Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection: Moon Island, Sunrise, Follies - Rosie Thomas - Страница 15

Elizabeth laid a tray with a lace cloth and three bone china cups and saucers, and set a silver cream jug beside them with a beaded net over the rim. She was folding napkins, in case her guests chose to eat fragile lemon cookies, when she heard the knock at the door.

Marian and Hannah were standing together on the porch. They looked so incongruous side by side that Elizabeth had to tuck in the corners of her mouth to conceal a smile. Marian was eye-opening in a full-skirted scarlet sun-dress, which showed the top of her freckled cleavage, and her hanks of hair were tied up with a red bandanna. Silver hoops the size of handcuffs swung in her ears

Hannah wore brown and a long-sleeved woollen cardigan that denied the heat of the day. She inclined her little round head towards the pots of marigolds and cineraria splashing over the step. ‘The garden looks fair, Elizabeth,’ she murmured.

‘Thank you. Turner Hanscom does well enough, if he’s watched.’

Marian was exclaiming that she and Hannah had met out in the road and they were both ready for business. Elizabeth led the way through the cool house to the evening room. When she brought in the coffee tray Marian was sitting back in one of the armchairs with her skirt making a creased pool of colour around her. She nodded at the cut flowers in the vases and an embroidery frame standing close to the hearth.

‘Always makes me feel I ought to be on my best behaviour, your house, Elizabeth.’

Elizabeth glanced at the other woman’s big bare feet. Marian had been wearing flipflops, but she had kicked them off. ‘Is that so, Marian?’

She handed the coffee cups that had been her mother’s and her grandmother’s before that. They were gold-rimmed with a pattern of blue flowers, and the touch of them and their fragility always gave her satisfaction, even today.

It was time to finalise their arrangements for Pittsharbor Day. The twenty-first of August was only a short time away.

The date was said to be the birthday of Benjamin Pitt, who had arrived at the coast from southern Maine in 1770 with a group of settlers in search of grazing land. There were still Pitts living in the vicinity, but the commemoration of their ancestor had been a date in the local summer calendar for little more than twenty years. It was true that the festival was regarded as something to please the tourists rather than the townspeople themselves, but the summer visitors liked it and it raised some funds for the town, so every year there were fun runs and craft stalls, exhibitions of local artwork in the library and Main Street galleries, and a Fish Fry on the town landing. Bunting was zigzagged across the street and a softball tournament was held on the green alongside the church.

Marian Beam was a great enthusiast for the day. It had become a tradition in the last few years for the houses on the bluff to run a wild blueberry bake stall. Marian had suggested the idea originally and the others had fallen in with her, because baking and selling was in the end easier than playing softball or taking a part in one of Amy Purrit’s Pittsharbor Musical Revues. Marian contributed her energy, her army of family helpers and tubs of wild blueberries bought from one of the farmers on the town road. Elizabeth lent her name and her mother’s recipes, and did some of the baking, but it was Hannah who did the bulk of the work. She was the best cook out of the three of them, although Jennifer Bennison had been a good assistant.

Marian took out a pen and began writing in a notebook. ‘I don’t suppose we can count on the Duhane girls for too much.’

Her pen stopped. The room went so quiet that the sea sounded like the steady pulse of blood in the chambers of their ears. Doone Bennison had drowned on 22 August last year. Elizabeth remembered the bunting flags hanging motionless from their strings as the police vehicle drove her body away from the town landing. Only an hour before, Jennifer Bennison had telephoned her to ask if she had happened to see her daughter sailing out of the bay. Jennifer said she must have taken her boat out early, while everyone was still asleep.

‘Don’t worry,’ Elizabeth had reassured her pointlessly. But still, she had been unable to settle to any of the tasks that were waiting for her. She had walked into town, telling herself she would collect the plates and dishes she had lent out for the bake stall. And she had been standing outside the town house as the news had run up Main Street like a freak wave.

When she heard that the child had drowned she had to grope for the nearby fence to hold herself upright. Her head turned towards Moon Island, although she couldn’t see even the harbour water from where she was standing. What had Doone seen or done? She was an awkward child with an air of melancholy about her and Elizabeth had not known her well. But now she was possessed by certainty that there was a link between Doone and the old story; one which seemingly renewed itself, generation on generation. Elizabeth’s stomach had churned with a mess of shock and guilt, as though she might have saved Doone if she had tried, as if the drowning was her fault.

Then Leonie Beam had come white-faced towards her. ‘They’ve gone to the house to tell Jennifer and Sam.’

The two women had put their arms around one another, Elizabeth wordlessly grateful that Leonie was there.

‘We should speak to Marty Stiegel again.’ The silence was broken by Marian, of course. She scribbled another line and Elizabeth reached out to her coffee pot, lifted it with an effort and refilled Hannah’s cup. This annual enforced contact was always difficult. Marian was a vulgarian and Hannah a provincial mouse, but a silently critical one, always appearing to judge and find wanting. Yet, Elizabeth reminded herself in her mother’s voice, the job had to be done, whether she enjoyed it or not, because she had undertaken it.

The previous year, Marty had brought along a gas barbecue and had made wild blueberry pancakes for all comers. It had been the success of the stall.

‘I’m sure he’ll help out again,’ Hannah judged.

‘They do have the baby this year.’

‘Marian, it’s only a couple of hours we’re asking for,’ Elizabeth said.

They wouldn’t show their dislike too plainly, any of the three of them. It was muffled about with coffee and china cups and decorous arrangements for the bake stall. Elizabeth looked at Hannah’s pursed mouth and sharp eyes half veiled with pink lids, and thought of the years they had known each other, since they were both young women, all the years that had been pressed into shadowy negative images by no one admitting to their real feelings. Owning to nothing had kept Elizabeth away from Pittsharbor and the beloved bay, and the spellbound heart of the island itself, for the whole of her married life.

Impatience with lists of ingredients and estimations of plates and forks needed, and calculations of charges and change crawled down her spine. It was an imposition to be old and look back on an unfulfilled life. Her memories bore a patina like clouded pewter, without colours or depth. Elizabeth wished she were young again and tasting the luxury of choice, with a passion that made her fingers tremble around the shell of her bone-china cup. And as she gazed downwards she was reproached by the sight of her own hands, age-blotched as they were and roped with sinews.

‘Do you agree, Elizabeth?’

It was Marian demanding and she hadn’t heard the question.

Marian was a bully. Elizabeth felt sorry for her children and their partners, and the grandchildren, driven into acquiescence by an overbearing old woman. Or was it better to be dominating in just the way that Marian was, rather than an accumulation of shadows, a prim negative, like herself? ‘I didn’t hear what you said.’ And she added with a certain satisfaction, ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.’

Marian’s tongue clicked. She repeated the question, which was to do with limiting the order of blueberry pancakes to one per customer because last year the line had wound all around the stall and caused a crowd, and in the thick of it some of the kids had pinched muffins off the dish at the front.

‘I don’t believe it matters a dab,’ Elizabeth sighed at the end of it.

It was a phrase Aaron used. She couldn’t have given a proper reason for why she had come out with it now. Hannah’s expression was inscrutable. Her ankles were set together and her hands rested in her lap; she looked as if she was drawing herself in and away from the other two, and from the polished order of Elizabeth’s drawing-room.

Marian pursed her lips and drew a line in her notebook.

Under her direction they agreed next on who would make pies and who muffins, where the cold-boxes would come from and how many quarts of cream to order, as they did every year. At last the agenda was covered. Marian said, ‘I’ll have Karyn and Leonie help out, and I’ll ask Gail and those Duhane girls if they’ll do some of the marketing and washing up. They’ll like to be part of the day.’

If Hannah and I had ever liked each other, Elizabeth reflected, we could join forces now and set Marian Beam exactly where she belongs. But the years had gone by and even the pain of long ago had been blunted and tempered by time. All that was left was the dilute sparring that took place over coffee and town celebrations, and the triviality of it made a mockery of what had been powerful enough to divide them in the first place.

It was more than fifty years since Elizabeth had last seen the woman on the island. But the memory of her was still sharp in her mind.

Marian was talking unstoppably as the three of them came out on to the seaward side of Elizabeth’s porch. Hannah had announced that since the tide was low she would walk back along the beach and Marian agreed that she would do the same.

Elizabeth escorted her guests through the garden to the head of her beach steps, where they met Marty Stiegel climbing towards them. There was a little camera slung on a strap around his neck. He gave them his sociable smile and pushed his hair back with two hands, smoothing his temples. ‘I heard there was a summit meeting. I’ve come to offer my services again.’

Elizabeth said, ‘That’s very good of you, Marty. I should have telephoned to tell you we were going to talk about the bake stall this morning.’

‘Marty, you’re a jewel. Are you certain Judith and Justine can spare you for the afternoon?’

‘Sure thing, Marian. It’s good that we summer complaints can give something back to the town.’

Hannah offered him a nod and made to move past at the top of the steps, but he blocked the way with a sun-tanned arm. ‘Let me take a picture, ladies.’ Without waiting for their answer he lifted the camera and snapped off a couple of shots.

Elizabeth could already see the photograph in her mind’s eye. The three of them ranged in a line, Marian’s floridness and Hannah’s unwinking, suspicious gaze, with herself in the middle, caught, so insubstantial as to be almost permeable to light.

‘That’ll be ten bucks,’ Marian laughed. She was waving to grandchildren on the beach. She kissed Marty flirtatiously on the cheek and swung her red skirts down the steps to the shingle.

After Marty had gone there was a moment when Hannah and Elizabeth stood on their own. Elizabeth could have counted almost on one hand the number of times they had been alone in the past fifty years. ‘How is Aaron?’

‘Not as strong as he was,’ Hannah said. ‘But still himself.’ She thanked Elizabeth formally for her hospitality and descended the steps, straight-backed, without putting her hand on the guard rail. Down on the beach she seemed to melt into the background of the bay, like one of the birds she resembled.

The island lay in its skeins of water and rock. If it were not for the boats and holidaymakers in the foreground, the wide view was the same as it had been when Elizabeth was a girl. How have we grown so old, she wondered. How have we grown so that so little matters any more? She turned her back on the beach and the bay, and bent to tear the dead heads off her flowers.

It was a hot day. Corn-weather, as Aaron and Hannah might have called it. The sea was a restless plate of ripples and the beach stones and sand were baked dry by the sun. At the southern end of the beach there were clusters of sunbathers on spread towels, lying between their encampments of picnic baskets, sand toys and rubber inflatables. Children ran into the waves, kicking up arcs of spray. The families from the five houses were out too. John Duhane was walking the low-water line with a panama hat pushed down on his head. Ivy lounged in her bikini, using Lucas’s bent knees as a backrest. Beam children and friends leapt and shouted on either side of a volleyball net, and Judith Stiegel sat reading in a low chair with Justine in a basket beneath a parasol. A shadow fell across Judith’s book and she looked up at Marty. The camera was at his eye again and she grinned into the lens, a lazy, barefaced smile that made him lower it without clicking the shutter. He bent over and kissed her instead, his hand cupping the rounded mass of her naked shoulder. Her skin was warm and slick with sun cream.

‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked him.

‘Visiting the three witches.’

‘Mart. Pancakes?’

‘Hole in one. Justine had her feed? Can I get you something? Otherwise I thought I might play volleyball with the kids for half an hour.’

She nodded her agreement, made complacent by the sun and his deference to her.

Leonie was sitting twenty yards away with Tom at her side. He didn’t often sit on the beach doing nothing, but he had already done his run to Pittsharbor and back, and there wasn’t enough wind for sailing. She watched Marty saunter over to the volleyball and saw Judith settle again to her book. The busy details of the beach, the specks of colour against the sea and sky, and the air’s relentless clarity made her feel as if she were in a Victorian picture. One of the minor English pre-Raphaelites perhaps, painstakingly observed but lacking in emotion. It was not a comfortable feeling. She longed to make something happen, some undisciplined smear of brilliance in the centre of the canvas, and at the same time she dreaded the impulse.

Tom folded the Wall Street Journal vertically into three. Leonie realised her arms were wrapped so tightly around her knees that the muscles of her shoulders were burning. She dropped her hands and kneaded fistfuls of warm dry sand instead. ‘I’ve hardly seen you this vacation,’ she said.

He looked up for a second, not quite audibly sighing. ‘You know how it is in the restaurants. This summer more than ever.’

‘Tom, are you seeing someone else?’ The question came out of nowhere. Once it was spilt it was like a drop of acid, smoking, then burning a hole in the sheet of their tolerance.

‘No.’

She saw that it was the truth. Or at least near enough to the truth to allow his face to blaze with indignation. ‘Are you?’ he countered.

Leonie shook her head. It was the same. Technically innocent, but the smooth surface of honesty was so undermined with the burrowings of despair and dissatisfaction that it must soon collapse.

‘That’s okay, then.’

He was going to turn back to his paper, but she wouldn’t let him. Not now there was a blur right in the middle of the day’s pretty canvas. ‘Do you feel like a walk?’ Leonie suggested.

He considered. ‘I’ll come with you.’

Not I’d like to, she noticed. But doing her a favour.

They skirted the edge of the water, walking with a space of solid air between them. Leonie wondered if John Duhane had turned to watch from under the brim of his panama hat. The dull weight of unhappiness made her hunch her shoulders with self-dislike. There was no reason for this misery, she thought. Or only the old reason that couldn’t be discussed any longer and therefore apparently did not exist. The fact that she couldn’t be happy with all she had was turning her life rancid. And Tom’s, too; the blight was not limited to herself.

They were following the route of the walk she had taken with John. Leonie didn’t want to retrace those comfortable steps in ugly silence. When they had rounded the first headland they came to a narrow inlet lined with rock and pungent with steaming rockweed. At the head was a gritty tongue of sand choked with the grey skeletons of dead trees. She sat down suddenly on the sand. With one hand she gathered some stones and pitched them one by one into the slapping water. Tom hovered behind her for a moment, then sat down a few feet away.

When they had first known each other, their earliest summer together, Tom and Leonie had sometimes taken a walk this way to escape from the rest of the family. Once or twice they had slipped deeper into the spruce wood and found a bed of moss to lie on. They had clung to one another, laughing and whispering like conspirators.

Leonie frowned now, trying to recall exactly how love had felt. A state of greedy inclusion.

She looked sideways at Tom. His face was set in the expression she was too familiar with – unyielding, with the corners of his mouth drawing sharp lines down his cheeks. Sadness and sympathy for him suddenly took hold of her and on an impulse she reached out and put her hand on his arm. He didn’t acknowledge her touch. ‘Do you remember we used to make love in the woods?’ she asked.

‘I remember you saying you felt overheard in our bedroom.’

It was true, but it pricked her that he chose to make it a criticism.

Marian had not put them in Tom’s old childhood bedroom. She had told them that his was too shabby, too cramped to be shared with Leonie, but the new room was also much closer to hers. As if it were as near as she could get to insinuating herself between them.

‘Anyway. It was lovely up here,’ Leonie said lamely, drawing back her hand. She had wanted to be Tom’s wife, but she had ended up in unequal partnership with his mother and his siblings and his businesses.

Tom didn’t answer. He was staring at the sea.

A wave of anger broke and washed over the swell of Leonie’s sympathy. Her husband was mean-spirited and neglectful. If there was guilt it was his, not hers.

So far, she thought with a little shudder of black excitement. So far. ‘What are we going to do?’ She made it clear that she wasn’t asking about tennis versus sailing.

Tom still didn’t look at her. Why? she wanted to shout at him. Just because I can’t grow us a baby, do you have to cut me off altogether?

After a long interval, he answered, ‘Nothing.’

She thought she knew him well, but even so she was shocked by the extent of his withdrawal. Then, just as she had understood over a plate of cherries in Sandy’s Bar that she and Tom didn’t love each other any more, another huge truth dawned on her.

Tom wouldn’t initiate any split between them. He wouldn’t be the cause of it, or even a collaborator. He would not demonise himself in the eyes of his family by dismembering even such a rudimentary and unblessed union as his with Leonie. She would have to be the villain.

The simplicity of it caused her to nod her head, even though her eyes burned.

He wouldn’t even fight properly with her now. They had escaped from the beach to the seclusion of the woods, not for sex any more, but they couldn’t even take the opportunity to yell at each other. A longing for a real war swelled in her throat, a vicious one that would rip their separate protective layers and expose the flesh, after which there could be a truce and maybe a reconciliation. ‘Nothing?’ She began to shout: ‘Jesus, Tom, what are you? It’s like living with some fucking rock formation. Don’t you care what happens to us?’

His face was turned away from her.

Slowly, Leonie wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Speak. Say something.’

He did look at her then. Articulating slowly, pushing out the words between his teeth, he said, ‘You can’t have a baby. You’re not the only woman in the world to suffer it. Grow up, Leonie. Get on with your life.’

‘I don’t think it’s just about babies any more,’ she whispered. Get on with my life. Is that really what he wants?

When there was no response she tried, ‘Can’t we talk about adoption?’

‘We have talked about it. I don’t want to adopt.’

It was true. Through sleepless nights and dry-mouthed car journeys, and dinners that turned into a wasteland of crumbed table-cloths they had followed the same thread. Now they had wound their way into the heart of the labyrinth only to find there was no heart. There was only a blank wall and nowhere to go beyond it.

The desire for a fight had gone out of her. She was left with little except an aversion to the stink of rockweed and the boneyard of dead trees. A fisherman in his lobster boat puttered across the middle distance, turning a furrow of white water as he rounded in on his floats. ‘Okay,’ she said flatly. As an ending it couldn’t have been less of a whisper. ‘I think I’ll walk back now.’

Leonie stood up, straightening her back because sitting hunched over had put a crease in it. Above her she saw a woman steadily climbing the slope away from the shore. Her pale-coloured clothing showed like a shaft of light between the dark verticals of the spruce trunks. It was uncomfortable to think that she might have overheard them. ‘There’s someone up there. It must be one of the Kellys.’ She remembered the name of the people who owned the isolated cottage set up on a ridge above the inlet.

Tom didn’t look. ‘No, the Kellys never come up here in August. They think it’s too crowded.’

‘They must have let the place, then.’ The woman had moved out of sight now.

‘If they have, it’s the first time in living memory,’ Tom said coldly, as if it was a matter of importance.

Leonie bent her head. After a minute she scrambled away from him up the ledges of rock and began the walk back to the beach.

There came a day not so long after the Dolphin crossed the Line when Captain Gunnell ordered the boats down. The look-out had sung out at the sighting of a pair of good whales, a cow and a calf, about a mile to leeward of the ship. It was a bright day with a good sea running and the oarsmen soon brought the boats to the spot where the cow had sounded.

Matthias Plant gave the order to his men to rest easy. At the prow the boat steerer was ready with his harpoon and all was silent as they waited upon the whale.

Of a sudden there came a great boiling of the water to the stem of the boat as she blew, and it seemed but a second after that her great head reared up and Matthias’s boat was caught dead in her eye. Her jaws were open wide but Heggy Burris the boat steerer did not delay an instant in hurling the iron true to the flank, where it lodged fast. Some blood ran from the wound but the beast seemed not to feel it, for all her attention was fixed on the fate of her calf.

Another boat had got the calf fast and it thrashed pathetically enough in the swell, its head dipping beneath the water as its life faded and a great wash of its blood darkened the sea.

The sight launched the mother whale into a transport. Her back arched into a mountain standing proud of the water between the boats and the dying calf. Then Burris was forward with his second iron, thrown as true as the first and the lines made a great run as her flukes went up and beat the water into a torrent of spray, which left the men blinded for an instant.

Matthias shouted, ‘Forward, forward all!’

The line begin to whip out of the tubs and the experienced hands knew for sure she was going away, an ugly whale that might lead them the dance of all their lives.

Then there was a scream that would sound in every man’s dreams until his dying day, as the line fouled and a loop of it caught around the body of Martin the bowman as he bent over his oar.

In an instant he was snatched overboard, gone after her as the whale dived, and his companions were left in the boat staring like stone men at the smoking line about the loggerhead, until William Corder tremblingly cooled it with water from his bailing bucket as Mr Plant had reminded him to do a dozen times.

The whale plunged many fathoms, taking the bowman down with her and boat careening in their wake.

Heggy Burris began shouting like the devil, with his lance at the ready, ‘Pull one, pull all, for here she comes again,’ and they readied themselves to haul on the line as their only chance of seeing Martin again. William bent to the frantic work like the others, giving the sum of his meagre strength to the task.

The whale broke the water not one hundred feet away and every man gave his all to bring the boat round to take her head and head.

It was this turn of direction that slackened the line for a brief moment, so releasing Martin from his terrible noose. He rolled up, to surface like a log, and Matthias roared the order to row to his rescue. The men did not need to be told twice. Even as the craft flew across the width of water the whale went flukes up again and for all the two harpoons lodged deep in her side she was going at an even greater rate than before. The line flew out once more but there was yet enough in the tubs to allow them to reach Martin where he floated and to haul him over the stern and into the boat.

It was a terrible sight.

The line had bitten through coat, shirt and flesh alike, and was near to having cut the poor man clean in two. As it was, his chest was hacked open as if with a butcher’s knife and the rib-bones laid bare. A mess of blood bubbled and welled out – it seemed to William’s horrified eyes more than a man’s veins could hold – and ran into the bottom of the boat to crimson all their feet. The poor fellow gave a cough and his eyelids fluttered, and Heggy Burris cried out, ‘Dear God, he lives.’

But even as the words were spoken Martin’s mouth opened and a groan and a great spout of blackened blood and sea-water spilled out of him together, and he lay still. He lived no longer.

William Corder watched all of this with staring eyes and the back of his hand pressed up to his mouth.

‘Hold hard,’ Matthias bellowed at him. There were other matters to attend to if they were not all to end up in the same way as Martin the bowman. The whale was still running away from them and they were fast being drawn from the other boats in the wake of this leviathan. The boat steerer was calling for the drags to slow her rush, and Matthias saw to it that William and the other two men worked the line regardless of the grim cargo they bore with them.

The whale flew on like an arrow and at such a speed that the water rose up in a wall on either side of the boat. The tubs would soon be empty of line and there was no other boat within reach to bend on with her own lines and help save them, and the fine whale.

William Corder cooled the flying line with water from his bucket, but his face had no more colour than the dead man’s.

At length Matthias had the bitter choice between giving the order to cut the line and thus surrendering whale, whaleline and two harpoons, as well as his bowman, or to risk being dragged under, and losing the boat itself and the lives of five more men. He gave the command, the lines were cut and, freed of her tormentor at last, the vessel wallowed in the swell like a porpoise.

The Dolphin rode three miles off to their stern. It was a bitter hard row back to her, with Martin lying cut almost in half at their feet. The sight of William Corder’s face touched some chord of pity buried deep in Matthias Plant’s hardened heart and to hide it the mate let out a great bluster of rage. He cursed the boy squarely for his softness, so that William bowed his head over his oar to conceal the shock and grief that racked him.

The men carried the body of their companion back on board the Dolphin and that night it was William Corder who sewed him into his sailcloth shroud. The last stitch was made through his nose, in the whalemen’s way, to be sure that the man was truly dead. Yet no man could have lived an hour with wounds like Martin the bowman’s. Before his body was given back to the sea William Corder tenderly kissed the cloth over the man’s face. Matthias Plant was the only one of the men who witnessed this last tribute, and that because he was secretly watching the boy and wondering what had led such a tender-hearted creature into the cruel chase for whales.

Captain Gunnell read out the funeral service and the corpse was slipped over the side. William turned away from the rail as soon as the water closed over it and silently sought his bunk down in the forecastle.

May was sick of reading, sick of her bedroom, of every mute piece of furniture and spider crack in the walls, and when she left it and went outside she felt like a snail winkled out of its shell to perish in the heat. The beach was a place of glaring light and intrusive happy voices, and the house was full of shadows that frightened her because they were impenetrable. She crept restlessly from one place to the next, never finding a refuge in which to be comfortable.

The three books lay on the bedroom shelf. She didn’t bother to replace Doone’s diary in its hiding-place any longer. It refused to give up its secrets to her, so she retaliated by leaving it in the open. Voyages of the Dolphin was significant because it had been in Doone’s possession, but she couldn’t fathom what it meant or why it mattered. What she had read of it was gruesome or boring, in equal parts

The other book Hannah Fennymore had lent her, In the Country of the Pointed Firs, she had read in a couple of sittings. It was quite short and easier than the whaling book. There was a lot about picking wild herbs and going visiting, but two stories from it stuck in her mind even though she tried not to think about them.

One was about the grave of a young woman who had cut herself off from the world because of some secret sin, and had lived the rest of her life and died alone on one of the bay islands. The image of the deserted place and the grassed hump of ground in the corner of a field was too vivid in May’s mind. One of the characters said of it, ‘A growin’ bush makes the best gravestone. I expect that wormwood always stood for somebody’s solemn monument.’ May had no idea what wormwood might be, but it spoke eerily of worms and coffin wood.

The other story was to do with a woman, quite an old woman herself, rowing out to visit her mother on some remote island. As soon as the boat drew near enough to be seen the ancient mother was at her cottage door, her handkerchief a white speck fluttering in the distance. The daughter smilingly said to her companion, ‘There, you never get over bein’ a child long’s you have a mother to go to.’

The words had made May buckle with grief. Even when she thought about them now and about never having a mother to go to, her mouth stretched and saliva flooded her tongue.

She hadn’t got past being a child, and now she was stopped dead, stuck in some midway place where nothing seemed to be within control nor ever to change. No talking to a tree, even one that reminded her of Alison, was going to help her. May was afraid and the worst of it was that she was frightened of herself, because she didn’t understand what was happening to her.

She left the books again and walked out of the house. From the land side of the porch she could see across the gardens to a corner window at the rear of Elizabeth’s house. Suddenly she remembered that she had told Elizabeth about the woman on the island and Elizabeth had responded with some embarrassing question about love, before telling a long story about sneaking out to meet some guy here in the Captain’s House.

Listening to anything would be better than going round in circles alone.

‘Hi,’ May said, when Elizabeth opened her door. ‘I, um, I thought I’d just, kind of, come by. Is it okay?’

Elizabeth thought how sad the child looked. Her chin and bottom lip jutted out, ready for a rejection, but her eyes were imploring. ‘Come on in.’

The girl followed Elizabeth through the house. In the evening room she marched to the window and stared out at the garden. ‘What’s wormwood?’ she asked abruptly.

‘It’s a plant. Artemisia is the botanical name. Why?’

‘Does it grow on graves?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose it could do, but I’ve never heard of it. Look, there’s a bush outside.’

It was a silvery white mound, dotted with yellow flowers. Just a garden plant, nothing more. May studied it in silence; then, without turning to look at Elizabeth, she said in a low voice, ‘I want to know about the woman I saw on the island. I can’t forget the way she looked at me. You know something about her, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said. The softness of her voice made May shiver. ‘I saw her fifty years ago.’

‘But…’

‘I can tell you the story, if you like.’

May did turn pleading eyes on her now. ‘Do you have to make it a story? I’d kind of like to know about things for real.’

‘How do we know what’s real, May? Anyhow, I don’t know any other way. I was told it as a story myself, by my grandmother, Elizabeth Page Freshett.’

May understood that she wasn’t going to get any matter-of-fact explanations. This old woman with her milky eyes looking back into the past, and her forebears and their murky, staring portraits, were all a part of this place, wound up tight with it, and she was delivering herself up just by being in the house with them. Daring a glance around the room she saw that everything in it was old, and looked as if it had sat in the same place for ever, regulated by the ticking of the clock and the crawl of sunlight across polished wood. The door of the room was shut tight. She thought the old woman might see her shiver. ‘Go on, then,’ she ordered in a loud voice.

‘I told you how I fell in love,’ Elizabeth began. She wasn’t looking at May any longer, but away to one side, at a little army of photographs in silver frames, drawn up on the lid of the piano. ‘I was unhappy because I couldn’t marry him. I wanted to, and I should have gone ahead and done it, but I was a coward.

‘I was going away to Europe for a year. I didn’t often go out on the water, but I wanted to get to Moon Island and look back at the beach and the houses to get a picture in my mind, one that I could carry with me, do you understand?

‘I took my father’s little rowboat. It was a misty day, not a regular fog but one of those light, silvery mists that lie in wreaths over the water. I drew the boat up and sat down on a rock. I don’t think I can remember feeling such desolation before or since.’

There had been a seductive shimmer to the sea. The implacability of the water’s fall and rise was soothing and Elizabeth watched until she felt she had become a part of it. Slowly, she had stood up and drifted to the water’s edge. The bluff and her father’s house looked a long way off, and the pain of her indecision receded too.

Dreamily she’d thought, I could lie down in the water and let it carry me away.

Her shoes were already wet, and her ankles.

Then the certainty that she was being watched had made her turn away from the hypnotic rolling of the waves.

A woman was standing at the edge of the trees. She had a pale oval face and her eyes were sunk deep in her head. Her hair was pulled cruelly back, so her skin seemed stretched over the bones. She was wearing wide trousers, which covered her feet, and a pale-coloured coarse shirt that hid the lines of her body. She was a stranger, Elizabeth knew she must be because she had never seen her before in seventeen summers, but she seemed to belong absolutely to the place. She had held up her hand and beckoned, and Elizabeth had begun to walk up the slope of shingle towards her, glancing back over her shoulder to the distant windows of her father’s house and the dark Captain’s House next to it.

When she’d looked up again the woman had gone. Elizabeth reached the spot where she had been standing and searched between the trees, even calling out Are you there? but there was only the sound of her own voice, the sea-birds and the waves. Her feet and legs were soaking and the cold had made her shiver.

‘That was her. That was the woman I saw,’ May cried. Then she stopped short and chewed at the corner of her mouth as she took a reckoning. ‘But I don’t believe it. It was fifty years ago?’

Elizabeth understood that to May it was an aeon of time. She nodded her head.

May sneered bravely, ‘So you’re saying this woman is, like, a ghost, right? Like The X-Files or something?’ Only she couldn’t disguise the flash of fear in her eyes.

‘The Passamaquoddy Indians believed that the island was haunted, or possessed. It was one of their sacred places. Then, in the nineteenth century the whalemen had a small settlement on the seaward side, just a few rough huts for shelter and a tavern. The only building here on the bluff in those days was yours. The Captain’s House.’

‘Yeah?’ May shrugged. But she knew she was caught. She didn’t want to be, she wished she could unlearn what she had already seen and discovered. But Doone and the white-faced woman were much too close to her now; she didn’t know who would step which way, whether they would slip into her ordinary world or whether she would mistakenly break through a membrane and become part of theirs. The boundaries of normality were dissolving, fearfully, as if they were no more solid than a morning’s fog. She wished with all her heart for them to be in place again.

Elizabeth Newton was waiting. Her chair was placed with its back to the light, so May couldn’t see her face properly. She was afraid of Elizabeth, too, and of the other spectres of old age and resignation. She wanted to jump out of her tapestry armchair with its feet like claws and run out of the house, but she didn’t move.

Instead, she sat still, listening to the clock ticking. ‘What did you do after you saw the woman?’

‘I asked my mother first of all. She was a very rational person, May. She believed in everyone and everything having their proper places in the world. If anyone had lived on the island after the whalers were gone she would have known about it. And she didn’t know, therefore no such person existed.’

‘And so you went to your grandmother, right? What was her name?’

‘Elizabeth Page Freshett. I was named for her.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Come into the dining-room with me. I’ll show you her picture.’

Reluctantly, May followed the old woman into the next room. The dining-room was a gloomy place with high-backed chairs ranged down a long table in expectation of guests who would never arrive.

‘I think I told you that her husband was Senator Freshett, my paternal grandfather. That’s his portrait above the sideboard.’

He was a frowning man with side-whiskers and a high collar. May glanced at him and looked away. There was a photograph of Elizabeth’s son done up in academic dress on the sideboard. May reflected on how pleased with himself he seemed and the thought cheered her a little. Elizabeth held out another picture in an oval gilt frame.

The grandmother had a mass of dark hair arranged to crown her head with a miniature turret, a patient expression and a high-necked lace-throated white blouse. May nodded as politely as she could and handed her back.

‘My grandfather bought this parcel of land when they were first married in the 1880s. He wanted her to have a summer cottage. She had a tendency to weakness in the chest and the sea air was believed to be good for her.’

May could imagine the dark-haired woman sitting propped up on some Victorian sofa, mournfully coughing. Boredom and impatience with Elizabeth’s ancestors snagged with her deeper-seated anxiety. She found it difficult to breathe, and her skin crawled and itched so that she clawed at one forearm with blunt nails. Suddenly she thought of Lucas, flip-haired and sun-tanned, and how dismissive he would be of all this musty stuff. And of her childish fears and superstitions. She knew that she was childish, and May so much wanted to be adult, and with him and part of him, that she had to stop herself from groaning in despair.

Elizabeth was telling her about her grandparents building their cottage, and how old Mr Swayne had bought alongside and built the extravagant place with all its gables and gingerbread woodwork, and the widow’s walk at the crown. ‘Long before Marian Beam’s day,’ she said.

May asked, ‘When did Mr Fennymore build his house?’

Elizabeth’s hand touched her throat. ‘Oh, he put it up, let’s see, it wasn’t until just after the war. He went into the building business. His family were fishing people, always had been, but Aaron was different.’

Once she thought of it, May was surprised it hadn’t occurred to her before. ‘It was him, wasn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘It was Mr Fennymore. The boy you fell in love with. And he was only a fisherman and your mother and father wouldn’t let you marry him because your grandfather was a senator? So you went off to Europe and married Mr Newton, and the Fennymores married each other and he built his own house up here. Just kind of to show you that he could? Is that what he did?’

Elizabeth’s mouth went white and she put her grandmother’s picture back on the sideboard next to Spencer’s.

‘Sorry. It’s none of my business,’ May offered. She was trying not to remember what the old woman had told her at the Flying Fish, about sneaking off to the Captain’s House and lying in the goose feathers having sex. With old Mr Fennymore. The thought of it disgusted her. It seemed that sex was all around her, oozing and creeping, contaminating what was supposed to be clean. Leonie Beam making eyes at her father. Ivy and Lucas in their hollow on the island. And another image: a shadowy room, lit by a single shaded lamp. Two people on a sofa, naked legs wound together, and a noise, the same sound, two voices. May squeezed her eyes shut, then forced them open again.

‘Yes, it was,’ Elizabeth said abruptly. ‘It was long ago. It doesn’t matter any more.’

Her voice and the sight of her face helped May to overcome her distaste. She took her arm and steered her to one of the straight-backed chairs. ‘Can I get you something? Some, um, water or anything?’

‘No, thank you. I’m quite all right. No one knows any of this, May. Do you understand?’

I don’t want to know it either, May thought. Why is it me, why should I have to? ‘Did Doone?’

Elizabeth looked startled. ‘No. Of course not.’

That was something. It wasn’t Doone who had fed the knowledge into her mind. She sat down at the table opposite Elizabeth, as if they were about to eat dinner together. ‘I’ve forgotten it already,’ May said. Alison had told her once that it was the right thing to say if you knew something that somebody would rather you didn’t know.

‘Thank you. You are a very nice and thoughtful young woman, May.’

‘I wish that was true.’

Elizabeth only smiled. ‘Do you want me to tell you about the Captain?’

‘Um. Well, all right. Yeah, go on then.’

‘The Captain was a whaleman. He was from Maine, not very far from here, and he went down to New Bedford to sign on a ship in the fleet there. He was brave and lucky, and in time he came to command his own ship. His wife, who was then his widow and an old woman, told my grandmother all this when she first came to live on the bluff.’