Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection: Moon Island, Sunrise, Follies - Rosie Thomas - Страница 19

It would be another hot day, but as yet there was a whitish mist blotting out the sky and sea. The horizon quivered between the two in parallel pale lines of grey and pearl, and the unmoving air was thick with salt. The gulls on the beach stalked and pecked at their wavering reflections in the low-water pools but Leonie stared beyond them at the confines of the bay.

She saw a lobster boat drawing a diagonal line from the headland to the corner of Moon Island. It slid out of her sight behind the outlying rocks but the pulse of the outboard, more subcutaneous vibration than sound, stayed with her for a long minute afterwards. It was a year ago this morning that she had stood with a brown bag of shopping in her arms, watching Doug Hanscom’s boat bring Doone ashore.

A jogger down on the beach reached the steps at the southern end and began the climb upwards. It was Tom, on his morning way into Pittsharbor.

Leonie opened the screen door from the porch, closed it behind her and stood looking into the centre of the house. The wide, shallow stairway with scuffed matting led up from the big hall. On either side two tall, foursquare rooms were filled with white morning light. It was a good house, solid and benign, and untidily comfortable with the well-used and unfussy things that Marian had filled it with. And Leonie was thinking as she walked through the quiet space that she felt about it just as she felt about Marian herself. She could appreciate all the qualities, but she had never been able to make appreciation warm into affection.

In the kitchen she toasted an English muffin and spread it with cranberry jelly. The sunlight cut through the jelly on the blade of the knife to make it shine like a jewel, and it warmed the yellow Formica of the worktops with their edges eroded like a geological formation to reveal the brown and white strata within. Leonie touched everything gently, the handle of the knife, the ridged knobs of the cupboard doors and the taps over the old sink. In Tom’s absence, in his continued and unbroken absence even though they had slept side by side, she was saying goodbye.

She sat down at the kitchen table to eat her muffin and watched the sky beyond the windows. The peace didn’t last long.

Elliot came down the stairs with Ashton in his arms and Sidonie skipping in front of him. ‘You’re up early,’ he said.

Sidonie squirmed up on to a chair and turned a radiant smile on Leonie. ‘Banana me,’ she wheedled.

‘D’you mind, Leonie?’ Elliot asked over his shoulder.

‘Of course not.’

When did I ever mind? I am Aunt Leonie, infertile but obedient.

As Elliot put the baby into his seat Leonie mashed a banana in a saucer. She put a spoon into Sidonie’s fist, breathing in her early-morning unwashed smell of innocent sleep. Sidonie began to eat and the intensity of childish concentration moved Leonie as it always did. Out of Elliot’s sight, under the table, she clenched her empty hands.

Richard was the next to appear, yawning in his bathrobe. ‘Tom gone running?’

‘Yes.’ The question was superfluous. When did Tom ever relax his rigid routines?

The smell of coffee brought Karyn and Shelly downstairs, and two of the younger children who argued about tennis games over their bowls of Cheerios. The noise level rose and Leonie sat within her bubble of isolation and let it break over her. At home in Boston she always ate breakfast alone and in silence. Tom usually stayed in bed longer because he left later for work.

It seemed inconceivable now that she had ever tried to be one of the Beams, let alone kept on trying for so long. Determination was crystallising inside her. It tasted like elation salted with fear.

Usually none of the older children appeared until long after breakfast, but this morning Lucas slouched in in his shorts and creased T-shirt. His hair hung down around his face and when he leant over Leonie for the milk he gave off a powerful waft of sweat and stale alcohol. He yawned. ‘Is Grammer all right after last night?’

Karyn scraped a ribbon of yoghurt from Ashton’s chin. ‘What d’you mean? What happened last night?’

‘I thought I was the last one in but Grammer came back a few minutes after me. Mrs Fennymore had called up to ask for some help. The old man was taken ill. They hauled him off to the hospital.’

‘I didn’t know,’ Karyn said. ‘That’s really tough.’

They heard Marian coming down the stairs and fell silent as they waited for her, all of them looking at the door. She appeared in a tom silk kimono with her hair standing out in a thick mass of grey and silver coils. Her face was marked with creases and there were dark pouches under her eyes.

Her children made themselves busy around her and even the grandchildren paused for a second in their intake of breakfast. Marian was irritable and rejected the coffee Shelly gave her as too weak. She rebuked Lucas for being only half dressed, before settling at the table in the place she always occupied. She answered their questions about Aaron in a sharp voice.

He had had severe breathing difficulties, and had become ill and distressed. Hannah had called for an ambulance, then telephoned Marian. ‘She was distressed herself. I went to help, that’s all. There wasn’t much I could do.’

Leonie watched her. There was a difference in Marian this morning that she couldn’t quite place. The kitchen was too full, there was too much light and noise and talk. Marian drank her coffee and pulled her kimono more securely around her bulk. After she had finished she went to the telephone, but there was no reply from the Fennymores.

‘Hannah must be still at the hospital.’

She brushed aside the questions and went out of the porch door, leaving her children mutely raising eyebrows at each other.

Leonie dutifully loaded plates and knives into the dishwasher and swept crumbs off the Formica into her cupped hand. Each small action took on significance for being the last time she would do it here. Today she would have to leave. She felt the potential energy spring-loaded inside her, surely just enough of it to carry her away and out of the gravitational field of Pittsharbor. Beyond that, she had no idea.

She found Marian sitting alone on the cluttered porch. The old wicker chair with a beard of broken cane hanging beneath the seat was her favourite. Marian’s eyes were fixed on the sea and her arms hung heavily over the chair arms, with the dirty diamonds of her rings looking like marine encrustations on the bay rocks. She didn’t hear Leonie approaching, or see her stop and lean against one of the porch pillars with her arms folded.

Although she had followed her mother-in-law out to the secluded corner, Leonie didn’t know what she wanted to say to her, exactly. It was just that there should be at least some acknowledgement between them of the decline and wastage of her marriage, some honest transaction made and recorded for the future.

I wanted a baby. I didn’t try on purpose to have this ache and a crater in my belly, did I? Do you think it’s worse for you, or for me, maybe? It wasn’t to Tom she wanted to say this, not any longer, but to his mother who had never loosened her grip on him.

At length Marian turned her head.

In the unguarded moment before their eyes connected Leonie saw what it was in Marian that was different this morning and the recognition of it arrested the momentum of bitterness in her.

Marian was transfigured by grief. It washed the hauteur out of her face and left it loose and vulnerable.

An uncalculated movement of sympathy started up in Leonie. She found herself kneeling down beside Marian’s chair and taking hold of her meaty hand. She squeezed it tight until the big diamonds of Dickson’s old-fashioned tributes bit into her clenched fingers. ‘Is Aaron dead?’

‘No. Not so far as I know.’

Marian didn’t yield an inch. But Leonie could still imagine why such a chord of sorrow was sounding within her. The Beams and the Fennymores had lived side by side on the bluff for many years. They hadn’t been close friends, or at least Leonie had never detected any signs of particular friendship, but surely Marian would look back on the summers of her own life lived in parallel with Aaron’s and Hannah’s? The probability of Aaron’s death would make her think of Dickson’s and her own. The grief in her face must be for losses Leonie could only guess at.

It was the place that affected them all. The beach reverberated with sadness. Why did I never recognise it before?

Sadness was thick like the sea-salt in the air, and as blind and all-pervasive as the endless fogs. The peculiar taint of it clung to the Fennymores and Elizabeth, and it crept through her own tissues like a disease. Now she saw the ravages of it even in the invincible Marian. Under the bright, healthy skin of all their summers, the swimming and sailing and barbecue parties and tennis games, lay the invisible cancer of sadness. The spirit of the place.

Leonie tried to dispel it, to rub some warmth back into Marian’s hand. ‘Can I do anything?’ she whispered.

Marian inclined her head. The possibility of a connection stirred between them. Marian felt it too, it was obvious that she did. Leonie thought, Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe we can talk to each other. I haven’t tried very hard. I will if she’ll let me. The beginnings of a smile twitched at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

Marian’s head lifted again and she stared at Leonie. ‘Do anything? No, I don’t think so.’

The possibility had been there, lying in the no man’s land between them, and she had seen it and chosen not to pick it up. Not only was it too late, the entire night had passed and now the day was coming round again.

Slowly Leonie let go of her hand. She sat back on her heels with cramp twisting her leg muscles and shook her head as if to clear it after a ringing slap. ‘You never liked me, did you?’

Sidonie had wandered on to the porch. She stood at the top of the steps looking out over the water in her pink dress and jelly shoes. One fist twisted up the hem of the frock, showing her pants underneath. The jet-black spirals on her forehead lifted a little. A breeze had sprung up off the sea and the tentative white mist would soon be gone.

Marian had the grace to look startled. ‘You’re Tom’s wife. Of course I like you, Leonie. It goes much deeper than that, you’re family.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Leonie stood up, looking down on the fuzzy grey circle at the crown of Marian’s head, all the sympathy gone out of her. ‘I think you and I disliked each other from the beginning. The shame is that neither of us ever had the guts or the wit to own up to it. If we had done we might have fought about it, or even laughed at ourselves.’

Richard wandered out with his coffee cup, and Karyn appeared, scooped up Sidonie and ran inside again. ‘What’s happening?’ Richard asked, without much interest.

‘Leonie’s upset.’

‘I’m not upset,’ she answered. The stored-up energy was suddenly released. It carried her along in a seductive rush. ‘In fact, I’m happy. I’m very happy because I’m going to walk out of here right now and I’m never coming back to this place again. I’ve had it with family parties and being an auntie, and a good daughter-in-law. I’m a failure at all of that and at being Tom’s wife as well, although God knows I’ve tried hard enough.’

Marian’s face contained three perfect circles of shock and amazement, and when she looked at him Leonie saw that Richard’s expression mirrored his mother’s exactly. They were so alike, they were so fucking identical, all the Beams.

Enough. In her outburst she had sounded just as petulant as Gail or one of the even younger ones. It was time to go, before the Beams or the beach itself finished her off. She half turned in the stunned silence and saw an arrangement of helmet crab and conch shells against the porch rail. She had always hated the beachiness of them, and now she picked up a shell in each hand and hurled them one after another in a curving trajectory towards the edge of the bluff. As if to smash the mirror of the sea. Of course, they fell far short even of the drop down to the beach. They bounced and rolled harmlessly in the seagrass.

A tide of elation and cathartic fury carried Leonie the few steps to the porch door. She opened it and closed it behind her with elaborate care. In the kitchen there was another silence, with adults and children frozen in their places. They couldn’t have heard from here what had actually happened outside, but the atmospheric shock waves had rippled a warning all through the house.

Leonie picked up Tom’s car keys from the counter top. Her own car was back in Boston. He always insisted it was pointless to have two cars up at the beach, even though when he went on one of his trips back to the city it left her without independent transport. Her handbag, luckily, was where she had left it yesterday on a chair on top of a pile of magazines. She dropped the keys inside and swung the strap of the bag over her shoulder.

‘Leonie …’ began Shelly, who was not a Beam and therefore might have been an ally, but still managed not to be.

Leonie didn’t wait to hear her. She went out again into the high hallway and looked up the stairs towards their bedroom, Tom’s bedroom as it had always properly been, thinking about clothes and a suitcase. But then, through the narrow glass panes of the front door, she saw Tom himself coming between the dogwood bushes towards the house. The sight gave her a slight shock, as though she had already placed him somewhere else.

He opened the door, one arm crooked around a bag of croissants and the newspaper.

‘Good run?’ she asked.

She was blocking his way but he side-stepped around her, already moving towards the kitchen. ‘Yes, thanks.’

‘They’re all in there. Everyone’s in the kitchen except Marian and Richard, who are out on the porch.’

He hadn’t even looked at her. But even if he had done, if he had faced her properly and taken account of her it would have been too late. The sweet stream of liberation was running too strongly.

‘Are you going out?’

‘Yes, Tom. I’m going out.’

And with that she left the house. In the sunlight, which had now grown strong, she passed the rusting cage of the tennis court and the bushes that separated the garden from Elizabeth Newton’s. Each successive footstep was lighter and faster. Tom’s elderly Saab was parked nearest to the lane. She slid into the driver’s seat and adjusted the incline and the rear-view mirror to make it hers. As she reversed, then nosed forward into the road, she looked back at the house; the door was firmly closed and no one had come outside to follow her or try to stop her. Leonie realised she was panting for breath as if she had been running.

She drove down the lane, away from Tom and Marian, and the Captain’s House, and the malign curve of the beach with the hungry glitter of sea-water beyond it. She slowed as she passed the Fennymores’, but there was no one to be seen there either.

She took the south-westerly road out of Pittsharbor. When she had put five miles between herself and the beach she relaxed the tension in her braced arms and let her shoulders rest against the seat back. She waited for the undertow of guilt and anxiety, but nothing came. There was only relief.

After another five miles she turned on the radio and searched across the local news and country music stations and weather reports until she came across the voice of Alanis Morissette. Leonie drove on, singing softly, with no idea where she was heading.

The first sign for the upcoming freeway startled her. She had automatically followed the route home – not home any longer, but towards Boston.

She didn’t in the least want to go back there. She braked suddenly and swung in to the side of the road, causing the Ford station-wagon behind her to sweep by in an angry diminuendo of hooting. In the past she might have reddened in belated apology, but now she merely shrugged and wound the wheel in the opposite direction. She took the next turning at random, then another, driving deeper into countryside she had never penetrated before until she had no idea even whether she was headed north or south. The fuel gauge blinked an amber light at her and she frowned back at it, unwilling to have her shapeless reverie broken.

A sign ahead indicated that she was coming to the town of Haselboro. She had never heard of it, and it looked a small, sleepy place as she drove past the neat lawns and white gates of the outlying houses. Although she had eaten the muffin and cranberry jelly for breakfast she realised suddenly that she was ravenously hungry.

Haselboro didn’t have much of a centre. There was a dingy supermarket down a slip road and a garage opposite it across a wider section of the through road. Leonie pulled into the garage forecourt beside the gas pumps and a boy in blue coveralls emerged at once. ‘Fill it up.’ She smiled at him. He had longish hair the same colour as Lucas’s and a face buckled with shyness. Leonie rummaged in her bag and brought out her wallet. There were only fifteen dollars in cash, but she had her credit cards and bank book.

‘Going far?’ the boy asked, not quite looking up from the fuel nozzle.

‘Yes. Well, no. Not really. I’m not quite sure where I am.’

He did squint round at her then. ‘Got a map, have you?’

‘No, actually.’

‘There’s one in there, if you want to have a look. I can’t give it to you, it’s not mine.’ He pointed towards the shop door.

‘Just a glance would be a help.’

The map lay on a counter near the cash till, with a half-eaten hot-dog oozing ketchup into a paper napkin alongside it. Leonie looked longingly at the bitten frankfurter as she flipped the map open. She fumbled the route from Pittsharbor with her forefinger, trying to trace the roads she must have followed in her meander. At length she located Haselboro. To her surprise it was only a couple of miles from the coast. She had driven a sprawling U north-eastwards from Pittsharbor.

The boy materialised at her shoulder.

‘I’m sorry, I interrupted your lunch.’

‘It’s okay.’ He blushed as he busied himself with her credit card.

‘Where can I get one of those?’

‘Huh?’

‘A hot-dog.’

‘Oh, there’s a store down the next street. It’s more of a grocery store, they don’t really sell hot-dogs but I’m sure they’d fix you one if you asked. It’s my mom working there. Say I told you to come by.’

‘Well, thank you, um …’

‘Roger.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Roger.’

‘And you, ma’am.’

Leonie went out again into the sunshine and found that she was smiling.

The store was on a corner at the intersection of two streets. Traffic lights blinked at an empty road each direction and a large yellow dog lay panting in the shade of the store awning. There was a public telephone against the outside wall. Leonie glanced at it and hurried into the store.

A pleasant-looking woman was stacking cans behind a glass-fronted display case. She had the same shyly indirect gaze as Roger. ‘I guess I can,’ she agreed, when Leonie had blurted out her request. ‘It’ll just take a couple of minutes out back.’

While she waited Leonie idly read the local ads on cards pinned beside the door. Laurel Jackson had lost her progressive bifocals, brown steel-rimmed, some time after the first week in August. There was to be a colossal yard sale at Kingdom Road, and a grey and white cat, four white paws, very friendly, had gone missing from home. And under the heading Summer Rental was a snapshot of an uncompromisingly plain grey-boarded box of a cottage, one square window on either side of a tight front door, set in a pretty woodland clearing.

Leonie read the details twice. Suddenly available for short summer rental. One bedroom, fully furnished, $280 per month, plus utilities. No pets, no children, no smokers. There was a name and a telephone number at the foot of the card.

She became aware that Roger’s mother was at her elbow, holding out the hot-dog in a folded paper napkin. ‘Ketchup or mustard?’

Leonie paid, then propped herself against the hood of Tom’s car while she ate, eyed by the yellow dog. The peace and emptiness of Haselboro was soothing. An idea was turning over in her mind and before the last mouthful of frankfurter it had turned into a decision. If not Boston, where she didn’t yet want the company of friends or their inevitable questions, then why not here rather than anywhere else?

It was far enough from the sight and sound of the sea.

In a cottage in the woods she would take a spell of solitude and reflection. Such a place would give her the privacy she needed and the independence, much more than a hotel or a bed and breakfast. There were still almost two weeks of her summer vacation remaining and she could spend that time alone, thinking, and walking and making some plans for the future. At the end of it she would have to go back to Boston, to the job that she now needed more than ever, but maybe, Leonie thought, her mind running ahead, if she kept a cottage she could come back to it when she needed to. It would be her own place, not permanent enough to be a tie but still somewhere she could depend on. Somewhere that was neither Boston nor Pittsharbor and so free of all the associations that clung to the familiar places.

‘Was that hot-dog good?’

‘Better than good. Mrs …?’

‘Brownlow.’

‘Mrs Brownlow, I’m looking for a rental cottage. Not for too long, maybe only a couple of weeks while I sort some things out. Do you know if this one is still available?’

She looked doubtful. ‘Jim Whitsey’s place? It’s a ways out of town, I wouldn’t know who’s up there right now. But you could give Jim a call, he’s generally at home in the day since he retired. Phone’s right out there on the front wall.’

Two hours later, after a series of wrong turnings on the woodland roads, Leonie sat in the sun on the cottage step waiting for Jim Whitsey. Goldenrod and magenta spikes of loosestrife grew in the long grass at her feet. There was plenty of light in the clearing and the mixed woodland encircling it danced with shafts of pale green and gold. It seemed welcoming after the forbidding spruce stands of the Pittsharbor shore.

Mr Whitsey bumped up the track in a Chevy pick-up. He shook hands and unlocked the cottage door, stepping aside to let Leonie walk in. He was a man of few words.

There was a woodburner in the main room and the ingrained scent of woodsmoke caught in Leonie’s throat with a reminder of the shadowy room in the Captain’s House. The kitchen was in a corner of the same room, with the bedroom leading off it. The only other room was a tacked-on bathroom at the rear, with an old water-heater and a green-stained bath. A large spider was stranded in the bottom. Leonie opened the window and carefully deposited it outside. ‘I’ll take it.’

‘Two weeks in advance. Cash.’

‘I’ll have to drive back into town to the bank.’

‘Yup.’

But when he secured the door again behind the two of them he extracted the key from the lock and dropped it into Leonie’s hand. ‘You enjoy yourself here. I’ll call by later for the money, if that suits.’

Leonie smiled at him in the sunlight, wondering why she felt so cheerful when she had just turned her back on her whole life. ‘Thanks. I’ll be here.’

After Jim’s pick-up had bumped away she took her seat again on the step. Back into her mind’s eye came the picture of Marian’s crab and conch shells spinning in crooked arcs over the porch rail. Anger had disabled her to the point where she couldn’t even throw straight. Leonie dropped her head into her hands and laughed out loud at the memory.

There was no one on the beach. At the public end were the usual families and groups of kids, but in front of the five houses the glitter of sand and shingle was unbroken.

May paced her way slowly along the tideline. Fragments of twine and polystyrene granules and crustacea shells were caught up with the bladder wrack. The harsh sun burned on her head and drew an unhealthy stink of decaying fish out of the debris at her feet.

The Beams’ porch was empty, not even Sidonie or Ashton was about. Their bright-coloured toys lay scattered around. May looked sidelong, in fear of seeing Lucas, but also willing him to be there.

The breeze had died away and the air was motionless. She shaded her eyes and looked in the opposite direction, out to the island. Its ridge of black trees looked like the spines of some fantastic creature. She thought the whole island might shudder and heave, then dive slowly beneath the water.

A year ago, Doone was already dead.

When she turned to the beach again she saw that Ivy had suddenly appeared. She picked her way over the stones at the base of the beach wall, gold-skinned against the faded green wood of the breakwater. When she reached a patch of sand she spread out her beach towel. Even at this distance May could see the minute crescents of pallor exposed beneath her buttocks as she bent over. Ivy arranged herself on the towel and bent her neat head over a book.

May went on walking aimlessly but all the time her path tended itself towards Ivy. At length she came obliquely to a point within talking distance.

Ivy glared at her. ‘Don’t hang around me. Come over and sit down if that’s what you want.’

May sat down a yard away, looking straight out to sea. Ivy was always so dismissive. May wanted her sister’s attention and she wanted to challenge her too. ‘Where’s Lucas?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Where did you go last night?’

‘Oh, just to the Star Bar with Sam and some of the others. It was okay. Not that thrilling.’

‘Yeah? I went for a long walk with Lucas.’ She had Ivy’s full attention now. She could feel her eyes drilling into the side of her head.

‘So what happened?’

May shrugged hotly. She wanted to lay out the details, to have the scald taken out of them by shared exchange and to be reassured she wasn’t a freak, that it was how it sometimes happened with the right person but so disturbingly in the wrong place at the wrong time. But neither could she resist the chance to taunt Ivy just for once. ‘Oh, uh, you know. He was really nice.’ She sensed but couldn’t see the glare of jealous disbelief and enjoyed it like a sip of iced water cooling her parched throat.

Then Ivy gave her low, disbelieving laugh. ‘Was he? With you and your braces? Well, there’s no accounting for taste.’

May bowed her head. The taunt made her mouth fill with metallic saliva and puffed the flesh of her thighs and belly into hateful cushions within her tight clothes. That was how they did it, of course, Ivy and the handful of thin girls like her whom every boy in every school wanted to date. They promoted themselves with an effortless armoury of ridicule and superiority. Under the claustrophobic skin of the day a flood of hatred pulsed through May and directed itself at Ivy. ‘Why are you such a bitch?’

‘Why are you such a baby?’ Her voice was cool and bored as she turned back to her book.

Effortfully May stood up. The memories of the night before were too vivid and unresolved in her mind. They became a series of jerky tableaux, grotesquely overlit figures superimposed on blackness. How hot the sun felt on her head.

Inside the Captain’s House it was at least cool. With the clockwork force of habit May opened the refrigerator and quickly closed it again. The sight of margarine tubs and dribbled mayonnaise bottles was disgusting.

Upstairs, her bedroom held the sound of the sea within it like a conch shell.

The diary lay in its place next to Hannah’s books. May dusted the tips of her fingers over the black cover.

*

Marian sat in unaccustomed stillness. Making considerate detours around her, Shelly and Karyn prepared lunch once the babies had been put down to nap. The younger generation from Lucas downwards, for once aware of concerns beyond their own immediate circle, had taken themselves off for the day to another beach. The telephone rang once and Marian made a heavy movement towards it, but Tom was too quick for her. It was only a girl calling for Joel.

The adults sat down to eat at the kitchen table. It was most unusual for the food not to be laid out on the shady porch overlooking the sea. A fly buzzed drearily against the screened window, and knives and forks clinked in the silence.

‘Will she have gone back to Boston, do you think?’ Karyn asked.

There was a whitish, pinched area of skin around Tom’s mouth. ‘I’ve no idea where she’s gone.’

‘You must go after her,’ Marian said.

‘I think she’ll come back when she’s ready.’

‘You must go and bring her back.’

Tom put down his knife and fork, neatly positioning them. ‘Leonie is an adult. And so am I. We can make our own decisions.’

There had been so many meals, so many variations on this same rigid theme of family gatherings and advice dispensed. Each of them was used to it, familiar with his or her place in the scheme.

Marian’s lips drew together. ‘I’m not convinced of that, on the evidence.’

Karyn reached out a restraining hand but her mother shook it off.

‘Do you love her? Do you still love each other? Because if you do you’d be a fool not to go after her right now. This is what matters.’ She made a gesture that took in the circumference of the table and the ring of faces.

‘No.’ The crash of Tom’s chair shook them all. He was on his feet, pushing himself away from the litter of plates and broken bread. ‘No,’ he repeated. He turned from the table and left them staring after him.

Marian’s face collapsed inwards, a network of lines meshing her mouth and eyes. She covered the lower half of it with her hand. ‘What does he know about anything?’ she whispered.

Elizabeth sat in her evening room, where the tendrils of a creeper made a minute scraping against the window glass. The irregular sound competed with the metronome ticking of the clock. Spencer had brought her the news that Aaron had been taken to the hospital. She had telephoned once and had been told that Mr Fennymore was stable. Beyond that there was nothing to do but wait.

When she came back from Europe, with her trunks of new clothes and her albums of photographs of Paris and England, and her taste for French cigarettes, it was Aaron who had been waiting.

The Captain’s House was now owned by some people from Bangor, Elizabeth’s mother had told her that in one of the regular letters from home, so there could be no more meeting in the empty dust-barred rooms where feathers waltzed in the breeze of their passing. Instead there had been a chance encounter on Main Street on an afternoon when summer had faded into the smoky chill of late September. Elizabeth had already been back in Boston for almost a month; there had been some parties she had wanted to go to, so she had not made the journey up to Pittsharbor right away. At one of the parties, the engagement celebration of a girl she had been at school with, she had been introduced to a lawyer called Andrew Newton. He was almost thirty, more than ten years older than Elizabeth herself. But she had liked his dry sense of humour and his slightly formal manners because they reminded her of some of the Englishmen she had met on her travels.

‘Newton? Newton?’ Grandfather Freshett had mused. ‘Randwyck Newton’s boy?’

‘I think he must be,’ Elizabeth’s mother responded. ‘Randwyck married Dorothy Irvine, didn’t he?’

‘That’s right.’

Elizabeth would once have felt impatient with this exchange, but now she found that she listened with a flicker of interest and even understanding.

In Pittsharbor, when she did come back to it at last, nothing seemed to have changed. Except, she thought, that the houses looked smaller and Main Street was narrower and more old-fashioned than she remembered. In Purrit’s Dry Goods the very same sacks and cans were arranged behind the salty window glass. And for a night and a day after her arrival she had looked out for Aaron Fennymore with almost the same breathlessness as when she was a girl, eager to slip away with him to the Captain’s House. She had watched the tides and the movements of the fishing fleet, and had wondered when she would hear the signal of his low whistle.

They had written no letters to one another in all the months of her absence. At the beginning of their separation Elizabeth had believed that their love was enough to bind them together without needing translation into the pale medium of words and she also feared that in any case her lover would be no letter-writer. Then, as the months passed, she had been reluctantly and gradually more eagerly taken up in the new world of Europe. Pittsharbor and Aaron had settled deep inside her, precious but untouched. Now that she was back, with the murmur of the sea in her ears and the tiny prickling of salt crystals on the skin of her arms, she was filled equally with longing for Aaron and with apprehension.

When she first caught sight of him, swinging down Main Street with a sacking bag slung over his shoulder, her immediate and terrible instinct had been to duck away and hide from him. There was an arrogance in his bearing and a rough look about him that made a poor contrast with European poise, even with Andrew Newton back in Boston. As soon as she recognised her betrayal her face crimsoned with shame and she was rooted in place like a tongue-tied schoolgirl.

Aaron had seen her. He didn’t change his pace, but came straight towards her. He stood foursquare on the sidewalk, blocking her path, and dropped the sack on the ground between them. It smelt powerfully of fish. ‘So you’re here, then?’

‘Just. Yesterday.’

‘I hear you were back in Boston a month ago.’

He had changed. There was a directness in him now that seemed almost brutal and the way he stared into her face was momentarily frightening.

‘I …’ She wouldn’t let him accuse her. ‘I had some things I wanted to do.’

‘Things?’ There was a sneer in his voice that was new, too.

‘That’s right,’ Elizabeth said coolly. She was regaining her self-possession now, but the look of him and the sound of his voice still made her want to step into his arms and never move out of his reach again.

‘You promised to marry me,’ Aaron said. ‘And you are old enough to know your own mind now. I’ve been waiting all this time for you.’ He put his hand out as he spoke and took hold of her upper arm.

Elizabeth was wearing a lawn blouse with hand-sewn tucks and her good wool coat because the afternoon wind was cool. She faced up to him, aware of the looks of the passers-by and shopkeepers. She thought he was rude. ‘Take your hand off me,’ she said in a low voice.

His arm dropped at once. ‘I’m sorry.’ He made no effort to speak quietly. He didn’t seem to care who heard or saw them, and Elizabeth felt herself turning hot with shame. It was only later, much too late, that she realised it was passion that made his face burn and anger that made him sound rough. She wasn’t used to naked feelings, only to dances and mild flirtations in taxis and Andrew Newton’s courtly manners.

Aaron bent down and shouldered his bag again. ‘Well, then,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’re back safely. But it doesn’t seem that all your wandering has taught you any sense.’ He left her standing on the sidewalk.

‘Aaron …’ she called, just once. He never turned back, and she was too conscious of what her mother’s neighbours might think or say to do what she wanted and run after him.

After that, they saw each other in Pittsharbor often enough. They met, even, once or twice in private, and tried to repair the damage. They kissed once, awkwardly, as if they were tasting a dish they had once overindulged in. But Elizabeth couldn’t forget that she had wanted to run and hide, and Aaron had seen that urge so clearly in her face.

In the years afterwards they both thought separately that they might have tried harder and understood each other again. But circumstances were against them; the Freshetts were pleased with the idea of a match between Elizabeth and Andrew Newton, and Hannah had presented herself to Aaron.

On the night before her engagement party Elizabeth and Aaron met again, on the beach looking out to the island. It was February and the bay was a ring of ice, so they had to walk briskly over the crackling shingle.

Elizabeth held her furs tight against her throat, but Aaron pulled them aside and put his mouth to the warmth of her skin. ‘It isn’t too late,’ he whispered.

Elizabeth thought of her diamond ring and the announcements in the Boston newspapers, and the house on Beacon Hill, which had already been bought. She knew she was a coward and despised herself for her weakness as she answered, ‘It is. It was too late when I left for England.’

Three months later she became Mrs Andrew Newton, and within a year Aaron married Hannah and began his buying up of the land on the bluff.

What a waste, Elizabeth thought in the quiet of her evening room. What a long and colourless waste of a life.

Aaron lay on his back with his arms at his side. Beside the head of the bed was an oxygen cylinder on wheels with a mask attached to the hose.

Hannah sat in a chair, dozing with her head bent. He had tried insisting that she went home, but she had refused even to listen to him. His breathing was stronger and easier now, and the grey-blue tinge had faded from his lips. Footsteps approached and receded in the corridor outside.

Suddenly Aaron said loudly, ‘I’m ready to go now.’

Her head jerked up again and she leaned forward to catch at his hand.

‘Did you hear me Hannah? I’m ready to go.’

Her mouth worked but she couldn’t make words come. She put her fingers on his forehead, bending closer over him.

He struggled to sit upright, weakly fighting her off. ‘Where are my clothes?’

‘Aaron, lie still.’ She looked over her shoulder in the direction from which help might come.

‘Bring me my clothes. I want to go home.’

‘Hush. Keep still now. Bobby’s coming from Cleveland and Angela …’

‘It’s not necessary. I’m not dying.’

‘Of course you are not.’

‘I want to go home. I want…’

She soothed him, ‘I know, I know you do. In a few days, maybe …’

He looked past her to the window. The strength he had summoned for the brief outburst was already spent. ‘I want to smell the sea,’ he whispered.

Leonie waved and smiled at Mrs Brownlow as she loaded her purchases into the Saab. She had bought supplies of food and drink, although the stores in Haselboro hadn’t offered much choice in either, and withdrawn Jim Whitsey’s rental deposit from the bank. She could be self-sufficient for a few days now, except that she had nothing to read. There was no bookshop in town and the Haselboro Compass and Advertiser would not hold her attention for very long. She glanced again at the telephone on the wall of the store and this time walked towards it without hesitation.

It was May who answered.

‘May, hi. This is Leonie Beam. How are you?’

‘I’m, uh, okay.’ Her voice was thickened, as if she had been asleep or perhaps crying.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I am.’ Hostility blanked out the moment of uncertainty and Leonie thought, She is all right, or as much as she ever was. ‘May I speak to your father? Is he there?’

‘Yeah, I guess, I think he’s outside somewhere. I’ll get him, if you want.’

I do want, Leonie mouthed. There was the sound of the receiver being dropped and footsteps scuffing away.

The yellow dog had roused itself from its spot in the shade. It came across now and sniffed at Leonie’s ankles.

‘Leonie?’

She smiled at the sound of his voice. ‘Yes.’

‘Where are you? Are you at home?’

Home? ‘No. Well, in a way. I’m at a place called Haselboro. John, I’ve left him. I walked out this morning. I just drove here and rented a place.’

There was a silence while he digested this. ‘And last night you said you had no idea what you were going to do.’

It seemed a very long time ago. It had been a bad telephone conversation; she had felt in despair. In comparison with that, this airy freedom was entrancing, and the mundane small-town street with its white fences and shade trees and slow-moving cars was poignantly beautiful.

‘Leonie? Are you still there?’

‘Yes. John, will you come and bring me some books? Just a visit, between friends. A glass of wine and some talk. I’ve got a jug of Napa Valley Chardonnay right here in the car.’

He asked for directions and she gave them. ‘I’ll be there in an hour or so.’

‘Will it be all right for you to leave your girls, just for the evening?’

‘Ivy is grown-up now,’ he answered. ‘And May is … well, May will be fine for one evening. I’ll be there soon, okay?’

‘Do you have to go?’ May asked him in her most sullen way. She hated the thought of being left alone, yet could not acknowledge it. ‘Where’s she gone, anyway?’

‘Just up the coast a way. I’m going to lend her a couple of books. Leonie needs someone to talk to right now. Do you want to come up there with me?’

May ignored the suggestion. ‘She wants you, doesn’t she? Isn’t having a husband enough for her, she has to grab you as well?’

‘It isn’t quite like that.’

‘No? What is it like, then?’

John sighed, caught between irritation and the knowledge that he should stay this evening and try to explain himself to May. She had sabotaged his relationship with Suzanne; maybe more honesty would help them all this time.

He hesitated, then remembered that Leonie had called him from a public phone. He couldn’t get back to her to change anything now. May was planted in front of him with her fists balled in the pockets of her jeans. ‘I have a life to live too, May,’ he said quietly. ‘Each of us does. Breaking windows and cutting your hands won’t change the fact; all it does is hurt you and fill me with fear. I love you and Ivy …’

He saw her look away, as if to hide the unwilling pleasure his assurance gave her. He thought, I haven’t talked enough, I haven’t given her the love she needs, the way Ali would have done. ‘And you mean more to me than all the rest of the world. But there are other kinds of wanting and loving as well as this kind.’

He tried to put his hands on her arms and turn her to face him but she stepped aside, round-shouldered. John sighed. ‘Can we talk about all this tomorrow?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Where’s Ivy, anyway?’ he asked.

‘How should I know?’

‘I’ll see you later. Watch some TV or something, then both of you have some dinner.’

He tried to kiss her but May jerked away suddenly and the connection became more a blow than a kiss. Then he was on his way out of the door with some paperbacks under his arm.

May watched him drive away. ‘I hate you,’ she yelled into the space he left behind.

Ivy came in later from the beach, in a black mood because Lucas and all the others had been missing for the whole day. May was huddled with her feet on the chesterfield cushions, staring at the television. Hostility crackled between them, low-key at first as they bickered about supper and the division of chores. The sky outside was turning lead-coloured as the light faded.

‘Where’s Dad gone, anyway?’ Ivy demanded.

May told her, gracelessly.

Ivy adopted her dropped-hip pose, all her slight weight prettily angled. She pointed the tip of the bread-knife at May. ‘You know, why don’t you back off a bit? Why shouldn’t he go see her if that’s what he wants to do?’

‘Don’t point that at me. Because she’s married to someone else, for starters. I came up here the other night and saw them … saw them through the window … it was …’ her voice blurred in her throat, then came out too high and hard. ‘It was disgusting.’

Ivy was staring at her.

The membrane was stretching, thinning. Losing its opacity. ‘I mean, she’s someone’s … Tom’s wife. I mean, how would it have been if Mom had. Had been with …’ May’s voice faltered and died altogether.

Out of the box in which she had kept it jumped the memory. Suddenly and without warning it was there, and she knew what it meant and was amazed by its sharp completeness.

She had been perhaps six or seven years old.

She had woken up in the night, surprised because it seemed that at one minute she had been asleep and the next she was as wide awake as if it were the middle of the day. She was hot and her throat burned with thirst. Usually there was a cup of water beside her bed, but tonight Mom must have forgotten to put it there. She pushed the covers aside and climbed out of her bed. The apartment was quiet but the dim light burned in the hall outside, just as it always did.

She padded out and crossed over to the room where her parents slept. The door was ajar. The room beyond was in darkness and the big bed was flat and empty under its smooth cover. May went on down the hall, remembering that John was away somewhere doing his work.

There were lights in the big room where the TV was. Soft yellow light, from the big cream-shaded lamp on the corner table. Silently she pushed the door wider open.

Her mother and a man were lying together on the sofa. Their legs were bare and twisted together. Her mother’s head was thrown back and she looked as if she was screaming. Only more terrifying than terror itself, there was no scream coming out of her mouth, but a little squeak, soft-sounding, like a kitten’s cry. The man’s breath was rasping. Then he began to moan too. He was saying her name over and over, ‘Ali, Ali, Ali.’

May turned and ran away. She dashed back to her room, pulled the covers over her head and pressed her hands to her ears. She didn’t know how she slept, but she must have done. In the morning she had a temperature. Ali was her mother again, cool and reassuring. She kept her home from school and sent a note to her teacher saying that May had a feverish cold.

She had forgotten it all because she had made herself forget. She had buried it away.

Ivy was still staring at her and she knew that Ivy knew, and now Ivy knew that she knew too.

Ivy gave her little shrug, prodded a bagel with her bread-knife. ‘Jack O’Donnell,’ she said.

May recalled a big, friendly man who had come to the apartment sometimes, no more or less memorable than any other member of her parents’ big group of friends. Ali and John were sociable, they gave lots of noisy parties and big, relaxed lunches on winter weekends, which spilled on into evening drinks. Jack O’Donnell’s had just been one of those faces.

‘You knew about it?’

The shrug again: a twist of her sun-tanned shoulder and a downward pull of the mouth. Ivy was affecting adult knowingness. ‘It happens. It’s not exactly an original story, is it? People do these things, good or bad. You’ll learn that.’

May thought of the night before. Lucas and Marty Stiegel. People do these things…. I made him touch me. There and everywhere. Her own collusion in the stew of sex made her feel sick again. ‘Was it, was it just once, Mom and him?’

Ivy laughed out loud. ‘Of course not.’ Her sneer took on a life of its own. It ballooned out of her mouth and swayed in the air between them, greasy and coloured, so that May put up her fists to bat it away from her, and she saw how Ivy flinched at the movement in the fear that May was going to hit her.

The idea lit up in May like power itself. The balloon sneer vanished and instead the space between the two girls was shimmering and splintering with threat. May clenched her fist and punched, and it was like the instant of hitting the volleyball, clean and pure, except that she slammed her knuckles into her sister’s face instead.

Ivy staggered backwards with the bread-knife still in her grasp. It came up in a silvery arc through the glimmering air and came to rest against May’s throat. Ivy was gasping with shock and a red blaze burned on her cheek. The knife blade vibrated against white skin. ‘You fucking little bitch,’ Ivy whispered. But her eyes widened when she saw what her own hand was doing. The fingers opened and the knife fell with a clatter. She put her hand up to cradle her cheek. Slowly they stepped apart, their eyes still locked together.

‘You should be careful what you say,’ May breathed. ‘What filthy things you say about our mother.’ But even as she said it she knew that her world view was askew; it was and had been balanced on the wrong fulcrum. Without thinking, she took her eyes off Ivy, looked round to find John and only then remembered he had already gone to Leonie.

With the contact between them broken Ivy bent stiffly and picked up the knife. She replaced it on the counter top and with her back turned mumbled, ‘I shouldn’t have said anything.’

‘I suppose I knew already. I’d just forgotten.’

The telephone began to ring and Ivy picked it up at once. The change in her face told May it was Lucas. May knew how it was, she had seen and heard it so many times before. He was saying he was sorry, when it should have been Ivy saying it to him. ‘Okay,’ she murmured, sweetly grudging. ‘Well, okay then. If you want.’

May went up the stairs. She opened and closed the door of her room but waited outside it, eavesdropping.

Ivy was agreeing to go out and meet him. There were endearments and a little curl of laughter like a feather settling on still water. Afterwards Ivy called up the stairs, ‘May? I’m going down to meet Lucas on the beach. We won’t be far away. We might go across to the island or something.’

For privacy, to their hollow behind the sandy crescent. Everywhere, and there.

When Ivy had gone the house settled around May into shadow and silence.