protested. ‘Venice? Tuscany? The French Riviera?’

He had dutifully taken her to Italy for their honeymoon. But the next year, and every year after that, they had returned to the beach. And at the beach house Marian was the matriarch. She presided over daughters-in-law and children and grandchildren like some fertility goddess.

Leonie stirred one leg in the water. She could feel warmer and cooler layers swirling around her calves, cooler on the surface. The storm had stirred everything up. ‘Where is everyone this morning?’ she asked. There was only Sidonie asleep on a towel in the shade of one of the parasols.

‘The kids are playing tennis.’

There were four of them, Lucas and Gail and Joel and Kevin, the children of Marian’s eldest son, Michael. All four of them came out every summer to stay at the beach, just as their parents had done all through their own childhoods. This year, unusually, their mother and father had gone to Europe. ‘And Karyn and Elliot are out in the boat.’

Leonie looked and saw the white mainsail and jib of the Beams’ Flying 15 running out beside the island. She nodded, wondering with a part of her mind exactly how she would occupy herself for this morning, and the afternoon that would follow it, and the nights and days after that. The beach and Marian and the family affected her like this.

A man Leonie didn’t recognise was standing up in front of the Captain’s House and a young woman in a double sliver of bikini was spikily descending the steps. ‘Who are they?’ she asked Marian.

‘They’re the Bennisons’ tenants, I guess. I hope they’re going to be an addition.’

Marian meant an addition to the local texture and colour, to the ever evolving art-form of the family summer holiday.

At the same moment there was a loud whoop from the garden of the Beams’ house, signalling that the tennis was over.

Marian said, ‘Take the babe for me, Leonie,’ and handed over the peachy weight of him without waiting for Leonie’s agreement. She waded out of the water, ready to welcome the older grandchildren, her tucked up skirt revealing navy-blue thickened veins behind her heavy knees.

They came streaming down the beach, headed by a suntanned young man of twenty in tennis shorts and a faded vest. He wore his long hair pulled back in a stringy pony-tail.

‘Lucas,’ Marian called to him, but her eldest grandchild’s attention was elsewhere. He had seen the bikini girl, who was wandering across the shingle and occasionally turning over shells with one languidly pointed toe.

May walked from the window of her bedroom to the door and pressed her knuckles against it, making sure that it was firmly closed. She was repeating a manoeuvre she had made only five minutes earlier but she could not have explained the need to make sure she was alone. She knew the house was empty; she had seen Ivy disappear down the beach steps and John was sitting reading a book on the bench above the sea wall.

With the door closed she felt safe. A fly buzzed against the window-pane. The forlorn room held her enmeshed in its drowsy heat. There were thirteen steps from the door to the window; she had already counted them. Her belongings were unpacked, sparsely laid out on the shelves. There was nothing else to do up here and the sea and the island were bathed with clean blue light. The water of the bay was dotted with cheerful coloured sails. She should put on a swimming costume and go out, like Ivy, into the sunshine.

May had bought a new one-piece from Macy’s. It was red-and-white plaid and she had thought she looked okay in it. A bikini was out of the question and now when she put it on she saw that even this suit showed the cellulite at the top of her legs. She stood for a long moment looking at her torso in the mirror over the dresser, then blindly turned away. If she didn’t go out now she was afraid she never would. She might climb back under the bedcovers and stay there with her knees pulled up to hide her stomach.

The fly had fallen to the window-sill. The buzzing was louder and desperate. May retraced her steps to the door. But when she grasped the handle and pulled it wouldn’t open. It only shifted slightly, resisting her efforts. It was as if someone else were leaning a shoulder against it. To keep her there, within the stuffy confines of the room.

With her breath catching in her throat May pulled harder. The door suddenly sprang open and she gave a muffled croak of surprise. Without looking back she fled down the stairs and through the screen doors on to the deck. There was an old woman in the garden of the next-door house. She had been bending over a clump of tall blue flowers, but she saw May and stood up, straight-backed, watching her with uncomfortable intentness. Even at this distance May didn’t like it. She ducked her head and ran down the sandy path, rough grass whipping at her ankles.

John looked up from his book. ‘Sun cream,’ he called after her as she raced by.

‘Ivy’ll have some.’

She wanted to get to Ivy. Without thinking, May ran down to the beach. She could see her sister in her bikini, standing gracefully, her weight all balanced on one long leg and angled hip. She was raking back her hair with her fingers and talking to some boys.

When May panted up to her she half-turned, startled, and smiled. ‘This is my sister, May.’

The three boys were standing in a dazzled semi-circle. Of course Ivy drew them like moths with no thought but to incinerate themselves in her flame.

‘This is Lucas, May. And … um …’ She didn’t try to conceal the fact that she hadn’t remembered the names of the others.

‘Joel. And Kevin.’

The middle one fell over himself to supply the information. Ivy gave him a small, considered smile and he blushed. Joel was about sixteen and Kevin a year or so younger. They looked just like the two hundred boys May knew in school in New York, who all wanted to date the same twenty skinny girls. Lucas was different. He was older, perhaps even as old as twenty. He had beige-blond hair pulled back in a pony-tail, a slippery golden tan and a lovers’ knot tattooed on his left bicep. May realised that she was openly staring at him and felt dull colour rising in her face as she dragged her eyes away.

‘Your sister?’ Lucas said in amusement.

May stood with her arms folded across her chest, numbly exposed in her stupid red-and-white swimsuit, feeling the sun hot on the top of her head. ‘Have you got the sun cream?’ she demanded of Ivy. She had forgotten the eeriness of the house. It was time to retreat from all these pairs of eyes. There were two women sitting on rugs only a few yards away and John was strolling across the sand with his hands in the pockets of his khaki shorts.

‘Sure.’ Ivy produced a tube from her straw bag. ‘Want me to rub some on your shoulders?’

‘No thanks,’ May snapped. She took the cream and marched away.

‘And this is my dad,’ she heard Ivy saying.

‘Hi. I’m John Duhane.’

Marian was already on her feet, on her way to greet the newcomer.

‘I’m so pleased someone has taken the Bennisons’ place. I couldn’t bear to think of it sitting empty, with all that sadness trapped inside it. Are the young women your daughters? They’ll make the house laugh again, I know they will.’

John hadn’t yet told Ivy and May about the death of the Bennison girl. It had seemed the last of too many negatives about the whole trip, but now he knew that he should have done so.

For the moment Ivy’s attention was fully occupied by the blond boy. The two of them had already begun to wander away, the younger brothers in attendance.

Marian Beam introduced Leonie, whose arms were full of baby. ‘This is Ashton and that’s Sidonie asleep on the rug.’

‘They’re beautiful,’ John said dutifully. But it was the babies’ mother who held his interest. She had a narrow, brown-skinned face and dark eyes, which met his briefly and slid away. She was pretty in a boyish way, but what struck him about her was the way her face looked tucked in, as if she was used to concealing things.

Marian was saying, ‘There’s plenty of company here for your girls. I’ve got eleven grandchildren altogether, from Lucas down to Ashton, and they all come to spend the summers with me. Is your wife here with you?’

‘I’m a widower.’

And he saw the mother look at him over the baby’s sun-hat. ‘You’re here on your own with them?’ Marian protested. ‘I call that plain heroic.’

‘Or plain foolish,’ John answered and was rewarded by another veiled glance from the daughter-in-law.

‘You must come over and join us whenever you feel like it. How about tonight? My daughter Karyn is here with her partner and Leonie’s husband is here too …’

Ah, John thought. Of course.

‘Unfortunately the other two boys and their families won’t be getting here until later, and you must meet them then.’

‘Perhaps not this evening,’ John said. ‘We should settle in up there first. We only arrived in the middle of the storm last night.’

He looked beyond the frayed brim of Marian’s hat to the Captain’s House. It stood at a slightly different angle from the others, seeming to turn aside from them and away from the full assault of the sea and wind. He could imagine that a seafarer had built it, a man who had had enough of the weather and the elements, but still couldn’t quite leave them behind. May had been standing on the lower deck looking down at them, but now she had disappeared.

Marian was insistent. ‘Tomorrow, what about that? Come over and have a meal with us tomorrow evening.’

‘Thank you, we’d like to.’

‘That’s settled then.’

Evidently Marian Beam was a woman who knew what she wanted and insisted on getting it.

The garden between the sea wall and the deck was not really a garden at all, more a strip of grass and sand, which had been decorated in places with big rounded beach stones and low bushes. May prowled aimlessly around the limits of the area, turning back when she came to the fence painted in faded blue that separated the garden from the one next door. Orange, scarlet and ginger flowers growing on the other side spilled over the fence, making a little oasis of brilliance.

May followed a stony path down the side of the house. There was an outside shower behind a screen, a big evergreen tree with a dilapidated hammock slung from the branches, a coiled-up hosepipe, which stopped her short for a second with its resemblance to a snake. When she recovered her breath and stepped forward again she immediately knew that someone was watching her. She peered behind her and up into the branches of the tree, to the little screened windows in the side of the house. There was no one to see. A cold breath fanned the nape of her neck, even though the day had turned hot.

She turned her head slowly.

The old woman she had seen before was standing on the other side of the fence, half hidden by the green leaves of her garden. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you,’ she said.

‘You didn’t.’ May was relieved. ‘I saw you before.’

The woman held up a big pair of shears to show May. ‘I’m doing some pruning. Turner’s supposed to come and see to it but he doesn’t always have time to do everything. Turner’s my gardener. My mother loved this garden and I try to look after it for her sake. I suppose it’s a kind of memorial.’

The woman really was quite old, so her mother must have died long ago. May liked the idea of her daughter keeping up the garden in her memory. She wished that she had something like it to do. Sometimes she and Ivy talked about their mother, but not very often nowadays. And John hardly ever even mentioned her. He just expected them to accept Suzanne or some other girlfriend instead.

‘I like your garden. It’s pretty.’

‘Thank you. I saw you looking at the Japanese garden the Bennisons did out the front. What did you think of that?’

‘Japanese? I thought it looked like someone had dumped a whole lot of stones and left the rest to itself. Gardens ought to have flowers and stuff. Lots of colours.’

The woman laughed. ‘I think you’re right. And my mother would have approved of your ideas too. Should we introduce ourselves? My name’s Elizabeth Newton.’

‘Hi. I’m May Duhane.’

‘I’m happy to meet you, May. I saw you arriving last night.’

‘Yeah? All that rain.’

‘You reminded me a little of Doone. You still do remind me of her, as a matter of fact. Perhaps only because you’re the same age.’

‘Doone? Who’s she?’

In the quiet that followed voices carried up to them from the beach. One of them was Ivy’s and a burst of laughter came after it.

Elizabeth said, ‘Would you like to come round to my side and have a closer look at the garden?’

‘Okay,’ May said. ‘I can get over the fence here, look.’

After the tour of the garden they sat in deep wicker chairs on Elizabeth’s porch. At first sight of her May had thought that Mrs Newton must be dressed up ready to go out somewhere, maybe to a coffee party or a town meeting, or whatever it was that old ladies did in Pittsharbor. She had on a dress, silky and pleated, with a brooch pinned to the collar. She was wearing tights, too, fine pale ones that showed the brown marks on the skin of her legs, and proper leather shoes. Then, when she didn’t mention having to hurry off anywhere, May came to the conclusion that this must be how she always chose to look. It made her seem even older than she really was, as if she belonged to history instead of to May’s grandparents’ generation.

Elizabeth had proper lemonade, which she served in a tall glass jug with intricate diamond patterns cut into it. She also offered May a plate of very good chocolate fudge brownies. May took two, telling herself it would not be polite to insist that she was on a diet.

‘Who’s Doone?’ May finally asked again.

Elizabeth was looking out to sea. The island was a solid shape in the middle distance, its beach fringed with a rim of silver. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Her parents own your house.’

‘The Bennisons.’

‘Yes. Doone was their daughter. She died in a boating accident last summer. She drowned.’

May looked at her glass. There was a sweat of condensation on the smooth rim and a greasy mark where she had put it to her mouth.

‘I reminded you of her?’

‘Just because of your age. And your size and build are similar. Actually you are nothing like her at all.’

May thought again. ‘Which was her bedroom?’

‘The one on this side of the house, looking over the sea.’

‘It’s mine too,’ May said. And in case her new friend should be concerned, or think that she might be unnerved by this idea, she added firmly, ‘I like it. It’s a good room. And I’m sorry about Doone, I just didn’t know.’

Her words seemed to echo in her own ears, as if she were listening to someone else uttering them.