by Rosie Thomas
‘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.