Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection: Moon Island, Sunrise, Follies - Rosie Thomas - Страница 14

The stagnant air of Doone’s bedroom breathed and sighed in May’s ears. Hannah Fennymore’s two books and Doone’s diary lay in a row beside her on the bed quilt. She let her chin fall on her chest as she stared at them, trying to imagine Doone putting her writing aside and picking up the whaling story. To mimic her actions, as if it might help her understanding, she opened the book herself.

The Dolphin’s was an uneventful voyage for the first six weeks. No whales were sighted, but favouring winds assisted the ship’s progress across the Atlantic and Captain Gunnell gave orders for the four whaleboats to be lowered from their davits at regular intervals so that the boat steerers and oarsmen might at least practise their seaborne manoeuvres as often as was practicable.

William Corder learned his part in the boat as readily as he had about the decks and masts of the Dolphin. He was assigned the position of stroke oarsman in the third mate’s crew, from which place he bent to pull his oar at the mate’s command, assisted with handling the small mast, and when the lightweight, sharp-ended craft took in water in rough seas it was his allotted task to bail her out with a canvas bucket stowed for that purpose among the copious whaling gear. The rest of the paraphernalia looked threatening enough to William – there were the tubs with their great coiled lengths of line, the razor-edged harpoon and long lances to be plunged deep into the creature’s innards, and the cutting spades with which great incisions could be sliced in the blubber for holding the whale fast while it was towed back to the ship’s side.

The boat was headed by the mate, who directed their turns and twists with the steering oar while the boat steerer pulled from the forward thwart until they could draw close enough to their target for him to jump up in the bow and throw his harpoon. The four oarsmen rowed for their livelihood, but always with their backs blindly turned to the scene in front, for they were forbidden even to glance over their shoulders at what might lie ahead of them. Their only clues were the headsman’s guttural commands and imprecations, and the light of terror or exultation in his eyes.

Even in practice it was deadly hard work, and William and the other green hands were in no doubt that the difficulties would multiply when there were whales in the offing. They listened with apprehension to the able seamen’s tales of closing in on their quarry – the great sperm whales. They heard how an ugly whale could stove in a boat with one thrash of his flukes and of the perils of a ‘Nantucket sleigh ride’ – when a running whale would drive across the surface of the water, dragging the boat and its occupants in a wild dash in its wake.

The third mate was named Matthias Plant, a Nantucket native and a great veteran for a whaleman, being almost forty years of age, swarthy from the sun and with a body like one of his own barrels of whale oil. Matthias had been married for twenty years and out of that span of time he had lived just weeks, in all totalling barely thirteen months, at home with his wife. The rest of the time he had been at sea. It was Matthias’s pleasure to regale William with stories of the chase and the catch, embellished with the most vivid and gory of details. William heard him out with his invariable courtesy, and tried manfully to hide his fears behind an expression of calm unconcern.

In truth, the rowing and paddling and hauling on the mast and sail under Matthias’s brutal direction was an exhausting trial for William. His narrow shoulders and slender arms were racked with the effort, and when the order came at last to row for the Dolphin, riding a mile or so distant like an ivory ship on a sapphire sea, he would have uttered a cheer if he had possessed sufficient voice for the task.

‘We’ll make a whaleman of you yet, my little parlour-maid,’ Matthias would roar and clap the boy heartily on his aching back.

After these expeditions William returned almost with pleasure to the shipboard routine of two-hour turns at the helm and as look-out at one of the three mastheads. He was keen-eyed, and it was one of the few joys available to him to stand at the high vantage-point and scan the glassy miles of water for a whale’s spout. In his commanding position, with the ship beneath him riding along under easy sail, he felt like a giant striding across the waves. He could even lean forward, his eyes stinging with the lick of the salt wind, and believe he wished for the spout of a whale as much as for the sight of another ship that might contain his true quarry.

The Dolphin was just two days short of a full two months out of Nantucket when Captain Gunnell took the observation and worked up the latitude before announcing to the second mate that the ship would cross the Line, or the equator of the Earth, at about sundown that evening.

The mate sagely nodded his head, then spoke to the helmsman who happened to be one of the green hands. ‘Do you hear the Captain? I believe that Old Neptune himself will be coming aboard tonight. Every whaler who passes through his empire must pay homage to him and from every first-timer he extracts the proper dues.’

‘What dues may these be?’ the sailor asked, thinking anxiously of his supplies of tobacco and other small luxuries safe in his sea-chest in the forecastle.

‘That’s not for me to predict,’ the mate answered. ‘All I know is that the old man will be aboard this ship tonight.’

As soon as the wheel was relieved, the man scurried below to spread the news to the other first-timers. William sat tight in the narrow space of his bunk, the curtain partly drawn, as was his habit, to afford the smallest protection from the squalid conditions of the forecastle. He heard the rumours and assertions of the other hands with misgiving. At sundown, as the last watch came down from the mastheads, the green hands heard the hatch over their heads slammed closed. They were shut tight in their living quarters until such time as Old Neptune came aboard.

‘I see a ship,’ the mate loudly cried out overhead. ‘The Emperor himself!’

Up on the deck, the biggest and broadest of the able seamen had padded his chest with mats, wrapped himself round in a white sheet from the Captain’s cabin and pulled on top of the whole a great dark coat blackened with smoke from the try-pot. He had a wild nest of hair made of frayed yarn decked with seaweed, whiskers of the same, and a cloth mask that covered all but his eyes and nose. In his hand he held a four-pronged harpoon. Against the dimming sky and the limitless horizon he made an alarming sight.

In the meantime the other hands dragged up from below decks the largest of the blubber tubs, a great vessel they filled to the brim with salt water. Over the lip of it, secured at the other end to the summit of the brick furnace where the whale-oil was boiled out of the blubber, a broad plank was fixed. The Captain’s own chair was brought from his cabin and set next to the near end of the plank, and Old Neptune took his seat upon the throne.

In a great roar he demanded that the first of the youngsters be brought up without delay.

In the forecastle the young men had heard the tramping and thumping over their heads, and waited with great trepidation for what would happen next. At the command they hustled forward the boldest of their company and sent him up the steps to the deck, and whatever fate was awaiting him. There were a few long moments before there came some confused shouting and the sound of splashing, and the call for the next victim.

One by one, they put their reluctant heads out into the night air. When it came to William’s turn he had no sooner appeared from the forecastle scuttle and tried to see around him in the blaze of lanterns than he was seized from behind and blindfolded. He caught no more than a second’s glimpse of Old Neptune towering on his throne, but it was enough to send a thrill of fear through him. He was hustled up the ladder and set in front of the sea’s Emperor. William’s common sense told him that all this was no more than a sailors’ prank, but still he could not stop his limbs from trembling.

‘What is your name?’ Neptune roared into his face, sending a great wave of tobacco and rum breaking over the boy, which would have knocked him backwards if he hadn’t been pinned by both arms.

‘William Corder, sir.’

‘And why do you travel through my domain, William?’

The young man hesitated for a long moment, as if debating with himself the best answer to give.

Neptune roared at him, ‘I have a dozen ships to visit tonight.’

‘I… I am hoping to catch a whale, sir.’

Amid a great roar of laughter Neptune said, ‘Aye, you and Captain Gunnell also. I have a piece of advice for you, William, before we make a sailor of you. If you want to see Nantucket again don’t look backwards when you can look forwards and don’t you look forwards in the whaleboat or Mr Plant will have your two ears for bait. Do you hear me? Open your mouth wide in answer.’

William opened his mouth as wide as it would go to say Yes, sir, but at once a filthy brush covered with tar and soap was crammed between his teeth. All over his face the vile paste was slapped on until he was gagging with it, then invisible hands pretended to shave his soft skin with a rusty knife.

‘There’s no beard on the boy, not a whisker,’ cried a voice he recognised as the first mate’s.

‘Can you swim, William?’ Neptune roared at him. ‘It might be better for you if you can answer yes.’

William remembered the shouts and splashing he had heard from the victims who had preceded him, and knew that he was going to be thrown overboard. He could not swim a stroke, and the green water would close over his head and he would sink like a stone. ‘No,’ he screamed, his voice rising to a shriek of terror.

But a bucket of water was thrown full in his face, so that his scream became a gasp, and he was lifted off his feet by what seemed a dozen men and pitched backwards into the water. As his heels flew over his head he heard the crew sing out, ‘Man overboard!’

William was kicking out for his life even before he hit the water in the blubber tub. He wrenched off the blindfold and looked up through the froth as he sank to see the grinning faces of his shipmates encircling the tub. He was choking and retching as he rose to the surface, and no more than two floundering strokes carried him to the side. Rough hands seized and hoisted him out, and a mocking attempt was made to strip him of his soaking shirt and trousers.

But the threat of having his tender naked flesh revealed was much greater to William than the fear of death by drowning. His fright was seemingly forgotten as he rounded on his tormentors and spat at them like a wildcat. ‘You have done enough. Take your hands off me at once.’

One or two of them were jeeringly ready to take the matter further, but Captain Gunnell called out from his place at the front of the little crowd, ‘Leave the lad alone now. He has shown spirit enough and there are more of them waiting below.’

At once, attention turned to the next youngster who was hustled up the forecastle ladder. William saw that those who had preceded him in the cruel ritual were awaiting the show as eagerly as any of the other hands, but he did not choose to take his place alongside them as Neptune began his roaring again. Instead he turned his back on the fun and leaned over the taffrail to gaze out over the wide black sea. Not one of the men saw that his face was wet with tears as well as tub-water.

May frowned. She could hear the endless sea beyond her window and wished that she could shut out the sound. The whaling story seemed to bring it closer and to amplify the threat in its lazy whisper. She opened the diary yet again.

Doone always wrote the date in full at the beginning of each entry. The last one was for 15 August but it ran to only a handful of numbers, scrawled with such heat that an impression of the digits clearly showed on the blank page beneath. Almost all the later entries were in code, except for the dates and a tantalising handful of words and phrases – mirror, photograph, dinghy – out of which May could piece together nothing significant. She was tired of staring at the code as if the intensity of her concentration alone could dissolve the mystery.

The plain-written page that held her attention was dated 13 June, not long before the Bennisons left Chicago for their summer vacation. The curve of Doone’s mounting excitement about the impending departure for Maine had been almost unbroken, but now it dipped into a chasm of despair.

Talked with Mom, back from the clinic early for once. Says she and Dad have been thinking about maybe going up to the coast a bit later, say a week, because Dad has some work to finish off and she ‘could always use a bit more time’.

What did I think?

Think. As if it’s anything to do with thinking, like whether to have relish or extra fries. It’s like I’ve made a little tower of stones balanced on top of each other, dragging them to their place and building up hopes and dreams all the year, then my parents knock it down and scatter the stones with a flick of their feet and don’t even see what they’re doing.

I need so much to be there in the places where I remember him, even if he won’t be there yet himself. I have got everything fixed on this, it’s what I’ve kept going on all these months and it’s so fragile that Mom can just change it, going hmmm? over the pasta as if nothing matters except her work and Dad’s.

There’s no defence and no control anywhere in my life.

I’m so scared.

I’ve got to be there, on the beach and the bay, closer to the memories and the promise of him arriving. A week longer to wait is longer than I can bear to imagine. There isn’t anything else I care about.

And as soon as I write that I think, God, what kind of a person am I?

And I know the answer to it is that I’m dumb, and a kid, and an ugly, fat-bottomed one at that – and perhaps it’s actually because nothing matters or means anything at all to me that I’ve fixed on this thing as a meaningful structure in my life. Probably that’s what Dad would say about it, only with a whole lot more jargon.

How pathetic of me, and how pathetic to hope for anything more, that he might want me for any reason at all, even though I love him so much I’d be glad to die for him.

And yet, and yet. I remember what I remember.

I didn’t say anything to Mom. I ran out of the kitchen and went to my room and lay under the covers, and in the end she came to look for me. She saw my face and I saw the dawn of fright in hers. And that made me feel really strong for a minute.

She asked me, ‘Are you okay?’

It’s a funny question, as meaningless as just about everything else. If your parents are a paediatrician and a shrink, what room is there for you not to be okay?

Then she said, ‘Honey, we’ll go up to the beach as planned if it means so much to you. Is there some reason why you so badly want to get away from here? Do you want to talk to me about something?’

I told her there was nothing. Nothing nothing nothing, like it’s my signature.

Nothing except him.

Who is he? May asked herself for the hundredth time when she finished reading.

It must have been someone up here at the beach; someone who had been here the year before as well as last year. A regular summer visitor, not a year-rounder, because Doone wrote about waiting for him to arrive. Was he from one of the five houses, or Pittsharbor, or further afield? Doone had written about the beach and the bay as if that was where he belonged, so surely that indicated here, the beach itself?

It was clear to May that he could only be Lucas, even though Doone never wrote his name. There were no other possibilities except Joel and Kevin, and how could either of them inspire such intensity of feeling?

The year before last something had happened between Lucas and Doone – I remember what I remember – and it had been enough for Doone to make it the structure of her life. Pathetic, Doone had judged her attachment to be and the judgement had extended to herself as well, but she had still acknowledged it to be the centre of her life. She had believed her love to be strong enough to die for and it was true that it had brought her moments of ecstasy as well as despair.

And she did die.

Was that because of Lucas or had something else intervened?

The Beach is particularly resistant to rational explanation. Aaron Fennymore’s dry words again, somehow more alarming for their very lack of colour.

May studied her bitten fingernails and the ragged cushions of flesh surrounding them. They looked like a stranger’s hands.

Was it possible, might she have to love Lucas just because Doone had done so before her? Was this helpless longing for a tattooed arm and dirty beige-blond hair inherited from a drowned girl? Is it me or her? Which of us is which? And the one on the island – who is she?

Suddenly May hurled the diary away from her. It landed face down with the pages splayed. Her hands flew up to cover her ears and she rocked in the old armchair.

There was a difference, a big one – Doone had had her mother to confide in, even though she was angry with her for her absences. Doone’s mother had come up to her room, hadn’t she, and put her arms round her troubled daughter and tried to make her talk?

An angry sob cranked itself out of May’s chest.

She knew how people could just die, like they could just go shopping or on vacation.

When she thought about her own mother in the earlier times the memories were dressed in colours: the clothes Alison wore, brilliant slabs of saffron or mint or cerise like exuberant abstracts out of one of her art books, and spiked with the scent that clung to her, and the sound of talk and laughter.

Then there came the reversal of all that, the dissolving of Alison into silence and darkness. She had gone so suddenly there had been no chance for anyone to make ready for the loss of her. There had been no packing, no goodbyes and all the tears had to be spent uselessly afterwards. She had left her clothes hanging in the closets, lurid ghosts of her, which still seemed ready to stir with her movements.

Alison’s disappearance out of May’s life seemed such a terrible and random assault that it had put every remaining corner of her world under threat. All the warmth and certainty drained away, leaving a place of yawning shadows and whispers she couldn’t hear.

May remembered the uneasiness that seeped through the apartment, filling the rooms like poison gas. She wondered who was guilty and what it was they were guilty of so that Alison had had to die, then she pinched down on the thought to press it into oblivion. Questions simmered in her head, about the time before her mother’s death and voices behind closed doors and murmured telephone conversations and Ivy’s mute, accusing face, but they were never spoken aloud. When Alison was gone there was no one to answer anything.

Maybe her father had never been very good at looking after people or answering their needs and she had never really noticed the deficiency because Alison had always been there. He made the right movements and gestures, and after the first weeks he found a housekeeper to take care of them all, but he did everything mechanically and painfully, as if he was too disabled by his own grief to attend to May’s. She tried to spare him by keeping still and quiet.

Ivy had been the strongest, but she turned her strength into icy withdrawal. She spent her time with her friends, and would hardly speak to her father and sister at all.

For months May had been afraid every day that Ivy and John would die too and leave her behind. One day she couldn’t keep the fear of it locked inside herself any longer. John was just leaving the apartment, in his business suit with a file of papers under his arm, and May clung to him and howled that she was sure he would be run over or murdered on the way.

He was in a hurry. He needed to get to a meeting and to win a contract; the business wasn’t doing well. ‘Nothing will happen to me, baby, I promise. I’ll be back at six o’clock, just like always.’

And he had handed her over to Carmen the housekeeper, murmuring that May seemed a little spooked and needed some extra attention. Carmen did her best, but May pushed her away. She lay on her bed, waiting and shrinking from the inevitability of the phone, the knock that would bring the news. What had once been safe was now precarious.

A few days later she cut up her mother’s clothes.

Dr Metz had been through all this with her. It was normal, she had told her. It was fine and natural for May to feel what she felt.

‘If it’s fine,’ May had snarled once, ‘why does it feel so bad?’

Dr Metz had smiled at her. ‘We can talk about it next time.’

If I had been Doone, I would have told my mother I loved Lucas. I’d tell Alison now, if she were here. May didn’t know whether she had spoken out loud or not, and the realisation made her feel that she might not even have her solid self to rely on any longer.

Restlessly, searching for an escape from her thoughts, she turned back to the story of the whaler ship.

It was the afternoon of the third day after the crossing of the Line ceremony when the exultant cry came at last from the look-out at the masthead. ‘There she blows!’

Captain Gunnell sprang to attention at once, and the rest of the watch on deck and William Corder with them.

‘Where away?’ the Captain howled.

‘Four points on the lee bow, sir.’

‘How far off?’

‘Two miles.’

‘Sperm whale?’

‘Yes, sir. A large school. There she blows again.’

‘Call all hands. Haul back the main yard and stand by to lower.’

The men from the watch below decks swarmed out of their places and joined the rest in the scurry to the boats. This urgency was like none of their practice games and even William felt the thrill of the chase in prospect, as the bow boat hit the water and he sprang over the rail and landed in his accustomed place. There was great rivalry between the boats to be the first under way and the fastest over the water, and William bent to his heavy oar with great alacrity as the mate sang out, ‘Give way, my lads, give way. A long steady stroke and we’ll have ’em.’

The four boats flew over the water, steadily closing the distance on the school of whales. They had travelled a mile and a half when the whales went down. The oarsmen stopped their work and lay on their oars until the headsmen directed them to paddle gently towards where the great beasts had last been seen. The sudden quiet and the tension prickled at the nape of William’s neck where the sweat- and spray-damped clothing stuck to his skin. He could hear Matthias Plant breathing hard and counting off the seconds into minutes. Then there was a sudden shout as a bull whale blew a great plume of water not a hundred yards away from them. He lay rolling comfortably in a trough of the waves.

William’s boat was caught at right angles to him, dead on the eye as whalemen called it, because the sperm whale has the best field of vision at that angle. As Matthias howled at his men to row round to bring them head to head, the remaining boats scattered in pursuit of the other whales now blowing all around them.

Heggy Burris, the boat steerer, stood up with his first iron grasped in his hand, ready to send it into the whale’s body once the head had slid past. At exactly the right instant he braced his foot against a cleat and set his thigh in a half-circle cut for the purpose in a gunwale plank, bent his body back in an arc and drove the iron through the air and into the whale’s flank. It buried itself deep and an instant later the second iron followed it home.

Pain bent the creature almost double as he flung himself away from them. He thrashed his mighty flukes and sent a column of water high into the air before he sounded. The line ran out so fast as he dived that smoke rose from it and the headsman hollered at William to douse it with water from his canvas bucket. The line had half run out before the whale rose once again and in agony beat the water with his flukes and tail, so that it churned and rocked the little boat like an eggshell. William could not make himself look to see, but he heard the whale’s jaws snapping like cannon fire seemingly inches from his own head.

‘Oh, my boys, my lovely boys, we have him now,’ Matthias was crooning. The lines held fast and blood welled up and clouded the water between boat and prey. The other craft closed in to assist the bow boat with the kill.

The poor whale proved no match for all of them. Soon his thrashing ceased altogether and he rolled belly up. Immediately they had the huge carcass secured Matthias set the signal to the ship. As luck would have it, it was riding to windward of them, so it beat down towards the boats while they rested next to their prize. A leeward wind or a flat calm would have meant a gruelling row back to the ship with the great dead weight of the whale dragging in the water behind them.

William was full of the exhilaration of chase and kill as they made the whale fast against the ship’s side, but he soon found that his day’s labours had hardly begun. Once the whale was properly tethered with hawsers and an iron chain passed around the narrow part of the tail before the spreading flukes, the work of cutting-in commenced. This was the stripping off of blubber, to be completed in the shortest possible time before sharks could begin to feed on the carcass and because the ship could make no further headway towards fresh whales with the unwieldy bulk of the dead cousin dragging alongside.

The Captain and mates began digging with their long-handled cutting spades. After an hour’s work of hoisting oily and bloody strips of blubber over the ship’s side, William knew that any notions of exhaustion he had entertained before this moment were no more than a sweet afternoon’s dream compared with the reality of stink and pain and retching disgust he was experiencing now.

At last the whale’s mangled body, headless and stripped bare of every other valuable shred, was cut adrift and left to the mercy of sharks and circling sea-birds. Matthias patted the crumpled boy on the shoulder as he came aboard from the cutting platform with the last of the animal’s blubber. ‘Well done, lad,’ he said simply. ‘Now you’re one of us good and proper.’

‘I think not,’ William retorted and turned away, with a display of energy and feeling that surprised them both.

Already the fires were blazing in the brick furnaces of the try-works. The seamen had fed the hungry iron mouths of the furnaces with wood carried for the purpose and now began the business of feeding blubber into the two huge pots mounted above. It was boiled to release its barrels of oil and when each load had yielded its all the tired-out scraps themselves were used to feed the red heat.

William sank down, mesmerised with exhaustion, on to the hatch-cover that up until now had protected the try-works. The boat steerers were the ship’s stokers, and they stirred up the roaring flames and used long poles to pitch reeking piles of blubber into the boiling pots.

The smell was all of terrible singeing, a sick oiliness that filled every throat with a taste of decay and death. Dense clouds of black smoke billowed up from the pots to darken the sails overhead with broad brush-strokes of filth. The ship surged forward in the night, freed from the encumbrance of the whale, with the inferno of fire and smoke blazing on its deck.

It was a twelve-barrel whale, William had learned. A good enough start to the Dolphin’s voyage

As he huddled on the hatch he watched the hissing pots and the belching flames of the furnace, and the figures of his shipmates bending and gyrating in the lurid light. Their naked upper bodies gleamed with sweat, their faces were black masks of smoky grime and their exertions drew their lips back from their teeth in a stark grimace so that white teeth shone cruelly out of the tangles of black beard. They looked like the devil’s own imps tending the subterranean fires.

‘I am in hell,’ William whispered aloud. ‘Truly I have descended into hell and this is the payment for my sins.’

He locked his hands together and tried to pray, but no form of prayer would come to him.

May lifted her head. She could see the dead whale and the oily fires glimmering on the deck of the ship. A shiver crawled over her skin. The sea was greedy and she felt how close it was to her, gnawing and worrying at the shore.

She thought that if only she listened a little harder she would be able to understand its language; maybe interpret the warning it was whispering to her. It was like breeding an extra sense that was not yet quite ready to use, a painful knob under her skin to which her fingers kept returning, pressing to test the growth.

The book was more than just a book, but she couldn’t put a finger on why or what it might mean. Hannah Fennymore had lent it to her because she had asked for it, because she was curious about Doone. And beyond Doone’s bedroom window there was nothing to be seen except the beach, and Kevin and the others fooling about on or in the water.

And Lucas, slant-eyed, who made her feel things she did not understand or welcome.

May didn’t want to be shut up alone any longer. She left her chair and ran to the door and for a second it seemed again that there was a weight pressing against it, trapping her in the room. But it yielded and banged open, and May ran down the steep stairs.

John was sitting by the window overlooking the sea. There was a book on his lap but he was staring out at Moon Island, his chin resting on one hand, as if waiting for something. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘What’s happening?’

May hovered in front of him. She was pricklingly conscious of her father’s outstretched legs and the sinews on the backs of his hands. Her own legs felt thick and over-elongated, and her hips wide and heavy. Her arms hung clumsily at her side.

He made the little beckoning movement she was waiting for, putting his book aside. May could see that he was afraid she might reject his gesture. She bundled forward and piled herself on to his lap, an awkward mass of jutting elbows and knees.

John held her, resting his chin on the top of her bent head and stroking her hair. Her weight and size surprised him. It was a long time since she had come asking for a cuddle like a little girl. ‘What’s wrong?’

May picked dully at a three-cornered tear in the pocket of his chinos. Where to begin? I wish I were like Ivy. I’m afraid I’m turning into someone else. There’s a ghost on the island and now I’m scared of the sea… ‘I don’t like it here,’ she said. It came out as a whine instead of an explanation.

John sighed. ‘I know that. What do you want to do, May? Go home early?’

He had unintentionally wrong-footed her, turning her into the saboteur of other people’s pleasure when she had only wanted reassurance. It seemed always to happen this way between them. When he offered his concern it made her feel awkward. She retreated in guilty embarrassment. And when she asked for it he couldn’t interpret the question.

May shook her head violently, bumping his jaw. ‘No. It’s okay. I don’t mind staying.’

‘Is there something going on between you and Ivy?’

‘Nuh-uh.’

She had blocked off the channels already and had no idea how to clear them. They both sat still, locked by the failure of communication.

‘Just feeling blue?’

‘I guess.’

At least he was holding her. But as soon as the thought came she was uncomfortable with the weight of his arms, the thump of his heartbeat against her ear. Her flesh shivered. The physical solidity of him was an invasion.

There was a tap on the door-frame. Leonie was standing there wearing a plaid shirt and hiking boots. She said uncertainly, ‘I was wondering about that walk. But we can easily do it another day.’

John lifted his hand an inch from May’s head and as soon as he did so May leapt to her feet and backed away, hump-shouldered and frowning.

‘May, how about coming with us?’ John asked.

‘No, thanks.’

They made an attempt to persuade her, then John went to put on his boots and Leonie tried to talk to May. May managed to answer every question with a monosyllable, but this victory gave her no satisfaction. At length John and Leonie went out together and May was left to drift out on to the porch, to watch their figures disappear northwards across the headland.

Ivy came up through the garden from the beach. ‘Hi. What is there to eat?’

‘How should I know?’

Ivy ignored her and busied herself with hauling food out of the refrigerator. ‘I’m starved. D’you want something?’

May could see that Ivy was wearing her marijuana face. Her eyes were pink and heavy-lidded, and she had a stupid, muzzy smile. She had been smoking with Lucas; it made her obliging and affectionate instead of the way she usually was. And it made her hungry, too.

Why did John never notice what was so plain? May felt angrier still with his lack of perception. ‘What have you been doing?’ she asked her sister sharply.

Ivy’s shapeless smile widened. ‘None of your business, kid.’

‘You’ve been smoking weed.’

Ivy turned her silky, sun-tanned back. ‘Grow up,’ she drawled.

The coastline above Pittsharbor and Moon Island Beach became a ragged fringe of wooded promontories and narrow green inlets lined with sloping ledges of granite. By staying close to the tideline it was possible to walk or scramble the two miles to a rocky causeway linking Berry Island to the mainland.

Leonie knew the route well and most of the owners of the summer cottages that stood back from the water in their secluded clearings. She liked walking and often came this way alone, but John turned out to be a good companion. He didn’t press too close on her heels where the path was narrow and on the strips of shingle beach he moved unobtrusively alongside her. He seemed content not to talk very much. They found a rhythm of step and breath, and stuck to it.

The causeway itself was a narrow spine of rocks from which the tide dropped to expose shoulders of sand and stone. It was low water when they crossed over, and they walked easily between lacings of driftwood and sea wrack and the occasional battered reminder of a lobster float. The soft, still afternoon had faded into an early evening the colour of smoke and the only sound apart from the chafing of the sea was the regular spoon-in-sugar crunch of their boots on the shingle.

Berry Island hung at the end of the rock chain like the dot of an exclamation point. There were no trees on it, only a scrub of blueberry and wild raspberry bushes, rocks and rough marsh grass, and the occasional painterly splash of a turks-cap lily. A path led over its mild convex hump to a tiny shelf of sand uncovered by the receding tide.

When they came to this ghost of a beach they sat down by unspoken agreement on the sand, from where they could look back at Moon Island and the needle spire of Pittsharbor Unitarian Church beyond. Leonie held out her hand and revealed a little heap of raspberries glimmering in their own juice. They took and ate one each, in turn, until they were all gone. The eastern horizon slowly turned the colour of pewter, ready to draw up the darkness.

‘They’re biting,’ Leonie said, pinching a mosquito off her wrist. ‘No-see-’ums, the Indians called them.’ She took a bottle of insect repellent out of her pocket and anointed her face and hands with it before passing it to John. He tipped it and went through the same motions, his gestures exactly mirroring hers. When he handed back the little bottle their fingers touched.

Leonie held herself still. There was a tranquillity about the place and the evening that was at the opposite end of the scale from the way she had felt in the town car-park. She feared the betrayal of some inappropriate gesture or movement, from herself as much as from John.

He was sitting with his knees drawn up, one hand clasped on the other wrist, gazing across to the bay. It’s like I’m setting both of us a test, she thought. Dare to come to my good place and see if we don’t spoil it.

She had been disconcerted by John’s casual suggestion to May that she might come along too. But now it came to her that it might have been a good idea. Dreamily, lulled by the repetition of the waves, she imagined how May might even have liked it. They might have talked quietly, about ordinary things. ‘It can’t be easy for you,’ she said, speaking her thoughts without preamble. John did not seem surprised, as if they had all the time been thinking in parallel.

‘No. It isn’t easy,’ he agreed. ‘For Ivy and May, or for me.’

‘What happened to your wife?’

‘It was a cerebral haemorrhage. She was dead within minutes. She was at a friend’s apartment, I wasn’t there. She had had a headache, that was all.’

Leonie stared ahead of her at the gulls strutting on a rib of rock that jutted out of the sea. When the space grew too crowded one of them would lift away and slide through the air to another vantage point.

She was imagining the impact of this sudden death. The magnitude of it and the details that must have gone with it. Telephone calls, news to be broken, a funeral, children to be guarded. In an unregarded hollow within herself she felt sympathy expanding, the pressure of it tightening against her chest wall. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, a sudden breathlessness making her inarticulate.

John ducked his head. ‘She didn’t deserve it.’

Leonie wondered why he should use those words.

He went on, looking out to Moon Island and the houses of Pittsharbor, ‘Al was a vivid person. She lived at double the pace of everyone else, at twice the intensity. If she disapproved of something she fought it, if she loved something she would defend it to the end, right or wrong.’

A picture began to form in Leonie’s head. A woman, not just a shadow of a dead wife and mother. Her fleshed-out presence lent different nuances to the way John sat here on the beach, how their arms didn’t touch, and they both gazed ahead at the birds and the darkening horizon instead of looking at each other. ‘How did Ivy and May deal with losing her?’

‘Differently. Ivy grew up too quickly. May was sometimes angry, sometimes withdrawn. You’ve seen something of how she can be.’

‘Yes,’ Leonie said. Truthfully, she did not think John’s daughters seemed much different from any of the other children she knew of their age. But she understood nothing about being a parent. It would be presumptuous, she thought, to offer an opinion.

‘Sometimes I catch myself saying to her, Alison, I’m sorry. I’ve screwed up with our children. Then I’m surprised at having said her name way inside myself. I guess the truth is I don’t miss her that much, not any more. I did, but she’s so conclusively gone.’

‘I think I understand that,’ Leonie said. To be gone didn’t necessarily mean death. There were other withdrawals and disconnections that were no less final.

‘And other times I think that the two of them might still have grown into the angry, pained women they seem to be now, even if their mother had been around.’

‘Perhaps. Or perhaps their anger and pain just seem more pronounced to you, because they allow you to see it. Even expect you to deal with it for them. Which means they have faith in you.’

‘I don’t know.’ The words broke out of him. ‘I don’t know anything. I thought I did, when they were younger. Then, after Alison died everything seemed to break up and get washed away. I shouldn’t have brought them here this summer. Neither of them really wanted to come and I thought it would be good for us all.’

‘You don’t know for sure that it isn’t. And it is only a vacation.’

Leonie heard rather than saw that he was suddenly smiling. ‘You could be right. And if we hadn’t come, you and I wouldn’t have met.’

She considered this. The acknowledgement that their meeting was significant was important to her, but all the time she was aware of taking steps that she couldn’t retrace. Nor do I want to retrace any steps, she thought. I don’t want to go backwards, to anywhere I already know.

She nodded her head and let her chin rest on her knees. The day’s heat was beginning to drain out of the air. They sat in silence for a while, listening to the sea fretting at the shingle, comfortable with the beach and the sky, and with one another’s company. They had come to the good place and nothing had happened to discolour it.

In the end it was only the thought of the rocky causeway and the rising tide that made them turn back again. Leonie led the way across the top of the island, familiar with the twists of the path even in the fading light. When they reached the last headland and the secluded crescent of Moon Island Beach they stood for a moment to look at the five houses. Their roofs and gables were black and strong against the navy-blue sky.

Neither John nor Leonie said anything more before they reached the Captain’s House and bade one another good-night, but she knew they had come an extra distance together. As she went up the steps to the Beams’ house she felt happy and calm, as she had not done for a long time.