Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection: Moon Island, Sunrise, Follies - Rosie Thomas - Страница 12

The morning sun shone into the room again, driving a bright wedge through the salt-veiled window.

May checked that the bedroom door was properly closed, then tried it again to make sure. In the absence of a lock or bolt, she came up with the idea of wedging the back of the armchair under the handle. But when she trundled it across she discovered that the chair back was too low.

Nobody would come in, logically she knew that. John was playing tennis with the Beams and Ivy was on the beach with Lucas. When she leaned on the window-sill to look for them she saw her sister wearing Lucas’s wetsuit, perched on his sailboard in the shallow water. Waves no bigger than ripples fanned around the board and ran out into the glittering shingle. Lucas himself stood alongside to encourage her, but as Ivy braced her arms and pulled on the bar, she wobbled and toppled backwards into the water.

May’s mouth curled with pleasure, but Lucas waded forward and hoisted Ivy in his arms. As he set her upright she turned her face up to his and they kissed. It was only the lightest brush of a kiss, but it filled May’s teeming imagination with images of other less public embraces. Her smile turned stiff and bitter. It felt like a Hallowe’en mask on her burning face.

Lucas.

As far as Lucas was concerned she was invisible. Since the night on the island he had hardly glanced at her. She didn’t really expect otherwise, but the glaring hopelessness of her attachment intensified the pain of it. May felt diminished and squat, trapped at the wrong end of some monstrous telescope. Sometimes it was hard to breathe when she covertly stared at him, her arms and legs seemed to waver and soften, and threaten to buckle underneath her. She didn’t know how to position herself, even how to sit or stand when he was around. The only solution seemed to be to hide in the room she shared with Doone and her secrets.

Nobody would come in.

Only there was nothing logical about her fears that someone might. May left the chair pushed hard up against the door and knelt down in front of the loose section of skirting.

She had resisted the impulse of curiosity for two days. Part of her recoiled from the very idea of reading the diary. The act of invading the other girl’s thoughts, making this intimate connection with somebody dead, was as much fearful as fascinating. But now the desire to read what Doone had written overcame her misgivings. Without giving herself more time to think she pushed the board so it fell forward and revealed the space behind. She slid the diary out of its hiding place and sat down with it in the armchair. Holding the book in her lap she began to read one of the earliest entries.

Six more weeks until 4 July. Six weeks, forty-two days. I can see the days lined up in front of me, like brown empty envelopes. Mom says we can go up to the beach house right at the beginning. Then at least I’ll be there, seeing the same places, the old places, even if I have to wait… but I’m used to waiting and watching. I know how to be patient. I can keep it all wrapped up inside me, my secret. Mine.

Then a whole summer, a long chain of days, shiny beads in a necklace …

Do I feel happy or scared?

I don’t know, I don’t know.

Sometimes I wish I could tell someone, just talk, but who? Imagine telling Amy, or Mel. Ha ha. That is so weird it is almost funny.

May frowned. The next line was just numbers.

66 7 10 146 12 2 67 10 9.

And then the writing resumed.

Went to Amy’s last night. We just hung out and painted our nails and watched TV. She talked about Scott T. all night. That is just so dumb.

Forty-one more days.

What did the numbers mean? They weren’t dates, nor did they suggest anything else May could think of. She flipped forward through the blue-lined pages and saw there were more groups of numbers, of two and three, sometimes whole paragraphs of them. Interspersed between the numbers were ordinary jottings, about school and sleep-overs and parties and friends, reassuring to May because they sounded so familiar. If the names were changed they could have applied to her own life as readily as to Doone’s.

Then, among the numbers and the scribbles about everyday events, there were the other paragraphs. These were passages of introspection, which caught May’s attention and held it hooked as if the barbs bit into her mind.

Argument with Mom.

I know everyone has rows with their mothers. You’re supposed to, even. Only I know there’s a difference with ours.

I’m like two people. There’s the one they all want me to be and I pretend that I am, the A-student and the choir leader and the student councillor; and the one I really am, that’s so dark and strong and deep that sometimes I can’t stop it bursting out of me.

Like tonight when we were arguing, about nothing at all, just what time I should come in on Saturday nights, and I couldn’t keep up the control: I felt the real me speaking.

Not shouting or any of that stuff. Just cold and quiet and sure. I said I didn’t care, their rules didn’t touch me, nothing really touches me except things they would never know about.

I could see Mom staring at me like I’m an alien. And fear in her face that she kept trying to rub out.

She said did I want to talk, I could trust her, I could tell her anything I wanted.

And I had to keep my mouth still to stop it making this crazy smile. Because I know what I am and what I have, and I know what I hold on to, and it’s nothing I could tell. Never.

Sometimes just the knowledge, the memory of it does make me feel so strong. Like I could hike up the highest mountain or live alone on a deserted island – oh, an island – just with this for food and drink and warmth and company.

And if I’m truthful there are other times when I doubt it all. All the wishing and waiting. Miss Straight-A says in my head, who are you kidding?

But it’s easy to quieten her. And the easiness makes me sure that I’m real and what I have experienced is real.

And then I feel happy.

After that there was a long sequence of numbers, scribbled and jumbled close together so that the hasty digits were barely legible. They looked as if they had been written in high passion.

Because May read too quickly she sometimes missed the sense, so she went back and made herself study each line. After a while she yawned, and the yawn caught in the back of her throat and swelled into a greasy surge of nausea.

She realised that the diary frightened her.

It was the combination that was unnerving. The way the accounts of normal everyday experiences were linked by the fierce jumbles of numbers to the passages of declaration. And Doone’s declarations of strength made her uneasy. If she was so strong and happy, why did she keep writing it down and why did what she wrote make her sound so lonely? What secret was hidden in the numbers?

May looked at them again. They were usually groups of three, sometimes only two. Once or twice the same number or similar ones occurred several times close together, but otherwise there was no apparent link or pattern. If it was a code, she had no idea how to break it. The thought of what the numbers might spell out increased the sick pressure so that May wondered if she might actually vomit. Holding her legs tensed against the chair’s worn slipcover she closed the book and waited.

Slowly the nausea subsided, but she couldn’t get Doone’s words out of her head. I could never tell. I could live on a desert island with nothing but this for food and warmth and company. It made her sound so isolated. And yet, May thought, I know her. This bed was where she had slept. From the window she had looked at the view of the island and had gone out and drowned in the blue water.

Somehow, with her diary and her introspection and her coded secrets – and her loneliness – Doone Bennison was slipping under her skin. Now that the knowledge of her was there, hooked in beneath the surface, May did not know how she might rid herself of it. She remembered how finding the diary had made her feel that she hugged the secret to herself like a shield.

Perhaps I’m like her, she thought. As if she were looking down from some vantage point up under the cracked ceiling, she saw herself sitting splay-legged in the old chair, with the closed diary in her lap and the chair wedged up close against the door to keep out intruders. Or, maybe, was it Doone she was seeing and not herself at all?

‘I would tell my mother,’ May said. The words sounded startlingly loud in the enclosed room. ‘I wish I could tell her.’

One grey, sleet-filled afternoon in the weeks after Alison’s death, driven by an impulse she didn’t understand, May had gone to the boxes where John had stored her clothes. She had taken out the dresses and jackets one by one and cut them, making long tattered ribbons, with the kitchen shears. ‘See?’ she had angrily demanded as she did it. ‘Do you see what I’m doing?’

She hadn’t expected her mother to hear the question, or to be hurt by the destruction of her clothes. Nor had the frenzy been a relief, only another shame to add to the ones May was suffering already.

The therapist John took her to see after this episode had advised May to search for something in nature that reminded her of her mother, and to look at it and think about her when she felt overwhelmed by grief or anger. Reluctantly May had chosen a tree, one particular tall, graceful tree, which grew in a little park near to their house, and in a way the strategy had worked. She thought of it secretly as Mom’s tree and tried in a stilted way to address her mother through it. Now she felt a sudden urge to run out and put her arms around the rough trunk.

There didn’t seem to be much variety in the trees around here. They were mostly hostile pointed firs.

May jumped to her feet and the diary fell to the floor. She shoved it back into the hole and clumsily wedged the skirting back in place, then pulled the chair away from the door. She didn’t have to trap herself in this room. Ivy was with Lucas but she could try her father. There were enough reasons why she didn’t usually turn to him, but she dismissed those for this moment.

May ran down the steep stairs. As her head came below the upper floor level she saw that he had come in from tennis; he was in the kitchen with Leonie Beam. The corners of the room were thrown into deeper shadow by the slices of light that angled from the windows. Dust specks floated in the sunlight, making the old beams and the blackened hearthstones seem darker and heavier.

John was making coffee in the old-fashioned percolator. Leonie was leaning against one of the counters. She was wearing white tennis shorts and shoes, and her long legs were crossed at the ankles. Both of them looked up at May in momentary surprise and smiled at her.

‘Hi,’ John said. ‘I wondered where you were. We had a good game, Leonie and I won both sets.’

Her smooth dark hair was damp, sticking to her forehead, and his shirt was darkened in a great patch across his chest. The two of them were smiling in exactly the same way – the neutral way that covered up other things. May had interrupted something.

‘Do you play tennis, May?’ asked Leonie.

‘No. I can’t think of anything more boring.’

‘May …’ John began, but she didn’t wait to hear him out. She marched across to the porch screen and slammed it open, leaving it gaping behind her.

After a second’s awkward silence Leonie gently closed the screen again. She took the mug of coffee that John handed to her.

‘Sorry,’ John said shortly.

‘No need.’

The child had materialised like some avenging angel. Her eyes had skewered them both, as if she could have uttered something much worse than mild rudeness. But her reaction at the sight of them had been so quick that Leonie knew jealousy was a familiar feeling for her. John must have plenty of girlfriends. Not surprising, she thought with resignation.

‘May didn’t like Suzanne, the woman I was involved with until recently. Neither did Ivy, really, although it mattered less to her.’

‘I see,’ Leonie said. She sat down at the over-large oak table and looked through the window at the pillars of the porch and the sky, waiting for what he would say next.

Out on the deck May hesitated, blinking in the brightness, remembering the people down on the beach and her sister’s golden limbs twined around Lucas’s. There was no going back into the house either, so she slipped down the dank space that separated the Captain’s House from Elizabeth Newton’s garden. She moved quickly, because Elizabeth might be working with her pruning shears again amid the thick greenery. She didn’t want to talk to Elizabeth now, or even to be seen by her.

There was no way to go but round to the road side of the house. There was a path and dogwood bushes, and the open patch of grass and stones where John left the car. The Pittsharbor lane petered out here at the Captain’s House, the last building on the bluff.

May wandered slowly along the road. She hesitated at the sound of a car and saw a black Lexus coming round the bend. She thought it must be more members of the endless Beam family arriving, but the car slowed before their driveway and turned towards the house that stood between theirs and the Fennymores’.

The name on the mailbox was Stiegel. The occupants of the car were a couple, quite young. May waited in the shelter of the hedge. The car drew up at the door and the man got out. He had dark curly hair and wore smart New York clothes; a pink Ralph Lauren button-down shirt and polished shoes. There was a thick gold band on his wedding finger; she saw the light catch it as he opened the rear door of the car and unbuckled a baby seat. He swung the seat into the air, using two hands, as if it were a prize he had just been awarded. There was a fat, impassive-looking baby strapped into it. ‘Here we are,’ the man cooed into the baby’s face, ‘here we are at last. Was it a long way for her? A long way in the nasty car?’

The woman had got out too. She was big, May saw, and swathed in those no-colour linen clothes that some people try to hide their size inside. ‘Come on, open up the house, Marty,’ she said. ‘You know she needs her feed.’

Marty handed the baby over to her and ran up the steps to the door, tugging a bunch of keys out of a slim leather bag. He fumbled, then unlocked the door. He pushed it open and held it for the woman, who walked by with the baby lifted aloft in its seat. They all disappeared inside, but a minute later the man reemerged and began taking heavy bags from the trunk of the Lexus. May slipped out of her hiding-place and walked on aimlessly.

The Fennymores’ house was smaller than the other four. It was a plain box but the steep pitched roof and low windows made it look hunched, even forbidding. There was no suggestion of a garden, only a piece of open ground where their old tan station-wagon stood next to a dilapidated shed. Shading the car and the shed was a big tree. It had pale, almost silvery bark and branches like the fingers of an elegant woman’s hand. A sweep of leaves looked like the layers of a skirt.

May hardly knew one tree from the next, but she thought this one might be a kind of birch or maybe beech. It wasn’t exactly the same as the one in the park she called Mom’s tree, but it was quite similar. On an impulse she left the road and went to it. She rested the flat of her hand against the smooth, sun-warmed bark, then tipped her head forward so that her forehead touched it.

Alison had been tall and elegant like the tree. The rustling skirt of leaves was like one she had brought with her when she moved from England to New York in 1970. Alison had been a student of American history and part of her degree course had been a year at Columbia. She had met John Duhane sitting on a bench at the Frick and had stayed to marry him.

The skirt was made of watery tie-dyed cheesecloth, sea-green and jade, with a handkerchief-point hem sewn with tiny emerald beads. The beads had rolled and scattered as the scissor blades sliced the cheesecloth into tatters. Once, long before that, May had implored Alison to let her dress up in the skirt. She had worn it to a fancy dress party as a sea nymph and Alison had plaited green ribbons for seaweed in her hair.

May pressed her face against the bark of the new tree, but she couldn’t conjure up any words, for her mother or for anyone else. Instead, her shoulders heaved and her face contorted. She rolled and scraped her forehead against the tree as the tears came.

Aaron Fennymore had been in the shed, chiselling a new dowel to replace a split one from one of the old chairs. Hannah had been asking him for weeks to do it, and today he had felt enough of a lick of energy to attempt a job that once would have taken a matter of minutes. It was slow work now; the wood slipped in the vice and the mallet had grown almost too heavy to lift.

He saw the girl as soon as she walked in from the lane. He frowned at the sight of her, then stood with the mallet in one hand and the chisel in the other as she stretched out her arms to embrace a tree trunk. He let his spectacles slide down his nose. Old age had made him long-sighted and he could see the child’s face squeezed with suffering. Gently, he put down the tools.

She didn’t hear the creak of the shed door or his slow footsteps. When he asked, ‘Can I help?’ she leapt backwards, hand to her mouth to stifle a scream. ‘It’s all right,’ Aaron said.

May rubbed her eyes and nose with the back of her hand. They stood looking at each other, not sure what to say next.

‘Are you in trouble?’

She shook her head, sniffing. ‘Sorry. I’m in your garden.’

‘Yes. I was going to chase you away with my big stick.’ He held up his knobbled walking stick. ‘But I can’t hardly do that if you’re crying, can I?’

May had been afraid of this old man when she had seen him at the Beams’. Now, closer up, he was a little less formidable. There were silvery fans of lines around his deep-set eyes and the hand resting on the knob of his stick shook uncontrollably. Even so, he did not look particularly benign.

‘Come inside.’

She would have made an excuse if it had been more of an invitation and less of an order. Instead she followed him into the frowning house.

The door opened into a little wood-panelled lobby hung with thick old curtains that smelt of dust. May imagined that the Fennymores would need all the draught insulation possible during the winters they spent alone up here on the bluff. Aaron held open a door for her, and she passed through into the middle of the house.

There was just one big room. Around three of the walls were floor-to-ceiling shelves made of thick, rough timber and the shelves were filled with dim-looking books. On the small spaces of wall that weren’t covered with books there were framed maps, and old brown-toned photographs behind glass, and little nests of smaller shelves made to display bits of what looked like carved bone. Against one wall there was a big wood-burning stove, with a chimney alcove stacked with cut logs. The seaward windows looked out at the bay and the island, but the curtains that framed them cut out a lot of the sparkling light. The room smelt of woodsmoke like the Captain’s House, and musty book bindings and old people.

May wanted to wander around and stare at the thick deposits of things, but felt too wary of Aaron Fennymore. Instead she glanced sidelong at a small table near at hand, where a vaguely spoon-shaped piece of the bone material was laid out like an ornament. It was an ugly yellowy-cream colour and she noticed now that it was minutely carved. Without thinking she picked it up. The carvings were patterns of tiny leaves and flowers.

‘What do you think of that?’ Aaron demanded, making her jump.

‘What is it?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘It’s scrimshaw.’ Seeing that meant nothing to her either, he snapped, ‘Where have you spent your life?’

‘New York City.’

‘Well, then your ignorance is hardly surprising.’

He hobbled over to a chair beside the stove and sat down, pointing to another seat opposite it. May obediently took her place, wondering how she was going to escape. The room and its crammed contents were overpowering rather than fascinating. Aaron took another of the yellowy carvings in his hand and gently turned it in his fingers. His fingernails were almost the same colour, thickened and horny. May looked away.

‘Imagine you are a hand on one of the old whaling ships. Away from home for years at a time, at sea for months on end. You live in the forecastle with the other hands, a space not much wider than this.’ Aaron pointed the fragment of scrimshaw, indicating an area of a few square feet. ‘And your berth and sea chest are the only space you can call your own. It’s the middle of a windless day somewhere near the Equator, and the sun’s so hot and so high overhead you think your little ship’s the centre of its burning eye. What do you do with yourself, eh? What’s your name?’

‘May,’ she said quietly. The picture he conjured up for her was so vivid that it interested her, even though she didn’t want it to. ‘I suppose I might read a book, or write a letter to my family.’

‘And suppose you’d never learned to read or write properly? You might just scratch your name to a contract of hire, no more than that.’

‘They’re sailors’ carvings, aren’t they?’

He gave a sharp nod of satisfaction. ‘They are. They took the materials they had plenty of, pieces of whale bone or tooth, and they carved them like this. They took their carvings home as presents for their wives or sweethearts, or they sold them for a few cents on shore. What do you think of them now?’

She looked again at the tiny whorls and fluted cavities, which with their unwholesome colour now made her think of inner-ear parts, or fragments of joint that would have been better left covered by merciful flesh. ‘I think they’re kind of sad.’ So much time taken, so much skill lavished.

Aaron’s face tightened into vertical grooves as he regarded her. To her relief he only said, ‘Yes. Maybe that’s why I like them.’

‘Can I look at the pictures?’ May indicated the old brown photographs. There was a noise out on the deck and Hannah Fennymore opened the porch door.

‘If it’s history you’re interested in, you should ask my wife to tell you some stories. Hannah the historian, she knows all about Pittsharbor and Maine. I’ve been talking to our neighbour about scrimshaw, Hannah. I found her out the back of the house making friends with the tree.’

Hannah put down a bucket which left a sandy ring on the floorboards. It was half-filled with clams; the Fennymores had clam beds on the portion of beach fronting their house. For fifty years Aaron had rowed out to his lobster traps, too, but now he was too infirm to handle the boat. May remembered that Elizabeth Newton had talked about all this in one of their conversations about Moon Island Beach. She had only half listened then but her interest stirred properly now.

In her clamming boots and thick brown jacket Hannah looked more than ever like some unshowy little bird. Both the Fennymores wore several layers of clothes even though the day was warm, and May wondered again how and why they lived out here all the winter through.

‘Historian? Hardly. No letters after my name. Aaron, haven’t you offered your friend a drink or something to eat?’

May stood up quickly. ‘I have to go anyway.’

‘Come again,’ Hannah said, pleasantly enough. ‘Aaron likes to talk about his collections. Doone Bennison, poor Doone, used to come and listen sometimes.’

‘Did she?’ There was an edgy note of curiosity in May’s voice.

‘Once in a while.’

‘What was she like?’

The two old faces turned to her. They were of an age to have grown to look alike, even though Aaron’s features were much sharper and stronger than his wife’s.

‘She was a lonely little thing,’ Hannah said at length. ‘But I used to think it was by choice. She didn’t spend much time with the other children, the Beams and the local kids. It was as if she didn’t have time for them. I lent her a couple of books to read, I thought she might enjoy them if she spent so much time on her own. Sam and Jennifer Bennison sent them back afterwards, after she died.’

‘Can I look at them?’ May asked.

Hannah paused, as if considering the propriety of the request, then went to one of the bookshelves. She took down two nondescript books in dingy cloth bindings and handed them to May. One of them was titled In the Country of the Pointed Firs and the other Voyages of the Dolphin. ‘You’re welcome to borrow them,’ Hannah said, forestalling May’s question.

‘Thank you. I’ll take care of them. Why did she choose these, out of so many books?’

‘She just seemed interested in the place as it used to be and the local whaling legends. As interested as Doone ever was in anything, that is. There are some old stories, you know. I don’t know if she ever read the books in the end.’

May nodded. ‘Thanks. Look, I’d better go. My dad’ll be wondering where I am.’ Perhaps, she thought. Or perhaps not.

Aaron levered himself painfully to his feet to accompany her to the door, although she wished he would not. Outside again beneath the shade of the tree he said, ‘I’m too old to remember why young women cry. I remember enough tears, but I’ve forgotten most of what stirred them up. You forget nearly all of it, however bad it seems at the time. You learn to live. That may not seem much of a comfort to you right now.’

May shifted her weight. She did not want to talk to Aaron Fennymore about any of this, although it was true he was only trying to be comforting. ‘It’s nothing. It’s just me.’

‘I told Doone the same thing. She didn’t believe me either.’

‘Was she unhappy?’

It was not the kind of question, she understood, which Aaron was interested in answering. ‘You know what happened.’

‘But wasn’t it an accident that she drowned?’

At length Aaron replied, ‘Yes. That was the verdict.’

Curiosity and a chill, queasy premonition crawled together up May’s spine. She wanted to know and feared the discovery, whatever it might be. She persisted, ‘Do you mean that the truth is different from the official story?’

To her surprise Aaron walked a little way away from her and stood staring past the house to a thin segment of the sea. When he turned his head again he spoke quietly, so that she had to inch forward to catch the words. ‘It’s more that there are always layers of truth. Some aspects of the truth you can measure and explain, and others defy you to do anything but accept them for what they are. I haven’t known so many other places that I can compare, but I believe the Beach is particularly resistant to rational explanation.’

May thought, I know that. I knew it as soon as we came here. Before I even knew about Doone.

She didn’t want to ask any more. There was enough to absorb already. ‘Thank you for lending me the books.’ They were tucked under her arm.

‘They belong to my wife. As for the girl, you’re not like her,’ Aaron said, as if that settled their conversation. He waved his stick in dismissal and hobbled back towards the house. May wandered slowly along the lane to the dark full stop of the Captain’s House.

Traffic in the main street of Pittsharbor was almost at a standstill with jeeps and RVs and station-wagons tailing back from the lights. Cyclists threaded between the cars and a steady stream of pedestrians flowed between the shops and the open-air vegetable and fish market. At the stall that Leonie knew always had the best fish John debated with the young stallholder, then bought a sweet, silvery chunk of tuna. She watched him, with her own shopping piled in her arms, as he took the neat paper package and stowed it in his bag.

Tom always did the food marketing swiftly and as if it was a test of his professionalism, prodding and irritably rejecting any merchandise that didn’t please him, and adopting a triumphant air when he brought his kill back home to the lair. By contrast, John seemed to take a mild and uncompetitive pleasure in wandering between the baskets of muddy lettuces and pyramids of melons, settling on his purchases apparently by whim instead of iron rules of quality and value. Leonie found this refreshing.

When they had finished they hesitated beside the road, watching the tailback of traffic.

‘Thanks for the ride,’ Leonie said. ‘Looks like I’ve brought you into town at just the wrong moment.’

After May’s exit Leonie had told John she must do some shopping. It was true: Tom had gone back to Boston to undertake the battle with his chef, otherwise the job would not have been delegated to her, but Marian had handed her a list that morning. Everyone else was busy with children or watersports.

John had said at once, ‘I’ll drive you. I’ve got some stuff to get, too.’

Now he turned his back on the glittering lines of cars and looked down at her. ‘I think we should have lunch.’

Leonie thought for a moment. She had the impression that there were unspoken negotiations taking place within this bland exchange. The realisation made heat prickle beneath her hairline and the picturesque and fully restored old façades of Main Street took on a more highly coloured focus. ‘What about all this shopping?’ she asked. Of course, Tom would never have left fresh fish broiling in the afternoon sun in the back of a car.

By way of answer John went back to the fish stall and returned with a bag full of ice. They bedded their purchases beneath it in the trunk of the station-wagon. Then he led the way to Sandy’s Bar, the best place to eat in Pittsharbor but no longer patronised by the Beams because Tom had had a disagreement with the proprietor the summer before. It gave Leonie an agreeable feeling of disloyalty to settle herself with John in a corner booth draped with fishing nets and studded with shells.

It was cool in Sandy’s; she pushed her damp hair off her face and eased the armholes of her cotton vest where they cut into her armpits. She was conscious of John watching these small movements; it felt like a long time since a man had watched her in just this way, but she accepted his gaze, letting it lie on her skin like warm honey.

With Tom there would have been critical deliberations over the menu, but now she chose food and drink at random. They were talking about their lives, filling in details that needed establishing before they moved on. She learned that John ran his own business mail delivery service. It was a successful company, but he found the demands of it difficult to balance against the need to take care of Ivy and May. In her turn Leonie described her work as an editor for an art and art-history publisher in Boston. She told him about the economics of high-quality colour printing and her plans to commission a series of monographs on women artists of the twentieth century. A plate of griddled shrimp with a hot Thai sauce was put in front of her and she blinked in surprise, having forgotten what she had ordered.

The talk threaded between them like a line of stitches. After the first connecting seam was made they felt free to change direction. Leonie said suddenly, ‘I’m not comfortable in that beach house, but just the same, Tom always wants us to spend the summer vacation up here. Marian makes me feel that I deliberately don’t conform. That I must be denying her more grandchildren on a whim.’

‘Hasn’t she got enough already? What about the population crisis?’ Their eyes met, testing the strength of the seam. ‘Doesn’t she know you can’t conceive?’

‘Of course she does. But perhaps if I just tried harder. Babies were so easy for her, and for Anne and Shelly and Gina. They’re the other daughters-in-law. Even Karyn, who didn’t manage to get much else right before that, cruised it.’

Looking down at her food Leonie thought of the hospitals; the tubes and the needles and the drugs and the waiting, and the increasingly desperate connections with Tom that had led them there. Tom had become angry with her, that was what had happened. She didn’t blame him for his anger, just for the form it had taken. He had retreated from her, and left her marooned on her island of sterility.

‘Is it difficult to talk about it?’

‘Only in the sense that there isn’t anything to say any longer.’

The waiter removed their plates. Outside, the sky turned the solid, passive blue of mid-afternoon. Back at the house, Karyn or Marian would have put the babies to bed for their afternoon rest and the adults and older children would move softly, allowing them their sleep.

‘Will Ivy and May wonder where you are?’

‘Ivy won’t. I don’t know about May. You saw her, this morning.’

Skewering them with her eyes. Jealous and dismissive at the same time. ‘Yes.’ The talk veered again. They were zigzagging close to intimacy.

‘They were both so hostile to Suzanne. I was amazed by the intensity of it. She was the first potentially serious involvement I’d had after Alison died, and it was almost three years later. At the beginning, when I first introduced her, they were welcoming enough, even friendly. And Suzanne did everything she could.’

I’m sure she did, Leonie thought.

‘She used to come round for dinner at first, and the girls and I would get together and plan a meal we could cook for her. Then she went shopping with them once or twice. May wanted a special outfit or something and Suzanne was a store buyer. Then the four of us went on a couple of weekend trips, which worked out fine. I thought we were going to make something of it, in the end maybe turn into a family.’

Leonie could see how John would want a mother for his girls, as well as a woman for himself. That was natural. But she guessed there were cross-currents of jealousy and mistrust in children, which ran invisible and powerful against the tide of what seemed natural. ‘What happened?’

‘Suzanne began to stay over at the apartment. Not all the time, not even often. But as soon as she did they turned against her.’ He rotated the stem of his glass in his fingers, watching the splintered lozenges of light it threw on the table-cloth. ‘Not difficult to understand why. But it finished everything off in the end.’

Leonie could imagine it. Suzanne’s retreat, John’s resentment, the girls’ pleasureless triumph in their achievement. She began to understand what a landscape the unspoken negotiations between John Duhane and herself might have to cover. A sudden jagged breath caught in her windpipe and even as she pressed her thighs together against the loosening between them, she was forbidding herself anything more. She was married and none of these silent phrases had been in her vocabulary for a long time.

Then something happened. She was gazing at some paired cherries on John’s plate. And as clearly as she saw their waxy sheen and wishbone stalks in front of her she knew that she no longer loved Tom any more than he loved her in return.

The cherries looked so ordinary, and the detritus of the meal spread over the cloth, and yet her bearings had shifted so suddenly and radically that she half-expected them to mutate into different objects. A knife-blade reflected a little asterisk of light at her as she stared at it. For more than ten years she had made her judgements and interpreted her place as Tom’s partner. Now she understood that each of those daily measurements was wrongly calibrated and therefore worthless, because they had no love left for each other. All the pressure of needing a child, and the bitterness and anger and violence that blossomed between them, were rooted in this one truth. A child would just have been a diversion. A bandage for a mortal wound.

For a moment she felt cold and calm, like the oily sea under a flat Maine mist. Then a wave of panic shrugged itself up and washed over her. The plump cherries blurred in front of her eyes, turning to dull blotches of crimson.

‘Are you all right?’ There was a crease between John’s eyebrows and one corner of his mouth was bitten in.

‘Yes. But I’m … thinking. We should take that shopping home.’

The crease stayed, but he was already signalling to the waiter for the check.

Outside he took her arm and steered her between the cars. The line of traffic at the lights was shorter now, and an afternoon daze of heat and lassitude had settled on Pittsharbor. They crossed the car-park to John’s station-wagon and he leant forward to open the passenger door for her. Leonie heard the words in her head. What the hell? she was saying. What does it matter now anyway? She tipped back her head and tilted it sideways a little, so that her mouth connected with his. The kiss shivered through her.

He would have put his hands on her shoulders, gently drawn her against him, but Leonie opened her eyes and over the hot metal curve of the car’s roof she saw Spencer Newton. His dark-green Jaguar was parked in the next slot, there was a brown bag of groceries under his arm and Alexander Gull was following behind him.

‘Hello, Leonie,’ Spencer said, with his feline smile.

‘Spencer, I didn’t know you were up here. Hi, Alexander.’

‘We’ve just arrived. I’m taking some supplies home to mother.’ The corners of his smile curled higher.

Without looking to see his expression Leonie introduced John to them, explaining that he had rented the Captain’s House.

‘I see,’ Spencer murmured.

The men shook hands and accepted one another’s assurances that they would meet again on the beach.

John drove with his eyes fixed on the road, but Leonie saw a twist of concern around his mouth. She said as lightly as she could, ‘Spencer is Elizabeth’s son. So he’s an old Pittsharbor man, like Tom. Alexander is Spencer’s partner, they have a rather wonderful gallery in Boston. Alexander paints. Hopperish. Not bad, in fact.’

‘I thought they were sweet,’ John said, and Leonie laughed and broke the tension between them.

‘Oh, Spencer and Alexander are anything but sweet. Spencer is trying to bully his mother and Aaron Fennymore into selling him the land behind the beach. He and Alexander want to build rental condos.’

‘I see. That would change the old place, wouldn’t it?’

‘It won’t happen. Aaron will never let go.’

‘And what about what Spencer just saw?’

‘Can’t I kiss a friend who just bought me lunch?’

‘Of course. If that was what it was.’

Neither of them spoke again. When they reached the Beams’ entrance John took Leonie’s shopping out of the trunk and piled it into her arms.

She said defensively, ‘Marian’ll be waiting for me. There are no cookies for the kids until I get back.’

He touched her arm. ‘Did something happen back there?’

Their eyes met. Leonie wanted to acknowledge to him what her words and manner denied. We’re both wary, she thought. And defensive. ‘Yes,’ she said simply.

He nodded, and turned back to the car.

She called after him, ‘Thank you for lunch,’ and he lifted his hand in acknowledgement. Leonie’s breath was jagged in her chest again as she carried the bags of groceries up to the house.

May idly let her paddle rest across her knees and the canoe drifted, the prow turning parallel with the island’s beach. The sea was flat, like oiled glass, and the afternoon sun plastered thick layers of light across the water and over the lip of beach. The rocky crescent reminded her of a mirthless smile and the trees and scrub that fringed it became a throat, opening, ready to swallow. She hoisted herself abruptly, causing the canoe to rock violently, and stepped into the shallow water. Even at only calf-depth the shock of cold made her yelp. The water was always cold here.

She grasped the prow and dragged the canoe up on to the stones. There was no one else on the island this afternoon, no other boat or beached sailboard and no sign of swimmers or picnickers. Once her canoe was safe above the tideline she hoisted her pack on to her shoulder and began to pick her way across the sand. In the wrack along the water’s edge she found the prehistoric-looking shell of a helmet crab. She examined it and trailed on, holding the thing by the tip of the jointed tail so that it banged dully against her thigh. There were other different shells caught in the washed-up debris. She squatted down to examine their shape and quality before pocketing them or hurling them out into the water.

Neither Ivy nor John had come back to the house at lunchtime.

May was used to making meals for herself, but today she had sullenly rejected the option and eaten a pack of Oreos instead. Her stomach was distended and she could still taste the sugar thick in the back of her throat. There was no wind, not even the smallest stirring to ruffle the water or cool her face. Beads of sweat pricked her top lip. She felt sick and solitary, and disgusted with herself.

It was the day’s motionless hour when time seemed to hang for ever between early and late. Even the shade within the woodland looked bruised and resentful. May dragged a few steps away from the water and sat down in the sand. In her backpack were some more cookies, but she stopped herself from reaching for them. Instead she took out the book she had brought with her, one of the two that she had borrowed from Aaron and Hannah Fennymore. The books that Doone might, or might not, have read. Listlessly she flipped open the warped board cover and began to skim the pages.

The ship’s log records that the Dolphin sailed from Nantucket on 1 May 1841, under the command of Captain Charles S. Gunnell. She was bound for the Cape Verde Islands and the west coast of Africa with a full crew of experienced officers and good men. Captain Gunnell was recognised as a fair master and a lucky whaleman.

Among the crew that left the sanctuary of Nantucket harbour on that spring morning was a green hand who had signed up for the voyage only two days before. He was eighteen years old and slightly built, but he assured Mr Gunnell most vehemently that he was a strong worker and ready to learn the whaler’s craft, and that he wanted nothing more than to take his share of risk and reward aboard the Dolphin.

The boy gave his name as William Corder. The crew-list indicated that he was a ‘down-easter’, a native of Maine.

The early part of the Dolphin’s voyage was without incident. The new hand did indeed prove to be willing and quick to learn the duties of the ship. He possessed courage enough for a man twice his size, showing no fear when sent aloft to furl a sail. And he could keep his head and secure footing when the ship’s head fell from the wind and the sail filled with enough force to tear a man from the yard and pitch him into oblivion.

But William Corder was sadly afflicted by seasickness. For all of his first month at sea he struggled with severe attacks, sometimes to such a degree that the first mate sent him to his bunk to groan out the worst of his trouble in peace. This perceived weakness caused some of the more experienced hands to joke about him, and to suggest that his smallness and gentlemanly demeanour would fit him better for a lady’s parlour or a draper’s shop than for the forecastle of a whaling vessel.

Then, after the first weeks of misery, William overcame his affliction overnight. He awoke one morning in his bunk and told his companions that he would never be ill again. His prediction proved correct. However rough the seas and however viciously the stubby vessel pitched and rolled, William steadily continued in his work from that day forward. He was not a high-spirited young man, never indulging in horseplay or coarse behaviour with the other hands with whom his life in the forecastle was necessarily shared, but he was always good-humoured and willing to apply himself to whatever the officers required of him.

For his quiet and modest demeanour he slowly gained the respect of his fellows, but their liking was bestowed on him in time for a different reason.

By the very nature of their arduous life, the whalemen’s clothes were frequently bathed in perspiration, coated with whale oil and grease and dirt of every description, and saturated with sea water. Any cleansing of their few articles of clothing had to be performed with cold salt water and the roughest soap, so this necessary labour was among the least popular of all the deckhands’ duties.

But William Corder, it was soon noted, went about the business of laundering his clothes in the deftest manner. He would stand up to the wooden tub containing water set aside for the purpose, and rub the soap into his loose sailor’s shirts and breeches in a shipshape fashion that betokened long familiarity with the washtub.

One of the hands chanced to make a passing joke about this unlikely talent, and William blushed and let his shirt fall back with a splash into the water. But he quickly explained that he was the youngest of several brothers whose mother had died of the fever when he was still an infant. While his father and brothers attended to the heavier domestic chores, as William grew up it became his responsibility to launder all the family’s clothing. ‘I have had a good deal of practice,’ he said, smiling a little. ‘I could not begin to count up the number of shirts I have washed in my life.’

‘Do you miss the privilege, then?’ one of the older hands asked mischievously. ‘Because if you do, you may certainly scrub mine for me.’

‘I’ll do it gladly,’ William replied.

So it happened that William Corder cheerfully undertook laundry duties for his crew-mates, continuing to perform the disagreeable work with a neatness and economy that did indeed speak of years of practice. William accepted whatever small payments of coin the deckhands were able to offer him in return for his services, but he had no interest whatsoever in the more common currencies of tobacco and rum.

The Dolphin continued her voyage towards the fertile whaling grounds of the Central Atlantic with William as an accepted member of the crew. It was noted that whenever the vessel drew alongside another whaling ship for an exchange of news or the barter of other sought-after shipboard commodities, William was the first of the sailors to run to the rail and scan the faces of the opposing crew.

‘Are you looking for someone, young Will?’ the mate enquired one day.

William’s face coloured up again. He was young and beardless, and his fair skin showed his blushes for everyone to see. ‘My brother. My brother Robert signed to a ship a year ago and I would be more pleased to see him than any other person in the world.’

‘What ship is he aboard, under what master?’ the mate asked curiously. Something about this story stirred his interest, although he could not have explained exactly why.

‘I don’t know the name of either,’ William said quickly, and turned away from the rail when the strange faces across the neck of water did not include the one he searched for.

Bored by the old-fashioned language and impatient with the close-set type, May looked up. A woman was standing under the trees, motionless, watching her.

At first May thought it was Ivy or Gail. But it wasn’t either of them, nor any of the other women from the houses on the bluff. She was wearing loose, wide trousers that hid her feet and a colourless shirt with some kind of deep collar. Her hair was pulled severely back from her pale face.

Stillness lay across the rocks and flattened the sea and pressed on May, so that she found she could not move. A chain of tiny cold droplets trickled down her spine. She stretched her fingers and they touched the discarded crab shell. She picked it up again and slowly, against the heavy weight of the air, she lifted her hand and arm upwards and backwards. Then, with an effort she flung the shell away from her. It flew in a great spinning arc and dropped into the sea, her eyes following it. She waited until the memory of it in her mind’s eye was swallowed up by the ripples.

When she looked again the woman had gone.