Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection: Moon Island, Sunrise, Follies - Rosie Thomas - Страница 16

‘You remember, May, I told you the Captain’s was the first house here on the bluff. Then my grandfather bought a parcel of land next to it and built a summer cottage for his wife, and old Mr Swayne built what’s now the Beams’ place.’

It was a relief for Elizabeth to talk about land and history rather than to recall the other details of those long-ago summers. The girl had startled her by making such a shrewd guess, that was all, and it was unlucky that her own reaction to it had been so unguarded.

Her guess could be forgotten again, May had said so, yet Elizabeth had the sense that the ground was shivering beneath them both, that some seismic disturbance would expose what had been buried and believed to be obliterated. It was May’s vulnerable age and the blindness of pain written in her face, and the crows’ wings of secrets that even Elizabeth couldn’t guess at that had set the tremors off. She was afraid that they wouldn’t subside into stillness again. Carefully, deliberately therefore, she concentrated for this moment on what it was safe to remember.

Elizabeth could hear her grandmother’s soft voice as clearly as if she were in the room instead of May. The old lady had loved to talk about the early days of her marriage, of the novelty of leaving Boston behind and travelling east to the coast to play at house in the cottage above the seashore. The blue-and-gold tea service had belonged to those times, and most of the heavy furniture that still filled the rooms, and the beginnings of the flower garden surrounding the house.

Even late in life the Senator’s wife had been a dreamy, otherworldly creature, made almost ethereal by long years of invalidism and cosseting by her husband and servants. She had told the story relayed to her by the Captain’s widow in languorous detail and the very words she used had stayed in Elizabeth’s mind. They murmured and whispered around the image of the island woman. White, scraped face. The poor, sad creature. Eyes set deep in the staring bone. A tragedy, and quite a mystery.

Long ago when she was a young wife and mother, the Captain’s wife had been sitting beside the window of the solid house her husband had built for her. It was within sight and sound of the sea that had made his fortune, but at the same time it turned its shoulder a little aside as if to emphasise that its hold on him had slackened now. It was a stormy evening, the last of the light just fading. The waves boiled and coalesced, and burst themselves on the shingle with furious energy. The young wife was musing on the desolation of the world beyond the windows and on the comfort within, where the stove glowed and her husband was whistling softly as he bent to some task. Their new baby lay asleep on her lap. She dropped her eyes from the window to look at the rosy little features. Then she looked up again.

She saw a face staring in at her, so close that the features seemed almost flattened against the glass. The hollow eyes were wide and staring, and the mouth stretched open in a silent howl. The wet hair, a woman’s long hair, stuck to the apparition’s forehead and cheeks like coiled black snakes.

The Captain’s wife screamed and swept the baby close to her heart. Her husband came running and looked where she pointed, but the face had already vanished. He ran out into the storm, leaving the door banging in the wind, but although he searched until the rain had soaked him to the skin there was no one to be found. He came back into the lamplight and tried to reassure his wife, telling her that what she had seen was only a trick of the light or a spectre conjured out of her own imagination. At last he was able to persuade her to follow him up the stairs to the safety of their bed and to lay the baby in her crib at the foot of it.

The storm wore itself out by the next morning. A day of stillness passed, then another and the Captain’s wife began to believe that the face framed by the snakes of hair had after all been imaginary, just as her husband insisted.

On the third day, a fisherman was passing close by the seaward side of the island. He noticed an unusual concentration of seabirds lifting and circling around a point on the hillside above the shore, and growing more curious as he watched them he turned his boat and took it in to land. He made fast and climbed the slope to where the whalers’ old stone tavern and refuge looked out to sea. In those days the cabin was already deserted and falling into disrepair because the few ships that still passed now made for Pittsharbor itself. The fisherman glanced in under the stone lintel, then walked out again into the sunlight. A cloud of birds rose with noisy cries from the trees behind the cabin and wheeled into the sky above his head. The man climbed slowly to see what it was that had drawn them in such numbers.

A woman’s body hung from a branch of one of the trees. It slowly revolved on its rope, as if the buffeting of the wings and beaks had set it turning on itself.

When the poor body was cut down and the pockets searched for clues to the woman’s identity, a piece of folded paper was found with the Captain’s name scribbled on it. The words written beneath his name read, I could not find it within myself to take the life of an infant’s father. I take my own life in its place and I bequeath you the legacy of remembering what you have done. Sarah.

Sarah was not a local woman and the enquiries that were made never revealed where she had come from nor why she had chosen to make such a sad end of herself. The Captain himself always steadfastly denied prior knowledge of her, or any of the details relating to her life and death. He had been, he said, to many strange places in his time and had seen many peculiar things that did not lend themselves to ordinary explanation. He was content to let mysteries lie. To his wife he insisted, ‘She was some poor, deranged woman in the grip of a sad fixation which cannot now be explained. A decent burial is the best farewell we can give the poor soul.’

Sarah was buried on the island. Her lonely grave was within sight and sound of the sea and some of the fishermen’s wives, who guessed at a history they would never know for sure, made it their duty to tend it. They planted herbs, which flourished in the broken ground, and at the beginning there were often fresh-cut flowers placed in a glass jar at the grave’s head. But there was no name or stone to mark the place, and over the years the mullein and catnip ran wild around it and the low grassy hump sank back into the hillside once again. The suicide’s grave was slowly forgotten, except when the Captain’s old widow recalled the history of it for her new neighbour.

Elizabeth Page Freshett had listened to the widow’s story with a shiver that made her want to forget what she had heard. She was waiting for the birth of her first child, and the image of a face staring in from the darkness at a mother and baby in the lamplight cruelly embedded itself in her imagination. There were often times after her son was born when she looked at the blank window glass as darkness fell and hurried to draw the curtains across it. But she never saw anything except a reflection of herself and the comfortable room behind her.

Her granddaughter was a different woman. The young Elizabeth was neither dreamy nor delicate and she was not especially susceptible to fears or morbid imaginings. But then she had fallen in love, and after the first delight the helplessness of her state seemed to peel her flesh raw and to leave her at the mercy of fierce influences that were not explicable by the steady rules that had governed her all her life.

And in this naked, elated and despairing condition she had seen the woman on the island.

She described her features and appearance to her grandmother, and the old woman lay back on her sofa and pleated her cashmere shawl between her ringed fingers. ‘There were stories, some of the fishermen’s wives used to whisper about a haunting. They always said in my young days that she only showed herself to other women. To young women in trouble, as a warning and a reminder.’ The diamonds flashed as the fingers suddenly stopped their fidgeting with the soft shawl. ‘Elizabeth, are you in trouble?’

‘No. Of course not.’ She knew that much, at least. Aaron wouldn’t let that happen to her. Elizabeth kept her face and her voice as bright as she could, not knowing that all she achieved was a pain-filled parody of happiness which the old woman chose to ignore. ‘I’m going to Europe, aren’t I? I’m going to see all the sights and have experiences I will remember for the rest of my life.’

‘Yes, my dear, you are and you will,’ the Senator’s widow had said.

*

Aaron and Elizabeth lay in their nest in the deserted Captain’s House. In the house next door Elizabeth’s steamer trunks were packed and her ticket for the Carpathia lay waiting for her. It was the last hour they would be able to steal together.

Elizabeth’s head rested on her lover’s chest. She could hear the steady pounding of his heart and when she moved her fingers she traced the outline of his mouth and the curve of his nose, knowing his features by touch as intimately as she knew her own. She was watching the window above their heads and the infinite gradations of pollen-yellow light that filtered through the salty glass.

‘I knew there was a suicide’s grave,’ Aaron said.

His voice resonated within the arch of his rib-cage and Elizabeth moved her head a fraction, to press her ear closer to the sound. It was like hearing two voices, the inner and the outer. ‘I saw her, standing there in the trees. I know it was Sarah and that she was watching me.’

Aaron would not deny what she had said. He lay in silence, sceptical and separate from her, listening to the contradiction of their joined breathing.

Elizabeth suddenly felt the tears running from the corners of her eyes.

‘I’ll come back,’ she whispered. ‘In a year I’ll come back to you.’

‘Is that it?’ May demanded. She was rubbing the mosquito bites on her bare ankles where the raw patches wept like tiny red eyes. The room, the house and Elizabeth’s murmuring voice made her shudder with claustrophobia. Why had the passage in the book about the grave seemed to jump out at her, when there was just such a real grave, if it wasn’t that Doone had read it before her? Angrily she pushed the thought out of her mind. She could stay real, if she concentrated hard enough. ‘You’re saying, like, this is a woman’s ghost, which only appears to women and I’m in some kind of trouble so she’s warning me just the same as she warned you when you were young?’ She shook her head, not waiting for Elizabeth’s answer, and gave a dismissive bark of laughter. The echo of it seemed to hang in the room.

‘You asked me to tell you the history,’ Elizabeth neutrally reminded her.

May jerked her head, gathering her forces, her mouth set in a hard line. Doone and her obsession, and Elizabeth and all the faded, musty business of regret and old age, and her own half-recollections and the spindrift of unease that rose from the island itself were like a gas threatening to choke her. She needed to jump away from the swirling cloud of it into fresh air. All she wanted was to be like Ivy, who was thin and impervious and desirable. ‘It sounds like total garbage to me,’ she snapped. Then, seeing the displeasure in Elizabeth’s eyes, she had to redeem herself by saying something that was clever but still distancing: ‘I mean, there’s history and there’s hysteria, isn’t there?’

There was a moment’s quiet. ‘You may be right,’ Elizabeth said softly.

May stood up and said that she would have to be getting back home.

The good weather still held. May walked through the stones and spikes of the Bennisons’ Japanese garden to the top of the beach steps. The view unrolled beneath her, shimmering in the heat-haze, as if it had been set up by a director who wasn’t afraid of using all the clichés to convey the perfection of a summer’s day on the beach.

Ivy and the Beams were playing one of their endless games of volleyball. Her legs glimmered like smooth toffee as she leaped and punched, and Lucas’s hair fanned around his face as he dived in response. His back was exactly the same colour as Ivy’s legs. Out on the backdrop of water the handkerchief sails tacked thin wakes behind them.

Marian sat with her baby grandchildren crawling around her and three of her daughters-in-law within ordering distance. Richard Beam slept in a canvas chair with his hat tilted over his face and Marty Stiegel wandered at the lacy edge of the waves. He wore a camera and the baby in a sling across his chest.

Leonie lay back in another low chair not far from Richard. In the midst of the contented families she felt that she was no more than a brittle composition of long bones. John had unobtrusively drawn closer to her chair. He sat on a sweatshirt spread on the sand, his ankles crossed and the fingers of one hand circling the wrist of the other. He was looking out to sea, apparently watching Karyn and Elliot trying to catch some wind in their dinghy sails. He wasn’t an ally, Leonie was thinking, not as she had first imagined he would be, before the kiss in the car-park. Almost without their acknowledgement the issue between them had become bigger than that, and darker because it carried the threat that everything might change because of it.

Before she encountered John Duhane, before this vacation, Leonie had gone on with her life day by day. She had done her job because she enjoyed it and found a refuge in it, and she had been Tom’s wife. The unhappy aspects of their relationship had been forced like a flower under glass by her failure to conceive, but the seeds had been there all along, and she had dutifully watered and tended the plant of their marriage because that was what she expected of herself. She hadn’t looked beyond what she possessed except to long for a baby – a yearning that had soaked up all the desires she had and more.

But in the way that everything can change, irrevocably and absolutely without warning, Leonie knew that her life had taken a different direction now. She didn’t want to drag the bulk of her unhappiness about with her any longer. The weight had become intolerable. If she had the choice simply to drop it and take a new direction – yes, that was the choice she wanted to make. It would have to be her choice. Tom would not do anything to ease the tension between the two of them; the more she thought about it the more certain she became that he would never make himself the villain. And John was inhibited by a debt of honour owed equally to his daughters and to her own married state; she didn’t think he would make the first move, although he hovered close enough to it.

Uncertainty made time stretch and distort, like a long road shimmering in a heat-haze. These beach days of sunshine and waiting, and Marian’s autocracy, seemed to dwindle into infinity behind and ahead of Leonie. She moved her bare feet in the sand, an impatient flurry of movement which made John turn his head and look at her. ‘It’s too hot out here, don’t you think?’ she said to him, the words dropping into a vacuum in which the waves and the gulls and the children’s voices were suddenly silenced. ‘Shall we go inside out of the sun?’

He unlinked his hands and stood up, as easy as if nothing significant were happening. They saw that May was walking in the thin strip of shadow at the foot of the beach wall, but as soon as she noticed they were watching her she veered sharply and arrived at the edge of the volleyball game.

‘Come up and have a cold drink in my house,’ John said.

They walked away from Marian and the encampment of baby toys and strollers. Leonie felt the eyes of her mother-in-law following her, but for once there was no call asking her to bring Sidonie’s parasol or some bottled water when she came back down again. The shingle was cool underfoot, then the wooden steps burned her with their splintery heat. She hopped too fast and almost overbalanced, and John steadied her with one hand.

‘Sorry. Should have some shoes on.’

They crossed the garden and climbed the shallow steps to the porch. Shade fell across Leonie’s burning face like a blessing. John held open the door for her and she passed into the shadowy room. The dimness and the wintry smell of woodsmoke was momentarily confusing, and she looked around to regain her bearings. A Walkman and a scatter of tapes lay on the table, amid a litter of dirty plates and glasses. Sneakers and a baseball cap and a Coke bottle decorated the steep stairs.

John opened the old-fashioned refrigerator and took out ice and mineral water. He filled a glass and gave it to her, and Leonie drank and rolled the beaded coldness between her sweaty hands. It was the first time they had been alone together since their walk to Berry Island. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.

‘Why do you keep saying that?’

‘I suppose I’m just used to it.’

‘That sounds like the answer of a weaker person than I think you are.’

He took her by the arms and while he was holding her looked carefully into her face. Instead of saying anything she waited, letting him discern whatever there was to see. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

She knew what she wanted now, this minute, and the recognition made her skin burn. Beyond that she had no idea how to sort the longings into a sequence she could give voice to.

He slid his hands to her shoulders and drew her against him. There was still time, Leonie thought wildly. Everything that had happened between them up to now – talk, lunch, kiss, walk – could be lightly dismissed or explained away. She could give a little regretful laugh or a rueful shrug, and step away from John Duhane and back into the dissemblance of her life. I don’t want to. I don’t want to step back. It was impossible for everything to go on being exactly the same. Whatever she did, it would have to mean change beginning at this moment.

Even as she hesitated Leonie was reflecting on damage, and how the instrument of her infidelity would almost certainly smash the last struts of her marriage and the remnants of Tom’s affection for her – if there were any. There was John’s life to consider also, and his daughters’, and the complications that would be visited on all of them. But if there was no stepping back, all she could hope to do was walk forward. The thought was like a reprieve and it made a beat of happiness shiver through her. John saw the change in her eyes and bent his head as she lifted hers.

When they kissed the tape of guilt and self-admonition stopped running. It was natural to do what they were doing and the urgency of it amazed them both. Leonie gave herself up to him and he took the offering with pleasure. It was a long time before they moved apart again and even then he kept hold of her, as if he was afraid that otherwise he might lose her.

He was looking for words and at last he said, ‘I’ve wanted to do that almost ever since I met you. But I don’t want to cause pain, or do damage. I’ve experienced enough of that.’

His echoing of her feelings was so precise that she laughed in sudden surprise and touched his cheek with her fingers. What scarred veterans we both are, she thought. ‘I knew you did, and I know what you don’t want because I don’t want exactly the same things. But neither do I want to turn my back –’ she paused, reversing her palms upwards to reveal their emptiness ‘– on whatever chance we might have. Am I allowed to acknowledge that? Or is it misplaced?’

‘No,’ he said gently. ‘Not misplaced as far as I am concerned. But I am free to say that because I’m not married or in any way attached. Except to my children, that is.’

Leonie nodded. ‘There are some things I should tell you. I’d like to tell you, before anything else happens between us. If anything else is going to happen, of course.’

‘Would a proper drink be a help?’

‘Yes, it would.’

He found a bottle and poured whiskey for both of them. Leonie sat down on one of the battered chesterfields and let her head fall back luxuriously against the cushions. The bright sunlight squared behind the old windows made the whiskey taste dramatic and nocturnal. She blinked back the tears the first gulp brought to her eyes. ‘The failure between Tom and me began a long time ago. Began and took its course. It’s complete now. It was nothing to do with you, then or now, except that on the day we had lunch at Sandy’s Bar I looked down at my plate and it dawned on me that Tom and I didn’t love each other any more. And once I knew it I couldn’t get rid of the knowledge.’

‘I understand that.’

‘I did that clumsy thing of kissing you in the car-park. It was in a kind of reckless glee, because of what I had just realised and because I knew that at least there would be a difference now, instead of the same old painful monotony.’

‘And there was I thinking you kissed me because you wanted to kiss me.’

Leonie took another happy swallow of the whiskey. The rawness of it in her throat was fiercely pleasurable. She thought she could easily get drunk, letting all her locked-up feelings run sloppily loose, then climb into bed with John Duhane and never get up again. ‘Oh, I did want to. And I wanted to give Spencer Newton something to think about, of course.’

‘Of course.’

He wasn’t touching her now. He was simply sitting beside her and listening, and the wholeness of his attention made her understand how isolated she had been. She basked in the comfort of his notice, resting her cheek against the glass she had just emptied. ‘I think I’m an intimacy junkie.’

The idea was tangential enough to make her wonder if she was already drunk, but John didn’t miss a beat. ‘Yes, maybe we both are. And we’re afraid of our addiction, so we shy away from what we long for.’

He was at least as lonely as she was, Leonie understood. She remembered what John had told her about Suzanne and the other stillborn relationships that had followed Alison’s death. It wasn’t just May and Ivy, then, who had pinched the bud before it flowered, but something in John himself. And what did that mean about him and Alison? ‘Tell me about her,’ she asked and waited, suddenly aware of the shadows in the room that remained out of reach of the sunlight, and the insistent murmur of the sea.

‘Al was very … vivid. I told you. She could swing between euphoria and despair within a day, sometimes it seemed like within an hour. And she never saw anything wrong with that, she thought it was how life should be lived. She never made compromises about what she wanted or what she believed in. I always loved her, from the time we first met.’

‘And she loved you.’

He took it as a question. ‘Yes, in her way.’

‘Were you faithful to each other.’

‘I was.’

On the beach May pushed herself into the volleyball game. The bright sunlight made her frown but Kevin Beam sidestepped to allow her some space and she flashed him what she thought might be an Ivy smile. If she could penetrate this circle, she thought, and join up with the younger Beam brothers and their dumb games and be near Lucas, then she could get free of Doone. If she hung out with the other kids and smoked weed and giggled like Gail and Ivy and the others, then everything would be ordinary again. There would be no island woman and no grave overgrown with wild herbs and nothing to be afraid of.

The ball boomed over her head to the opposite side of the net and Lucas swung his crossed wrists to connect sweetly with it. The ball soared again as a star-shaped image of brown limbs and torso and a face blurred with hair printed itself behind May’s eyes. She planted her feet apart and bent from the hips, waiting for the ball as she had seen Ivy do, but she was too late and her eyes were still dazzled as it came out of nowhere and hit her on the shoulder.

‘Hey, Maysy, that’s some cool play. We want you on our team for Pittsharbor Day.’

She knew that Kevin and Joel were smirking behind her back. She twirled round to face them and forced another smile. ‘Sure. You can count on me.’

‘Thanks, man.’

‘May!’ Lucas was calling her. He punched the ball in her direction and as if she were pulled towards him on a thread May’s head lifted in response and her back straightened. She jumped and her arms stretched out to meet the swelling black dot.

The blue air seemed to shimmer around her and gravity lost its hold as her feet left the ground. She knew she couldn’t fail and sure enough her shoulder drove her fist through an immaculate arc and her knuckles connected with a jolt of pain that was also a stab of pleasure. The ball skimmed back over the net and Ivy missed it altogether.

‘Yeah!’ Lucas smiled and swept the hair back from his forehead. Ivy and Gail applauded, even though it was a half-ironic slow handclap.

In the unaccustomed perfection of the instant May was thin and strong, and confident of her powers. She leapt once more in pure exultation and Marty Stiegel caught her in his camera lens. ‘Good one,’ he told her casually and lowered the camera again. He adjusted the sling tied to his chest and cupped his free hand protectively around the baby Justine’s sun-bonneted head before he strolled on again.

‘Five two,’ Lucas called. He jerked a thumbs-up at May and she felt such a pinch of love for him that it crimped her chest and threatened to stop her breath. She bent double, pretending that it was the play that had winded her. After the game the players streamed down to the water’s edge. Lucas and the other boys dived like seals under the glittering swell, while Ivy and Gail and Richard’s daughters shrieked and danced in the shallows. Droplets of water starred their arms and shoulders with diamonds. May was sweaty and still scarlet from her moment of glory, but she was too self-conscious to wear her swimsuit. She hovered in her shorts and T-shirt until Joel sneaked behind her, planted his hands at the small of her back and propelled her into the water. She stumbled forward and lost her balance. A wave broke and she fell, hearing the shouts and laughter.

The water was icy. She gasped and a flood filled her mouth and nose. She came up coughing and blinded, humiliated by water that was not much more than knee-deep.

The next wave washed another body up beside her. Lucas jumped out of the surf and grabbed her wrists, then dipped and rolled his shoulders to hoist her on to his back. Only staggering a little under the burden he stood upright and lunged for the deeper water.

His back was slick and cold. May’s mouth collided with his neck and she tasted salt and – with a shock of amazement – the unique flavour of his skin. He was gasping with laughter and still wading, drunkenly now because she was slipping from his grasp, and before it was too late she pressed a blind and desperate kiss against his shoulder.

Lucas tottered and they fell together. Even under the weight of water May thought she could hear his laughter, but when she surfaced again he was watching out for her. ‘Swim,’ he ordered, and obediently she rolled on her back and kicked towards the island. Immediately the world receded and there was nothing but the sun on her closed eyelids, and the fingers of the tide combing her hair, and the turbulence of Lucas swimming alongside her. Happiness made her buoyant. She forgot that she had been afraid of the rolling currents and the island with its dark spine of trees, even the omnipresent dark shadow of Doone.

They swam for fifty yards, then Lucas stopped and trod water. ‘You okay?’

She nodded, speechless, wishing she could offer him something other than her awkwardness in return for the gift of his attention. In the end she just smiled at him. Lucas looked at her for perhaps half a second longer than he had ever done before.

Ivy was waiting on the beach. The double band of her silvery bikini gleamed as she half turned, hands resting on her hips and all her weight balanced on one leg.

‘Time to head back,’ Lucas said. He ducked under the water and when he surfaced he struck out with a powerful crawl. May paddled after him towards the beach. When she waded out he was already standing with Ivy, their heads close together as she rubbed his hair with her towel. ‘Don’t get cold, May,’ Lucas called. ‘Go put some dry clothes on.’

May’s ears filled up with extraneous sound again. She heard the surf and the complaints of gulls, as well as Ivy’s laughter. But she did exactly as Lucas told her. She picked up a dark-blue towel and swathed herself in it, before plodding up the shingle towards the beach steps and the Captain’s House.

The light in the room had dimmed as the sun travelled westwards. It was the colour of dust now and the shadows in the corners were touched with violet. Leonie and John had talked for a long time, exchanging their histories in a conversation that seemed to her to have been more intimate than sex. They touched each other’s hands and explored the contours of one another’s faces, but it wasn’t until the day receded and left them in the dusk that they stopped talking.

The whiskey bottle was half empty, but Leonie had never felt more clear-headed. ‘It’s getting dark,’ she whispered.

‘Not quite yet.’

The cushions of the chesterfield smelled of mildew and smoke. The timbers of the house seemed to shiver as Leonie and John wrapped themselves together. There was a long, blind interval while they kissed again.

Then Leonie opened her eyes.

There was a face at the window, muffled to the throat in a dark wrap, looking in at them. The eyes were staring with horror in the white mask and the wet hair lay in ropes plastered to the skull.

May had no idea how long she stood frozen to the porch boards. In truth it was probably no more than two or three seconds. But she knew that the tableau of her father and Leonie Beam with their arms and legs entwined and their mouths greedily fastened together was already indelible. She would never be able to make it go away.

It bred another image out of itself.

Once again the other picture came swimming up out of a dark place. The pairs of legs and arms seemed to writhe and multiply, clothed and naked, and the intent unseeing faces fed on one another until they blurred and became one, and turned into everyone she knew and everything she feared.

May drew back her fist, just as she had prepared herself to punch the volleyball, with the same ecstasy of determination. But now she drove her arm straight through the window glass. There was a smash and a scream – she never knew whether it was hers or not – and a white-hot wire of pain ran up her arm and straight down to her heart.

The floor, the rugs and the mildewed cushions were splashed with blood. Leonie knelt in front of her with an armful of towels and over her shoulder May glimpsed the shocked crescent of her father’s face.

‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ Leonie was murmuring over and over. The towels were bloody too, but there wasn’t as much of it as she had feared. ‘John, bring me a bowl of water, some cottonwool, anything.’

May’s fist was clenched and the curled fingers were mired with blood. Leonie swabbed at the lacerated knuckles and May bit the inside of her cheeks to stop herself moaning aloud.

‘Look, see, you’re okay. Open your fingers. Show me, May, please let me help.’

John came with a bowl of warm water and offered it up. Leonie rinsed out a cloth and swabbed the cuts clean. Gently she prised the curled fingers loose. The veined wrist was miraculously unscathed, the palm was sticky with blood but uncut. Leonie bowed her head with silent relief.

‘May, do you know what you just did? Do you know what you could have done, severed an artery?’ John’s voice was loud and Leonie could hear the raw vibration of horror in it. He gasped for breath and the loss of control told Leonie more clearly than all their hours of talk how deeply he cared for his daughters. ‘You could have bled to death.’

‘John …’ She tried to calm him but May sat upright.

‘I don’t care. I wouldn’t care if I did die. Like Doone Bennison.’

John made a movement that was so quick and violent Leonie thought he was going to hit the child. Instead he enveloped her head in his big hands and pulled her face against his chest. He tried to rock her, murmuring, ‘No, no.’

Slowly Leonie stood up. She wanted to leave them alone and to spare herself from seeing this. But May snatched at her wrist with her undamaged hand. ‘Stay,’ she commanded.

She was so angry with her father for what she had just seen that she wouldn’t be alone with him, even if it had to be Leonie who was the buffer between them.

Leonie hesitated and saw John unwillingly nod. ‘I’ll dress those fingers,’ she said.

There was a first-aid box in one of the cupboards. She fetched it, checked the lacerations for splinters of glass and swathed May’s hand in bandages. May sat silent, uncomplaining. At the same time John swept up the broken glass and wrapped the jagged fragments in newspaper. He found a piece of a cardboard carton and cut it to fit over the hole in the window, then taped it securely in place.

At last May sat nursing her bandaged fist in her lap. Leonie made a cup of tea and gave it to her, and the child obediently drank it. Then she put the empty cup aside and stared through the window with its disfiguring patch of card at the velvety sky beyond. There was a bruised quiet.

John sat down on the chesterfield at May’s side. ‘Do you think we should talk about this? About what you saw happening between Leonie and me?’

May turned her head stiffly. She darted a look at Leonie, not her father. ‘Not now. I don’t want to.’

‘Why did you try to hurt yourself?’

‘I don’t know. I just did it.’

Leonie sensed that it was the truth. Also that there were too many other things that May did not know or understand.

‘You won’t do it again,’ John said.

‘No,’ May answered quietly. After a moment she added, ‘I think I’ll go upstairs now.’

They waited until they heard the door of her bedroom close and the faint creak of footsteps subside overhead.

John dropped his head into his hands. ‘Jesus.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry she had to see what she did. But doesn’t she have to learn to accept sooner or later that there’s a world beyond her immediate wishes and concerns?’

‘Yes. But I don’t know how that happens.’

They sat in silence after that, occupied with their separate fears.

May felt calm, as if breaking the glass and shattering the image behind it had been a catharsis. She walked the thirteen steps across her room and back again, then touched the tips of her fingers to the door, checking that it was firmly closed. She turned again and saw the three books innocently lying in their place on the shelf.

Without thinking she picked one up and awkwardly flipped the pages with her bandaged hand. It was the whaling book and she looked with indifference at the heavy old-fashioned type until she noticed some pages near the end that were marked with pencil. Words were faintly underlined, not consecutive words, nor did they make any sense when she read them in order, but still some faint association nagged in her mind. She frowned at the brown-edged pages, then at the pencil marks themselves because they seemed to contain some familiarity that maddeningly swam just beneath the surface of her consciousness. She riffled through the pages in the opposite direction and found nothing. She was about to discard the book again when frustration made the connection for her.

She had flipped the pages of Doone’s diary in this way and felt just the same baffled impatience with a secret she couldn’t unlock. The skin at the back of May’s neck suddenly prickled with cold.

She placed the whaling book open and face up on the top shelf, and picked up the red-and-black diary. Some of Doone’s last entries, the coded ones scribbled with such heat that the groups of numbers were gouged into the underlying pages, were written in pencil. The same soft, blunt pencil.

May stared at the trios and pairs of numbers. She realised that her mouth was open and her breath snicked audibly in her chest. Eagerness fought with an impulse to throw the books aside and never look at them again. With exaggerated care she smoothed both sets of pages, glancing from one to the other.

Then she remembered the birthday present. It had been a gift from an English relative of Alison’s when Ivy turned thirteen. The great-aunt hadn’t seen Ivy or May for a long time and the present was much too young for Ivy, whose interests had long ago switched from toys to nail polish and sleep-over pyjamas. May had inherited the book. She remembered the laminated white board covers and bold tide lettering quite clearly. It was Great Games, Puzzles and Quizzes for Kids. One of the pages was headed ‘Secrets to Share: a simple book code’.

May licked her dry lips. That was what it was, of course, Doone’s secret code. Simple, once you knew which book she had chosen. The trios of numbers were page, line and word. Where there were only pairs of numbers she had found the word she wanted on the same page.

May chose a group of numbers at random. Her bandaged fingers and the way her hand shook made it hard to turn the pages of the Dolphin book. The first set of three numbers – page, line and word, she murmured to herself as she laboriously counted them off – yielded I. The second gave her followed and the third, which she knew would be proof that her guess was right, was him.

I followed him.

Breathlessly she took the next chunk of numbers and slowly counted out their placings too. She was staring at it so intently that the book’s sullen typeface began to blur in front of her eyes. It took her several minutes to decode Doone’s words but at last she had He turned around and saw me.

She glanced up briefly at the bare room. There was the rug covering the burn mark in the haircord carpet, the faint outlines on the walls where Doone’s posters had been taped, the French bed.

Now, May thought. Now I’ll know.