Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘Ivy said we could go straight home, but I don’t want to yet. I want to go back to Pittsharbor and finish everything off,’ May said.

  He didn’t ask her what her unfinished business might be. ‘We can do that if you’re sure it’s what you want,’ he told her.

  ‘I’m sure.’ May bent her head again to concentrate on the sky-blue fingernails.

  Fifteen

  ‘You put it back, didn’t you?’ May locked her eyes on him.

  He stared at her bare sandy feet, at the floor, anywhere but into her face. She had come in from the seaward side, materialising at the screen door and boldly walking into the room, before Marty had a chance to withdraw or to hide from her. He could not know how much of May’s courage it had taken to propel herself here.

  She repeated, ‘You crept into my room and took it, and you read it, then you put it back again so it would look as if it hadn’t been touched.’

  The Stiegels’ house was in disarray. There were boxes and half-packed bags spilling their contents on the floor, and already an atmosphere of neglect, as if dust motes were thickening in the stagnant air. The last grains of summer were running out, sand in an hourglass.

  Marty straightened up and put down the concertina file he had held in his arms, reminding May that she had come across pictures of Doone by prying and snooping on her own part. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘I had to know what she had written about me.’

  ‘And did you find out what you wanted to know?’

  ‘It was in code, most of it.’

  ‘I told you that.’

  There was a silence, in which they appraised each other. May held up her head, keeping her resolve firm.

  No one knew she was here, unless she had been seen as she slipped up the Stiegels’ steps. She had told John she was going to call on Elizabeth, knowing that Elizabeth had driven to Pittsharbor with Spencer. It was a heavy, thundery afternoon with occasional fat drops of rain pockmarking the flat sea and the beach was almost deserted.

  ‘What do you want?’ Marty asked. He suddenly came a step closer and automatically, fearfully, May retreated by the same measure. It was as if they were dancing together.

  But she did know exactly what she wanted: it was the first certainty she had ever had that was based on an adult’s perception, not a child’s.

  She had dreamed about Marty Stiegel, in the hospital and twice more since she had come home to the Captain’s House. They were superficially harmless dreams in which he served a family dinner of live lobsters in the New York apartment, or appeared smiling in her classroom at school dressed in a Hallowe’en costume but with the mask held out in his hand for her to take. Yet there was an undercurrent to them, which stayed with her long after she had woken up, and she knew that it welled out of fear and washed in a cold flood right through her.

  I want not to be afraid. The thought came to her as she sat on Doone’s bed, looking at the diary on the shelf. If she dammed it up the fear would still burst out in the end and carry her away. She could confide in her father, perhaps, or Elizabeth, or even Leonie, and there would be more sessions with Dr Metz and she would be treated with concern and sympathy, but she would still be a flood victim. I don’t want that, she thought. It would be to make herself passive again, to be at the mercy of fate or whatever random circumstances life threw at her, when she needed to be exactly the opposite.

  The only proper way forward was to face down the fear and so to exorcise it. She could make herself unafraid by crossing the arcs of sand and shingle, and climbing the steps to Marty’s door and looking straight into his eyes. ‘I want to talk to you,’ she answered.

  He was, in truth, the only person she could talk to properly. To reveal her fear to anyone else would be to betray Doone’s secrets too, who had chosen to take them with her beyond where they could be uncovered. Unless Doone had left the diary on purpose for her to read, and decode, and to inherit…. May blinked. She couldn’t believe any longer that Doone possessed her, or influenced her. Doone had just hidden her diary where she believed it wouldn’t be found, then she had sailed her boat out of the bay.

  ‘Go ahead. There’s no one here, as you can see. Judith and Justine have left me.’ With a shrug he indicated the dismantled room and his sad solitude within it. He screwed a piece of paper into a ball and threw it aside.

  May felt a brief contraction of sympathy for him, twisted with dislike of his self-pity. It was very quiet; the ball of paper unfurled with a tiny scratching noise. ‘I heard. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I think they will come back.’

  ‘What exactly did you do to Doone?’

  He looked now, jerking his big head, pinning her with his narrow eyes. It was much too far to the door, May realised. Her heart was hammering. I want not to be afraid. But she was afraid of him, she couldn’t escape it.

  ‘You read what she wrote, didn’t you?’ he said softly. ‘You know everything.’

  ‘It was … oblique. She wrote what you made her feel.’

  ‘You broke the code. That was clever of you. How did you do it?’

  ‘I …’ May’s stomach loosened. She should have denied it instead of letting him see through her like a pane of glass. She eased away from him, another step towards the door, but he followed as if magnetised. Her hands came up in self-protection but he caught her wrists and held them down. The force of it made her wince with the pain in her bruised shoulder. Marty let go and smiled at her, as tender as a father. ‘Listen. Your view is distorted. Of course you identify with her. But she wanted me, not the other way round. She was hysterical. Do you understand what that means? I was all she wanted, May. In truth and in fantasy. I went along with it, further than I should have done, much further, but never as far as she wanted.’

  Everywhere, and there.

  May said slowly, ‘I think she died because of you.’

  Marty shook his head. ‘She died because of herself, May. I told her that what was happening between us had to stop. She wouldn’t – couldn’t – accept it. She took out her boat and she drowned herself.’

  ‘Was that how it was?’ May asked.

  At first he didn’t answer. May thought he was preparing a lie and fear and dislike of him rose more strongly than ever. But then he lifted his head and looked straight into her face.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. His voice was steady and May couldn’t tell whether he was offering her the truth or concealing it. ‘Maybe it was an accident or maybe she drowned herself. We … I… shall probably never know.’

  She wanted to die, May thought. That was what you did to her. And you know it too.

  ‘Was that how it was?’ she repeated, pressing him.

  He retreated now from the slip into honesty, if that was what it had been.

  ‘Of course it was. What did she say different? What did she write that says specifically, incriminatingly, Marty did this but I didn’t want to. He forced me?’

  His breath warmed her face. She remembered the night of Pittsharbor Day, in this very room, when he had comforted her, then come too close for comfort. It was the way he was, the flaw in the silky-smooth weave of him. Young girls. She thought of young girls now as she made a move beyond them, into the adult realm. ‘Nothing.’ Her mouth formed the word stiffly. Doone had been protective of her betrayer to the end.

  He was close enough now for her to see tiny veins netting the whites of his eyes. His grip on her relaxed. ‘There you are.’ He was reasonable, even magnanimous.

  Blood swished in May’s ears. ‘I’m not afraid of you,’ she insisted. It came out too loud, almost a shout.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘On the island, when you found me. You thought you would kill me, didn’t you? To protect yourself?’

  He looked amazed, shocked, disbelieving; the expressions chased over his flexible features before he laughed. It was a gust of laughter that shook his chest, convincingly. ‘My God. No, no. All I felt was huge relief and gratitude that you were safe.’

  He
had cradled her in his arms and picked the debris out of her hair. May’s defiance softened and buckled, before threatening to collapse altogether. She couldn’t discern what was the truth and what she had hatched from within herself, brooding alone in Doone’s bedroom. ‘The diary,’ she insisted. ‘Once you had it, why did you put it back? You could have destroyed it. That’s what you should have done.’

  ‘I didn’t know who else knew about it by then.’

  ‘Only you and me,’ May said.

  She studied his face again, watching hindsight and rapid calculation adding up together, and pulled herself away from him. He didn’t try to restrain her. She was still alone with him, the door was still behind her and at a distance, but the room shrank and became unthreatening. The place was just a holiday home in the process of being closed up for the winter. She had achieved what she had come for: she would walk away with distaste for Marty Stiegel and a queasy kind of sympathy, which weighted her heart, but she wasn’t afraid of him any more.

  ‘You could do it,’ he urged. ‘You could destroy it. Doone would want that. Not to have her secrets read and exposed and pawed over.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do with it, yet. I have to go now.’

  He was going to stand in her way with further insistences, but in the next room the telephone began to ring. He spun round at once, with the eagerness of someone who had been waiting too long for the call. May walked quietly to the screen door and let herself out on to the deck once more. The sky had grown dark, with a purply tinge to it that faded over the sea to the flatness of lead.

  ‘Judith?’ When he heard her voice at the other end Marty closed his eyes and breathed a silent 0 of relief.

  She was angry still and she wanted to hurt him. He let her talk, offering no resistance to her sharpness, but all the time he was thinking that it would work out in the end. Her fury would diminish, she would accept what had happened and allow it to be put in the past, and he would have the relief of nothing to conceal. He would be at home and comfortable again, with his wife and his daughter. ‘Listen,’ he soothed at last, ‘listen to me. I’m coming back home. No, wait. You don’t have to do that. Just back to New York. We can talk, at least we can talk, can’t we?

  ‘We always did talk. Judith, We were always able to do that much.

  ‘I’ve rented a car. I’ll close this place up, bring back whatever needs to be brought. And when I get back to the city – Jesus, Judith, you left without taking any of your stuff. I’ll bring it round for you. No more, nothing more than that.

  ‘And – Judith? – How is she? My little girl?’

  He listened again to his wife’s bitter voice, his teeth viciously tearing at the margin of his thumb-nail.

  ‘I love her so much,’ he mumbled at the end. ‘I will see you soon, both of you.’

  But Judith had gone, cutting him off in mid-sentence.

  Marian went to call on the Fennymores. She had telephoned, of course, as soon as she heard Aaron was home, but Hannah was adamant that he should have no visitors. Now Marian made the short walk down the bluff road, passing Marty Stiegel’s rental car parked in his driveway. The sight of it made her thoughts travel from the Stiegels to Tom and Leonie. Their readiness to accept failure gnawed at her, opening unwelcome perspectives on her own life.

  She knocked and rang for several minutes before Hannah opened the door by a slit. Her bird eyes settled on Marian’s face for an instant, before flicking defensively away again. ‘It’s you. Thank you for coming the other night. I’m grateful to you, Marian.’

  ‘I was glad to do it,’ Marian answered. Not for you, but for him.

  They both heard the unspoken words. Hannah held on to the door as if it were a drawbridge. She had become the guardian of her husband’s citadel at last and Marian saw that the new-found power filled her with grim triumph. She had waited long enough, poor Hannah, and had made do with so little of him. It wasn’t much, especially in the face of the loss that must soon come. He was receding, slipping out of the grasp of both of them.

  Marian wanted to push open the door and elbow past her to get to Aaron, while he was still there. ‘I would like to see him, Hannah. Just for five minutes.’

  The slit narrowed. Only one of the unblinking eyes remained visible. ‘He’s ill. He’s asleep just at this minute.’

  ‘Hannah…’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She closed the door. It was a small, mean victory. But a victory, nevertheless.

  Marian walked slowly away, wondering if Hannah was watching her from one of the curtained windows.

  Instead of turning for home she crossed the headland on the Pittsharbor side, walking over Aaron’s land where Spencer Newton wanted to put up rental cottages. There were only a few cars in the small car-park, which served the public end of the beach, but beside one of them a young couple were scolding two tiny children as they made ready for the drive home. The kids squirmed as their fat limbs were rubbed clean of sand and dry clothes were hastily zipped up to cover them. Marian would normally have stopped and exclaimed over their prettiness, but today her eyes slid past. She went on down the beach steps. The bluff houses reared solidly above the sea wall, each seeming tethered to the beach by its flight of steps.

  Marian tucked up her skirt, revealing the puffy blue-and-white pillows of her knees. She walked into the water and stood with her back to the land, letting the waveless suck of the sea test her precarious balance.

  Her love affair with Aaron had been conducted with Hannah always in the background. Hannah had known about it, of course, but none of them had ever admitted as much. Even before Dickson’s death, Marian had been in love with Aaron Fennymore. The passion had fed her with energy and zest for life, and the summers at the beach had given the rest of the year meaning and shape. It had not seemed to matter that he had loved her so much less in return.

  Marian turned to look at the houses and the water swirled around her calves. The Fennymores’ presented a closed face to the bay, the Stiegels’ upper windows were blanked with winter shutters. From the flagpole in front of her own house Dickson’s Stars and Stripes hung motionless. There wasn’t even a stirring of a breeze, and the air lay thick and heavy. The light in the west had turned greenish, almost luminous. There was going to be a storm.

  Lucas came cantering down the beach with Sidonie on his shoulders, causing the little girl to scream with a mixture of delight and terror. After the quarrel with Ivy and May’s disappearance Lucas had been sullen and uneasy, but the mood seemed to have lifted now. The other boys were close on his heels. They hollered at Marian and wheeled towards her.

  ‘Grammer!’ Sidonie yelled and the boys dashed into the water, sending up thick plumes of spray. Marian drew her skirts closer around her and the children halted in a semicircle, startled by her unresponsiveness.

  ‘You okay?’ Lucas asked.

  I am not, Marian thought. Not any more. ‘I’m old and very tired,’ she said slowly. ‘Just leave me alone now.’

  They started up again, uncaring enough, and exuberantly ran away in another direction.

  In the house, from his place beside the stove, Aaron asked, ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Marian.’

  The deepening of the furrows beside his mouth might have indicated disapproval, or disappointment.

  ‘It’s time for your medicine,’ Hannah told him. She brought a bottle and spoon, and poured the measure, and afterwards she wiped his chin with the cloth she kept at hand. Aaron’s eyelids descended, shuttering his feelings. After a moment Hannah settled her spectacles in place and went back to her reading.

  Ivy leant her elbows on May’s bedroom window-sill. ‘It’s going to thunder. Our last night’s going to be the same as the first one. Doesn’t all that that seem like years ago?’

  The Duhanes would drive back to New York the next morning. Ivy and May had done their packing; except for the last of her belongings the room was almost as it had been when May first saw it. The red-and-black diary and Hannah Fennymore�
�s two books were centred on the top shelf.

  ‘I’m ready to go,’ May said calmly.

  ‘What is all that stuff in there?’ Ivy nodded at the diary.

  ‘Oh, you know. I couldn’t make half of it out.’

  ‘Weird.’ Ivy yawned in agreement. ‘Listen. I’m going to go and hang out for an hour with Lucas and Gail. A goodbye thing, nothing heavy. Why don’t you come with me? Maybe we could all go into town, get a drink or something?’

  ‘You should go. But I think I’ll stay here. I want to take Mrs Fennymore’s books back.’ It was easy to think about Lucas; May’s face curved into a surprising smile.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Totally.’

  The old Saab was parked outside the Beams’ house. Ivy walked by without giving it a glance. The porch had been tidied somewhat, although the splintered boards were still dredged with sand.

  Tom opened the door. He directed Ivy towards Lucas’s room and she slithered past him and up the stairs, raising her eyebrows at the silence in the house.

  Leonie was in the kitchen, leaning against one of the countertops. She followed a crack in the floor tiles with the toe of her sneaker. Tom came back and sat down again at his place at the table. He knitted his fingers together and frowningly aligned his thumbs. They hadn’t argued or even disagreed; they had simply made arrangements about what was to be done. It was a bloodless way to end a marriage, in restrained negotiations over property and bank accounts.

  Yet what more did she expect, Leonie asked herself, from a marriage such as theirs had been? Of course it would not finish with operatic quarrels, or with cleansing rage, or even the bitterness of misplaced passion. The married Leonie made sad and reasonable provisions to put her married life aside and all the time the part of her that occupied the seedy cabin in the woods sang out with illogical hope.