Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection: Moon Island, Sunrise, Follies - Rosie Thomas - Страница 11

May sprawled on the bed in Ivy’s room where her sister was getting ready for dinner at the Beams’ house. Ivy had already changed her clothes twice and May was still in the baggy shorts she had worn all day. ‘Ive, did you know about the kid?’

Ivy snapped the cap off a lipstick and coloured her mouth. She lifted one eyebrow at May in the mirror. ‘What kid? What’re you talking about?’

‘The daughter of the people who own this house.’

A shrug. ‘Nope.’

‘She drowned. Last year. Elizabeth told me. She was out sailing by herself and she fell in. She was the same age as me.’

Ivy lowered the lipstick for a second. ‘No. I didn’t know. That’s really sad.’

The shadow falling on Ivy’s face made her beautiful by dimming her china prettiness. May noticed it and for all the jealousy that clogged her veins and weighted her feet, she knew that she loved her sister. She gnawed viciously at the corner of her chapped mouth, not knowing how to deal with the realisation. She complained, ‘Why do you think Dad hasn’t told us about her? I’m only sleeping in her bedroom. He never says anything, does he?’

‘Perhaps he thought it would spook you.’

‘I’m not spooked,’ May insisted. ‘I’m not a baby.’

Ivy shrugged, losing interest. ‘Well, ask him, if you want to know. How do I look?’

‘Nice.’

Ivy had finally settled for a halter top and a tiny skirt. They left uncovered a slice of smooth flat belly. Her legs and shoulders were already turning a pale gold. ‘Nice? Don’t go crazy, will you?’

‘What d’you want me to say? How about hot? You look like you put out big-time, as it happens.’

‘Little bitch,’ Ivy retorted, not without amusement. She was in a good mood. ‘Are you going in those clothes?’

‘Does it matter?’ May jumped off the bed, needing to hide the fact that it mattered too much. ‘Anyway, what about Steve?’ Steve was Ivy’s steady boyfriend back in the city.

‘What do you care about Steve?’

‘I don’t. I thought you did, that’s all.’

Ivy had spent weeks protesting that it was because of Steve that she didn’t want to be dragged away from Brooklyn Heights and made to spend half the precious summer in some Godforsaken seaside town like a kid being sent to camp. ‘I’m here and he’s there. Besides, Lucas is okay.’ Ivy combed out her glossy hair. ‘I saw you checking him out.’

‘I didn’t. I wouldn’t.’

Ivy only grinned. ‘No? One of the kid brothers would do for you. Whatshisname, Kevin. He’s cute.’

‘Shut the fuck up, will you?’

May stared in fury. That’s how it was between them. They veered from being almost friends to raw-skinned irritation, and back again, without any episodes of moderation. Sometimes May wondered if their mother had been around whether she might have been the mediator, smoothing over the spikes of anger and making their attempts to like each other seem less clumsy. John didn’t do anything of the kind. He and Ivy seemed to occupy a different territory, adulthood maybe, which left May stranded somewhere apart. It intensified her loneliness and made her angrier still with both of them. Yet sometimes only Ivy would do: only Ivy understood anything.

She slammed back into her own bedroom. She had spent the whole day in here while Ivy lay sunbathing. The cracks in the paper and the vertical shadows that ran like thin ribs in the grooves of the panelling had already become familiar. May imagined Doone Bennison sitting reading in this same armchair, or lying on her back making figures out of the spidery lines that traced the ceiling. Perhaps she had swung her legs off the bed like this and ducked down the stairs, and then gone out to sail the boat across the bay for the last time.

What was it like to drown?

May pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, experimentally stopping the air. Her heart fluttered against her ribs and she found herself gasping for breath.

Ivy banged on the door as she passed. ‘You coming?’

It was too late now for May to do anything about the way she looked. She could have fixed her hair, at least, or chosen a looser top to hide her fat.

She vented some of the pressure of dissatisfaction with herself by kicking the skirting beside the base of the bookshelf. A neat section of it immediately fell forward and lay on the worn carpet with the unpainted splintery back exposed. There was a rectangular black space behind it.

May knelt down and peered into the hole. Something was hidden in there.

Carefully she reached in and drew it out. It was a hardback notebook with dusty black covers and a scarlet cloth spine. She opened it at the first page and saw girl’s handwriting not much different from her own. The first word on the top line was May.

May licked her dry lips. The faint murmur of the sea swelled in her ears until the room seemed like a giant shell that amplified the greedy waves.

The book was Doone’s, it had to be. This was her bedroom, and May had kicked against her secret hiding-place. Now Doone was writing from somewhere directly to May, and the roar of the sea rose up in her ears and almost deafened her.

She read on with reluctant fascination, her fingers shaking as she turned a page.

It wasn’t her name, she realised. It was a date: 15 May, last year. This was a diary. The dead girl’s diary, tucked into its hiding-place and forgotten.

John and Ivy were calling her.

May closed the book and blew the dust off the covers. She slid it back into the hole in the wall and pressed the loose section of skirting back into place. It fitted closely, with only two vertical cracks to betray its existence. No one would bother to investigate unless they accidentally dislodged the section as she had done. She scrambled to her feet.

John was standing downstairs next to the smoke-blackened chimney stones. He had put on a clean blue shirt.

May rocked on the bottom step, glaring her latest accusation at him. ‘Why didn’t you tell us about what happened to the Bennisons’ daughter?’ It was typical of May not to offer an introduction, just to launch straight into her offensive.

John temporised. ‘All right, May, I should have done. Okay? But I didn’t want it to be a reason right off for you not to like the place.’

She recognised the expression on his face. It was a taut mixture of conciliation, impatience and anxiety, and she often saw it when her father looked at her. Thinking about the hidden diary she felt defiance harden within her. Somebody’s drowning shouldn’t be wrapped up and hidden, just in case it might spoil someone else’s holiday. A person took shape in her mind, a girl, with her skin mottled by sea water and her clothes streaming with it. The momentary vision was real enough for May to see her pale features.

Holding her discovery to herself, May felt the secret settle in place like an invisible shield.

The diary was lying in the darkness, waiting for her to read it. Finding it in its secret hiding-place drew her into a conspiracy with Doone: Doone must have something to tell her that shouldn’t be shared with anyone else. ‘The place is okay,’ she said tonelessly. ‘Why wouldn’t I like it?’

John’s face relaxed. This was better them he had hoped. ‘Good. We’re going to have a good time. These people seem friendly.’

‘Are we going, then?’ Ivy sighed.

The Duhanes walked down their own driveway, passed Elizabeth Newton’s mailbox and doubled back between the overgrown trees and bushes that lined the way to the Beams’ house. They skirted the tennis court and various cars drawn up on a gravel sweep, and climbed the porch steps to knock on the back door. There was plenty of time before anyone answered it for them to survey the sagging chairs, heaps of shells and discarded shoes that lined the unswept boards. John and Ivy exchanged questioning glances.

At length the screen door was tugged open by a man none of them had seen before. But it did seem that they were expected.

‘Hi, I’m Tom. Come on in, we’re all out the front.’

The glimpse of the house confirmed their first impressions.

It was huge and chaotic. Open doors revealed chairs piled with children’s toys and floors patterned with sandy footprints. At the beach, Marian favoured freedom and space for self-expression over domestic order.

The houses had been built so that they turned their backs on the land and the lane leading away to Pittsharbor. The wide porches and front windows faced the curve of beach, the island and the open sea beyond, and they were separated from the edge of the bluff by their gardens. Elizabeth Newton’s and the Bennisons’ gardens were cultivated, but the other three were not much more than sandy spaces stitched with seagrass. Tonight, the porch and the decks at Marian Beam’s house appeared to be crowded with people. Lucas and his two younger brothers and two of their friends from Pittsharbor were playing frisbee between the deck and the bluff, with Gail looking on.

Ivy stepped forward, smiling, knowing that she would be welcomed. May hung back, disabled by shyness.

Marian surged forward to greet the Duhanes. Once they had been processed by her, John and Ivy were drawn straight into the party. May edged around the group and positioned herself where she could watch Lucas covertly and survey everyone else. After a minute’s quiet observation she saw that, apart from the four Beam siblings and their friends, the crowd was only made up of five Beam adults, Elizabeth Newton and an elderly couple May had not seen before.

Marian was introducing the old people to John. ‘This is Aaron and Hannah Fennymore. Your neighbours from the opposite end of the beach, John.’

The woman was about the same age as Elizabeth Newton, but she looked completely different. She had none of Elizabeth’s stately bearing or gracious manner. Hannah Fennymore was small and bent-backed, dressed in layers of nondescript brown and grey clothes as if the evening were cold instead of soft and mild. She was sharp-eyed and inquisitive-looking, rather like a small busy bird.

The man, her husband, must once have been tall and imposing. He was bent now, too, and a stick lay on the floor beside his chair. He had white hair, long and a little unkempt, which stood out around his hollow, beaky face like a lion’s mane. Everyone, even the boys, stepped carefully when they came near Aaron.

The Fennymores were Mainers, not weekenders or summer visitors. They lived all the year round up on the bluff.

At last, feeling more confident, May slipped into a seat near Elizabeth.

‘I remember parties at this house in the nineteen-thirties and forties,’ Elizabeth murmured to her, as if they were resuming a conversation they had broken off only minutes before, not a full day and a half ago. May liked the implied intimacy of this. ‘Long before Dickson Beam bought the place. Marian makes believe the Beams have been here for ever, but they’re just newcomers, really.’

‘What were they like, the parties?’

‘They were grand affairs, for a summer cottage. Everyone in evening clothes, a uniformed maid. Of course, the house looked quite different then. Marguerite Swayne wouldn’t recognise it if she saw it now. Mr Swayne was a friend of my grandfather’s. They were an old family. Their money was in fruit shipping: bananas, up from Jamaica.’

May scratched at an inflamed bite on her ankle, half-closing her eyes and trying to conjure up the scene. Movie images of marcel-waved ladies foxtrotting with gentlemen in white gloves danced in front of Joel and Kevin Beam. The pictures clashed with May’s own much darker impression of the beach and its houses. Another face swam by, drowned features framed by tendrils of wet hair. Water blotted out the dancing couples.

Elizabeth was saying, ‘This house was built ninety years ago by the Swaynes, at about the same time as my paternal grandfather bought our parcel of land. He was Senator Maynard Freshett. His family business was timber, lumber mills. There’s a rather forbidding portrait of him in my dining-room, but he was the kindest man. My mother brought me up here every summer to visit her parents-in-law, from the time I was two years old. Her family were from Portland, originally, but her mother died when she was just a girl.’

May nodded politely. ‘Who else lived here in those days?’

‘When I was a child?’ Elizabeth laughed briefly, showing the soft crow’s-foot skin beneath her jaw. ‘Aaron, Mr Fennymore did, for one. Not in the house along there, that came later. His people lived back in Pittsharbor.’

‘What was their family business?’

Elizabeth gave her a quick glance. Then she touched her throat with the tips of her fingers, as if needing the powdered wrinkles as a reminder that the skin was an old woman’s. ‘Fishing. His father and grandfather were fishermen.’

May wondered if she had inadvertently strayed on to some sort of forbidden ground. She didn’t like the look of Aaron Fennymore very much. He was stern, yet alarmingly frail – ill-looking. As if he might die or something.

Marian clapped her hands and walked between the groups. She was wearing a tiered hippie skirt and the toenails of her faintly grubby feet were painted ripe purple. ‘Everything’s ready, plates are right here. You have to help yourselves, now, no ceremony. We’re just family, John.’

Aaron Fennymore’s white head jerked and his wife patted his hand. ‘I’ll fix you a plate,’ she soothed him.

‘Go on,’ Elizabeth said to May. ‘You’ll be hungry.’

‘Not really,’ May said coldly, while her stomach clamoured for hamburger.

The food was barbecued with some aplomb by Tom Beam, aided by Lucas, and served up by Lucas’s laid-back friends from Pittsharbor. Leonie always let Tom do the cooking. He ran two successful restaurants in Boston, and he had precise ideas about the right way to do anything connected with food. She sat back in one of the canvas loungers, wondering vaguely when the salt-rotted fabric would finally tear apart and deposit her on the deck. The size of the gathering allowed her to feel that for once she needn’t make a particular effort to be cheerful and talkative. No one would notice if she withdrew and let her thoughts wander.

Everyone had eaten and Tom made regular circuits of the adults with the bottles of Californian Merlot. Lucas and his friends, and his sister Gail and Ivy, drank beer. Marian looked pleased with her success in having been the one to draw the new people into the little society of the bluff. They would be her protégés now and she liked that.

Marian had stopped to listen courteously to something Elizabeth Newton was saying. Leonie knew that privately Marian considered Elizabeth to be an old Boston snob and an anachronism, but she was always polite to her in public. Maybe they were talking about the land behind the beach and the development. Elizabeth’s son Spencer and his partner wanted to buy a piece to build condominiums, but Aaron owned it and flatly refused to sell. Elizabeth tried to promote Spencer’s cause whenever she could and she was well aware that Marian’s relationship with the Fennymores was more cordial than her own.

Leonie drew up her knees and rested her chin on them. She was happy watching without having to respond to anyone. She saw her husband lean down to say something to Karyn and their physical likeness struck her all over again. All Marian’s children resembled her and one another. Their wide, handsome faces with broad foreheads and big noses might have come from the same mould. Karyn was dark like her mother, whereas Tom had inherited his father’s sandy fairness and prominent chin, but they were unmistakably brother and sister. They laughed now, the same noisy burst of amusement that was the signature sound of Beam family gatherings. Leonie’s gaze travelled on at once.

The sky over the sea had turned pistachio green and now the light was fading into navy-blue darkness. The teenagers had begun to talk about taking a boat out to the island and lighting a fire, so they could carry on their own party there.

‘Aw, c’mon, we’ve done it plenty before,’ Joel was protesting to Tom and Marian.

Leonie did not try to intervene. The older of the two sisters from the Bennisons’ place was as graceful as a gazelle, but she was wearing too much make-up for a summer’s evening and her eyes were bold to the point of hardness. The younger one with the round, sweet face hovered watchfully at one side. She kept tugging at the hem of her shorts as if she wanted to cover herself up. Leonie wondered how long ago their mother had died.

Their father moved around the circle, making a polite point of talking to everyone. He had sat for a long time with the Fennymores and now he was nodding in the midst of a brief conversation with Elliot. Watching them, Leonie reached down and groped unseeingly for the glass of wine beside her chair. She finished what was left of it, her third of the evening. She didn’t often drink more than one. Abstemiousness over food and drink was part of her carefulness, her exercising of control in all the areas of her life that remained susceptible to control.

The children began a shift down the beach steps. Marian and Tom moved in their wake, issuing warnings and instructions. The sea was calm and the tide was right, so they had been given permission to row across to the island. Leonie saw how the younger Duhane girl waited until her sister motioned her on with a hitch of her chin. Then she followed on after Kevin and Joel, who took no notice of her. They clattered down the steps and out of sight and the adults came back into the circle, simultaneously smiling and shaking their heads.

‘They’ll be okay. You can’t stop them doing everything because of what happened,’ Tom proclaimed to no one in particular.

‘May I sit here?’ someone asked.

Leonie turned her head and saw it was John Duhane. She was convinced that he had taken care to talk to everyone else except her because he had been saving her until last. ‘Please do.’

At first, he didn’t say anything at all. They sat in companionable silence watching the glow of candles around the deck and as the quiet stretched between them Leonie let her head fall back once more against the salty chair canvas. A thin wire loosened between her shoulder-blades and her breathing steadied. The murmur of the sea grew louder.

When he did speak it was in a low voice that she had to turn her head to hear. He was telling her his daughters had been reluctant to make this trip and how pleased he was that there were other young people for them to be with. ‘Vacations have been the hardest part to deal with since their mother died.’ He spoke softly but without hesitation.

‘How long ago?’

‘Four years now.’

‘I’m sorry. They must miss her. And you must too,’ she added hastily, disconcerted to discover that she sounded clumsy.

John was sitting on the edge of the decking. He reached down to the coarse grass arching beside his ankle and pinched a blade between his thumb and forefinger.

‘One of the babes is crying,’ Marian called. There was a nursery alarm plugged in close to the porch door. Karyn swayed past and the hem of her skirt brushed over John’s arm. A moment later she came out again with Ashton in her arms. His dark pin-curled head lolled and his thumb was wedged in his mouth. Over her shoulder his wet saucer eyes blinked at the world with tearful reproach.

John moved a little to one side, but Leonie sat motionless with her hands locked behind her head. ‘They’re beautiful children,’ he said. ‘You don’t believe they will ever grow up, do you? But they do. They grow up and they stop thinking you’re the best person in the world. Overnight you become the enemy.’

Leonie followed his surprised gaze as Karyn went to Elliot. Elliot took the bundle of damp baby and unconcernedly rocked it and went on talking. She made a small sound that might have been laughter, or something altogether different. ‘Oh, I see. You thought they were mine? From the beach, yesterday morning? No, they’re Karyn’s kids. Elliot’s her partner, obviously. My husband is Tom.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. It’s a natural assumption to make, a woman with a baby in her arms.’

‘So which of all those children are yours?’

‘None of them. Tom and I don’t have any.’

‘Ah.’

Leonie stood up. A spoon that had been hidden in the folds of her skirt clattered to the decking but no one looked round. She retrieved it and replaced it with the others. ‘Will you come for a walk on the beach? Just ten minutes?’ she asked abruptly, without having pre-planned the invitation in her mind.

‘Of course.’

They crossed the deck and descended the steps without anyone seeming to notice their withdrawal.

Once they were there, Leonie kicked off her sandals and hooked her forefinger through the straps. The sand was pleasantly cool and coarse underfoot. They began to walk, side by side, their heads bent.

‘I wanted children,’ she heard herself saying. ‘I wanted a family.’ Even the word itself had become taboo, so that it lay unwieldy on her tongue. ‘But I couldn’t. I had all the tests. The problem was me, not Tom. We tried the … the alternative methods. Quite a lot were undignified, most of them painful, all of them were expensive. None worked. I sound sorry for myself, don’t I?’

John listened, but said nothing.

‘We were told to consider adoption, but Tom didn’t want to do that. He felt it wasn’t right for him. So. No children.’

‘I’m sorry, I made a clumsy mistake.’

‘Don’t be. I said, it was natural enough. I’m spilling all this out probably because … because of the wine.’

Laughter and the splash of oars travelled across the water to them. Two boats were making their way out to the island.

‘Why don’t you and Tom take your vacations somewhere else?’

She was taken aback for a moment. The question leapfrogged further than she had been prepared for. ‘Oh, it’s a movie, isn’t it? The beach, the island… that house, Maine itself. It’s woven into all of them, a picture, that was what Marian wanted. It’s her oeuvre. Family, grandchildren, the tradition of all the summers. Tom wouldn’t consider cutting us out of the celluloid.’

‘Not even for your sake?’

Leonie considered in all seriousness, wishing to do her husband justice. At length she said, ‘No.’ It was the truth; it was so important to Tom that the two of them should remain part of this extended family. The connection compensated him for the lack of his own children, even as comparisons deepened the sense of loss and failure for her. ‘It isn’t so much to ask, you know. It’s just a summer vacation. Some tennis, a couple of barbecues. Aunt Leonie and Uncle Tom. In the winter we go on a ski trip, usually with friends. Last year we went to the Caribbean …’

She knew that she protested too much. It was part of a contract she had agreed with herself, to be as positive as she could manage. There seemed no way, any more, to give expression to the desperation and craving and sense of futility that were all her body did manage to breed. At the beginning, in the first years, she had talked – ranted, sobbed – to Tom about her longing to conceive. But now, driven into blankness, they hardly ever even mentioned it. Except maybe as the bitterest, the most oblique of jokes at their joint expense.

Although she had told John Duhane the bare facts, Leonie couldn’t have conveyed to him or anyone else how it felt to hold Ashton or Sidonie in her arms. The simultaneous longings to smother them, to inhale the scent of their skin and hair to the point of narcolepsy, to hurl them aside, to rake and pummel her own disobliging flesh… I’m crazy, Leonie thought. Raving. There’s no hope for me… She grinned in the darkness. There was relief in acknowledging her madness.

An onshore breeze had sprung up, and it blew a hank of hair across her face and flattened her skirt against her thighs. Being at the beach made her crazier, being inundated with babies and pounded by teenagers and chewed up by the clan of Beams, up here where everything was so god-damn clean and healthy and salt-scoured and plain … at least back in the city there was dirt and confusion, and work, and even a couple of women friends who had elected not to have babies …

She laughed now, a low noise that made John look sideways at her tucked-in face. ‘Something funny?’

He touched her wrist, guided her around a mooring chain snaked over the shingle. She resisted an impulse to take his hand.

‘In a way. Tell me about your girls.’ She wanted to ask about his wife.

‘They’re growing up.’

‘They would do, in the end.’

They reached the far point of the beach, where the steps led up towards the Pittsharbor road. Leonie had the sense that John was also thinking of Doone Bennison, who had not grown up in the end.

Which was worse, she wondered, for the thousandth time, to have had a child and lost her, or never to have had one at all? She didn’t know, any more than she had known on the afternoon a year ago when the fisherman brought Doone’s body ashore. She had been there, with a brown bag of shopping and a quart of ice-cream from the Ice Parlour. There had been a flurry down at the dock and one of the men had run forward with a tarpaulin and another had dashed along the harbour wall to the wooden hut where there was a telephone. At the same time there had been a hideous silence, and all the running and hoisting and sluicing of water had seemed to take place in slow motion. They had lifted the body, laid her on the dock and covered her over. Leonie remembered the white hands and feet.

The breeze off the water was cold now. Leonie and John turned and began to retrace their slow steps along the tide-line.

‘I miss their smaller selves,’ John said. ‘Even after Ali died, I was certain I could look after them. Now I don’t believe I know anything. They think I’m the enemy.’

‘You said that before. I’m sure it isn’t true.’

She had seen the girls, she wasn’t sure of anything of the sort. But you reassured parents about their children, didn’t you? That she was uncertain even of that much made Leonie aware how useless she had become around the whole business. Parents, procreation. Cut off from the chain of heredity, except via aunthood. What was there to do? she wondered. What, exactly?

Out on the island beach two tongues of fire made wavering figures that were answered by fainter reflections in the water. They stopped walking, stood still to watch. The fire torches dipped and a third flame sprang up between them. The young were lighting a bonfire.

‘Looks kind of fun. Do you think they’ll be okay out there?’ John asked.

‘The kids row or windsurf or sail across all the time. The beach on this side is safe enough and there’s not much to go over the top of the island for. A lot of thick scrub, rough ground. Once there was a whalers’ retreat out there and a Native American settlement before that. Plenty of legends about it.’

‘Tell me one.’

‘Ask Hannah Fennymore. She’s the local historian.’

John took this to mean that Leonie didn’t care enough for the place to absorb its history herself. They resumed their walk.

At the foot of the Beams’ steps Leonie said, ‘Come and have a cup of coffee. Or another drink.’ The thought of going in on her own was not inviting. She felt a connection to this man and wanted to hold on to it.

‘Perhaps another evening,’ John said politely. He was half turned towards the island, listening to the murmur of breaking waves.

‘Do you play tennis?’

‘Yes. Not quite championship standard.’

‘Good. Come and play. I need a partner, Tom’s too competitive. Marian likes to see a family tournament.’

‘I’m sure she does.’

They allowed themselves a moment’s sly amusement Oh, God, an ally, Leonie thought. I need an ally so badly.

‘Goodnight. Will you thank Marian for me?’

‘Of course.’ She went up the steps and left John to cross the remaining expanse of shingle to the Captain’s House.

The Fennymores were preparing to leave. Aaron leaned heavily on his stick with Hannah guiding him. When Marian kissed them both, Aaron submitted to her.

‘You’ll come again? You won’t let the whole summer go by this year?’

‘Time doesn’t mean as much as it once did, Marian.’ Aaron’s voice was deep and hoarse, as if it cost him an effort to propel the air from his chest.

‘All the more reason,’ she answered, patting his hand as it rested on the knob of his stick.

They passed Elizabeth, who was also making ready to go. Hannah and Elizabeth mimed a kiss, Aaron looked at her once and nodded his big head.

‘Let me help clear up,’ Elizabeth politely said to Marian.

‘Let the boys do it. Tom will walk you home, Elizabeth.’

‘Aaron has aged ten years since last summer,’ Karyn said, after they had all gone. ‘It’s quite a tribute to your new friend, Mom, that they came to meet him. I wonder if he realised it?’

‘Why should he?’ Leonie demanded, too sharply. When they looked at her in surprise she added, ‘I mean, understand all the social and historical nuances that rule this place? It takes years to figure exactly where the Fennymores stand in relation to the Newtons, who said or did what to whom twenty years ago. John Duhane’s only just got here.’

Marian smiled at her. ‘You are very good at it yourself, Leonie. You humour us.’

Leonie lifted a bunch of dirty wineglasses on to a tray. ‘When do the Stiegels get here?’ she asked.

Elliot took it from her. ‘I bumped into Marty and Judith at a gallery opening in SoHo,’ he said. ‘They’ll be arriving in a week.’

‘Great,’ Leonie said. Although they had rented the fifth house for several years the Stiegels were outsiders too. Like John Duhane. And herself.

The younger boys brought driftwood from the ends of the stony beach, and Lucas and one of his friends knelt by the fire and fed it. The flames fanned upwards, washing their faces with lurid light. Ivy and Gail reclined on the rocks. Their long legs folded on either side of the other friend, flirtatiously penning him in. The three of them watched the fire, smoked and murmured and joked together. Lucas had brought beer in his boat, and from time to time one of them lazily tipped a can and gulped from it.

May sat apart. When Kevin and Joel were tired of collecting wood they squatted head to head and produced cigarette papers and a packet of weed wrapped in tinfoil. They offered her a draw from the resulting roll-up but she shook her head, wishing at the same time she had accepted and could melt into the group as easily as Ivy had done. It was cold at this distance from the fire, so she edged a few inches closer, feeling the meaty weight of her buttocks as she slithered a trough across the sand.

Lucas was kneeling, staring into the fire. A pale slice of hair had worked itself loose from the rubber band that held it and fell forward, bisecting his face.

May gazed at him.

To one side of her Joel coughed as he inhaled, then snorted with laughter. In her flat, slightly nasal voice Gail called for another beer.

‘What’s happening, then?’

Lucas shrugged in answer to Joel. From his place between Gail and Ivy the other boy said, ‘I’ve got a couple of ideas. How about this for a start?’ He rolled over and flopped on top of Gail, pushing his knee between hers.

Lucas briefly glanced over his shoulder at Ivy. To May he said, ‘You okay there?’ She nodded, unable to speak. The metal braces on her teeth felt like a gag. ‘How old are you anyway?’

‘Fourteen,’ she managed. She kept her lips folded down over her teeth.

‘Yeah. Well, Kevin’s fifteen and Joel’s sixteen. Not that much difference.’

From their snuffles of laughter it was plain that his brothers thought otherwise.

‘What’s with these names?’ Lucas’s friend asked. ‘I mean, Ivy and May?’

It was Ivy he was looking at but May said loudly, ‘Our mother was English, she chose them. She said they were Victorian housemaid’s names.’ She remembered the day when they talked about it.

They had been in the kitchen, the three of them, the one in the old apartment, so she must have been still small, perhaps five or six. They were baking. Ivy was running the bendy plastic blade around the mixing bowl, scraping up a pale creamy ruff of coconut cake mix, ready for licking.

Alison bent over to peer inside the oven, at the first batch of cakes. She straightened up and her face looked shiny from the heat. ‘They are English names,’ she said in her definite way that made you know whatever she said was right. ‘Old-fashioned names, not modern trendy ones like Zoe or Cassie.’ Victorian housemaids. ‘They’ll come back in style one day, you’ll see.’ May had felt proud of her name and distinguished by it.

She saw that everyone was laughing at her. Kevin and Joel had collapsed sideways in a heap and Gail and the two other boys were grinning, showing their big teeth. Ivy was glaring in fury.

Lucas stretched out a foot and stirred the logs with the toe of his boot. ‘Ivy and May,’ he mused. ‘I think they’re cute names, your mom was quite right.’

May looked at him again. The wedge of hair had fallen loose and now he pushed it back with a flat hand. The firelight neatly divided the planes of his face, light and shadow, rose and umber. Gratitude hammered in her chest, and as he turned his head their eyes briefly met and held.

In that single second May fell in love.

Adoration and devotion seeded themselves and flowered, and overwhelmed her with their cloudy scent. She felt dizzy and elated even as she watched his attention leave her and return to the fire. She didn’t care any longer what the others thought. Lucas had defended her. The island and Pittsharbor and the world itself were bearable, even beautiful, because they held Lucas. The music of amazement and awe hummed in her ears.

Lucas scrambled up and sauntered over to sit down next to Ivy. She made room for him, curving her leg so that her hip tightened in the little skirt. Lucas put his big hand there.

Humbly May ducked her head. The moment was already forgotten, it had meant nothing to any of the others. With the tip of one fingernail she scratched minutely in the sand. Lucas, she wrote, the letters engraved on top of each other so no one could see.

Later, Lucas and Ivy strolled away from the fire. With her chin resting on her knees May watched them. As they crunched to the end of the little beach Ivy curved her pliant body inwards so that her thigh and hip and shoulder touched his. Lucas’s arm rested lightly around her waist.

Kevin and Joel tried to talk to May but she couldn’t listen. She kept saying what? or nodding her head and in the end they gave up.

After what seemed like a long time May stood up. Ivy and Lucas had climbed beyond the beach and vanished into the scrubby trees. She dragged a log to the fire and dumped it on, raising a cloud of powdery sparks. Then she slipped off from the others. She wanted to get away from Kevin and Joel and their monotonous stoned giggling, and from the two other boys tussling over Gail. Perhaps she would stumble across Ivy and Lucas. If she interrupted what they were doing, Ivy wouldn’t be able to have him all to herself.

The darkness in the shelter of the spruce trees was intense. May stood still, widening her eyes in an effort to see ahead. A path revealed itself as a just discernible glimmer of paler ground and she ducked forwards, her breath growing loud in her ears. The ground rose steeply and a claw of undergrowth ripped her calf as she climbed. When she stopped to take her bearings the silence was absolute: solid, it lay like a suffocating coat over her skin, pressing down against her lips and eyelids. She rubbed her bare forearms and felt the fine hairs prickle under her fingertips. She was breathing in little irregular gasps.

May sat down suddenly on a broken tree stump that was furred with moss. The silence swelled, rushing away from her at a speed that made her dizzy, then became a vast shell containing tiny noises – the rustle of an insect in the vegetation at her feet, the whisper of the sea, the furling of leaves and the slow surge of her own blood.

Terror suddenly expanded in the narrow space of her chest. May felt each hair at the nape of her neck rise. She stared wildly around her, fearing what might be concealed behind the trees. Every impulse told her to run but she was frozen, pinned to her log like a dead moth in a case.

Then she looked up through a gap in the trees. The stars were cold but she saw the reassuring blink of a jet making its way down the coast. Carefully, brushing her fingers against the mossy dead wood, she stood up. She could move, she could return to the beach; she would be all right if she made no sound.

May crept down the path. Her only thought was to get back from this eerie place into the firelight and warmth; she had forgotten about Lucas and Ivy. But now she came to the lip of a little hollow. She must have missed the original path because she didn’t remember it from the way up.

They were lying in the shelter of a clump of bushes. May saw the pale blur of Ivy’s discarded halter top, then Lucas’s pale profile burned itself against her eyes. He was leaning over her sister, his hands busy, and even in the thick darkness May could read his delighted absorption. Then he dipped his head and their faces greedily blurred into one. Ivy’s thin arm reached up, lazy and proprietorial, and wound around his neck like a noose.

A small sound escaped from May’s mouth. She tasted something sour and burning in her throat, forgot the need for silence and began to run.

The sudden crashing and flailing in the undergrowth flung Ivy and Lucas apart.

‘Shit,’ Ivy gasped. ‘What’s that?’

Lucas rolled on to his back and relaxed. He was laughing, his white teeth split the pale oval of his face. ‘These woods are haunted, baby.’

Tom and Leonie went to bed in the room that had been Tom’s since he was a boy. The windows overlooking the beach stood open and moist, salt-laden air washed in. Lying on her back, Leonie imagined that she could see mist wraiths sadly hanging in the corners.

‘Are you cold?’ Tom asked. He sat on the edge of the bed with his back to her, the mattress dipping under his weight.

‘Not really.’

‘Did you enjoy tonight?’

‘Yes,’ Leonie said truthfully.

Tom eased himself under the covers with a sigh of satisfaction and clicked off the bedside lamp. He settled down for sleep. Experimentally, Leonie rubbed her cheek against his shoulder.

‘You reckon I should just confront him then?’ Tom asked. He had been having a battle with a temperamental chef and as they undressed they had been talking about ways of dealing with the situation.

‘I guess so,’ she answered. She moved her head so that her cheek was no longer touching him. They did not often make love nowadays. When she been trying to conceive it had become one of the hurdles to be scaled on the way to a baby. Now that they had given up, Tom seemed to prefer to roll on his side and fall asleep immediately. Leonie would have welcomed the warmth and affection of familiar sex, but she no longer commanded the language in which to ask for it.

Elizabeth wound the clock in the evening room and replaced the key on the ledge where it always rested. On the way to make herself a cup of herbal tea she passed through the dining-room and stopped in front of the portrait of Maynard Freshett. He did look severe, but she remembered how patiently he had taught her to play canasta, sitting at this very table.

Grandfather Freshett had always been very sure of everything. Of his own worth and that of his family. Of his place in the world. Of what he expected of himself and everyone around him. It was this sense of order and expectation that Elizabeth had wanted to convey to May Duhane. Instead, she had come out like an old-fashioned snob. What was their family business, the child had asked. She was a sharp little creature. Smart, that was the word. Her sadness didn’t obscure how smart she was. Fishermen. The Fennymores had been fishing out of Pittsharbor for generations.

The look of Aaron had shocked her. It was her first sight of him since last fall and he had turned other-worldly, as dry and leaf-brittle as if only the most fragile stalk held him connected to life. He and Hannah had barely spoken to Elizabeth beyond expressions of politeness. Even now, it was difficult.

On the mahogany sideboard under the senator’s portrait was a silver-framed photograph. It was Spencer, Elizabeth’s only child, on the day he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard. Bob would have been proud of his boy, but he had died the year before the photograph. Elizabeth picked it up and stared into Spencer’s eyes. She could almost hear the dust, gathering and layering itself in invisible soft motes all through her empty house.

Tonight she was oppressed by the relentless passing of time, by the accumulated, stifling deposits of wasted and missed opportunity.