Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection: Moon Island, Sunrise, Follies - Rosie Thomas - Страница 17

By nine o’clock in the morning on Pittsharbor Day preparations in Main Street and on the green beside the church were in full swing. Flags and bunting strung between the Wigwam craft gallery and Sandy’s Restaurant stirred in a gentle breeze off the sea. Main Street was closed to traffic for the day and storekeepers were laying out displays of goods on the sidewalk in front of their windows. The Wigwam’s owner made a pyramid of Native American baskets and arranged an armful of dried flowers on the top.

‘Going to be a good one,’ Alton Purrit remarked to Edie Clark in the Sunday Street Bakery.

‘I don’t know as it makes much odds,’ Edie said with a touch of sourness. The home-bake stalls on the green took away more business than the day’s extra visitors ever brought in.

‘Well, there’s no harm in getting the town talked about by the rest of the county,’ Alton chuckled. The Jenny Any would be full all day long taking visitors on twelve-dollar trips around the bay and islands.

‘Talk never cost anything, of course.’ Edie had to have the last word. She bundled his bread into a brown bag and folded the mouth with a sharp crease before handing it over. When Alton took it without a word she was afraid she might have been unfriendly and to make amends she nodded towards two people passing beyond the bakery window. ‘Nice to see Aaron out and about.’

He was leaning heavily on Hannah’s arm. They shuffled slowly down the sidewalk towards Main Street and the harbour.

‘Mhm. He don’t look too bright, though,’ Alton said. ‘Morning, Edie.’ He tucked his bag inside his year-round windbreaker and headed out into the street.

Aaron stopped for breath on the corner of Sunday and Main. Glancing at his face, Hannah steered him to a bench in the shade in front of Howard’s Hardware. They sat in silence for a minute between two pyramids of saucepans and shiny galvanised buckets, while Aaron sucked the mild air into his lungs. ‘Just look at it,’ he rasped, when he could speak again.

Hannah surveyed the flags and flowers and tables of goods for sale. ‘It’s only a day, what harm can it do? The visitors like it and so do the children.’

When she turned her head again she was pained to see that the seams in Aaron’s cheeks were glistening with tears. She knew him perfectly, from so many years of watching and accepting his ways. It wasn’t just the catchpenny street decorations, or the traders’ determination to do as much selling as possible in the invented name of Pittsharbor Day that had made him weep. They were only the outward signs of changes he could do nothing to prevent. Aaron was crying for a time and a place that he had lost, and for chances that would never offer themselves to him again.

Hannah understood too that he would despise his own grieving, because he would interpret it as weakness. She inclined her head so as to seem not to notice his tears. Her knee-bones stood out tiny and sharp under the folds of her skirt. Then she took Aaron’s arm through hers. The back of his hand when she touched it felt as brittle as a dead leaf. ‘Have you got your puffer?’ she asked.

Aaron used an inhaler to help his exhausted lungs. ‘Not using it out here,’ he reprimanded her. There was a blue tinge to the skin around his lips and the rest of his face was stone grey.

A pair of dead leaves was exactly what they were, Hannah thought, still clinging to the branch while the fat spring buds pushed out all around them. Pittsharbor was putting out new foliage in gaudy colours and they hung on at the tip of their twig, waiting for the brutal wind to dispatch them. How cruel old age turns out to be, she reflected, and a twist of sympathy for Aaron that was all wound up with love and exasperation pulled at her heart. She felt a distaste suddenly equalling his for the new Pittsharbor with its gaudy decorations and artistic shops and hand-painted signs set out to catch the summer visitors’ jaded attention.

The town that she and Aaron had grown up in had been a harsh but logical place. It was governed by the winter ice and short summer’s heat, and by fishing and making do against the weather, and the other plain rules of survival. It had been the same way since the first houses were built around the harbour. There had been no pizza and subs, or quilt shops lining Main Street, or summer visitors in their rental cottages. Except for the Freshetts to begin with and the other families who had followed them out to the bluff. It didn’t occur to Hannah that she might also let herself grieve for a way of life that was finished. She sat and held on to Aaron’s arm instead, gazing expressionlessly ahead of her.

A red jeep swung down Sunday Street and braked noisily in front of the bakery. A young man in bermudas and sneakers leapt out and ran into the store, leaving music tinnily thumping from the jeep’s speakers. Hannah knew him by sight. He came every year to stay at one of the cottages in the woods behind the bluff. The land had once belonged to Aaron, from a parcel he had bought for next to nothing right after the war. In time he had sold it again, using the money from the sale to extend and weatherproof the house where he and Hannah now lived. Over the years a series of boxy houses had been put up in clearings in the woods and the occupants’ name-boards lined the access track that had once led only to a loggers’ clearing. The young man sprinted out again and tossed a brown bag into the passenger seat. He reversed up to the top of the road and accelerated away.

As the din faded Hannah was thinking about Elizabeth Newton. If she had come home from Europe and agreed to marry Aaron, against the Freshetts’ wishes, would he be a happier man now? It seemed cruellest of all that there was no way of telling. The different paths their lives might have taken were as conclusively lost as the old Pittsharbor their possibilities had once inhabited.

‘I’m ready to walk back now,’ Aaron said.

Hannah had left the station-wagon at the other end of Sunday Street, not far from the church. Aaron had insisted that he wanted to walk down the town first thing to see what inanities were going on and that, of course, was what they had done.

They stood up and moved to where the sharp sun sliced across the sidewalk. With the warmth of it on his back Aaron put Hannah’s arm aside. They walked slowly past Edie Clark’s windows. ‘Leave them all to it,’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ Hannah agreed.

Spencer saw the station-wagon with Aaron and Hannah inside as it turned into the Fennymores’ entry from the road behind the five houses. He murmured to Alexander, ‘I’ll call on him now. I guess it’s as good a time as any.’

He waited for a few minutes, then sauntered after the car. Hannah was coming down the steps from the porch. ‘Good-morning, Mrs Fennymore. How are you?’

Spencer Newton had impeccable, slightly old-fashioned manners that went with his preppy clothes and air of unshakeable superiority. Spencer would never be rude, or even abrupt. Like his mother he made Hannah feel wrong-footed from the moment he opened his mouth, but she held her ground on the bottom step. ‘Thank you, Spencer. What can I do for you this morning?’

‘Is Aaron at home?’

‘He’s resting. Can I help you?’

Spencer put his head on one side and smiled. ‘I was hoping to discuss our proposition.’

‘No.’

The smile only broadened. ‘Mrs Fennymore, you can see the sense of it, surely? If Mr Fennymore agrees to sell the land to me it will give him – and you – a healthy capital sum that you can invest against medical expenses, nursing requirements, whatever you both may need in the future.’

Hannah said nothing, only watched him with her round bird’s eyes.

‘You both know me well. I belong to Pittsharbor and I love the beach as much as you do.’ When Hannah made no response he corrected himself, ‘Or almost as much. I wouldn’t do anything or sanction any development over there that was in any way unsuitable or intrusive. I’d like to build a small house for myself, one or at the most two others, well screened, to cover my own outlay…’ Spencer couldn’t help glancing at the coveted ground as he spoke. It was the tongue of headland that backed the southern end of Moon Island Beach, from the side of the Fennymores’ property to the curve of the bluff road as it wound towards Pittsharbor. It was prime seafront land, ripe for development. Aaron had acquired it from old man Swayne forty years ago.

‘No,’ Hannah repeated.

Spencer had been wheedling and cajoling about the land for a long time. He had tried a dozen different tacks and none of them had brought him any closer. But Aaron was tired now and his grip was loosening. ‘Why not, Mrs Fennymore? It’s just a piece of ground. It sits there. It could be utilised, put to work for you …’

‘No.’

Hannah was surprised at herself. Elizabeth was a part of all this, of course. The woman was probably lending her son the money for the deal. If she and Aaron gave way to what the Newtons wanted, a pincer movement would cut them off from the town and the space of the beach and the sea. There would be little grey shingled boxes and hammocks and barbecues under the trees, and their nearest neighbour on the town side would no longer be the shack that had turned into the Flying Fish.

The new Pittsharbor Aaron had seen this morning was swallowing up the old one and the greedy mouth of it was right here, mumbling against their own fences. Hannah saw it as only part of history’s pattern that the offensive should come in the shape of Elizabeth and her son, because Elizabeth had always been there like a shadow. For all her married life Hannah had soothed and protected and defended Aaron, but she had never succeeded in blotting out the past.

She threw up her hands and pressed the flat palms against Spencer’s crisp shirt-front. If all she had ever been able to do was defend her husband, then she wouldn’t give up the meagre role now. Her amazing strength propelled Spencer backwards, away from the house. He stumbled over his own polished loafers and his mouth gaped in an instant’s disbelief. ‘Go away. Go away right now, and don’t ever come back here.’

Spencer took two more steps backwards and raised his hands in a gesture of submission. ‘Yes. Of course not. I’m sorry you misunderstood me, I didn’t…’

‘It’s not a misunderstanding. I’ll say it again. Aaron won’t sell our land to you so’s you and your mother can build condos or whatever it is you’ve got planned. He may be ill but he won’t weaken and even if he does you still have me to contend with.’

The declaration gave Hannah a novel thrill of power. She squared her shoulders and watched Spencer continue his retreat, until he had skirted May’s tree and disappeared into the lane again.

When she turned round she saw that Aaron had come out on to the porch. He was leaning against one of the supports, steadying himself with one hand. He looked ill and very old. Hannah went to him at once.

‘What did he want?’

‘Nothing. Just giving me a message from Elizabeth about the bake stall.’

Alexander was sitting out on the deck reading Scott Turow. The glittering bay and the island were a perfect backdrop. He put his bookmark carefully in place when he saw Spencer. ‘What happened?’

Spencer shrugged. ‘Still a blank. But there’s plenty of time.’

‘Ah. Elizabeth was out here looking for you five minutes ago.’

‘Thanks. I’ll go and see what she wants.’

The house was cool with blinds drawn against the sun. The scent of baking led him to the kitchen where Elizabeth was setting out trays of blueberry muffins. She was wearing an apron over one of her old-fashioned afternoon dresses and a complex of associations made Spencer suddenly feel a child again. He stole a muffin from a corner of one of the trays and bit into it as his mother turned and asked him, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. Hannah and Aaron Fennymore still being obstructive about the sale.’ He made a wry, appealing face.

The instant’s unpeeling of the years affected Elizabeth too. She put down her oven glove and hugged Spencer as if he were a little boy again. They almost never touched each other nowadays and broke apart quickly, without speaking. ‘I wanted you to drive me and the muffins up to the green, so I won’t have to search for somewhere to park.’

‘Of course I will.’

‘Marian’s already gone, so we’ll have to be quick. I saw Leonie driving her.’

Spencer helped her out of her apron and folded it over a kitchen chair. ‘Leonie?’ he murmured, remembering something. ‘What’s going on there, I wonder?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Guess what I saw?’ He described the brief scene in the car-park. Spencer had an eye for telling details.

But instead of responding to the titbit of gossip Elizabeth only hesitated, frowning. ‘Poor child,’ she sighed in the end.

‘Child? If Leonie Beam’s not a grown woman I’m Bette Midler.’

‘I meant the daughter. John Duhane’s younger one.’

Spencer had barely noticed May’s existence. ‘Why would it be a problem for her? Didn’t you say Duhane’s wife was dead?’

Marian was presiding at the stall. The church green was already thronged with people although it wasn’t quite noon and the Reverend Leavitt hadn’t declared the fair officially open. There were families with young children and weighty, meandering older couples, most of them wearing bermudas and peaked caps against the bright sunshine. It was one of Pittsharbor’s rare, truly hot days when even the breeze off the sea was stilled. Most of the younger visitors and townspeople were missing. There was a softball tournament starting up and a three-mile fun run was under way from Deer Hill to the finish point at the harbour car-park.

But May was there.

She hung in Marian Beam’s shadow, watching without seeing as Marian briskly laid out the baked goods.

‘You sure you know the price of everything, May?’ A tray of moist, glazed blueberry pies from Hannah’s kitchen took centre place. ‘There’s a list here, see, so you can always check.’ Marian rattled a canister with a secure lid. ‘And you give change from here, we’ll be needing a heap of quarters since Elizabeth insisted on pricing the pies at two seventy-five. Good, here’s Marty at last.’

Marty and Lucas unloaded the gas barbecue from a borrowed pick-up and hauled it into position under Marian’s directions. Unable even to look at Lucas, May stared dully at the grass. It was pocked with dusty hollows and coarsened with weeds.

‘Hi.’ His bare feet were planted in front of her. There were tiny tufts of bleached hairs glinting on each of his toes.

The diary. With the whaling book in her hand the sets of numbers had slowly but obediently yielded their meaning. 66 7 10, He. 146 12 2, touched. 67 10 9, me.

Doone’s words about Lucas crept in May’s bloodstream – or not the words themselves because they were so bare – but the thick, impassioned, glutinous intensity that was locked into the unravelled code.

Those coded parts of the diary were the most disturbing, yes, the hottest thing May had ever read. Once she had painstakingly picked them out she couldn’t get them out of her head. ‘Oh. Hi.’

‘How’s the hand?’

The knuckles were criss-crossed with surgical tape, but the shallow cuts were already healing. An accident, John had told everyone, even Ivy. May had tripped and stuck out a hand to save herself. Do you want to talk about what’s happening? her father had asked her. May had answered flatly, No.

‘Uh, it’s okay.’

May felt rather than saw Lucas shrug and stroll away, and all the time Doone’s obsession made her skin shiver as if she had a fever.

He touched me. I knew he wanted to. All the time he wants to, but his hands move nearby in the air instead. But today, after we swam in the sea, he gave me my towel.

‘Towel’ was one of those words written plain, because Doone couldn’t find it in the whale book.

Nobody was there. He dried me and lifted a coil of my hair between his fingers. Touched my shoulder with his finger, his eyes shut. Both of us shaking.

The very clumsiness of the available words, the make-do of the language, stirred a response in May. She closed her eyes and the scene made itself vivid. She saw Lucas bending his head, intent on drying the beads of salt water from Doone’s pale shoulders and the precise articulation of his finger joints as he played with the sticky curl of her hair. It wasn’t the same Lucas who fooled on the beach with the rest of the Beams, nor even the version of him who fondled and necked with Ivy. She never even named him in the scribbled pages but he was Doone’s alone, violently painted and coloured out of nothing with words that sometimes didn’t even fit together. And mine, May thought. Mine, too, because of her.

She opened her eyes, realising that she had been hugging herself so tightly that her fingernails had dug into her upper arms.

Marty Stiegel was looking at her. ‘You okay?’

There were already people standing in line for blueberry pancakes. A little girl held a balloon and her brother tried to grab it from her.

May nodded her head. ‘Yes.’

The blur of burning gas wavered and fined down into little blue points as Marty fiddled with the controls. ‘Right. We got customers, so let’s make pancakes. You want to take the orders and set out plates for me?’

‘Okay. Whatever you want.’

Marian was loudly giving instructions too, from behind the pies and muffins. It was very hot next to the barbecue and the crowd pressed all round them. Tom Beam was there and Elizabeth Newton in one of her ladylike dresses. May saw Leonie’s pale face swim out of the sea of all the rest and turned sideways so that her shoulder partly blocked the unwelcome view. She hadn’t seen her for two days, since the night of the broken glass. Lucas had gone, to play softball or to hang out with Ivy at the beach. She rubbed her forehead with her fist and tried to concentrate on what Marty was telling her to do.

Leonie thought May looked ill. It didn’t escape her notice that the girl wouldn’t meet her eyes.

Marian was rattling the tin of quarters to attract her attention and Tom moved to make room for his wife behind the makeshift counter. Leonie took her place obediently, with the heat of rebellion invisible inside her. She was thinking that nothing tied her here, to Tom or her mother-in-law or the Pittsharbor Day bake stall, and she had been wrong to bend her head to their demands for so long. If Tom and I loved each other, she thought. If we did, then Marian’s intransigence would be funny, and I would be able to bear the closeness of my baby nieces and nephews, and Pittsharbor would be as precious to me as it is to them. But we don’t love each other.

Instead of sounding a knell, the truth began to offer her some hope of escape.

Elizabeth worked from the other end of the stall. She didn’t recognise many of her customers for cookies and muffins. There were few local people in the line, or anywhere on the church green. At the height of summer Pittsharbor belonged to the visitors and she saw no harm in that. Tourists brought prosperity to a coastline that had once been frozen with poverty; she was a summer migrant herself, just like the Beams and the others, although Marian considered herself above the rental tide that flooded the coast every year. It was a shame Aaron and Hannah were so resistant to Spencer’s proposition. The land was ripe for development.

Characteristically, Marty was a blur of energy. He juggled his two pans, flipping an unending series of pancakes out on to the paper plates May held for him. He even found time for good-humoured conversation. ‘I got a great shot of you.’

‘What?’ Her sore hand wobbled and she almost dropped a loaded plate before thrusting it into the outstretched hands of a waiting customer. ‘Three dollars, please.’

‘Down at the beach. When you were playing volleyball with the other kids. I’ll show you tonight, if you want to come over before the party.’

‘Party?’

‘After the town fireworks. Just beer and barbecue, for the five houses and whatever kids are around. Maybe not the Fennymores. Are you and your dad and sister coming?’

May moistened her lips. ‘I … I guess so. Although, I don’t know.’ A party for the bluff houses meant Leonie as well as Lucas. Darts of confusion shot through her. A hand clutching loose change opened under her nose. ‘Miss? You gave me a dollar short.’

Marty had already turned back to his pancakes.

The afternoon grew hotter. The sky was a thunderous metallic blue and the sea seemed exhausted into stillness. The crowds that had thronged the green over lunch-time thinned out as people drifted down to the harbour and the beach. Karyn and Elliot arrived to relieve Marian, who swept the babies away to buy balloons. Tom took over the pancake-making and when Marty left, May seized the opportunity to slip away too. A little later Richard and Shelly arrived with their children and suddenly there were more helpers than customers.

Leonie stood by her husband’s shoulder. ‘Is there something I can do?’

He flipped yet another pancake on to a paper plate and heaped it with sweet blueberries before folding and anointing it with sugar and cream. A woman who should have refused the temptation accepted the plate and dug a plastic spoon into the ooze. ‘Nope. Thanks.’

Leonie knew well enough what Tom thought of her cooking, but the curtness of his dismissal made her head jerk up and her mouth fill with a retort. Before she uttered it she looked along the efficient line of Beams working the bake stall and turned away abruptly.

The churchyard was enclosed by a tidy white picket fence and a gate that led on to the green. Leonie clicked open the gate and stepped inside. Immediately the air felt cooler from the prospect of shade under the trees edging the plot. She put her hands in the pockets of her shorts and wandered along the path between the gravestones. Most of the inscriptions were familiar to her, but she let her eyes travel once more over the memorials to Purrits and Hanscoms and Deeveys.

What to do? she asked herself hotly and incoherently. What to do for the best?

In the farthest corner stood an old yew tree. When she reached it Leonie stopped in its green-black shelter, stroking the ribbed, fibrous bark with her fingertips.

To go or to stay. Those were her choices, without making John Duhane a factor in either of them. The other night after May had gone up to her bedroom they had sat together for a little while, mostly in silence. Then John had stood up and said he would see her back to the Beams’ house. They had flitted through the Japanese garden and descended the beach steps. Their footsteps mushed noisily on the shingle and the waves sucked at the tideline.

At the Beams’ stairs John had stepped back, almost melting into the darkness. ‘Good-night,’ he’d said quietly.

An hour before, they had been locked in one another, then May’s staring face had materialised at the window and the glass had shattered under her fist.

‘Good-night,’ Leonie had answered formally, as if they were strangers.

Since then they had only glimpsed each other in the distance.

‘I always find it a good place for thinking.’ The voice made Leonie spin round, a startled gasp catching in her throat. Elizabeth was kneeling beside one of the graves. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.’ She motioned towards the headstone. ‘I took the opportunity to come and do some tidying up. Have they finished with you at the bake stall too?’

Leonie moved out into the harsh sunlight and stood at Elizabeth’s side. The plot was well tended and there were fresh garden flowers in a marble um. Screwing up her eyes against the brightness, she read the inscriptions and saw that it was the grave of Elizabeth’s parents. ‘Don’t let me disturb you,’ she murmured, but Elizabeth stood up and brushed at her skirt.

She dropped a pair of secateurs and a trowel into her raffia basket. ‘I’m done here. Perhaps we could sit over there for five minutes.’ There was a bench against the fence, still in the tree’s shade. A patch of scuffed earth in front of it and the scattering of cigarette butts suggested that it was one of the evening hang-outs of the town youth.

When they sat down Leonie groped in her pocket and brought out a pack of her own cigarettes. She had started smoking again in the last few days, ignoring Tom’s disapproval. She lit up and exhaled fiercely. She was calculating that she must have known Elizabeth Newton for all the years she had been coming to the beach, but she couldn’t remember ever exchanging more than polite commonplaces with her.

‘My mother and father are here. But my husband is at St John’s in Boston. Where should I be put when the time comes, I wonder?’ Elizabeth spoke meditatively, as if to herself. ‘In the end it will be Spencer who decides.’

‘Won’t he do what you tell him to?’

‘I suppose he might.’

Leonie suddenly laughed. There was a sly humour in Elizabeth she had never noticed before.

‘What I would really like’, Elizabeth continued, ‘is to be planted out on Moon Island, like Sarah. Now, that is a beautiful spot.’

‘On the island? Sarah who?’

Elizabeth slowly turned her head. She examined Leonie’s face in detail, searching for a sign. ‘It’s an old story. Haven’t you ever heard it?’

The Pittsharbor Day noise from the green was a long way off as Leonie listened. But threading in and out of Elizabeth’s low murmur she thought she could hear the counterpoint of Tom’s voice and Marian calling, and the clamour of children. She frowned in concentration, following Elizabeth’s narrative. The old woman was a good story-teller.

‘Little May Duhane saw her ghost.’

Leonie straightened her back. The gravestones marched away from her across the grass, their shadows beginning to lengthen now. An uncomfortable association that she couldn’t place scratched at her subconscious. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ she said. ‘Or in supernatural warnings, whatever they might be. But I’m sure of one thing. May will be all right in the end, however difficult her life may be now. Her father loves her and he puts his children first, above everything else.’ She paused, looking down at her hands resting in her lap. She twisted the wedding ring on her finger and stared away again over the gap-teeth of the gravestones. ‘It’s her age. The demons of adolescence. They’ll let her go in the end. Don’t you remember what it was like to be that age?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

The tremor in the older woman’s voice made Leonie turn to look at her. ‘I didn’t mean to dismiss the Sarah story.’

‘You didn’t dismiss it. You just said you didn’t believe in one aspect of it.’

Leonie sighed. She gestured away to the green, where the buying and selling was beginning to wind down. Lucas Beam was reversing a pick-up truck too fast towards the grass. ‘Pittsharbor’s a mundane place. We spend muddled, ordinary times in it.’

‘Do you wish for something more than that?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Are you in love with him?’

The question was so unlooked-for that Leonie found herself answering without calculation. ‘Perhaps. Or I could be if I let it happen, which I won’t.’

Of course Spencer had passed on what he had seen in the car-park that day. How is it, Leonie wondered, that there are any secrets at all in a place as small as this?

‘It’s none of my business, I’m sorry.’

‘You’re right.’

But Elizabeth was not deflected by the finality in Leonie’s voice. ‘Forgive an old woman’s intrusion. At my age there isn’t much to do but observe other people’s lives and make presumptuous conclusions about how they should handle them. You aren’t very happy, are you?’

There was no point in attempting a denial. The children were much closer now, running past the fence that separated the graveyard from the green and Leonie tilted her head to watch them as Elizabeth talked.

‘Don’t pass up the chance of happiness, if you think it might be within your reach. When it’s gone you will never stop regretting its loss.’

‘It sounds as though you speak from experience.’

‘I do,’ Elizabeth said. Leonie waited with interest and the beginnings of sympathy, but the older woman didn’t say any more. Instead she added, ‘I saw the ghost too, when I was not much older than May. I asked who she was and my grandmother told me the story.’ Elizabeth’s hands opened as they lay in her lap. Her wedding and engagement rings were worn to thin gold hoops and they were loose on her finger. ‘It’s like a duty, a piece and a part of belonging to the beach, to hand on the history. Keeping the thread running.’

‘To hand it on to May and me? I don’t feel that I belong here. The opposite, in fact. I wouldn’t know about May.’

‘You remind me of each other. You’re alike.’

The incongruity of the idea made Leonie hesitate, then suddenly she thought, yes. Maybe we are. Maybe that’s why we mistrust each other. ‘And you too,’ she said with conviction. The idea comforted her. ‘What do you think I should do, Elizabeth?’ Using her name was a token of friendship.

‘I can’t tell you what to do. All I know is that I didn’t take a chance, a gamble, a long time ago. I was sorry for it afterwards.’

‘I see. Thank you,’ Leonie said.

Ivy and Lucas were with a crowd of young people at the Seafood Shack down on the harbour. Lucas had been playing softball all afternoon and Ivy was angry with him for neglecting her. She sat sideways at the table where Lucas was eating a double crab roll, with one smooth thigh touching the leg of Sam Deevey’s jeans. Sam was one of the locals and a bit of a hick, she thought, but not at all bad-looking in an Antonio Banderas kind of way.

‘You coming down to the beach tonight?’ Lucas asked her, his mouth full of crab and mayo.

Ivy barely turned her head. ‘I’m going to watch the fireworks with Sam. Maybe afterwards.’

‘Sure,’ Lucas said uncertainly. He wasn’t used to rejection, even by someone as gorgeous as Ivy. The evening in prospect was uninviting without her.

May waded out of the sea and shook the drops off her hair and skin like a dog. It had been so hot that for once the cold shock of the water was welcome and she was glad there was no one about to see her in her swimsuit. She stood with her back to the houses and the deserted beach, rubbing her chin with the corner of her towel. The sea was flat and milky pale, reflecting the mild early-evening sky. The island’s hunched back bristled against the colourless horizon. Then she heard confident footsteps treading the shingle behind her.

‘Hi,’ Marty called to her in his friendly way. Judith and he were younger than most of the other beach adults and he liked to make his social moves between the generations of parents and teenagers, seeming to belong with equal ease to both groups. ‘Are you all on your own? Want to come up and have a Coke or something with Judith and me?’

‘Okay,’ May said. She pulled a wrap over herself.

There was baby stuff spread all over the Stiegels’ floor and Judith sitting in the middle of it with Justine on a diaper across her broad knees. May loitered awkwardly, wishing she hadn’t come, while Marty fetched drinks for them.

‘Are you having a good time up here?’ Judith asked. She was so big, with her solid shoulders and upper arms rounded like boulders on the beach.

May knew she was a sculptor and thought she looked a bit like a sculpture herself. One of those massive, immovable pieces of work that sit on lawns outside public buildings. ‘Yes, thank you.’

Once the baby was parcelled up in a stretchy sleeping suit Judith calmly hoisted her shirt and undid her bra. A vast white breast spilled out and Judith took the nipple between thumb and forefinger and pressed it to the baby’s mouth. Its gums clamped and it began noisily sucking. How disgusting, May thought giddily. Never. I’ll never do that.

Marty came back and she gratefully took the Coke and drank with pretended thirst, not even asking if it was a Diet one. ‘Come through here.’ He beckoned.

There was a small room off the main one, obviously used as a study. There were a desk and a laptop computer and a fax machine, and a scatter of folders and notepads. Marty busily opened an envelope file and May saw that it was bulging with black-and-white photographs.

‘You take a lot of pictures.’

‘Uh? Yeah. I’m lucky. My work is my hobby.’ She remembered now that he was a photographer in the city, taking the pictures for ads. ‘Here they are.’

He fanned a handful of the photographs expertly in front of her. It was the volleyball day. There was Lucas, with his hair swinging up from his forehead. And Ivy and Gail, clapping hands. Marty found the shot he was looking for. May was leaping high in the air. All the picture’s huge energy was driving through her arm and clenched fist. Seeing it brought back to her the power and exhilaration of the moment. She looked like someone else, perhaps in a Nike ad, not herself at all. ‘Oh,’ she breathed. She turned her lit-up face to Marty. ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’

He patted her shoulder. ‘I was pretty pleased with it. I’ll get you a copy.’

The photograph gave May an unfamiliar feeling of warmth. She put it down with reluctance. ‘Thank you. I’d love that.’

She cocked her head to one side to examine the other pictures in the sheaf. There was one of Elizabeth with Mrs Beam and Mrs Fennymore, standing at the top of some steps. The picture had been taken from an angle below them so they loomed grotesquely. Their contrasting features were sharply delineated, but something in the patina of old age made them seem three different versions of the same witchy old woman. Alarmed, May looked away quickly.

‘Marty?’ Judith called from the adjoining room. ‘She’s spat up. Can you pass me the towel from her bag?’

He hurried away and May could hear them dealing with the baby emergency. Idly she poked at the concertina openings of the picture folder. One of the sections held a squared wad of pictures tied with a piece of braid. Without thinking May picked out the package and looked at the uppermost photograph.

It was of a girl sitting on a rock. Her arms were wrapped around her drawn-up knees, but there was movement in all the lines of her body, as if the photographer had unexpectedly called her name and she had turned happily to see him. Her face was solemn but it was about to break into a delighted smile. Her eyes were locked straight into the lens.

May was gazing at the picture when Marty came back. She fumbled and almost dropped it, ashamed she had been caught snooping into his folder. She held out the little package, but he didn’t take it from her. ‘Who is she?’ May asked, already knowing the answer.

Marty said, ‘Doone Bennison. Would you like to look at them?’

‘Yes, please.’

She undid the tie. There were a dozen photographs, all of Doone alone. In a windbreaker, a polo shirt and in one case a lifejacket with the wind whipping her hair across her cheeks. She had a heavy, rather pasty face with thick eyebrows and a wide mouth, but her smile was transfiguring.

May gazed at her and her eyes fastened on Doone’s as if they were meeting in the flesh. But she was looking at a stranger. Nothing about Doone’s features was familiar, or even remarkable, except for her smile. May was amazed at how happy she looked. ‘She looks … she looks ordinary. Like any girl.’ A stupid thing to say, May thought, as soon as it was out. It was only her deadness that made her any different, and the diary of her love.

Marty was standing at her shoulder, solid and self-assured and detached from all the whispering undercurrents that washed the beach, in the adult way that her father was and the other men from the five houses, except for Lucas. May suddenly felt reproached by his normality. She was clumsy and intrusive, like a voyeur with Doone’s pictures in her hand. She folded them together abruptly and handed them back. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be snooping. It must have been terrible when she drowned.’

‘It was. For everyone at the beach.’

Of course she was still here in their memories, her life and her death. They were all back for the next summer, enjoying their vacations because that was what you did, you carried on with living. Just like she and John and Ivy were doing, even though Alison had died. But Doone would still inhabit the place for the Beams and the Stiegels and the rest. They would remember seeing her on the rocks where Marty had taken her picture and on a towel on the sand, and in the sea that had taken her away. She was there even for May, who had never seen her face until today.

May shivered. Only the thinnest membrane separated the beach people from another multitude that held Doone and Alison and the island woman. The divider was as opaque as a Pittsharbor mist and as insubstantial. Any of them could slip through it. Maybe without even knowing it.

The telephone rang shrilly on the desk. The edge of a startled scream came out of May’s mouth but she pressed her hands over it. Marty’s eyebrows lifted as he answered. After a few words he handed her the receiver. ‘It’s for you. Your father.’

‘Yeah? Hi. Yes, I’m here. How did you know?’

He had been reading on the deck and had seen her going up to the house with Marty, nothing more complicated than that.

John wanted to know if May was going to the harbour with him to watch the Pittsharbor Day fireworks. He made regular overtures of the same kind, giving her the opportunity to talk to him if she wanted to. It left May feeling cornered, keeping the refuge of her silence. ‘I’ve got to go, he wants me,’ she mumbled to Marty.

‘You okay?’

Why were people always asking her that? ‘Yeah, thanks. Thank you for the drink. And letting me see the photos.’

The pictures of Doone were already tucked away again.

After the loss of Martin the bowman from the third mate’s boat, the Dolphin’s days at sea took on a heaviness and a monotony that the lack of wind and whales did nothing to dispel.

A sombre mood possessed every man among the officers and crew, but the worst affected of them all was William Corder. On more than one occasion good-natured Matthias Plant sought him out wherever it was he hid himself, behind the thin curtain of his bunk or up in some sheltered corner of the deck, and tried to raise the boy’s spirits by joking with him, or at the least by persuading him to share the reason for his melancholy. The mate had seen enough deaths in his years of seafaring to be by rights almost immune to tragedy, but still he was enough of a man of feeling to remember how he himself had been affected the first time he had witnessed such a loss. Yet it seemed to Matthias that the boy was overtaken by deeper sadness and anxiety than could be explained even by the terrible death of his shipmate. But whatever method of coaxing Matthias employed on him, William begged only to be left alone and retreated into the silent sanctuary of his own thoughts.

At length Captain Gunnell despaired of the poor hunting around the Congo basin and the whaling grounds of the southern Atlantic sea. He gave orders to his officers to set the Dolphin’s course westwards for the islands of Fernando de Naronha, to the north-east of Brazil. At first a fair wind seemed to promise better fortune, but after not many days the breeze died to a whisper, then failed altogether. A cruel heat descended on the ship and pinned it like an expiring insect to the harsh mirror of the sea. The foul smells and vermin bred by the heat below decks were a torture even to the experienced men, and the lack of fresh food and sweet water began to take their toll on the health of the crew.

William Corder fell ill of a fever. After insisting for two days and a night that he could stand his watch with anyone, he collapsed in a dead faint one morning while kneeling to the task of scrubbing the ship’s decks. The officer of the watch ordered him to be carried below and he was placed in his bunk to recover.

Matthias Plant was the officer of the middle watch on that same night. The sea was dead calm with not so much as a breath of wind stirring and Matthias wearily stretched out his arms on the rail, praying for a wind or at least for some thought of action that would keep his eyes from falling shut in sleep.

One of the men from the watch on deck ducked below, with the intention of lighting up his tobacco pipe at the lamp in the forecastle. A moment later there came a great shout, enough to have roused the whole ship if the sleepers had not been so drugged with heat and lassitude. The man who had gone below burst out of the forecastle scuttle. Matthias could at first make no sense of his babble of words. ‘That young fellow,’ the sailor raved. ‘The one that’s sick and lying below.’

‘What of him?’ Matthias shouted back, fearful that poor William had taken a turn for the worse. ‘Come, out with it. Are you an idiot or a native, that you can’t speak properly?’ For indeed the man was gibbering, hardly able to form his words in a manner to allow understanding. The mate took him by the throat and shook him like a dog with a rat, for his sudden anxiety for William Corder overwhelmed his habitual reason.

At last the sailor found words that could be understood. ‘That young fellow is a woman, sir.’

Matthias gaped at him like a fish, the first time in many years that he had been silenced by one of his own men.

‘Come below,’ the man exhorted him, tugging at his arm. ‘Come below if you will not believe me, and see for yourself.’

Matthias followed him at once. It was all quiet below decks save for the faint creaking of the timbers as the ship made slow headway over the flat water. The young creature they had known as William Corder lay in his bunk, with the lamp shining in on him. In the stifling heat of the night and with the burning of his fever he had thrown off his clothes, and now lay exposed to the eyes of his rough companions as a perfect and beautifully made young woman. She was lying there in restless sleep with the sheen of sweat upon her white skin.

The commotion on the deck had drawn the rest of the watch crowding into the forecastle and the watch below were stirring drowsily in their places.

Matthias swiftly pulled the curtain to shield the woman. He dispatched one of the men to rouse the Captain and sent the others back to their places in short order. He bent over the young woman and drew the tumbled bed-things over her body. Her eyelids were already fluttering, and she gave a low moan and came fully awake. Her eyes fixed on Matthias’s face with a flash of terror, then such speechless pleading that it brought a pang to his heart the like of which he had not felt since he was a young man newly in love. ‘Come,’ he said, almost adding William. ‘Your secret is discovered. This is no place for you. You must make yourself respectable and come with me to the Captain, who will see what should be done to help you.’ And all the time his mind was running over the almost incredible fact that this young woman had spent so many weeks living alongside the coarsest creatures who inhabit the forecastle of a whaling ship. What she must have seen and suffered overwhelmed him with pity.

Her eyes filled with tears at the mate’s words and she whispered, ‘I am glad I am found out, because I do not think I could have borne this life for many more days. What will happen to me, Matthias?’

He told her, ‘That is for the Captain to decide. But he is a good man, as you well know, and he will see that you come to no further harm.’

While he waited with his back turned and his eyes sternly fixed on the other astonished occupants of the forecastle, she hurried into some clothes without leaving the shelter of her bunk. Then she slipped upright and, seeing the size of her and the fragile curve of her arm and shoulder, Matthias wondered how he had ever been blind enough to have taken her for a man.

The Captain was waiting in his cabin. Shock and disbelief made his mien sterner than was usual and the poor sick girl began to shiver with fright as well as fever. ‘Sit down,’ he said, indicating the chair opposite his. ‘And you had better stay here, Mr Plant.’ Seeing her shivering Mr Gunnell took the rum bottle from its resting place and poured her a good measure. ‘Drink this. It is hardly the refreshment to offer to a lady, but I suppose you are used to it by this time.’

She took the tot and downed it, and they saw that her hands were well shaped, although badly roughened by the heavy work she had been doing for so many weeks.

‘What is your name?’

‘Sarah. Sarah Corder, sir.’

‘Well then, Sarah, you had better tell Mr Plant and myself what you are doing aboard my ship disguised as a green hand.’

‘I did my work as well as I could, sir, and as well as any of the others. Matthias … Mr Plant… will tell you that.’

She turned her face in supplication, looking to Matthias as her friend.

‘It’s true, Captain.’

‘I have no doubt. But you must tell us how you come to be here in the first place.’

Sarah took a deep breath. As she began her explanation they could see it was a relief to tell her story to listening ears that were at least half sympathetic.

It was a sad tale, but in the end the two mariners were not so very surprised by it. It was only Sarah’s bravery and determination that left them wondering.

She was a young woman of good family, from Portsmouth, Massachusetts. Her mother had died when she was a child, and she had been brought up by her elderly and somewhat strict father. When Sarah was eighteen she went to stay with some relatives of her mother’s who lived up at Portland on the sea coast of Maine. While there, she met a young man. He was a friend of a friend of the son of the family and had therefore been introduced into their circle without anyone having much knowledge of his history or connections. He was an attractive and lively young fellow, and his manners were plausible enough, so he was made welcome as such men often are when there is a need for dancing partners.

Sarah and Robert Hanner soon fell deeply in love. He begged Sarah to marry him, but he also explained that he was waiting to inherit some money from an ancient and infirm relative who lived in New York. The bequest was dependent on Robert appearing to remain just as he was, an attentive and dutiful bachelor with a care for his ailing great-aunt. Notwithstanding this, however, Robert claimed he could not live without his love. Even though they would not be able to marry just yet, for a matter of but a few weeks because it was certain that the great-aunt could not survive beyond that, he begged Sarah to accompany him when the time came for him to leave Maine and return to the city.

‘I know now that I was a fool,’ Sarah told her audience across the Captain’s polished table. ‘But I loved him and I believed what he told me with all my heart.’

The young couple ran away to New York together. No more was heard of the elderly relative. Robert Hanner did not marry Sarah, and within a matter of weeks he abandoned her and disappeared. Sarah’s father and family had cut her off, and she was alone in the world. She had a very little money of her own, and used it to try to find her lover. In the end she had hired a private detective, who traced Hanner to a shipping office where he had declared himself ready to go a-whaling.

The Captain and Matthias Plant gravely nodded their heads. In their time they had encountered many a blackguard who had taken to sea as a way of evading enemies and creditors too numerous or too troublesome to escape by a less demanding route.

‘And then?’ asked Captain Gunnell.

Her voice was soft when she answered but from the flash in her eyes neither of the two men was left in any doubt of the steel beneath Sarah’s tender skin. ‘Why, I determined that I would follow him to whichever end of the earth he had chosen. And when I found him I would make him marry me, because for all that I am a fool and a lost woman I have my strength and my wits to depend upon. God help me but I still love him, and I believe that we would make a good partnership.’ It was only at the last words that her voice wavered and the tears started to her eyes once more.

‘I am sorry for you,’ said the Captain gently.

Sarah had travelled homewards again from New York, but only as far as Nantucket, from where she was advised by the shipping office that Robert Hanner had embarked. ‘I thought that once I was in Nantucket it would be easy to find him, or to discover which ship he had signed to. But I had no idea there were so many whaling ships and such crowds of sailors, or that the life they lived would be so rough and dangerous. By this time I had no money left nor anywhere to go, and so it seemed that my only course and the sole hope of finding him was to disguise myself as a man and follow the whales, just as Robert was doing. Even when this ship set sail I thought somehow our paths would cross, but I see now that I was mistaken.’

Matthias at last understood why she always scanned the faces of the crews when the Dolphin lay near other whalers and the reason for the deep sadness that had recently overtaken her. It was no brother she had been searching for. ‘But this is a bitter, cruel life,’ she added piteously. ‘I had determined that when we reached the next port I would slip away and try to make my way home again. Then I fell ill and you discovered me.’

From the manner in which Captain Gunnell cleared his throat before speaking Matthias knew that he was as affected as he himself had been by Sarah Corder’s story. ‘A whaling ship is indeed no place for a lady,’ he declared. ‘And I must put you ashore as soon as I can. My plan is to put in to port to take on water and supplies, then I shall place you in the care of the Consul at Rio de Janeiro. It is my only course of action, Miss Corder.’

‘I understand,’ she softly answered.

It happened that there was an empty stateroom next to the Captain’s quarters. On his orders it was rapidly cleared, a pair of his own sheets were placed on the bed and the young woman was allowed to rest there in some measure of comfort and privacy. The officers of the Dolphin saw to it that she was provided with what nourishing food their limited supplies permitted and were rewarded by her almost hourly improvement.

When she was somewhat recovered she thanked them with proper warmth. ‘The officers of this ship are true gentlemen and I am in your debt for ever.’ She had a pretty smile and modest ways, and soon the other men were as much under her spell as Matthias Plant.

The weather changed within a day of Sarah’s secret being revealed. A strong north-easter helped the Dolphin to landfall at Fernando de Naronha, where much-needed water and fresh food were taken on board, then a course was set for the mainland. For most of this time Sarah kept to her cabin, but from time to time she was persuaded to take the air up on the deck. Her behaviour when she met her erstwhile forecastle companions was a picture of modest goodwill.

Sometimes when Matthias had a spare hour they would pass it together in talk, for the good mate had no doubt that she was lonely. He learned much about her childhood and the friends and companions of those early days, but she would almost never speak of Robert Hanner. Yet notwithstanding her reticence, Matthias did not believe he was ever out of her mind for more than a minute at a time. He would come upon her when she was staring out to sea or down at the ruined skin of her hands, and she would be so lost in thought that his voice would startle her. He knew then that she was thinking of her betrayer and most likely still planning how she might discover him again. Matthias felt a dreadful weight of fear and anxiety on her behalf, yet there was determination and an iron will in Sarah, as strong as or stronger than any man’s, that in some way only heightened her very womanliness.

At Rio de Janeiro the Captain sent word to the Consul, and he soon received assurance that that gentleman and his wife would receive Sarah into their own home until such time as a passage home could be arranged for her.

The day came for her to leave the Dolphin. Her share of the oil taken amounted to some sixty dollars and this money the Captain arranged for her to have, together with a similar sum collected for her by the other officers and men, so she was at least not quite penniless. For his own part Matthias gave her his gold watch, and she put her arm around his neck and kissed him and sobbed that he had been kinder to her than any father or brother.

One of the boat steerers who was of similar height had given Sarah a white cotton shirt with a wide blue collar, and a pair of black broadcloth sailor’s pants, which fell smoothly to cover her low shoes. She had a broad-brimmed straw hat, tied with a black ribbon. She did not look like a lady of fashion, but she was neat and pretty in her makeshift clothes. The crew had gathered on the deck to see her off, and as the boat that was to row her ashore was lowered she shook the hand of each of them and whispered her thanks. Matthias waited until the last, except for Captain Gunnell.

When it came to his turn to say farewell he took her small hand between both of his great calloused ones. ‘Sarah, if you do find who you are searching for, what do you truly believe will happen?’

‘I will make him marry me.’

‘And if he will not? Or cannot?’

Her wide eyes never wavered. Matthias felt a shiver touch him like the first intimation of a fever. ‘Then I will kill him like a venomous snake.’ Her hand slid from his grasp and she was smiling. ‘Good Matthias, you must not be anxious on my behalf. I am truly grateful for your kindness and I will always be your friend. Goodbye.’

So saying, she kissed his cheek for the last time and turned to Captain Gunnell at the taff-rail.

The men stood together watching as the boat carried her towards the shore.

‘Do you imagine that she will find him?’ Matthias musingly asked.

‘I am certain she will.’

‘And then?’

‘I would not be in that man’s shoes for any money.’

News of the woman who had disguised herself in men’s clothing and sailed on the Dolphin had travelled fast. A crowd of people were gathered on the dock, all waiting to catch a glimpse of her. Sarah stepped out on to dry land, handed up by her boatman, and the press of people immediately closed around her.

She turned once to look back at the old Dolphin. She took off her straw hat and waved it, the black ribbons fluttering on the crowded dock.

That was the last glimpse they had of her.

May yawned and scratched the mosquito bites on her ankle. She liked books and she was quite interested in the sad and gory whaling stories, because of the remote connection with the history of Moon Island, but she couldn’t imagine that Doone would have read much of them by choice. From the plain sections of the diary she knew Doone didn’t exactly have broad literary or historical interests. Maybe Hannah Fennymore had offered to lend her the books and Doone had accepted out of politeness. Perhaps there had been no other suitable book to hand, so Doone had used the Dolphin book as the base for her code.

May flipped idly to the front and scanned the introductory pages that she hadn’t bothered to read before. She learned that the book’s narrative was based on Matthias Plant’s journals. The old whaleman had continued writing his journal for the rest of the Sarah Corder voyage and the three voyages that followed it, until he retired at last in 1848. Finally, in old age he set up home with his wife in the village of Wellfleet on Cape Cod, to be near one of his married daughters. After his death his books and papers were stored with the rest of his keepsakes in a tin trunk, and there they stayed until they were disinterred in 1902 by his grandson.

This young man read the whaling diaries with the utmost fascination and passed them to a college friend who worked as an editor for a New York firm of publishers. So it happened that more than fifty years after they were written, the story told in Matthias’s memoirs was published by Charles Scribner & Sons under the tide Voyages of the Dolphin. When she looked at the front of the book again, May saw that Hannah’s book was the second reprint, dated 1909. Hannah must have owned the book for a long time. Or perhaps, May thought, she had found it on the second-hand shelves of the Bookhouse, Pittsharbor’s only bookshop. Her name was written on the blank first page in blue ink, but there was no date.

‘May?’ She looked up. John was calling her from the foot of the stairs. ‘Are you coming to watch the fireworks?’

May swung her legs off the bed, noticing as she always did the ugly way the flesh quivered inside the loop of her shorts legs. ‘Yeah, okay.’

John and May walked down the Pittsharbor road together. They hadn’t even waited for Ivy to materialise, knowing that she would have her own plans for the evening.

‘It’s a wonderful evening. We’re lucky,’ John said. Darkness was settling over the bluff and the first stars pricked the sky.

May wrestled with what she should say. The image of her father on the sofa with Leonie Beam remained obstinately stuck in her head. It jarred like a misshapen jigsaw piece with other graphic sexual images. A scene from a video she had seen long ago with Ivy. Ivy herself with Lucas. The old people, Elizabeth and Aaron long ago in the Captain’s House. Doone’s numbered words conjuring thick passion out of the pages of an old-fashioned book. They were images she didn’t want to see but they attacked all her senses. Sex was everywhere, roping around everyone but herself.

It was impossible to tell her father any of this. Disgust and shapeless longing possessed her in equal parts. ‘Yes.’

After a moment’s hesitation John asked, ‘Can we talk about the other evening?’

The cuts on her hand were healing. The new tissue puckered and crawled under the antiseptic tape. ‘No.’ She heard how her blank monosyllable disconcerted him. Miserably she added, ‘Can’t we just forget about it? I’d rather we did. Truly.’

‘It’s just…’

‘Please,’ May begged.

Her desperation silenced him. ‘If that’s what you really want,’ John murmured. They walked on to the harbour without speaking.

At the moment of their arrival the first firework exploded overhead in a mushroom of sparks and a cascade of blue and emerald fireballs. The sparks drifted down, turning scarlet until they were blotted out in the sea, and another rocket streaked upwards.

Ivy was in the crowd, with her arm draped around the shoulders of Sam Deevey. She waved when she saw them. Leonie Beam was there too, with Sidonie on her shoulders. The bursting rocket illuminated her profile for an instant and May knew that her father’s eyes stayed on her.

Lucas came out of a group and greeted them. It was clear that he had been drinking. ‘Hi, Maysy. Happy Pittsharbor Day, guys.’